[LintMan]

Talenn, I think that's a good idea about the AI using military strength rather than score as a decision whether to attack. (One thing though about a strong econ/weak military as being a prime target for attack... I think that was a key factor in Japan's decision to attack the US in WWII - perhaps not the best idea in the long run!)

But does the AI know what the military strength of its neighbors is? Intelligence is quite expensive to get and it risks pissing off your neighbors.

Also, a more agressive AI doesn't help in the situation I'm in. In my jumbo galaxy, there are 8 AI players plus myself, giving huge amounts of time for expansion before even encountering one other race. I'm not an expert player, but by the time I met another race, I already had a very substantial lead over them in tech, economy, population, and planets. I didn't have a single ship with weapons on it built yet, nor any minefields, platforms or setellites. I'm confident though that if the AI went on the offsensive immediately upon discovering me, the fat cat
with no military, I would be able to quickly ramp up my war machine in defense without losing more than a few outlying colonies.

Military aggressiveness would only work if it hit me early on to have slowed me down, or if it was coming from an empire as strong as mine research and economy wise.

Of course, the solution in future games will be to fill it with more players so I will be slowed down, but that doesn't fix the fact that the AI doesn't do peacetime buildup very well.

Well, what would fix this? Well, the AI needs some tweaking to recognize the likely long term peacetime situtation, and go balls-out expansion. And it needs to be smarter about exporting population to the colonized worlds, and building up research. It should build more base space yards so it has the production capacity to quickly produce some defense if needed.

But also, I think if fleet maintenance was less, it would help things a bit even without the above tweaks. It would be nice if the AI (or a player for that matter) could build some ships for defense without needing to pay the high costs.

Some thoughts:

- What if the maintenance cost was lower for the first number of ships, and then grew as the number of ships exceded a certain amount (say, more ships than you have colonies or space yards).

- Maybe maintenance could be reduced for ships that are "local" to you (ie: ships in a system with a colony owned by you and having a spaceport), so ships that are on defense in your systems would cost less to operate than those in a distant campaign.

- Or maybe a variant of something like in Alpha Centauri, where the further ships were from a "headquarters" the more ineffiency there would be and thus the more they would cost to operate. The headquarters would be an expensive facilty that could be built nearer to the action to cut down those costs.