What's the deal with AI planet capturing?

[Gorgo]

I've once seen the Sergetti from the Mod Pack doing it - I was really surprised, as I had never seen the AI doing it before!

[Rollo]

I second Master Belisarius' opinion about the AI having little strategic concept about attack locations and also that they leave captured planets behind undefended.
It is also true that in the example MB used the AI tried to capture a well defended world, however, it could not have known how well defended it actually was. The world had two defense stations (which could have been space yards as well), five weapon platforms and a few missile sats. If the space stations were scrapped (Okay, a little cheating, but which non-homeworld has two defense bases anyway? ), the attack on the planet was well executed by the AI (troops stay behind; WPs are destroyed; troops move in for the capture, while sats are destroyed). So that's not bad.
A few turns later in the same testgame another AI fleet showed up that was strong enough to capture the planet even with all defenses. I reinforced the defenses of that planet with a few ships to see what would happen. The AI was now attacking a different planet that had no defenseive fleet and captured that instead. So the AI does seem to attack the least defended planet in a system.
IMHO the AI handles planet capture not too bad. The thing that really hurts is that they leave the planets undefended.
So why bother with it, some might ask? Because it's fun .

Rollo

[Q]

Rollo I can confirm your obsevation that the AI attacks the least defended colonies in a system. I was under attack of 4 fleets with up to 90 ships in a system with 12 colonies, some but not all of them heavily protected by defense bases, weapon platforms, several hundreds of fighters, hundred satellites. The AI did not attack the well defended colonies but whiped out the weaker ones, exactely as a human player would have done it. The AI never lost a combat, when attacking a colony. I could only stop it when I had a fleet large enough to attack his fleets.

[Sinapus]

quote:

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Originally posted by Q:
The AI did not attack the well defended colonies but whiped out the weaker ones, exactely as a human player would have done it. The AI never lost a combat, when attacking a colony. I could only stop it when I had a fleet large enough to attack his fleets.

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I had a similar experience, though it seems my initial premise that the AI can detect weapon platforms and other stuff stored as cargo isn't accurate. I will continue testing and see if I can get the AI to attack a huge planet with a bunch of weapon platforms on it, but no satellites, ships or bases in orbit.


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"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"

[Devin D.Bass]

I keep on hearing about great battles against the AI with lots of ships...

I haven't experienced any of that so far.
Maybe it's the difficulty level I am playing at. I do use the Mod races.

What levels are you playing at to get this great game play?

[Q]

Devin I use TDM Mod combined with my own modification of CueCappa, Phong and Borg (posted in the mod section). The situation I described happened, when at about turn 250 I was number 1 with mega evil empire status and in fact had won the game. At that time I switched all remaining empires to manual and surrendered them all to the Borg (which have the most dangerous technology trait: assimilation) thus creating one mega AI empire as strong as mine!
I can only recommend this trick to create a really huge AI empire.
Oh I almost forgot: it was maximum difficulty but only low bonus for the AI in my game setting.

[This message has been edited by Q (edited 27 August 2001).]

[Sinapus]

quote:

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Originally posted by Devin D.Bass:
I keep on hearing about great battles against the AI with lots of ships...

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I've seen some pretty huge fleets of Pyrochette ships... Some of them cloaked. Good thing I was using an expendable ship as a picket. Attacking that "one" cruiser that may or may not have been a minesweeper and finding about 14 other cruisers was NOT fun. Can you say "crash research advanced military science"? I knew you could.



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"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"