AI cheats even more?

[imminence]

Playing these games since the first MoO many years ago, I guess I can say without being arrogant, that I have some experience.

Shortly after release ( I didn't sign up for the early access-thing) I played it for some dozens of hours, came along just fine, but finally quit because of too many bugs, respectively features not working or not implemented.

After all these patches I came back to the game yeaterday. Well, the first thing I noticed, was the broken creative-perk. Hard to understand, but nevertheless, I tried something else (anything on normal difficulty).

Until now, I have about five different approaches with different tactics / strategies, but when I think, I could get along, some AI shows up with fleets several tiers higher, with unfathomable numbers.

Don't get me wrong: I know, that there is always an AI on par with the player. So, nothing against an AI with a Titan or two, while I am still researching this hull.

But an AI (in this case the Meklar) with DOZENS of Titans ( at least what I saw on the map)?

While they attacked I could finish my research and saw, that it would take between 30 and 40 turns on my best planets to build a single one.

Even if I had the time to do this, I'd be broke, because I'd need LOTS of command points, which I simply would not get out of my current "empire". But the AI has of course some wonderous ways of getting the command points besides the resources and the money and... and.... and.... etc.

I know, I know, there will be many posts now trying to explain, why this is all possible and has nothing to do with cheating etc. etc.

I realize, that even an experienced gamer can make wrong decisions or simply play in a stupid way. But five or six times in a row, just to see AI X coming and stomping me?

Nope, I am not that stupid. There must be something wrong.

[frdnwsm]

OK, it's quite possible to win on hard settings. The trick is not to fall too far behnd early on, or you will end up in a hole that you will not recover from. This game's mechanics differ considerably from MOO1 and MOO2. You need to adapt different research, production and combat methods. Note that in the vanilla (unmodded) version, the Meklars are always the hardest opponent to fight.

You can obviate this by taking the Meklars as your racial choice, and if you are doing a custom race, take the Meklar avatar; this will prevent them from being one of the AI opponents.

It is crucial to claim a decent territory early on. Since, unlike the original MOO and MOO2, this game has starlanes, you can just sit a frigate on a warp point and block access to a system by setting it on guard. AI opponents will generally not attack you early in the game; they tend to get aggressive only when they have no more unocuppied systems to colonize.

Make trade agreements with everyone. Keeps the aliens friendlier and makes you wealthier. Never let your fleet numbers fall too low in comparison to the AI fleets; if you look too weak, this will indeed trigger their aggro.

Your ship designs should outclass the AI, since it is restricted to cetain paradigms. Emphasize missiles, preferably MIRVed, early in the game. Beam/cannon/energy weapons suck until you get decent targetting computers. Make sure every ship, even frigates, has one bomb for dealing with pirate bases. NEVER accept the default ship designs the game will try to saddle you with.

[bilbous]

I have a different strategy in some respects. I tend to colonize one or two systems early and not expand beyond my ability to defend myself. six or eight missile boats seems to be enough of a deterrent early on and is cheap enough to keep upgraded. If you have one system adjacent to your home system with two good planets and several other inferior planets you can do quite well with just the two systems until you are ready to go to war. I use my scout ships to go meet other races but I rarely build more than one or two, once you meet them and have embassy tech you can start milking them for trade treaties. Once I have met all the races I disband my scouts to build extra frigates.

If you are going to keep missile boats you can always take the bomb tech instead of the beam tech, most ai races don't and it trades at good value while it is fresh. You can often get one or two techs, cash and per turn income from several races for the same bombtech and it means you can have 500 credit turn income early. I rarely haggle with ais I just ask what they will give me for tech. if it isn't good enough i don't trade. When you have that much cash coming in you can buy a lot of things. The nice thing about trading bomb tech is it doesn't help the enemy defeat your fleets, if they can't get to your planets it does them no good.

Usually three planets with star bases is enough to go to war. You will want the alien management building as well. Once your territory expands you will need warp gate tech.

[imminence]

What I did in this game:

Early defeated the Darlok and conquered their home planet.

Found left neighbour: Bulrati. Blocked starlane.
Found right neighbour: Psilon. Blocked strarlane.

Because of the small fleet I needed to defeat the Darlok ( just some frigates, two or three destroyers and one cruiser) they seem to be impressed enough to be polite.

The south was all mine and I found a system with a minor race, which provides food.
So, I had lots of good planets to colonize and did it.
I spent some points into espionage, researched this cloak and could - by zero risk - steal all the techs from my neighbours, which were still friendly and gave me a present from time to time.

Trade-treaties didn't work, because they never had enough starting money and - for the same reason - I couldn't sell anything.

Nevertheless, as written in my OP, I could develop my tech up to almost titan, anti matter drives, jump gates, anti matter bombs / torpedoes and so on.

In my eyes I was really not fallen back in any aspect.

I remember the old games and agree, the Meklar, if not destroyed early, can be a real PITA.
Nothing against that. There are stil battles against them or the Psilons from the original MoO 2 in my remembrance - after all these years!

(Example No 1 is always Psilons with thousands of ships and me with my black hole generator....)

Many things can happen and many might be correct in certain aspects...

But NEVER EVER in the way I have seen some hours ago (read OP). NEVER EVER.

[frdnwsm]

I have never seen the AI, even the Meklars, with that many titans unless it was late in the game. I have had battles (with the Meklars, of course) where there were 10-12 titans per side, but it was pretty late in the game by that point. From your post, you had just gotten anti-matter drive, so it sounds like mid game to me. So, I'm just curious ... what turn was it, and what starting parameters did you choose?

It also sounds like you hadn't been able to research Interplanetary Administration yet. Linking production in a 3 planet system will let you grind out a titan in 7 turns or so. It's possible, although unlikely, the Meklars had researched this tech early. A sysem with 3 decent colonies linked via IA, combined with the Meklar innate production bonus, could give them a serious edge in ship production.

[numbnumbnewbie]

LOL,
"AI cheats even more"

it comes down towards player progression,
from newbie mode to pro mode.
keep on practicing.

I think you forgot to tell us which race you were? custom race? patch 55.1, the custom race special ability option is broken. what mode did you set the AI on.

What turn were you on when you noticed that the meklar had a big load of titans?

If you need a greater challenge with AI that gets a crazy boost of resources to the point it's considered cheating, try the 5X ulimate balance mod and set the AI to impossible difficulty.

It's fun and yet still beatable, just need to progress and learn the dynamics of the game.

[kwegar]

I enjoy the game, Hard is HARD for me. I like a casual game. Hard can beat me at least half the time.

[frdnwsm]

I used to play on extreme level. Patch 55.1 combined with Spuds most recent 5X mod makes the alien AIs less likely to be pushovers, which forced me to actually drop the difficulty back down a level to very hard. This is the situation in my current game. I am just startng production on my first titan, but the game is pretty much all over, with my fleet being 2x as large as anyone else's.

Note that I am quite low on the population score; you don't need a huge population base to field a strong fleet. (I'm using the Darlok avatar).



http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=915177793


My hardest fight so far was against the Antarans, and I defeated them handily, even though they had titans and I didn't. Their ship design, like most AI opponents, sucks badly.

Now, my fleet expansion was relatively recent; I had to build up my infrasructure first. 50 turns earlier, I was weak enough that the Mysrhans were extorting money from me. I caved in and paid up, while swearing revenge. Now the tables are turned, and I am carving the Myrrshans up. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

[imminence]

Originally posted by frdnwsm:

I have never seen the AI, even the Meklars, with that many titans unless it was late in the game. I have had battles (with the Meklars, of course) where there were 10-12 titans per side, but it was pretty late in the game by that point. From your post, you had just gotten anti-matter drive, so it sounds like mid game to me. So, I'm just curious ... what turn was it, and what starting parameters did you choose?

It also sounds like you hadn't been able to research Interplanetary Administration yet. Linking production in a 3 planet system will let you grind out a titan in 7 turns or so. It's possible, although unlikely, the Meklars had researched this tech early. A sysem with 3 decent colonies linked via IA, combined with the Meklar innate production bonus, could give them a serious edge in ship production.

It was around turn 450, give or take 10 more or less.

I did research IA before they started their attack.

One more thing:

Someone said, the AI never attacks without the need of space to expand.

Well, in my case this was certainly wrong.

Up "north", there was plenty of space with dozens of sytems belonging to nobody.

The Meklar came out of nothing from there and declared war right after the first contact.
At this time they already had their titan-fleets with hundreds of frigates and destroyers.

After the experience of a former game setup and reading here about the new bugs I made a custom race without "creative" and used seed 51595 for a huge spiral galaxy.

[numbnumbnewbie]

Originally posted by frdnwsm:

I used to play on extreme level. Patch 55.1 combined with Spuds most recent 5X mod makes the alien AIs less likely to be pushovers, which forced me to actually drop the difficulty back down a level to very hard. This is the situation in my current game. I am just startng production on my first titan, but the game is pretty much all over, with my fleet being 2x as large as anyone else's.

Note that I am quite low on the population score; you don't need a huge population base to field a strong fleet. (I'm using the Darlok avatar).



http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=915177793


My hardest fight so far was against the Antarans, and I defeated them handily, even though they had titans and I didn't. Their ship design, like most AI opponents, sucks badly.

Now, my fleet expansion was relatively recent; I had to build up my infrasructure first. 50 turns earlier, I was weak enough that the Mysrhans were extorting money from me. I caved in and paid up, while swearing revenge. Now the tables are turned, and I am carving the Myrrshans up. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Good play, try playing it at impossible difficulty. lol.

[numbnumbnewbie]

At turn 450, i'm thinking that the Meklar AI was aiming to achieve the victory objectives,
Conquest
technological
economical stock market

AI also plays much smarter and sometimes more aggressively in the 5X ultimate balance mod.

[frdnwsm]

>>Someone said, the AI never attacks without the need of space to expand.<<

Never say "never". Need for Lebensraum is certainly the commonest cause for the AI attacking you. However, if your fleet is too weak compared to theirs, they will extort you, or even declare war outright. Extortion happened to me several times in this game, as I mentioned, before I started really cranking up my warship output.

Imminence: By turn 450 you should have had a fair number of titans of your own. As I mentioned, the Meklars are often going to be badly outproducing you by that point in the game, especially if you use a stock race. But usually my ship designs are better by a significant margin, so that I can beat them in battle even at a 2:1 odds disadvantage.

I thought I had saved a screenshot from a such a battle against the Meklars, but I guess I was wrong.

[imminence]

Well, I've gone back to a save of turn 390 or so. I did some scouting and found them.
They were "neutral" at this point, but in war with the Bulrathi.

Because I traded with the Bulrathi, they declared war to me after two warnings.

Interesting was, that their first attack against the Bulrathi system in my neighbourhood was smashed, while they wiped out the Bulrathi in my first approach (check OP).
Then they attacked me and I could destroy their fleet (2 Titans and many destroyers) with a fleet of one battleship, some cruisers and about a dozen of frigates / destroyers.

It looks like a discovered AI cheats less than one which was not discovered by the player.

[frdnwsm]

Ah! OK, so they did warn you, twice. Too many adverse response actions close together will do it. Personally, I don't let the AI tell me what to do, but I'm always wary of adverse reactions, and try to have a response fleet ready if they get ticked off enough. Or, if you don't have the resources immediately, you can try to buy their good graces with the gift of some relatively harmless techs or cash.

[bilbous]

You can act with more impunity if you have one or two disposition leaders. There are many factors that influence the course of a game. Those leaders also help you get better trade deals.

[Silverholic]

I have only experienced what you are describing on the highest difficulty level (Impossible?). Anytime I try to playat that difficulty level this exact problem happens. One or 2 empire decide to wipe me off without reason (good diplomatic relations and all) and they come at me with fleets of ships I could never be able to produce. So I simply play at the second highest level now but that is usually very easy. I think they should adjust the hardest difficulty so you can actually have a chance of winning.