[wingte]

The medium setting should be balanced so that is the position where I will play.
The real test would be to creat an AI where you could give yourself every advantage and still have a challeging game because the AI actually learns.
My experience in SE III was that the AI would adapt to the tactics I was using in the medium/normal mode. When I developed the stellar manipulation tech and started cleaning systems by destroying the suns,, the AI started mining the sun. When I started putting mine sweepers on the sun destroyers,, it put a fleet at the sun. So far as I could tell the AI never used any of the stellar manipulation tech even when they clearly should have had it since I had long since maxed out the tech. I also found that using the warp manipulation would upset even my allies and using the sun destroyer against even a genocidal opponent would likly cause my allies to break their treaty with me.

But none of this happened in less than 50-60 turns since that was just about the minimum time I could research the warp point tech and still research the other stuff that would give me the resources to maintain the fleet with expensive components.

So ,, I still maintain that 100 turns is not enough to be able to really get a feel for what and how the medium setting on the dificulty is actually going to react. This is especially true since the Demo doesn't have the stellar manipulation tech in it that caused the SE III AI to really show what it could and would do.

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Wingte