LOL! Dumbass AI!

[dogscoff]

Playing a single-player proportions 3.05 game, just to learn the tech tree. I'm happily exploiting every possible cheesy anti-AI trick I know in order to win.

It's a pretty crazy game: I have two homeworlds, thanks to starting in the same system as two other races, and sending out a troop transport on about turn 3 while the AI was still building space stations. =-)

In another system, the game appears to have put 5 (FIVE!) AI homeworlds in one system. yowch. I'm currently trying to trade as much population away from them as I can before tech reaches homeworld-busting levels and total genocide ensues.

Anyway, I have events set to maximum probability (and I took the unlucky trait as well) and there seem to be an awful lot of revolutions happening: I think I've seen at least four new empires break away from their own races so far.

I conquered the first one (which was one of mine) but the others were so far away from my homeworld, with so many nebulae and black holes in between that it's almost impossible for me to get warships there. Instead, I came up with a great way to take these worlds: Buy them. I see the new empire's planet via a partnership treaty and then get contact asap via a scout ship. All I have to do then is offer to swap them all my comm channels, maps and techs for their one little planet. They fall for it every time! A bloodless coup! It's a great way to pick up new planets full of different breathers.

[Cipher7071]

They went for that????

[douglas]

That's nothing. I once started demanding each race's homeworld as tribute on first contact in one single player game, and all three races I met before quitting in boredom gave it to me.

[PvK]

LOL!

[Cipher7071]

I knew the AI were gullible, but I never would have suspected they were THAT gullible.

[Captain Kwok]

Douglas, do you recall your relative score against them?

[PvK]

It's also funny knowing that I went through all of the Proportions AI settings trying to remove or at least reduce all the trading abuses I could. If you are an empire with one or more homeworlds against a colony though, they may accept almost anything you say due to the perceived power imbalance, since most of the acceptance conditions are expressed in terms of relative score. Sounds like one would have to just set the AI to never accept such trades to avoid this, since evidently it is not coded to not trade its last planet. Of course, the unmodded AI will even accept Surrender proposals if the score ratio is high enough, and there are so many AI exploits in trading and elsewhere that it's nearly impossible to mod all of them away, expecially if you want to keep some features in for people who are "roleplaying" and limiting their abuses as opposed to playing exploitively.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

*Blink Blink*...Remove score?

[PvK]

I don't know that you can (mod out the score, assuming that's what you're suggesting, Narf), really, or at least, not without creating a bunch of other issues to deal with. For example, the score value of ships seems to be based on the tonnage, which means that in Proportions mod, where colony ships are about 1500kT or more (instead of 300kT in unmodded), and each transport to move a million people has a considerable tonnage too, an empire with a bunch of large colonization ships and almost no warships ends up being quite intimidating to the AI.

[Fyron]

One thing that could be done is to downscale all ships and components by 10, thus leading to ship hulls contributing only 1/10th as much to score. You can also use scale mounts on the colony module and starliner comps to make the colony ships and transports smaller.

There really isn't anything you can do to mod how score is calculated though, sadly.