Computer has a huge ship advantage in 1.2b...

they could have something you dont realize, like a trade good that helps, or something... with that said, it is hard to believe all that fit on there, but maybe it did. find out how much room each thing takes up and do the math to see if it could or not.

What type of ship was it? What did the AI call it?

I think something along the lines of Drengin Heavy Figher M4-1 or M4-5 or something like that.

What difficulty? ARe you saying that in 4 years you guys are tossing black hole generators at one another?

Many ships gets Attack/Defense Bonuses while in orbit. Or the Drengin might have some hefty military resources under its control.

Well, I stopped trying to conquer the Drengin and were going for diplomatic victory instead because of this in my last game (1.2beta1009, tough).
The Drengin had 1 Heavy Fighter (around 60 attack and 30 defence matching my weapons) that destroyed one of my most powerfull fleets, so I had to reload because they had lots of them and end that game.
I didn't think of a possible bug because I was a bit behind in weaponry, but I thought they named a huge hull ship accidently as Heavy Fighter.

or maybe you should read his post properly. he said that he got more more miniture bonus but cannot build all the component in one small hull like the drengin AI did. this does not have to do with military resources or trade goods.

I guess he is playing on high difficult settings where the ai get may miniaturization from the start.

Ok, please forget my first post. I reloaded the game and couldn't find anything like the Heavy Fighter I mentioned above. The best Drengin Heavy Fighter I could find was this:

It was June 2231 on tough with tech trading disabled and techrate on normal, so it should be possible to build it. Nevertheless the Drengin did a really good job designing their ships

Sorry for my useless post ...

Running in windowed mode, and I use minimze all to view the desktop, and then bring up a non maximized window of any type, anywhere on the desktop I see the GC2 mouse cursor and a click will bring up the game.

What difficulty? ARe you saying that in 4 years you guys are tossing black hole generators at one another?

I guess from MetalKid's MV profile that it was on Suicidal - which explains it, as the AIs get big undocumented bonuses to most stats at that level (makes the game very interesting). Still, 8 BHGs on a small hull is fairly impressive - I think the best I've seen was a Drengin large hull with 12 Doom Rays when the best I could fit on was 6 with the same other components.

And yes, 4 years is easily enough time for getting to the top of at least one weapons / defence tree (I've had one game where I completely finished the tech tree in Nov 2229 - and that was on "slow" tech rate).

I have noticed that under 1.2 .009 beta the AI is MUCH more effective at designing ships.

Not a bug, but just better AI.

It seems the AI is designing/buidling ships more often. Has this been changed under 1.2? If so great job.

Yep, it only takes 4 years for that to happen. In fact, the Drengin pretty much have EVERYTHING researched within 3-4 years, anyway. They had about 2-3 times the research of any other race. I always play Suicidal difficulty on the biggest universe vs 9 opponents. Though, the research was set to Very Fast, as well.

It definately wasn't a huge ship because it only had a logistics count of 3.

On a side note, it seems defenses are even more worthless now than before. In 1.1, I would always have some defenses on in case I couldn't take them all out in a hit, saving most of my ships. Now, when I sent a fleet of huge ships with about 800+ total mass driver defense vs a bunch of heavy fighters that only had weapons (i think 1800 or 2300 mass driver weapons), my huge fleet was completely destroyed and i didn't take out a single one of them...

And when you think about it, there is really no reason to put defenses on. The best defense costs far outweighs their usefulness. Instead of defenses, if you just put the 2nd best weapon on (usually cost about 70) and make a bunch of those, you end up being able to make 3 or 4 ships instead of 1 with those big weapons. Basically, you can keep sending a lot of ships at the enemy.

This ship isn't the same as I mentioned earlier, but it is actually worse. For the list of things it has, you can't see 1 more MK III drive and 2 ultra supports.

Oh, and one other bug I noticed, at least vs the Drengin... I took out a military starbase of thiers that gave +49 to attack/defense, but their attack/defense didn't go down at all. I even waited a turn to see if it took affect then, but they were all just as powerful...

Alright, I finally found the ship I was originally talking about. You can't see the 2 MKIII drives and 2 Ultra supports... Does Suicidal mode give an undocumented 100% to their miniturization? I thought they only got boosts to their building and research?