Re: Nerfed empires
 

Blind: Give every ship an inherent cloaking ability. Don't research sensors.

Only One: You can only have one ship at a time.

Crappy Weapons You can only use Graviton Hellbores.

Tourists You have to put at least 1M (or 10 or 100) people on each warship.

Weak-Willed Whenever the AI sends a message you must comply. If they tell you to abandon a system, you do. If they tell you mineral planets are the best, you go all out colonizing mineral planets. etc.

Re: Nerfed empires
 

How about "Single Minded"

You pick one direction to explore and only go that direction all the way to that edge of the board before picking a new direction.

Whatever teck you pick you study it compleatly before picking a new teck.

If an AI goes to war with you, you stop everyting else till you have killed it.

Re: Nerfed empires
 

Don't know if this one's been proposed or not, but:

Clueless: Everything is run by the ministers. You may change only one minister decision per turn, no matter how large or small your empire is.

Re: Nerfed empires
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The enemy is 100% under AI minister control, so you can't be too upset at your own ministers. Mainly one just ignores most of what they do. Playing this way has led to some suggestions that have become AI improvements in the patches. One of the worst used to be the scrap minister, who would destroy fully-trained top-of-the-line ships (fortunately, only those under under AI minister control) when out of resources.

The most annoying AI minister when playing fleet commander, IMO, is the resupply minister, who sends all ships and fleets to a depot when they approach 50% supply, even if they are near a depot, and even if they are not marked for minister control http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif . Solution is to bring a tanker along.

Still, it's very fun and is of course massively faster to play when the AI is running most of your empire for you.

PvK

Re: Nerfed empires
 

Good ideas, especially the ones with the complete AI control except your one fleet.

One game I played I started out with the following restrictions: I could not use warp poitns, research, or build any warships untill an AI empire warped into my system. Wound up being an interesting game, I think I may still have that game on my harddrive.

Re: Nerfed empires
 

What about controlling diplomacy - declare on every empire you meet and never have peace - ask them always for gifts and tribute and surrender even when at war - take on 19 computer empires at once. Or all human empires vs computer empires - thats fun.