Finding AI opponents / good mods

[Cylon99]

I've owned SE4 for about a month, and while I've had a some enjoyable games, I've found (as echoed here in the forum) that the AIs supplied with the game just aren't that challenging. There seem to be two ways that the player community has addressed this: custom AI/races, and game mods - although the line seems a bit blurred between the two, as I've read a number of Posts that make it seem as if certain race/AIs are part of particular mods.

I've looked a number of SE4 web sites, and frankly they're rather uninformative in this department - disregarding the 90% that are basically clan/empire sites, the 'general' ones focus on races and how they look - with no info on their AIs. As for mods, there's hardly any that are even linked to, let alone described.

And while the Archives for mods and AIs has lots of Posts, they're mostly from the authors - "Here's my mod!" - it's hard to tell what people think of them.


So here's my requests for all of the folk who've been around the SE4 block a few times:

1. What are some mods/AIs that you've found to make the game more of a challenge? If they're not in the Archives, where can they be found? Describe them a bit if you can.

2. Are there any sites that have a good overview of the mods out there, with reviews or descriptions?


[This message has been edited by Cylon99 (edited 25 May 2001).]