Soil Enhancement / AI priority

Cause the Ai can be really, really thick sometimes?

Aphrodisiac.

Probably aphrodiasiac as moose said. But it's really counter productive. I generally steal the PQ tecs with invasions, since you really don't need them till the mid game. I've seen AI planets with 1 factory, 4-5 pq improvements and then a farm etc...Meanwhile the planet is stuck at 5billion pop waiting for all the stupid PQ improvements.

How do you figure it building up soil enhancements instead of upgrading the farm?

Empty tiles should be filled first, before any building upgrades, and before any tile upgrades.

I can currently screw the AI over by giving them Soil Enhancement, and by feeding them building upgrades once every month or two. By the time I invade, they still haven't developed their worlds, because they were trapped behind a bad priority system.

Suggestion: Sort the build queue into three levels of priority:

1. Empty tiles
2. Upgrading buildings
3. Upgrading tiles

Then the AI will be more competetive. It could even be applied to the Planetary Governer, and the screen where the player is filling out a new planet. Instead of having yellow/orange/red tiles jump up in the middle, have them at the end.

I haven't messed with the AIPriority flag that comes with techs, but it might be useful when looking at a planet and deciding if an upgrade warrents coming before an empty tile, or being purchased outright.

Aphrodisiac is/should be ruled out. One of my planets happen to distribute it.
Another odd event is placing a market center before building a factory on a 300% bonus manufacturing site.

You can see their build queue after you've invaded. (or even before.) I did a post on this before, and they still have not completely fixed it. (seems like they generally pick upgrades on bonus tiles first)

Link

Yea, I miss the old governers from GC1, where you could set up a build queue in advance, to be applied to new planets. That was great.

It could work even better for GC2: Have several lists set up, and choose one based on what the world looks like when you get there. The governer could be in charge of placing them on appropriate bonus squares, but the player in charge of the sequence.

The AI seems to have a much better plan with 1.2 than the other versions though.

Most of the time I find worlds filled with factories now and only 1 maybe 2 farms, and no more than one embassy or morale improvement.

Empty tiles should be filled first, before any building upgrades, and before any tile upgrades. Suggestion: Sort the build queue into three levels of priority: Empty tiles Upgrading buildings Upgrading tiles

Yes.

Then the AI will be more competetive. It could even be applied to the Planetary Governer, and the screen where the player is filling out a new planet. Instead of having yellow/orange/red tiles jump up in the middle, have them at the end.

Actually you just answered the original question which is.

I wonder why the AI decides to build soil/habitat/... enhancements prior to building/filling up empty space. Does anyone has a theory?

It's simple enough, there's no big strategy involved rather that's how the default plantery governer works. You research soil enchanment, and the governer helpfully adds upgrades of tiles on all your colonies. The human player probably tries to organise the queue a little but the Ai doesnt

That said, doing soil erosion and stuff first improves your planet class, and hence speeds up population growth a bit I think. But I still think it makes more sense typically to develop building on tiles first and do soil erosion and stuff last .