AI player building waaaaay too many morale and culture improvements.

Uhm, no idea why it double posted
Anyway, anyone else noticed this problem?

I had a similar behavoir in last night´s game (Gig Map, 9 AIs ), The Korx built nothing but farms and starports , maybe a factory, and left many tiles empty. The other races were doing fine... and took the Korx colonies, but did nothing to
change the planetary setup...

Yup. It almost seems to have become worse with 1.1, although that might be my imagination. In my last game, the AI (Drath) had particularly terrible building priorities for its small (Class < 8) planets. Farms and morale structures are rather useless on planets that small, but the Drath just loved 'em.

The AI does seem to generally fall in love with influance buildings for no apparent reason. I've also seen multi farm building on PQ <8 planets, which makes no sense since the max pop caps below the food generation, and these planets will have worse morale problems anyway.

Personally I wouldn't be against putting some hard caps on what the AI can build and where it can build it. Limit to 1 or 2 culture buildings per planet, and *no* farms for planets with PQs <8.

I also think that the AIs do not prioritize trade goods and wonders very well. I've never lost one to an AI, other than the handful which I don't pursue (aphrodesiac and micro repair bots normally, later galactic guide book and that privateer thingy). Part of it is my prioritizing the techs to build the ones I want, but why wouldn't an AI do the same? I play only on tough and higher so it shouldn't have anything to do with sub-optimal routines.

The AI simply uses the governer for upgrades, so it gets upgrades built in the order research is done.

As for the OP, it sounds like those AIs were simply pushing for a cultural victory. It's when they do the odd embassy I worry, because unless you're really pushing the cultural front, then why bother? Influence starbases are better anyway.

This usually happens when the planets are in someone else’s cultural influence. The AI starts making embassies and moral boosting buildings to try to counter the influence. I don’t usually see it otherwise. If you track how the buildings were before you may see that it was built pretty well before the planet was under attack from someone else’s influence.

THe truth is that this is one of the reasons why players are better then the ai. I almost never use cultural improvements unless I have a tile that gets a bonus for it. The game uses way to many. Picture how deadly they would be if they had factories or research there instead. I understand using them on the outside of your area of control but they have them on almost every planet. They place more in other peoples areas and that is understandable but your home planet and it's close planets. I agree that a change in this would increase how competitive the ai is.

The AI starts making embassies and moral boosting buildings to try to counter the influence.

Yeah, but they do not understand that boosting the influance on a planet with 5bil pop is useless!!!

That and they don't seem to use their SBs very effectively, though perhaps that's due to incomplete tech research. However, there is a feedback on that since they don't build the labs in the first place to generate the research...

Some AIs do ok on some planets, but generally they are underpoped on their high PQs and overpoped on their low PQs. Makes me wonder if there isn't a simple transposition of in the code somewhere.

Just last night I nabbed an Iconian class 18 that they'd had for a loooong time, and it didn't have a single farm on it! It did have like 6 embassies, even though it was never in any culture danger, and wasn't even positioned to push culture on any other systems.

Its really getting annoying to see this willy nilly culture approach. If you want to win a culture war you will have to build SBs at some point (unless you have tons of systems and planets in the game). I do see the AIs building some SBs, but they never really seem to add enough, or the right modules to them.

In my game (gigantinc 6 races) I am picking apart the Korx but started noticing this trend. So I upped my espionage and started looking at all their colonies. Of about 40 or so I looked at, I found 6 Industrial Sectors, all on different worlds. Personally, I think thats kinda BS to be fighting against an AI that buys everything (thats the only thing I can think of) because there is no way it can be competetive when it takes 200+ turns to build a medium ship.

Even if it is just a slight bump in the AI's like to build factories, it would make this a lot smoother. Plus then I dont have to redo all the planets I take

Reactionary AI: It seems to me the AI does pretty well as long as the game is somewhat competitive but when the AI perceives and projects it's own defeat it sort of goes insane.

In other words if a human player has gotten off to a good influence start by dominating mining resources, the AI goes into a frenzy of useless countermeasures. If the advantage is military the AI often seems almost paralysed.

When I have reached mid-game without establishing certain victory the AI seems to develop their planets fairly well.

Any chance a dev could give us some insight into this ? :o)

franco fx - thats some decent reasoning you've got there, i've had a similar problem in my last game but the truth didn't click. its a bit of a bummer, but on the flipside - at least we know the ai is 'thinking' but it seems to need a quicker turnaround.

does anyone know if the AI builds new improvements over old ones??
i personally have never seen / noticed this and this may be important.

No dev input? aww
IMO this is quite a big problem for the AI in terms of competitiveness.