[LGM]

I cannot believe people are still grumbling about AI limitations. Since there is no way to code your AIs to look at the environment around them, it will be hard to produce good AIs. You really need to be able to access information that would be available to a human playing the game. You need to know your resource levels, what are my shipyard capacities, what kind of races surround you, where there are big stacks of ships controled by other players, what those designs look like, etc.

If you really want to create smart AIs, you need to program them and have SEIV provide a way of indicating an executible module to make your designs (e.g. a COM object, a .NET object, or a DLL to invoke your AI code). In conjunction to this, SEIV would need to define interfaces that could be used to get information on the game (List of colonies, ships, units - friendly and enemy; Resource Information; Rival Race Information; Rival Designs; Treaty Grid; and so on all need to be available). Until you can create AIs in such a manner, they are going to be weakly driven by priority parameters. Those priority parameter are based on what you think is important in every game, they do not react to what actually transpires.

The only time I play SEIV is against humans, other than to test a race design for early growth (testing construction rate versus resource production) to make sure my designed race will be balanced.

This new patch fixed some bugs and weakness that human players could really exploid against other human players who do not know about them (or whose race cannot exploit them). A good fix was the quad damage versus shields fix. I moded those weapons to be Shields Only and I made the damage 4 times bigger to avoid Temporal Players from exploiting that bug.

The MC/Al Subverted takes away the unstopable combination of Virus + Allegiance Subverter for Psychic races. Now, the Psychic has one weapon for MC ships and one for crewed ships and he has to guess which type to build. You build both, you might not get to use one. This allows designs to be counterd, but at a cost. Before there was no counter to a Psychic with CVs before the patch.