[Alpha Kodiak]

The AI will colonize as fast as you tell it to build colonizers (assuming that it sees worlds to colonize). There are a couple of ways to approach the issue early, each with minor drawbacks. The fastest expansion that I have seen comes from having 3 colonizers at the top of the ship construction file in the exploration phase. This basically forces the AI to completely colonize everything it can before your homeworld starts building anything but colonizers, since it can't build them as fast as they get used up. Once there is nothing to colonize, you will see a couple of colonizers hanging around doing nothing until an attack ship gets built and it finds something to colonize in another system. The drawback is that if a hostile empire shows up early, there are no warships to help defend the home system. It does seem to generally work well, though.

The other approach is to have 2 colonizers at the top of the construction file, followed by a base space yard. This gets more construction going, but since the space yard builds slower, typically you will wind up with a colonizer under construction for an extended period of time (thus slowing down expansion since the construction minister counts that colonizer toward the requirements for colonizers.)

The other thing that I found that improves expansion is to make sure that the planet types file is set up to place a resupply base with a spaceyard in every system you colonize. This makes sure that there is a place for construction as well as resupply everywhere on the perimeter of your empire. The default planet types file does not do this and can handcuff the AI fleets later in the game because they have to return to worlds on the interior to resupply and repair. Of course, the resupply world means one less resource planet, so you run into a trade off again.

Actually, finding the balance between expansion and infrastructure/defense is probably the most difficult part of designing a challenging AI. There are trade offs at all levels.

EDIT: One more thing, make sure that you have entries for colonizers in the construction file in all phases, even attack and defend. Otherwise, your expansion will dramatically slow down as soon as you run into another empire, and that will kill you.

[This message has been edited by Alpha Kodiak (edited 02 August 2001).]