I believe that Technological Victory was the solution to this problem that way when they reach the end of the tech tree its over.  I have to assume you turned it off so my advice is to turn it back on and try not stall the opponent out. Instant fun and challenge yay !  At the point in game where you have all techs and you're going for a military victory the AI is at a disadvantage anyway, because you can design ships specifically to counter their weapons and defenses(they stick to one of each even when they have all types in my experiance) to my knowledge the AI doesnt do that. Instead they stick to the prefabs. So yea tech victory on and beat them down before they get there.

If you turn technology victory on with the technology speed at anything above normal, it's not even a game.

And there is a game option to play with all tech already researched.

If you play a very large game with many planets on a very large map, the only way to allow the game to play out in a military fashion is to turn tech victory off.

So if what you want is a large military game, you cant get it caues the AI is only good until the tech race is over.

Playing on the biggest maps, with tech victory on, and the tech speed normal or faster, there is little military involvement in the game.  YOu just hold everyone off while you race the other civs in research.

This is a military game.... but the AI cant deal with playing correctly once the full tech is unlocked? 

That's pretty lame in my opinion.

If the game had multiplayer internet support this would be a small oversite.  But as a single player only game, it takes this game from what I thought was a really cool turn based stragety game a few weeks ago into something that probably wont even get launched again.  Bummer.

I think the point is you should not have to carry the AI in that manner.  The AI needs to adapt to any strategy you adopt, especially a basic one like he was where you re-tool to fight a long, drawn out war.  The AI is broken in that regard because even given all the techs they still build a huge number of research facilities from the outset.

The AI does a pretty good job of expansion and occasionally springs a surprise on you by showing up somewhere you did not expect them, but it really never puts up a terribly great military fight.  It builds far to many defenders, never concentrates its forces in a manner to really threaten you and often times if they do send a few powerful fleets at you their transports are lagging turns behind and are easy pickings for the opponent.

In my experience the actual deployable military force for the AI is like 1/2 of what is listed.  Usually 1/3rd or more is composed of defender ships that are useless in offensive action.  I have never used defenders on any world.  I always just develop mobile fleets and a reserve of transports in case something happened to get through.  I may have half the military rating of the Korath but all of mine is in fleets rather than defending every world on the map.

It is such a basic strategy as to be laughable really.  I cruise into a sector with 4 or 5 planets.  One one is a major enemy fleet.  I casually move from planet to planet wiping out defenders, mines and starbases.  Their fleet never leaves orbit.  I leave unharmed and they begin rebuilding the same so we can do it again in a year or so.

I am reminded of what Napoleon said upon being presented a plan to defend France that spread troops evenly across the border "Is the idea to prevent smuggling?"  Concentration of force is one of the first military principals out there, particularly in naval engagements.

The AI is seriously broken on the military side.

Jeez, you guys don't want much, do you?....just an AI that is as smart and adaptable as a human player. What are you running your games on, a HAL9000??

And multiplayer for a strategy game as layered and complex as GalCiv ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT WORK! its hard enough playing real-time strategy games on-line without one or more players spoiling or quitting or sabotaging, never mind a turn based game. I used to play MOOII on-line, and that is a much more basic game than Gal Giv, and I think out of the approximately 20 games there were maybe 2 that got played out to something resembling a finish. Players would quit, or stall, or not be available when the other players were, or spoil the game by surrending  their powerful empire to another player (usually pre-arranged) or cheat by communicating with other players outside of the in-game messaging...you think its frustrating putting up with stupid AI, trust me that putting up with stupid humans would be far, far more frustrating.

First of all I dont want a HAL9000 AI.  Simply an AI that can play with some sembelence of skill with the full tech tree.  Leaving hundreds of research building all over your planets when the tech tree is full is just horrible gameplay from the AI.

As far as multiplayer that's just flat out wrong.  There are plenty of turn based strategy games as complex and MORE complex than this one that play just fine multi-player.  The civilization series comes to mind...

It would be pretty simple to write better military routines in for the AI, particularly in regards to its defensive and offensive planning.  The route taken was really fairly lazy as the defender ships are just a crutch to keep the AI from getting totally rolled.  It really is just insane that on high difficulty levels I can roll in and strip 3 or 4 worlds of their single defender ships and invade while a 6 or 7 ship fleet made up of battleships just sits there on another planet in the system and watches.  It is equally insane that the enemy will invade your space with the occasional surge of fleets but more often than not sends no transports with it, or they lag so far behind they are easy pickings for light forces.

What is needed are routines to have the AI engage in a proper fleet defense of certain areas rather than just scatter defenders across all of its planets.  When I come crashing across the border with 100 huge ships or more in the end-game I don't want to be met by piecemeal resistance where I take out the enemys fleet in ones and twos for the most part while running across the occasional planet with 4 or 5 ships.  I should be met by a fleet containing the majority of the enemy combat power, especially if I was overtly building up on the border for over a year.

Instead I overrun everything within a couple weeks travel of my borders and consolidate before a couple of powerful fleets come trickling out of the enemy's core worlds at the rate of 1 or 2 a week.  They cause problems but can't undo what is done.  Even if they have transports to retake many of the planets I am going to strip the worlds bare first so they are of no value.

My point is no one would look to defend like that.  If you can travel between systems inside of a week then it makes sense to cocentrate your forces and actually look to hold someone on your border, rather than engage in some suicidal policy of fighting it out over your own planets.

I would not complain if the AI were not responsding properly to feints and pincer moves and other more advanced tactics.  But it is not even necessary for the player to exert themselves that much.  I can make a blatant show of things for months prior to jumping the border, declare war prior to doing it and the AI is still unprepared for it and has its defensive forces scattered all over its empire.

As far as I can tell the AI makes no effort at fleet defense at all.  It has fleets that will attack you if the opportunity presents itself while they are on their way to do something offense, but defensively I hardly ever see them employed.  They just wait on planets to be eaten in small chunks.

I have said other places the whole fleet structure needs to be rethought to give the AI a fighting chance.  As it stands right now the AI basically needs to have out-built you by a 3 or 4 to 1 military factor to really have a fighting chance unless they just way outdistance you in weapons and defenses.  Once the tech tree gets maxed for everyone it really becomes a mess.  The AI can certainly wear you down, but it really only employs about 1/3rd of its military against you on offense.

Hell, I have had the AI wander a whole fleet right by an area where I was marshalling nothing but unarmed transports, like 30 of them with 2,000 troops each and it just crusied right on towards my pretty useless military starbase to conduct an attack there.  I was just floored.

I agree there are issues with it, like I said I think any fix would have to be a result of totally reworking the fleet system.  Fleets should be much larger (I would prefer them be unlimited in terms of size and have logistical ability basically serve as a multiplier of effectiveness) and should be able to be deployed in defense of a number of systems.  The player can do this, at a great deal of micro-managing currently.  I simply propose to automate that as much as possible.

Say I have 100 ships to defend 6 Systems with 3 planets in each.  Right now the AI pretty much just spreads ships across those systems, with the occasional concentration of ships it has not launched yet on production worlds.  What I would propose is a pretty simple system.

Those planets are assigned to a fleet, lets call it 1st Fleet for simplicity sake, and that fleet defends it according to some simple pre-set paramaters.  When you create the fleet zone you simply answer some questions to setup your defense and the AI would be able to do the same.

So you setup the area and assign certain ships to it.  You then are given a list of planets and installations in the area to which you can assign ships, along with an option to create a mobile response group.  Let's say you have a 15 factory production planet you want to protect so you assign 50% of your forces to that and select an option to either have them stay in orbit at all times or only engage enemy fleets that allow a return in the same turn, the next turn, 2 turns ect.  There would be other options to allow the system to automatically handle dispersing some ships on the borders for sensor coverage and making sure there was 1 or 2 or however many ships on each planet ect.

The last set of options simply determines how your forces react.  Do they attack anything that enters the area if within the allowed zone?  Do they only attack weaker forces?  Do they run from stronger forces?  If so where would they rally to?

This is something simple for the AI to do.  It simply makes an assessment of the relative values of the planets in a certain area and assigns its defensive forces accordingly.  If there is nothing of exception value and it is more of a border post most of your forces to a mobile force.  Everything is a simple yes/no force assessment.  They may not be as good as the player at it but it is still better than what exist.  If their mobile force was told not to engage anything it was weaker than and in the event it spotted such a force to rally to the most protected planet then at least the system is making a sound decisions, rather than just waiting to be blown to bits in pieces.

The programing, while challenging, is still a bunch of yes/no questions that the game already does on a global basis when deciding to declare war or not and so on.

  Great one Iztok!

Plus the fact that in the case of chess, the AI can simply calculate all possible scenarios in the next few steps + assess the "value" of each of those situations.

In an open world like GalCiv II this is not the case, so many variables, so many possibilities even more so since there are events that can spark wars unexpectedly...