Ahem....AI don't mass you say...

[Nyx]

Some strategies and tactics work against the AI better than others, and all of us have wildly different strategies. For myself, I've had games where I got into a 3-way war on turn 4 (Had my 3 starting planets each in a system with a different race) and within a very short time had all three at my mercy even with them having a low bonus.

I just started a game Last night with the AI on low bonus, high difficulty, and I began with fewer race points than each of them. On turn 1 I was in 4th place out of 4. By turn 3 I was in first. By turn 15 I was over twice the score of the second place AI.

Now, some of those early differences are attributed to little things, like knowing when building different sorts of facilities on a world to build research facilities before resource harvesting because you have a surplus of resources at the beginning. The AI doesn't know this, so I get maybe 5 or more extra turns of research over him if we build the exact same number and type of facilities. When multiple worlds begin in the same system, the AI isn't smart enough to scrap the surplus space ports and recycling centers, so I get 2 extra facility spaces on my homeworlds that it doesn't get. Not to mention the resource bonus for scrapping those rather expensive buildings.

If you know when to time these things, and how to take advantage of the AI's weaknesses, it is essentially helpless. If you don't know the tricks, then it is actually quite a good opponent. I'd rank it as an intermediate-level player. Beginners will have a lot of trouble with it, and intermediate players will or won't based on how their particular strategies match up against its strategies (and wheter or not they do the missile-dance in tactical combat). But advanced players know all the weaknesses to exploit in its behavior.

------------------
Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

[Tomgs]

The AI can be more challenging if you do strategic combat and never ask them to surrender (Use troops or glass the planets if you want to fight them), and never trade technologies. This is not the way I play usually though because I like tactical combat. Also what I do I don't think of as a missle dance (What I think of as the missle dance is what I do if the AI uses missles before I get point defences just move the targeted ship out of range and hit them with my other ships) I just use long range weapons beam and missle as appropriate and let them chase me no dancing involved. If anything they are a bit too aggressive in tactical combat to their disadvantage. If I had to chase after them and they could turn at fire at me at times it would even out a bit. That might be hard to implement though because if 2 AI fleets meet they would never attack each other with that strategy so it would always be a stalemate.

You can out expand the AI though because they don't go too far outside their home systems very fast. If you take the first few turns to colonize you can get a headstart on them especially if you build storage facilities on your first few worlds to catch what otherwise would be wasted resources (I always start out with the beginning resources set to low because the AI will lose all those resources anyway except perhaps the research points). But they can now field larger Groups of ships and they do protect their home systems better now.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 05 January 2001).]

[DirectorTsaarx]

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I've had to claw my way to fourth place (I started at 9th!) in my current game. And the 3rd place player has 125% of my score, 2nd is more like 200% of my score, and 1st place is about 300% of my score (they're at 1.1 Million points!!!). The AI in my game has expanded like rabbits! The top three races have over 100 colonies each, and are producing resources at seriously high levels. Well, except for research. I'm outresearching everyone else, so I imagine I'll be taking over before too much longer...

While the AI can still be improved, it's giving a much better fight in 1.19...

[Nyx]

I've found the AI's expansion is strongly tied to the map. In ancient quadrants, the AI is lucky to get 4 systems. In grids they expand very rapidly. Galactic edge slows them down a bit less than ancient quadrants.

Someone else (forgive my bad memory) posted that he found a high number of AIs and neutrals makes them all weaker. I'd only just been discovering that myself. When there are a lot of them, they get into multi-front wars and can never use their fleets intelligently. Against just one enemy, they fight quite a bit better.

------------------
Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

[Tomgs]

Well my saying the AI is easy for me to beat has to be understood in light of the times I have played the game. I have been playing it since the first demo came out and I have been taking a vacation from working for the Last couple months so I have played it a lot. I don't mean to say that the AI can't put up a fight it can. I have been sorely pressed on some occasions but those times were all when I went in to attack it not when it was comming after me. I do suppose if I played a style that made treaties with it and didn't attack it on sight that it might build up to the point it could hurt me a bit. I just started my first high tech start since the full game came out (that is one of the things I love about this game as many times as I have played it I can still change the settings or my playstyle and get a very different type of game) and they do make some tough ships to fight at this level of technology.