Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

ya'll ain't played that GO Grappa..the two-headed pink things I was Last night...had a nice war going with them...knocked a system with plague ships and another by take-over with troops when boom the SOB came and ripped thru a system of mine with 22 dreadnaughts and 6 other ships (a bunch had died in minefields and satelite screeeen I had at the warp point..

humph, I must had a "special" AI that ya'll ain't seen. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

SOB has been tearing me a new one all along... http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

or maybe ahm just that idjit I posted about earlier...

oh well, back to the blood bath....

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

Good luck. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

Wel the AI isn't as bad as everyone ( who Posts on this Boards anyway ) thinks

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Seawolf on the prowl

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

I agree, Seawolf.

I think some people are beating up the AI without trying some of the harder settings in the game setups. Apply the current patches, give the AI all the bonuses and set up small galaxies. It can be difficult!!!

I know some of you are already groaning about how the AI is still too easy. Some of us don't have all that tactical 'genius' at our command and like to win once in a while.

OK, I'm ready for the flames now....

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

Hurm,


Just was wondering what the correlation of people saying the AI is "easy" to the people who modify the text files..


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Seawolf on the prowl

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

Previous to this patch, I have been playing in a 254 system galaxy with all the planets set at huge with as many as 12 per system...makes for a lot of powerful races. I created 8 5000 point races and along with the computer generated ones, I have 20 players in the game. I also set high bonus and high difficulty. Also I created a couple more ships per race, one as a science ship and the other bigger than a dreadnought that I call a battlestar (for lack of a better name) both of these all the races use extensively. So far out of 20 players I have never got above 10th place (even after re-playing it many times). Some races focus on production, some on huge fleets, others on massive intell projects...it has been extremely tough to keep up even using mines and such. I find that if the AI wants a system, they go to no end to get it...even busting through my minefields...and I have seen races declare war on me for not responding to their diplomatic Messages. I dont know about everyone else, but fighting several of these races at once has been extremely difficult. I consider this game with all its editing capabilities and setup options far superior to any of the 4X games in the past. Not since the original MOO have I spent so much time with a space game.

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

Sabre21, Could you send me your text files and setups?

jpinard@home.com

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

Some strategies and tactics work against the AI better than others, and all of us have wildly different strategies. For myself, I've had games where I got into a 3-way war on turn 4 (Had my 3 starting planets each in a system with a different race) and within a very short time had all three at my mercy even with them having a low bonus.

I just started a game Last night with the AI on low bonus, high difficulty, and I began with fewer race points than each of them. On turn 1 I was in 4th place out of 4. By turn 3 I was in first. By turn 15 I was over twice the score of the second place AI.

Now, some of those early differences are attributed to little things, like knowing when building different sorts of facilities on a world to build research facilities before resource harvesting because you have a surplus of resources at the beginning. The AI doesn't know this, so I get maybe 5 or more extra turns of research over him if we build the exact same number and type of facilities. When multiple worlds begin in the same system, the AI isn't smart enough to scrap the surplus space ports and recycling centers, so I get 2 extra facility spaces on my homeworlds that it doesn't get. Not to mention the resource bonus for scrapping those rather expensive buildings.

If you know when to time these things, and how to take advantage of the AI's weaknesses, it is essentially helpless. If you don't know the tricks, then it is actually quite a good opponent. I'd rank it as an intermediate-level player. Beginners will have a lot of trouble with it, and intermediate players will or won't based on how their particular strategies match up against its strategies (and wheter or not they do the missile-dance in tactical combat). But advanced players know all the weaknesses to exploit in its behavior.

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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

The AI can be more challenging if you do strategic combat and never ask them to surrender (Use troops or glass the planets if you want to fight them), and never trade technologies. This is not the way I play usually though because I like tactical combat. Also what I do I don't think of as a missle dance (What I think of as the missle dance is what I do if the AI uses missles before I get point defences just move the targeted ship out of range and hit them with my other ships) I just use long range weapons beam and missle as appropriate and let them chase me no dancing involved. If anything they are a bit too aggressive in tactical combat to their disadvantage. If I had to chase after them and they could turn at fire at me at times it would even out a bit. That might be hard to implement though because if 2 AI fleets meet they would never attack each other with that strategy so it would always be a stalemate.

You can out expand the AI though because they don't go too far outside their home systems very fast. If you take the first few turns to colonize you can get a headstart on them especially if you build storage facilities on your first few worlds to catch what otherwise would be wasted resources (I always start out with the beginning resources set to low because the AI will lose all those resources anyway except perhaps the research points). But they can now field larger Groups of ships and they do protect their home systems better now.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 05 January 2001).]

Re: Ahem....AI don\'t mass you say...
 

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I've had to claw my way to fourth place (I started at 9th!) in my current game. And the 3rd place player has 125% of my score, 2nd is more like 200% of my score, and 1st place is about 300% of my score (they're at 1.1 Million points!!!). The AI in my game has expanded like rabbits! The top three races have over 100 colonies each, and are producing resources at seriously high levels. Well, except for research. I'm outresearching everyone else, so I imagine I'll be taking over before too much longer...

While the AI can still be improved, it's giving a much better fight in 1.19...