Is the AI too stupid to make this game fun?

[mu695]

I recently picked this game back up after at least a decade of absence. Within a couple hours of casual play, I was beating the base game's hard AI and finding it to be very exploitable. It seems to be easy to stall outside of battles, has a tendency to spam sub-optimal units (e.g. I recently saw a nearly 200 point Rebel fleet that was mostly A-wings), and retreats far too often on the offence. It's slightly smarter on the ground battles, but the ease of stalling means that it's not hard to have the Death Star fix that.

Is this normal for this game? I'm not asking for mods to fix this, I just want to know if the AI is known for being this stupid. If this is the norm, I can't see myself ever losing to the AI in galactic conquest. If anything, I'll only be beaten by the conquests with time limits.

[Zom Zoms]

Humans are stupid.

[The Lord Of Iron]

no there are ways to make this game harder trust me no need to worry

[Butterlord]

yeah that's how it is, they will occasionally hit you with big pushes but nothing a human won't be able to keep up with on vanilla. I know you say you don't want mods but there are so many good ones which increase difficulty in just about every aspect, consider looking into some. The new Fall of the Republic mod is fantastic and even has a "cruel ai" option. I also know the Foc Alliance Rebellion mod is supposed to have more aggressive ai with bigger armies.

[mu695]

Originally posted by Easy AI:

Humans are stupid.

It took me a while to get that joke. Nice job.

Originally posted by Gordon Ramsay:

yeah that's how it is, they will occasionally hit you with big pushes but nothing a human won't be able to keep up with on vanilla.

Are there any other commonly-known issues with the AI?

[Gauzl]

The AI for the vanilla games is broken, you'll notice they wont even upgrade their space stations or advance tech.

[rigrug]

If it's too easy there are a lot of great mods on the workshop. My personal favorites are Thrawn's Revenge or Fall of the Republic, which is new. If you're looking for a tough challenge, the Republic at War mod is really fun but playing as the Republic means you're in for a tough ride.

[mu695]

Originally posted by Gauzl:

The AI for the vanilla games is broken, you'll notice they wont even upgrade their space stations or advance tech.

Is it really that bad?

Originally posted by rigrug:

If it's too easy.

But is is normal to find it too easy? I've put less than 6 hours in to the game since probably a decade of not playing and I'm already finding The Lines Are Drawn on hard mode too easy regardless of what side I'm playing.

[Geara_Doga_Flakes]

I've beaten several vanilla campaigns as the Empire and yeah as much as I love this game the AI can be pretty incompetent at times.

Try mods like Thrawn's Revenge and New Jedi Order if you want the AI to actually be a huge threat. Those and Fall of the Republic are my personal favorite mods.

[Geara_Doga_Flakes]

Originally posted by rigrug:

If it's too easy there are a lot of great mods on the workshop. My personal favorites are Thrawn's Revenge or Fall of the Republic, which is new. If you're looking for a tough challenge, the Republic at War mod is really fun but playing as the Republic means you're in for a tough ride.

The AI pretty much knows how to spam Lucrehulks and Providences in Republic at War lmao. It's pretty challenging and I would be lying if I said the AI in that mod didn't make me rage quit at times.

Thrawn's Revenge, Fall of the Republic and New Jedi Order are definitely more forgiving but that's balanced by the AI's aggressive nature in those mods evidently. And the fact that in TR and NJO there's multiple AI-controlled factions trying to kill each other.

[prof_pessimist]

I dont know why you would play the vanilla version of this game?

Thrawns revenge
The remastered Mod (early still has issues, but the best visuals)
The fall of the republic
and the best one - awaking the rebellion

All of them improve the game and AI. With all this why would you ever play the vanilla?

[mu695]

Originally posted by prof_pessimist:

With all this why would you ever play the vanilla?

Two reasons really:
1) I've only just started playing again. Why mod when I'm not yet done with the base game?
2) I'm playing on a disc version. It's harder (impossible?) to get the big mods on there.

[mu695]

Is The Lines Are Drawn just particularly bad on the AI or something? I recently finished doing it as the Rebels on hard mode and it was a complete joke. I started off by focusing on my economy (mines and smugglers everywhere) and building a fleet to defend my two border planets. Once I had that, I used C3P0 to scout out my two options for attacks and I noticed that my best option had a hypervelocity gun on the ground. My first attempt to raid it failed pretty badly, but I soon discovered that the AI can't play very well against Rebel Speeders. Once I knew that, it was mass destruction until it finally wised up and built an anti-air gun. With my objective completed, I soon moved to the proper space assault, which, despite my inexperience with the Rebel ships, was pretty easy because the AI doesn't seem to like to put its main fleet on its borders. The ground assault was similarly easy - I had already destroyed most of their buildings and had them massively outnumbered.

With that done, I knew that I had as good as won. The AI doesn't seem to focus on its economy, and I now had 5 planets to its 3. All that I had to do now was defend my borders and let time do the work. This was even easier than expected - for the rest of the playthrough I never got attacked. In terms of how I actually won, it was trivial. All that I did was build up some ships and an Ion Cannon so that I could be sure that my new border was safe. Once I had that safety, I built up a huge ground and space attack force. After that, I discovered that the other original border planet (Taris) had a pathetic defence - 5 low tech ships. As for their main fleet, it seemed to be 19 Tartans and 3 Broadsides (why? It can build ISDs!).

From this point the game was a joke. I used the Taris battle to test my fleet and it turned out to be an easy win. Their ground defences were better than anything that I'd enjoy fighting (it was lots and lots of factories), so I auto-resolved that. Now that I could see their remaining two planets, I saw how pathetic what remained was. Their final ground defence was 2 AT-STs, 2 Stormtroops, 2 Maruders, 2 Scout Troopers, and a few heroes, on a planet that's fully capable of building AT-ATs! I auto-resolved every remaining battle and crushed them. My entire play time between my first conquered planet and beating the game was about 40 minutes.

What's going on here? Is it just The Lines Are Drawn that's like this or is it always this bad? I've noticed a few points of concern:

• The AI is absurdly easy to stall. Once I conquered one planet, I was never attacked again.
  
• The AI seems to focus on building unit-producing buildings, even when it doesn't have the economic support for them. I can only remember seeing one enemy mining facility in my entire conquest. On top of being poor economic management (assuming that the AI isn't cheating its credit counts), this makes ground battles much harder than they should be. It strongly encourages me to auto-resolve or rush to build the Death Star.
  
• I never saw The Emperor leave the planet that he was on. It seems like the AI is not using his discounts wisely.
  
• Some units, like Rebel Speeders, are lethal to the AI. It seems like it doesn't know how to counter some of them.
  
• The AI seems prone to spamming the production of poor space units. It rarely builds capital ships and seems to have a strong preference for anti-fighter units like Tartans and A-Wings.
  
• The AI obvious advances its tech level, but it rarely replaces old units with new. I don't think that I saw a single space unit that went past tech 3 and every AT-AT that I saw probably came from the factories producing them rather than from being a proper unit.

I know that people are telling me to just suck it up and play the mods, but I fear that they're polishing a turd. Where's the game that I remember? I shouldn't be breaking the game so hard after so little time spent with it. If it's this easy for me, then I dread to think of how easy it is for an experienced player.

[mu695]

I'm on the brink of uninstalling. Today I beat The Shipyards At Kuat as the Empire on hard mode. The time limit was a little bit of a problem, and I really thought that having so many borders with the Rebels would also be, but I've ran in to the same problem again. The AI is too unaggressive and rarely builds a good defence. The game just feels too darn easy. I really like the grand strategy elements, but the vast majority of it is made redundant by the enemy's stupidity. It ruins the game.

There also seems to be an issue with how highly heroes are valued by the auto-resolve. I've auto-resolved and won many ground battles that I never could've won if played normally. But this is a much lesser problem than the one above.

Is there any time where it's not this bad? Do I need to play a different galactic conquest map or maybe the campaign?

[GunsAndGlory]

If you want challenging AI, I recommend downloading the Republic At War mod.

[GunsAndGlory]

Trust me it is quite the opposite with RAW. The AI is 10x more aggressive and hell bent on watching you burn.