Got a nice 9 Hard AI FFA game to send to the devs to highlight some areas where the AI is lacking.

Where do I send it :P

Hey,

After several tries I finally managed to get a huge galaxy with 9 hard AI going, me playing as TEC. Usually I would get ganged up on early by the AIs in my galaxy, fighting on 2-3 fronts and atleast 2 AIs were cooperating closely and coordinating their attacks perfectly.

This time however, I managed to stay afloat for more then 2 hours and got a solid foothold in the starting system. Having wiped out one AI and working on another, I have a solid chokepoint against the other 2 AIs in the system, who happen to be the best of buddies making large coordinated attacks on said chokepoint :)
For about 40 mins now they haven't made any moves, probably scared off the massive fleet I got defending it :)

Anyway, when I quit a short while ago I went through all the stats of the game (Awesome work with the charts and being able to pinpoint exact times and figures in it!). While doing so I noticed some obvious features of the game the AI was very bad at utilizing or plainly ignoring :)

Granted I've only played 3 hours so far, but they have all gotten quite far in the civic trees, where most of the flaws lie.

Mainly they are very bad at utilizing trade posts. They don't "play" the market, i.e setting their resources up for sale, instead of selling it directly. Now I realize that the market thing isnt a big deal and might be tricky to code a proper behaviour for, just thought I'd mention it :)
They never buy levels for their capitals, one AI was sitting on 15000 credits and still he never spent it on capital levels, of which most AIs had 4-6 of at this time.
There are many, many good and excellent things about the Sins AI, they colonize very aggressively and when they can't expand they tend to go to war quite soon. They do tend to leave their planets without many defensive structures, I don't think Ive seen even one hangar on their side, yet.

Anyway there's far too much info that might be useful to write it all down, so if Ironclad/SD are interested I'll gladly send the ongoing game to them if they want some info on how the hard AIs are faring in densely populated systems :)
6,004 views 7 replies
Reply #1 Top
I've been meaning to ask, what does the acronym FFA stand for?
Reply #2 Top
Free For All!
Reply #3 Top
Which in turn means that it's everybody for themselves. There can be temporary or even long lasting alliances but nothing is certain. ;)
Reply #4 Top
You can expect that the developers have played hundreds of games like the one you just described, they should be aware of the weaknesses and working on them..
Reply #5 Top
Even the defensive hard AI rarely puts up much defense of his systems. Big let down. They do all tend to plataeu and just stay ahead of you (miraculously it seems) in miltech and ship numbers, and I have never seen a single AI split his forces or attack more than one target at a time (against me at least, can't say anything about what I am not seeing) in force... at most he will calve off a few ships, 5 - 20 and raid a planet but generally speaking the AI is very single minded and narrow in it's strategic and tactical approach to full on offensive action. The only time I have seen an AI split his forces is if he is faced on multiple fronts or responding to multiple fleets, but he will often reform everything into one when there is some kind of tipping point in how powerful one of your fleets becomes (even if there is not advantage to him facing that fleet or attack in such overwhelming numbers).
Reply #6 Top
I actually had a fort Ai put up 6 hanger defense in his homeworld, backed up by 4 cruiser carriers. Needless to say, it forced me to actually build some flak frigates.
Reply #7 Top

Great stuff Vanchelon!  You can send the description above, and your saved game to support@ironcladgames.com
Title it 'AI observations'