Well, complaining about the AI is a little harsh - that said, given how much has been talked about the AI, I'm certain that some folks had very high, even unrealistic, expectations for it. What I would hope that Brad would be open to is suggestions from said "best human players" on how the AI could be improved.

Oh, and Skynet is a sore loser.

I agree that some people here seem to expect too much from a computer game. The AI seems pretty good to me, considering what it is. I have seen it do some good moves, at least twice: one time I saw an enemy fleet and sent a ship to pursue, and lost track of it. It turns out that that fleet went around my sensor range and attacked me from the opposite side, trying to take out the sensorship.
The other time I had several sensorships covering my territory and moved one of them, which created a thin fow covered zone (one square large). I thought no problem. And turns out that the computer sent ships following that line, undetected by me, and attacked one planet in the heart of my territory that was lightly defended.
And I’ve seen the computer construct ships that are equipped to face my own. And that evolve if I change weapons on the ships. Of course it takes some time, but I’ve noticed it, which pushed me to build ships with 2 weapon types so that there is always one that the AI has no defence against.

There are only 2 things I don’t like and that seems to me weaken the AI a lot (mind you I don’t play big maps, always medium with all civs, mixed intelligence levels, but not above intelligent : after a year or two some civs have given up to others and it is always a different game that way – without me controlling it all with the start settings).
The first thing is that, indeed, the AI build a lot of very small ships that cannot do anything against my large designs in the late game. When medium is available, they should at least use it…
But what I really consider as a flow is that the AI never go attack my military starbases. Since I play a more defensive game, and fall behind in the start, I build one or two of them (depending on how many planets I have to defend) that give a lot of bonuses and allow my small ships to survive till the endgame with incredible levels of experience, thanks to the defence assist modules installed in the starbases. Most of these ships are worthless when first built, and would be easily destroyed by AI’s very superior ships (since they have more attack techs than me). If they attacked the starbase they could easily take out my fleets and then planets. I’ve had a single fleet of 3 small ships defend against 5 or 6 waves (24 ships +/-) and come out without a scratch. If they went for the starbase I could not have defended it. (no engines on my small ships).
That’s my only real critic. Maybe it can be corrected, since I noticed that the AI will always go for my sensorships. ALWAYS. Which is a good tactic as well since it takes out a huge advantage of mine that compensate for the slow speed of y ships. But still, the starbase would be a much better target.

But all in all, good AI, limited by this starbase flaw: I would not have won the 3 games I posted if the AI tried to take out my military starbases.

The planet I took over from the Dark Yor seems fairly well put-together, even without any reconstruction. Actually, it's probably my best planet at the moment.

You know, with all the comments about poor algorithms at higher difficulty levels, it might be worth checking that the AI difficulty selection didn't actually get messed up somewhere around release.

Overall, I think there is a good chance we'll have a much more competitive opponent over time. This is because the AI has a number of weaknesses at the moment that tend to reinforce each other, but each of the weaknesses seems addressable. I'll put up a couple of suggestions, but they might not be practical at all...

1. The AI has to be able to take the observed ship types of an opponent (and the proportions) and using the military strength score, make a reasonable estimate of the opponents total inventory of ships. Then as a hypothetical exercise, form those ships into fleets and fight a few (dozen) simulated 'wars' between it's fleets and the opponent fleets (just a series of fleet-fleet engagements until one side is dead...). Some reasonable proportion of the engagements in those simulated wars should be under the influence of military starbases on one side or another. The AI estimation of relative military strength should be based off the median outcome of these hypothetical wars, not raw military rating. You can imagine elaborations on this, such as fleet speed determining how often one side gets first attack. This is working on the assumption that you can simulate hundreds of typical fleet engagements per second (which I don't think is unreasonable).

2. I have to go to work ...

If the AI is building embassies all over then you're not playing at a high difficulty level. That's one of the low-intelligence algorithms on planet set up.

Although I don't support the tone or comments of the thread starter, I've been playing the AI on the intelligent difficulty level and both of the two planets I've captured in my current game so far were covered in embassies - maybe 50% of structures or more. One was Torrean though, who are influence-freaks I think.

May be something wierd is going on with which levels are associated with which algorithms?

Any way, I think we should give Frogboy the benefit of the doubt here as he seems committed to improving the AI ... we can always flame the hell out of him later!

I will take exception to "the AI is pretty bad" though. Pretty bad compared to what?

Well, pretty bad as it the AI in GC2 is just as bad as in other games. But the thing is, other games usually rely on their mulitplayer or long campaigns for good gameplay while GC2 is really a single player game so any small AIs flaws are seen repeatedly throughout even single game.

Ok, here's something constructive (my first post touched on the basics of the problems with the AI):
The AI does not guard (or hell even attack) transports. Sometimes I see a transport in a fleet. Wtf? What is the purpose in fleeting a transport with combat ships? You have a gimpy fleet and it now only takes 1 move to kill the whole thing. Putting a combat fleet on top of a transport fleet is far superior. This is a simple fundamental part of conquering, without doing this, it is really hard for the AI to win. Now the problem may not be with the actual AI, the problem is when you group 2 fleet and Auto-pilot them to the same place, they move at their own max speeds so they get separated and destroyed. So you have to micro them and make sure your transports don't get ahead of your fleets (transports should have troop modules and engines only, no weapons or shields on transports silly AI) A uman does this by micro'ing his fleet each turn. A computer may be able to do this by not using Auto-pilot or by making a lot of waypoints = to the speed of the slowest fleet in the attack group.

From my point of view, the AI does have it's low point at LOWER DIFFICULTY LEVELS.

My main gripe is that even at intelligent, with 100% economy, the AI doesn't seem to be doing that much.

On the other hand, playing a higher difficulty levels (where the AIs get an economic bonus) they can be seen in their true splendor.

I think it might be a bug or something, but shouldn't it be doable to allow all algorithms without an economics bonuses?

Apart from that, the AI -is- truly remarkable when set at its hardest. I just think "Intelligent" isn't at its hardest.

Maybe I am just dumb, but I think GalCiv2 has the best AI of any game I have seen (well, maybe not Massive Assault, but that was just basically Chess so you can hardly compare the two). You want to see shoddy AI that basically just blinks at you - Play Rome Total War.

If GalCiv2 has such crappy AI, then PLEASE - enlighten us - WHAT similar 4x games have BETTER AI? Its the nature of the beast that AI is going to have some bumps on it, that is what the 'A' in 'AI' is for

I have seen the AI do some amazing things. I have seen it match me, ship for ship as I built up forces for an invasion while our relations were still cozy (and this was three levels below bright!). I have seen it realize that it is about to lose valuable mining starbases and either sell them to another empire for desperately needed cash, or sell them to an empire to get their support against a common foe. All in all I think the AI alone is worth every penny I have paid for the game.

Its all very well and good to say 'The AI should anticipate my attacks more' or whatever, but context is everything. HOW exactly in concrete terms do you teach the AI that? Is it just distance between your ships and their planet? What if you inhabit the same system? What if you are moving through their system? What if you are allied? What if you just bought ships and they appear there, does that count? What if you are gearing up for a war, but this AI personality is set to a passive personality or something? How should this strategy be cashed out across the MULTIPLE AI personalities that exist in the game? Something that is obvious to a human with intuition, is not so easy to spell out to a formal system like a computer. I am not saying it can't be improved - ANYTHING can be improved if you pour enough resources into it - but from the mere fact that improvement is possible (which is always a given) it doesn't follow that something is shoddy, or SUXORS.

The ONLY weaknesses I can find in the AI (and I am still only playing on one level below Intelligent, and fighting tooth and nail for my victory too) 1) Some of their planets are wastelands, or are filled with useless structures, and 2) The AI tends to play a defensive battle even if it has more ships, which is suicide in a game where attacking is everything.
I think the AI is much better than any other game I have played where I have to think hard about what the AI does WELL.

Just my two credits

Dano

The AI should anticipate my attacks more' or whatever

The thread has contained criticisms of the AI MUCH MUCH more specific than this. Basicaly the people coming to defend the AI have not exposed its weaknesses yet via gameplay. You will eventualy. Then you will be in the same boat as the rest of us of being able to beat the game on at least tough every time.

To reiterate there are at least 4 specific things the AI does very poorly.

1. It spams un upgraded starbases which serve no purpose.
2. It makes terrible use of planets
3. It never makes ships faster than 2 (and also often dosnt use larger hull sizes even if available)
4. It has no clue how to deal with Player military star bases and the fleets protected by them. (These are the key to victory by the way)

Yes it does somethings excellently but at the moment all of these things are totaly undermined by the above achilles heals.

Dont get me wrong, I think this a great grat game. That dosnt meen I shouldnt call a spade a spade. If these basic errors are fixed then this game will be truely excellent.

As for comparing it to the AI of Rome Total War, does that mean that all a developer has to do is create an AI better than the POS AI in RTW and we should all clap our hands. We should never use that AI as a yard stick of succses.

The games I know of that have the best AI are indy titles made by small development teams on small budgets. Namely Highway to the Reich (Amazing AI) and Dominion Wars 2. Is it a coicidnece that indy titles have great AIs and mainstream titles have poor ones, not if the mainstream is using the AI of RTW as a yardstick.

No exploits are needed the AI just isn't as good as GC1. Next game I play will be on suicidal. (been playing painfull)
I think the root of the problem is the way military power is measured. I think the AI's tend to waste resources in a massive arms race every game, but the ships they build can be wiped out by a much smaller good navy.

This gives the human player massive advantages :
1) AI ships are slow, and under powered
2) lower maintenance costs. (build your top of the line fleet when you need it, and it's cheaper)
3) you can build up your planets much too long. (knowing you can arm up latter)
4) you can pretty much always get a tech lead.
5) you can pretty much always grab the super-projects that you really want - (xinthum, -training, eyes, research )

My last game the korx actually had some dam good ships.
But after grabbing they're mil resource, and the torian's, (both used starbase defenses, no fleets nearby) they were easilly defeated.

Perhaps if the AI just evaluated military strength in a more realistic way, it would build more capable fleets and not waste it's resouces.

They need to realise that it's much better to attack than defend.

I dont think the AI should be changed here. I dislike the game mechanism that the attacker has the first shot with his WHOLE fleet. IMO the game mechanism should be changed here. Seek and destroy and engage at any price isnt really an interesting aspect of a strategy game. I like to have a more difficult choice between engage or not engage.

Actually moo2 had initially the same "attacker has 1st shot" problem. They solved it in the 1.31 patch with their ship initiative rule (ini=combat speed+beamattackvalue/10).

Some of us prefer to play the aggressive approach though. So far I haven't had any interest in a diplomatic, influence or research victory and I have always played evil going for a military victory. But the getting there isn't as fun as it should be because of stuff mentioned by me and others.

Great! Then help improve it, you actually have the opportunity to! But really, nobody promised you a perfect and unbeatable AI. Nobody promised you anything, for that matter. Stardock just tries to bring you a fun game, and I believe they succeed. Charging here like someone LIED to you and there's really no AI in the game at all, just because you found some flaws, is...well...not constructive? To say the least.

By the way, I'm refereing to the nay-sayers in this thread in general, not anyone in particular.

Great! Then help improve it,...

Have you read his previous posts? It doesnt seem so.

I want to say thanks to Stardock for making a great, highly addictive game and especially to Brad for creating an excellent AI.

I think the people with destructive criticism have not the slightest idea of programming. Reading some (negative) comments here makes it seem like it's the easiest thing in the world to create and balance a challenging AI regarding every possible aspect of a complex game.

I'm looking forward to V1.1 . Keep up the great work, guys.