[Tomgs]

The AI can be more challenging if you do strategic combat and never ask them to surrender (Use troops or glass the planets if you want to fight them), and never trade technologies. This is not the way I play usually though because I like tactical combat. Also what I do I don't think of as a missle dance (What I think of as the missle dance is what I do if the AI uses missles before I get point defences just move the targeted ship out of range and hit them with my other ships) I just use long range weapons beam and missle as appropriate and let them chase me no dancing involved. If anything they are a bit too aggressive in tactical combat to their disadvantage. If I had to chase after them and they could turn at fire at me at times it would even out a bit. That might be hard to implement though because if 2 AI fleets meet they would never attack each other with that strategy so it would always be a stalemate.

You can out expand the AI though because they don't go too far outside their home systems very fast. If you take the first few turns to colonize you can get a headstart on them especially if you build storage facilities on your first few worlds to catch what otherwise would be wasted resources (I always start out with the beginning resources set to low because the AI will lose all those resources anyway except perhaps the research points). But they can now field larger Groups of ships and they do protect their home systems better now.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 05 January 2001).]