'Why does the AI suck so much?'

[Pope Innocent the 69th]

1. It doesn't appreciate population count as high as it should. The most succesful AI empires (klackon, meklar, sakkra) ALWAYS have more pop than their rivals. Pop is the single most important thing in this game, primarily because more pop can be used to make even more pop, faster, and build structures that let you generate more pop faster. This leads to an exponential power curve that the AI doesn't seem to be aware of.

2. It sucks at diplomacy. Not as much as in other games, but they seem a lot more concerned over poking the eye of the player out than benefiting themselves (oh, you want to sign a research treaty? You better give me 14 creds per year or I won't sign it. Oh you want a mutual embassy? That will be 5 creds pls). They don't seem to be trading as aggressively as they should, as a result I almost always have the most money in my games, simply because I'm not a total ♥♥♥♥. Alliances are also extremely rare, I've never seen 2 ais ally with each other and I myself could only ally someone if they were in my pocket. The pointless penalty of 'you didn't vote for me at the council' is also a pain, because it means the mayor ai powers will always hate you, just because you didn't help them win the game?

3. It doesn't seem to know what to produce. I conquered many AI colonies that lacked basics such as a hydrophonic farm or a governmen support facility

4. It is unaware of its own strengths. If they pump out a ton of units, they might as well use them? At other times it will commit to a war that is not advantageous for itself and thus only end up tiring out the other party, without gaining a significant enough advantage. Conquets in this game takes a lot of effort, you really have to commit to either a lot of nukes and colony ships or troop transports and alien managment centres. You can't half ♥♥♥♥ it. As a result, I've never seen a succesful AI warmonger, they always fall behind eventually.

5. It doesn't realise that somebody on the map is getting out of control. Remember the exponential power curve I talked about? Well, if a player is about 20-30 population ahead of other races by turn 200, that will become something like 50-60 by turn 300 and 90-100 or even more by turn 400. If somebody, NOT JUST THE HUMAN, is getting out of control, they should get a 'threat to our existence' penalty with all of their neighbours, and these neighbours should seek allies asap before the player gets too far ahead.

As a result, I 'win' ages before I actually get the victory message. The AI just can't keep up with the human players, it doesn't expand and 'macro' aggressively enough. By the time you finish devouring half the galaxy, one of the AI empires should have the other half and it should all come down to a late-game slugfest between 2 giants, yet this never happens, for reasons mentioned above.

This is something that is very common in 4x games and its about time somebody figured it out because its a massive drag on the genre.

That's about it.

[frdnwsm]

I have seen two AI races ally ... exactly once in about 50 games. Should be more common. They will, however, ask on occasion for you to ally with them. Needless to say, I almost always say no thanks.

There are rare 4x games where it takes some ingenuity to defeat the AI. MOO:CTS was actually a harder game than it is now, about 3 or 4 patches ago. The AIs were more aggressive and built actual warships earlier in the game, as opposed to the "colony ship spam" that characterizes the AI early game building program currently. The Devs listened to all sorts of input from too many players, and ended up screwing the pooch.

Consequently, as you mentioned, the player often has the game well in hand long before formal victory conditions are achieved. As a result, a lot of us try various handicaps, beyond that conferred by level of diffficulty, to add interest.

I've basically exhausted the vanilla game possibilities, and am currently trying out Spud's 4x mod, which he claims significantly increases AI race competitiveness. I'm not far enough into the game yet to comment one way or the other, but I'm hopeful.

[Pope Innocent the 69th]

Colony ships spam is not the problem, I tend to do that myself and it is the correct thing to do in the early game if you aren't planning to be aggressive. That being said, I've seen ai colony ships casually chilling at their home planet far too long. At the start of the game, the AI should assess how many 'viable' planets he has access to and colonise those asap. If another player snipes them he should switch over to fleet building and punish that player. That is how I play anyways.

The real problem is them settling those colonies and then not developing them properly.

[Spud Dastardly]

1. Several races have their "growthInclination" setting too low. That's fixable through modding.

2. The AI is programmed to ask someone for a deal not more often than every 15 turns, and it can't ask the same deal twice in 25 turns. This can be modded as well. I don't know why they consider research treaties to be so valuable, but if you mod them to make them cheaper, the AI asks for less and will sometimes as you for them. The penalty for not voting for them at the council can also be removed with mods. Getting them to ally with each other is tougher.

3. This might be moddable. I toyed with the settings, but I don't know if they actually took effect.

4. The AI sucks at invading people, but you can at least mod their invasionInclination to increase the likelyhood that they'll go for it.

5. This one was a design decision. The devs felt it would be too "gamey" if everyone piled on the score leader when they got ahead, even though that's what human players would do.

4x AI's are rarely any good. I assume it's rather hard to program one. The devs did as bad or good as any other 4x, and like many games they gave the AI unfair advantages on harder difficulties to create an artificial challenge. However, the devs also didn't set their own AI parameters at the optimal levels, and this can be adjusted through modding. Since the devs have given up on this game, modding is all we have left...

@frdnwsm I've made more improvements for the next update this Friday. I've adjusted the AI settings to be about as good as they can get, I think.

[frdnwsm]

Yes, I saw your notice about Friday's update. So far with your 4x I'm finding things easier, if anything. Mainly because of the earlier and more varied tech you have made available. The AI hasn't been particularly aggressive, although admittedly it's only turn 150; plenty of empty planets yet to expand into, so no wars declared so far. They do seem to have built more warships, though.

I'm eager to see how the planetary defences have improved in tactical combat.

[frdnwsm]

>>"Colony ships spam is not the problem:<<

It is when it's unaccompanied by production of protecting warships. I've had games where I just spam a few frigates and troop ships and totally gobble up my nearest AI neighbor early in the game. I end up basically doubling my number of colonies, which is a huge long term edge.

[drunkjk]

You make some interesting and valid points Dr. Yolo Swaggins Esq. I like your name by the way, I might steal it kappa

My biggest gripe about the AI is, when playing in any size galaxy with at least two AI, they seem to always disregard personal space. I get nervous whenever they colonize a planet next to me and I'm always tempted to attack them, which I do, hoping they get the message to expand somewhere else that's not near me, but that never happens. Instead the game is over in about 100-200 turns because I end up simultaneously declaring war on EVERY AI in the game.

I hate it. The AI should be tweaked so that it "thinks more logically like a human", or something like that, that way I can play a more chill and laid-back type of game against the AI.

[Spud Dastardly]

Originally posted by frdnwsm:

Yes, I saw your notice about Friday's update. So far with your 4x I'm finding things easier, if anything. Mainly because of the earlier and more varied tech you have made available. The AI hasn't been particularly aggressive, although admittedly it's only turn 150; plenty of empty planets yet to expand into, so no wars declared so far. They do seem to have built more warships, though.

I'm eager to see how the planetary defences have improved in tactical combat.

In 2.2.1, they are not as aggressive as I had hoped. My tests with the new 2.3 settings usually end up with 2 wars starting in the first 110 turns. On impossible difficulty, I even saw a war start before turn 20.

Originally posted by drunkjk:

You make some interesting and valid points Dr. Yolo Swaggins Esq. I like your name by the way, I might steal it kappa

My biggest gripe about the AI is, when playing in any size galaxy with at least two AI, they seem to always disregard personal space. I get nervous whenever they colonize a planet next to me and I'm always tempted to attack them, which I do, hoping they get the message to expand somewhere else that's not near me, but that never happens. Instead the game is over in about 100-200 turns because I end up simultaneously declaring war on EVERY AI in the game.

I hate it. The AI should be tweaked so that it "thinks more logically like a human", or something like that, that way I can play a more chill and laid-back type of game against the AI.

Not much we can do about this one unfortunately.

[frdnwsm]

AIs are not human, don't "think" like a human, and cannot operate outside their programming parameters. I.E. they cannot adapt to circumstances outside their programming, the way you or I could. The best a programmer can do is provide reactions for as many situations as he can think of.

There's a bunch of virtual on/off switches ... if 01100101110110 occurs, then 110111001000101 happens. Wheee.

What the computer CAN do is run many thousands of calculations in fractions of a second, which is why the best chess programs can beat all but the very strongest of human players.

[drunkjk]

Originally posted by frdnwsm:

AIs are not human, don't "think" like a human, and cannot operate outside their programming parameters. I.E. they cannot adapt to circumstances outside their programming, the way you or I could. The best a programmer can do is provide reactions for as many situations as he can think of.

There's a bunch of virtual on/off switches ... if 01100101110110 occurs, then 110111001000101 happens. Wheee.

What the computer CAN do is run many thousands of calculations in fractions of a second, which is why the best chess programs can beat all but the very strongest of human players.

Thank you for that very unhelpful and unnecessary comment 😂

[drunkjk]

Originally posted by Spud Dastardly:

Originally posted by frdnwsm:

Yes, I saw your notice about Friday's update. So far with your 4x I'm finding things easier, if anything. Mainly because of the earlier and more varied tech you have made available. The AI hasn't been particularly aggressive, although admittedly it's only turn 150; plenty of empty planets yet to expand into, so no wars declared so far. They do seem to have built more warships, though.

I'm eager to see how the planetary defences have improved in tactical combat.

In 2.2.1, they are not as aggressive as I had hoped. My tests with the new 2.3 settings usually end up with 2 wars starting in the first 110 turns. On impossible difficulty, I even saw a war start before turn 20.

Originally posted by drunkjk:

You make some interesting and valid points Dr. Yolo Swaggins Esq. I like your name by the way, I might steal it kappa

My biggest gripe about the AI is, when playing in any size galaxy with at least two AI, they seem to always disregard personal space. I get nervous whenever they colonize a planet next to me and I'm always tempted to attack them, which I do, hoping they get the message to expand somewhere else that's not near me, but that never happens. Instead the game is over in about 100-200 turns because I end up simultaneously declaring war on EVERY AI in the game.

I hate it. The AI should be tweaked so that it "thinks more logically like a human", or something like that, that way I can play a more chill and laid-back type of game against the AI.

Not much we can do about this one unfortunately.

Agreed 😂

[frdnwsm]

>>"Thank you for that very unhelpful and unnecessary comment 😂"<<

No problem! Only too happy to shed light into the darkness.

[Exoclyps]

The AI will never get smarter really, at least not for combat. The only way to deal with this is to put the AI as ridiculous difficulty so that they outnumber you so that you have no choice but to take command to stand a chance.

[frdnwsm]

Doc:

The AI races need some help to be competitive. Their ship designs tend to favor energy weapons, which leaves them vulnerable to missiles, as you have discovered. So, I often restrict my ship designs to exclude missiles entirely, which puts me on the same footing as they are.

The Antarans are a bit more challenging than the stock AI races, simply because of the numbers in which they appear.

[Pope Innocent the 69th]

Here's what rustles my jimmies more than anything:
'Here, take this fusion bomb and declare war on this race!...
...NO?
Well, too bad, I'm gonna drop from Relaxed to Guarded. Non-Agression pact, trade treaties? No, I'm gonna be salty because you didn't just declare war on someone for me!'

If anyone can point me to a mod that fixes this I'm downloading it yesterday!

[drunkjk]

Originally posted by Dr. Yolo Swaggins Esq.:

Here's what rustles my jimmies more than anything:
'Here, take this fusion bomb and declare war on this race!...
...NO?
Well, too bad, I'm gonna drop from Relaxed to Guarded. Non-Agression pact, trade treaties? No, I'm gonna be salty because you didn't just declare war on someone for me!'

If anyone can point me to a mod that fixes this I'm downloading it yesterday!

Well, remember, you are dealing with AI that when they offer to trade charts with you in exchange for your charts, and you decline, you end up rustling their jimmies 😂 so none of that is a big surprise to me 😂