A few comments about the Romulan

[Master Belisarius]

Nitram Draw: don't be confused. Also, I still love the game.
I'm only saying that playing alone against the AI, I never use Mines, Alliegiance Subverters, Board Parties and Stellar Manipulations.
Also, I never take over AI planets and use AI population, to populate planets with a diferent atmosphere.

[Nitram Draw]

Yep, I restrict myself in a lot of way too, except against those devious humans that I play hotseat against. They are such sneaky buggers!

M. B. - I do not use the others, but mines are the bedrock of my planetary defense for the first 50-70 turns. After that it is WP with missiles, PD, and beams. Until the AI starts doing serious sweeping mines make more sense. Research for them is cheap, but a good WP is very expensive tech for an early game....

[Atrocities]

The romulans work well for me. Then again, I am not an AI kind of guy that spends hours tweaking it. I only work on the ship sets.

But let me tell you how my current game is progressing. Out of 8 players, only the Romulan, Ferengi, Dominion (me), and the Klingons are still active.

Ranking:
Dominion
Ferengi
Klingon
Romulan

The Romulans and the Klingons are the only races attaking me with intel. The Klingons have massed huge fleets and have glassed many of my worlds. The Romulans lay back, and do not attack. They have a huge fleet, but do not choose to use it.

I do not know if this is a trait or just the AI being dumb, but I fear that when I engage the Romulans, they will have a fleet twice the size of the Klingons, and equal to my own by that time. To date, every time I have engaged them, I have lost the combat.

Their intel attacks are devistating, and they have caused many of my worlds to switch sides.

The Ferengi are just as leathal, if not more so, but their time is quickly coming to an end.

God only knows how to create a dominate AI that can do all the things we want it too. But for now, we have you guys, and I sincerely hope that you all will continue to improve upon the AI's for ALL races.

That was my own worthless 2 cents.

[Q]

To come back to the original topic posted by Master Belisarius: I too like the Klingons and Romulans very much, but I agree that the design of the attack and defense ships should be revised, at least the Version without modified components, that I have. It is not reasonable to have separate designs for very small and large ships. The AI will just stick to the small design in the later game.
Do you plan to post an update GodEmperor?

[This message has been edited by Q (edited 29 May 2001).]

[God Emperor]

Atrocities,
I appreciate your comments....

Q,
I have been working on an update but I'm not entirely sure how to deal with the small ship/large ship problem. In the standard/ basic game, the AI needs to build missile ships early on, but, once destroyers are achieved I prefer them to use DUC's. I'll have a rethink of this approach though and see what I can come up with...Perhaps I'll use a beam weapon other than the DUC (which means I can include it ahead of missiles in the Weapon priority in the DesignCreation file - I cant do that of course with DUC's because all players start off with level 1 at game start)...

In the destroyer/point defence Version though, I do not need the small ships as I equip them with DUC's at the start (apart from the Romulan Defence ships which I included just to make the Romulan ships a bit more variable)....