AI Weapon Choices

My experiences have been pretty varied. The closest pattern I've noticed is that they run beams or mass drivers early and then switch to missiles for the late game.

The AI's initial preference is = rand()%3.

Guess that about sums it up then.

Me too, I've had everyone concentrating on missiles for the entire game, with the exception of a recent one where the Korx AI seemed to go for mass drivers in my border skirmish with it, mixed with missiles.

Yeah, I think what happens is that the minors always tend to go the missile route, and then the majors trade with them for the techs? Even if they have a preference for beams or guns, they're prolly going to go for missiles, in my thinking, because of the high damage per mount, early in the game. I've seen some variety with mostly missile mounts and then maybe one laser V mount on a Drengin corvette, but yes I've also had mostly missiles in my games.

I've noticed they tend to start with beams, then move on to adjust to their enemies...

The three games I've played that have turned into open war, I've had one of each type of weapon used on me...

I thought this too... for a long time it seemed like every comp opponent was going Missles. So much so that I would immediatly move to the missle defense tech without even bothering to see what ships I was up against.

All the sudden though...i rarely see missles and I see lots of beam weapons. I figure once I get to the point that I immediately start going for the shield tech.. they will switch to mass drivers.

I've seen mostly beam weapons until the last few games where I've eschewed beams myself. I wonder if what we're seeing is a correlation of our own tendencies. Otherwise, I'd imagine each of us personally has only seen a pretty small sample size where variations like that are normal. If you put all of our experiences together they'd come out to what you'd expect from the "rand()%3" line of code.