Difficulty Differences

[Cdubbs]

Wondering what the AI bonuses are per difficulty level? Like do they get stat bonuses or are they just more efficient/aggressive as you increase.

[Periwinkle6774]

From my experience on impossible difficulty, the AI doesn’t appear to have any stat increases or cheat like abilities. However, their fleet composition and time spent on asset acquisition has changed dramatically, the ai is also hyper aware fleet cohesion and when that breaks, they typically will warpout early in a fight to mitigate damages. I could be wrong but this is what I have noticed without concrete data. Hope this helps.

[RCMidas]

According to the developers, the AI just gets smarter up until Hard, and only after that does it also start getting resource cheats. More difficult AI is also significantly more wary of engaging in fights, as it knows losing will take time to recover from whilst the victor can keep doing damage to its infrastructure - basically the AI is aware of the risk of a death spiral.

The AI is also more than willing to sit it out on the edge of a gravity well, waiting for an opportunity to attack its neighbour. It doesn't care how long it takes, but a human does, so two roughly-equal AI enemies can stalemate each other at their borders until someone else comes in to shake things up.

[BLACKcOPstRIPPa]

I have I have seen in playing around with difficulties that AI will tend to make multiple factories in a system as well.

So they are ordering ships like a player does, but instead of making 1 factory in a couple systems, the game picks the closest system and queues up all ships.1 factory, they make multiple factories in 1 system so they produce 2-3 ships at a time.

I lost an early game war because ai was making 4 frigates at a time from 1 system away. That was a wake up call to me, now I do the same thing and my war efforts have seen more success😁

[Nimeroni]

Hard and below : no bonus, it just get smarter and smarter. Hard is reluctant at engaging you if it think it will lose, unless you fight it on its home planet.

Unfair : +5 credit, +2 crystal, +2 metal as a baseline, then +2 credit +1 crystal +1 metal per planet. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/SoSE/comments/1eyxwxc/is_this_how_the_ai_cheats/ljgudxb/