AI difficulty

[Sigilli]

Hey guys
I've been somewhat training from time to time and I've seen that the Normal AI just behaves... it doesn't behave. It takes 5 planets, have no fleet, no defense, not a single thing. I just make one fleet and it caps the whole game.
I set one game to 10 players, I solo and a few teams, still, I steamrolled their faces with one fleet and one starbase on a chokepoint.

am I doing something wrong or the Normal just don't do anything?
At the same time, I've been reading that the Hard is just ... to hard? I'm yet to test it, but still I'd like to see a few opinions

cya

[dead]

Yeah, the AI is like that in Sins :/ Easy/Normal are too easy, and hard onwards is much harder then what it says it is. There isn't much of a between leve. Mostly because the AI just gets income cheats anyway ;-;

[thefoodwagon™]

no the ai is ♥♥♥♥ sadly alot of strat games ai are like this you can not have a commpetient ai the only way to make the ai put up a fight is like Davoss said give it income boost and it will still not enough play multiplayer tho if you dont like faster settings good luck 98% every lobby is faster i like normal personaly

[WHIPperSNAPper]

Try the Harder level and see if that makes it more challenging. If you get to the point where you can the Hard and Unfair level AI's easily, then you might consider online mutliplayer team PvP to play it against human opponents.

[CursedPanther]

Normal AI should've been the default entry difficulty. As of now the so-called Easy AI appears to be a program that functions for around 30 minutes and then simply stops for the rest of the game.

[Foocubus]

AI is a bit easy here, although not quite as bad as Civ5/Beyond Earth. There is PvP, although, I understand the reluctance to deal with that. The best AI in the business is still with GalCiv2.

[Summanus]

Thats kinda the glaring problem with this game, good as it is. The Normal and Hard difficulties are too easy but if you bump up to Unfair for a challenge it starts getting ridiculous. Hence why its called 'unfair' I guess.

Case in point - I'm playing Advent vs 3 unfair AIs (all different teams). I'm only a few minutes into the game, just taken my 3rd planet (including the homeworld) and now I'm being attacked by an enemy with 2 capital ships at level 4 and 45(!) accompanying frigates. I have only managed to build 1 capital ship and 4 frigates with the resources I have. So I have no chance whatsoever.

I wouldn't mind, but that particular enemy is also dealing with constant pirate raids, so I assume their full fleet is even larger than that.

Ha! And then when you somehow manage to destroy all those. They instantly send another 30 frigates. Its a shame their only way to make the AI good is to make them cheat.

[insolent1]

The most challenging AI was the original sins game as it didn't waste resouces on starbases/titans, it focused on its fleet and it was much better for this.
There is a mod that allows you to play without the expansion packs.

[♥Fluffy♥]

I've gave up on playing the AI's on Easy or Normal. I've been playing them only on Hard. Also been doing the Achievements for Hard. Gotta kill 4 Hard AI's for the next Achievement should be easy enough.

However, Getting off topic a little, Normal AI Difficulty with Agressive or Fortification they will do some improvement, but if they are set to Economic or Research they don't do anything and just focus on that. But if you set it to Hard Agressive, They act way to agressive and somehow there Research is much higher then yours. Samee thing happens with Hard Fortification. Hard Research AI... They... Just go after the Superweapons so you are kinda screwed if you don't have proper defenses for it.

Anything past Hard, I do warn you to get Star basses as quickly as possible and Fortify all your planets as quickly as possible.

[Summanus]

If you're finding Normal too easy, then I'd say the best thing to do is to bump it up to Hard and give that a go. Try setting all your ai opponents to be 'fortifiers' (because anything else is too easy to steamroll) and change the settings to "Normal Start" (this'll put you on slightly more equal footing with your opponents in the early game).

It also helps if you add more than one opponent, because then they'll have a little more to worry about than just attacking you.

Pretty soon you'll start to find Hard too easy and, like me, you'll have to bump it up to Unfair for a challenge. The only problem with Unfair is that you have to weather an initial storm as your vastly superior opponents try to batter you down very early on, but if you can manage to get passed that part, then the rest of the game plays out pretty much the same as Hard.