More than just 'weak' AI?

[Raapys]

I don't know. It might look better on paper and in theory. But situations where one AI empire sends 5 seperate fleets in *one* turn with *a single colony ship* in each, even though it has done the same things dozens of times and never had a ship last more than 1 second once through, makes me think it doesn't really work right. It's not even remembering where and how it met my ships the very same turn.

[pujal]

I made a mod yesterday that took out the no-research a few other treaty elements from the game. Sadly it didn't help much. The AI seems very limited in how much they expand and how many research facilities they make.

I want my money back.

[Moriarty]

I want my money back.

Well in the UK you can probably return it under your statutory rights. The game isn't doing what its supposed to be doing after all (i.e. its AI is certainly no challenge, even on hard with 7 "allied" computers against me all of which have a high bonus).



More on topic
What would happen if the AI shared research? They can have "share research" treaties, however after an experiment I found that though I get the AI's tech, he doesn't get mine (even though it says he did). If that bug were fixed maybe the AI's really could ally together and share their research with each other.
Mind that still wouldn't help much if the AI's aren't bothering building research buildings in the first place.

[tmcc]

If you all recall the stcok AI for SEIV was pathetic when the game first came out. Fortunately the user community has a very active modding group that came up with much better AI's, and I would even say some "racialy diverse" AI's. This all took time though.

I have not programmed in about 10 years but I would say step one would be to take a look at what the TDM mod for SEIV had the AI doing and replicate that as closely as possible, taking into account the changes between the two games. That would be a start and the we could tweak from there. If we find that the basic code needs some changes than we will all have to e-mail Aaron with the right requests. Are the TDM guys still part of the community??

[Captain Kwok]

The design of the AI is quite different from SE:IV and it will take some time to build up more detailed functions for it, but there is a ton and potential and I predict in the next year the quality of the AI will be even better than it was in SE:IV after 6+ years of modding.

[pujal]

I really hope so Kwok. I wonder if Strategy First knew how incomplete the game really was when they shipped it out.

[Ragnarok-X]

Well pujal, there were more than enough warnings in this forum. I will probably buy it in a few months.

[Moriarty]

pujal said:
I really hope so Kwok. I wonder if Strategy First knew how incomplete the game really was when they shipped it out.

Long answer: Allow me to introduce you to the concept of rushing software out of the door in time to meet the christmas period.

Short Answer: Almost definately Yes.

[Baron Grazic]

Captain Kwok said:
The design of the AI is quite different from SE:IV and it will take some time to build up more detailed functions for it, but there is a ton and potential and I predict in the next year the quality of the AI will be even better than it was in SE:IV after 6+ years of modding.

Which brings up the question, how do you mod the AIs?
Baron Grazic

[tmcc]

It would be nice to know how the AI system really works so that we could start making flow charts of what a good AI should do. I looked at the empire data files and ended up just guessing at what did what.