Poor AI
I am playing the tutorial to the finish, so that I learn how to build stealth ships. I know that now. But when I had conquered over half of the galaxy, I decided to leave my empire to full AI, and see how it plays the game. I was surprised how bad the AI is.
1) Immediately it began to build a huge amount of population transports and some defence stations (far away from the enemy). In about two turns my positive mineral production was ruined from +20000 to -50000 or something. My empire was not able to build anything. I had to scrap all these transports and bases and many other ships to get a positive mineral production again. I had to do the scrapping twice before it remained positive.
2) The resupply routines are broken. I had several ships which had attacked or explored the galaxy, and they had no fuel left. I had a colony ship nearby which was going to colonize a planet and build a resupply facility. AI decided to move these ships back from this new colony, the return trip would have taken about 30 turns. If AI would have waited for the new planet, they would have been refuelled in about 4 turns. And what was the worst, these ships had to go through a black hole system. You can guess what happened to them, because they could only move one square at the turn, and the black hole sucked them two squares at the turn.
3) When AI had build a new attack ship, it sent it to front line. The problem here is that sometimes it moved the ship back for some reason. It moved one ship forwards for two turns, then one turn back, and then again forward. I don't know what it was thinking, maybe it was the resuppy routine again. Once it moved one ship forward for two turns and then back to the starting point for two turns.
4) When AI decided to colonize a planet, it could build the colonizer ship in the other end of the galaxy, and move it all the way from there.
The problem with this bad AI is that you really can't play with the computer, PBEM is the only choice. And if you want to give any control to the ministers, you should double check what it is doing every turn or you will be surprised.
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