Computer defensive fleets

from GalCiv2 Forums
With the change back to weaponless ships using no maintenance, I've had two games in a row now where a computer puts small defender ships with zero weapons on all of his planets. While this is a good tactic to stop a spore ship from just flying in and nailing your planets, the production time it put into it made it easy pickings. My original plan wasn't to go for them, but I couldn't resist when all i saw were planets with a token ship in orbit. I play with tech trading turned off to help preserve the custom tech trees, so i have no way to know if the computer AI decided it just didn't feel like getting any weapon techs or what. Needless to say, his entire civ (of roughly 14 planets) was gone before he even had a ship that could fight back. As a side note, in one of the same games, the Korath had an absolutly unstoppable military for the first half of the game. So I don't know what would cause some of them to just not care about defending themselves.
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Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Interesting, i hit enter to make paragraphs, but it seem's once i posted the reply it nuked them and it just went into one big paragraph. Do you have to do something special to get returns to work? Or was this a fluke?
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I'm seeing something different but maybe related (latest TA beta). It's a large map with four races (Torian, Korx, Drengin, Altarian) and I'm playing Yor. It's a new game and I'm in the early phase where all the available planets have been colonized, we're getting our economies established, and the first trade routes and starbases are being set up.

In prior betas (and in DA), I'd be seeing everyone starting to put at least some minimal fighter in orbit to prevent early invasion. Not happening in this game. Only the Drengin have any military ships, and nobody else does. The other three races have completely undefended planets.

I have tech trading on, and in the trade screen all the races have at least minimal weapon tech by now. I don't know why they're not defending their planets against an early cheap-shot invasion. I'll play some more later tonight, and see how far that goes.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Well keeping a large defending force on each planet is waste of resource imho, my long standing opinion was that in galciv this is simply dumb - you can never "defend" a planet against dedicated strike star fleet .Good human player never does that and instead has a defence fleet (which can cover more than one planet and withstand such a force)

Now no defence at all seems a little overboard though - maybe they trying to finally fix AI so it defends with fleets but it isnt quite working yet :)
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Yeah, I always thought it was a waste for the AI to defend every planet it owned as soon as it could, and I don't do that with my own planets. But I just chalked that up to limited AI routines. Easier to defend everything equally, than figure out which are the strategically most important or threatened planets.

But not defending any planets doesn't make much sense, unless the AI is now smart enough to do a last-minute build when a threat approaches. Now THAT would be cool, but I'm not far enough into this game to see it that's the case.