[PvK]

The AI does some things well, and has some problems, with Proportions. For a while, it can seem to do pretty well, deploying ships with its usual semi-competence. I modded all of the AI's very slightly to overcome some basic disasters. If you take an unmodded AI from outside into Proportions, it will have problems designing ships properly, for example, because unmodded AI's don't have good designs for the modded ship sizes. My slight AI mods at least do take care of this and some other problems. They will actually build ships of all sizes, and continue to do so throughout the game, which is neat. They will also put a proportion of armor on ships, which in Proportions is good.

The AI will also cheat slightly at the start, by putting an extra (illegal) engine on some of its ships, until it gets another component with a defensive bonus. This isn't a big deal, though.

The modded AI is about good enough to at least play the game for a while and get used to it via single-player, but its unlikely to be very competitive. In 1.3, the AI's main flaw is it will try to make homeworlds out of all its colonies, and doesn't know how to effectively ferry population to colonies, which means its colonies will be essentially useless for pretty much the whole game. This gets compounded by the supply issues in Proportions. Since the AI isn't building resupply depots, and isn't designing long-range ships, all it can do is buzz around the systems within a few jumps of its homeworld(s).

In 1.5, which I hope to release this weekend, I have tweaked the AI some more, so that it builds appropriate facilities on colonies, instead of trying to build cultural centers with a couple million colonists. This allows the AI to spread over the quadrant. I've also started developing some of the AI's so they are more effective on a one-by-one basis, to build longer-ranged ships and so on, but even so, it's still not going to be really skillful. Maybe with a lot more work it can get to be a semi-reasonable opponent by 1.6. The very cool new AI tweaking features MM is adding will make it easier to develop specialized ships for the AI, for instance. I think these might allow me to get the AI to build appropriately fearsome planetary defenses on homeworlds, too.

Sadly, there are a number of issues that will linger, I think. For instance, the AI doesn't know how to intentionally cure plagues, and even event-generated plagues can be devastating in Proportions, if they strike a homeworld. Since population is important and hard to move in Proportions, random events like plagues or unstable stars can be real disasters. This is actually pretty interesting, I think.

All told, I think Proportions will remain best suited to human-vs.-human play, although I have enjoyed playing around against AI players.

PvK