THE AI DOESNT CHEAT. stardock has said it over and over again, and for each level it is clearly documented in many places what each level the ai gets. i have no problem at normal, i cant play higher then that yet. just play more games, try new strategies, and you'll get better. you have to buy your first few colony ships, and maybe factory too. it makes it a lot easier. i usually buy colony ships till i have about 600 cash left. its not soo hard like that.

I don't do the same as the AI, but I still manage to keep up with them last time I played Normal.

Keep in mind that starports are also among the cheapest buildings. Rush building a staport the same turn you land (or the turn after) is only around a couple hundred bc. So in the beginning, it's no problem to have every world you touch producing colony ships, at least until you can't afford to buy them anymore.

I highly reccomend upgrading your colony ships with new engines, so they'll double their speed.

It'll take a turn to upgrade your first one, but it's well worth it.

Dude, that's flippin hilarious.

The AI does NOT know where the good planets are. Only humans (played by the computer or yourself) don't know where planets are. Everyone else knows wher the planets are - but NOT weht quality they are.


Just to rpeat what's said above - the AI doesn't cheat at normal, it has a 25% handicap economically even, and it's dumbed down, too. If you find yourself 25% behind them at that level - well, that makes you 50% worse than a fairly playing dumbed down AI player. No cheating going on, just good play.

well it doesn't cheat, so if you can't keep up, they're obviously managing their taxes better, exchanging techs so they can spend money elsewhere, finding good anomalies...

They're not cheating, and at normal they actually run dumber and with less money than you. Try playing around with your strategy.

well... this is how it feels like to me...

AI DO scout for planets before sending colonyship (I have seen it many times in my games) for the most part.
Other than Human, all races start with "Stellar Cartography." So all races (other than human) know where all planets are. But they don't know plants' class. So scouts were sended out to check on them. As soon as the planet is within scout's sensor range, the class of the planet can be deterimine. Then the scout will move on to another sector, to another system... so on and so on... Its just that for the most of time this happened before your ship get to that area. So it looks like as if AI never scout them.

Now, there are times players sending colony ship out blindly.
Because "Stellar Cartography," all planets' locations are known. If you see 2-3 star systems nearby each other with 8-13 plants total, won't you send a colony ship there blindly? After all, the chance of finding a useable planet within that group is much much higher. And even if your colony ship gets there late, there might be 2-4 planets still available.
Taking a calculated risk like this is a very "Human" move (good AI design if you ask me ).

perhaps you should play a race that's not human next time, so you would have "Stellar Cartography" in the begining. And try more *tricks* , out colony rush AI at the normal level is not hard at all...

I, too, am having a REALLY hard time making the jump from beginner to normal. I can hold my ground, but my chances of achieving supremacy are based on luck... last time I tried on Normal, I made it a point to have a strong defensive military but stay neutral in the galactic wars if I could. It only paid off when races started surrendering to me just to spite their enemies... I still managed to lose because of the technology gap...

I still agree that it is much more fun to lose gracefully than it is to win without a challenge.

duplicated, page timeout, refresh *yadda, yadda*

The initial colony grab appears to be critical to victory on the harder levels.

Everyone in this thread is commenting on a series of fundamental flaws in this game:

1) You start with limited fog of war - you know where stars are and how many planets there are per star (AI knows this as well). There is very limited exploration in the game.
2) You start with (for all intents and purposes) unlimited ship range - so you can instantly colonize vast expanses of the galaxy.
3) You start with far to much cash - enough to buy four or five colony ships, or several planetary improvements. You should maybe have enough starting cash to buy ONE ship or ONE improvement.
4) All colonizable planets can be colonized by all races (unlike MOO where planets had size AND type, and type dictated what tech or race was required to settle on the planet).
5) There are no research techs that allow you to colonize "grade 0" planets or create new planets - what you get at the beginning of the game is it.

So what's left? An all-out land grab for the first hour of the game that dictates the winner 90% of the time. The rest is just careful management of resources until your planetary superiority overwhelms your opponents.

The thing that made MOO so successful was the DEPTH of gameplay strategy, and that you could play the game over and over and use different races and different strategies and win the game in very different ways. GC2 is close, but needs some definite tweaking to get there. The whole early game aspect of "race to colonize planets regardless of your race, situation, or strategy" has to be reworked.

I think the problem is that you depend on your population due to taxes, there is actually no drawback in having lots of planets colonized, you get more money, you can have more research and more production since there is more space for those buildings, it's all about colonizing the most planets so your econ gets boosted beyond morality, the problem is that you cannot sit back and try to get ahead in research or influence since research only works with enough money which you can only get through taxes at the beginning, another point is that teching is way to powerful, you get so much bonuses through some techs, it's unbelieveable