Retreats of a Solar Empire

You expect them to just throw away ships when they are losing? Please qualify your post, did they have a more valuable and more fortified planet to protect? Did they retreat so they could group up with newly built ships? Both of those options are better than just throwing ships away.

Well, actually he's quite right, even though the tone and style of his post is quite unhelpful.

The AI still retreats even if there is no place to retreat. I've just won a game against the AI in which the AI retreated to nowhere. I attacked it's last planet, an asteroid, and it still retreated. (Probably to a planet it just had lost minutes earlier through culture bombing.)

Or the AI had one frontline planet, protecting all it's other planets. I attacked it, the AI retreated, thus giving me a way to all it's other planets without a fight.

Or the AI abandons fully upgraded high value planets.

Etc. etc.

Yep, my own fleets retreat regularly. Running away is better than taking out a "few more ships" and losing a lvl 5+ capship (or two). Retreating is closer to human tactics than throwing units away, IMHO.

This of course can be true.

But the problem is, the AI is still retreating so often, that it ends up having nothing to defend.

Also, it's no fun. Decisive battles are fun. Large battles to the complete annihilation of the enemy are fun.

Battles where one side retreats after a few seconds are just boring.

If the AI would lose after it had lost a large battle, nice win for me. Yay, fun!

But instead the AI just runs away until it has not enough planets to win. No fun.


Edit: But now it's of course a bit better then before. The sometimes even stands and fights! *shock*



But imho still not often enough. Though it's a step in the right direction.

Yeah I think the problem is the AI doesn't know the value of holding a chokepoint planet, so instead of buckling down and fighting tooth and nail for that planet - for example by throwing up turrets/repair stations/hanger defense when it sees an enemy fleet incoming like a human player might do, it just runs away if you have a bigger fleet than it does.

A classic example of this was when I was playing a 1v1 versus a human opponent on ICO, I attacked one of his chokepoint planets and he did everything in his power to save it, micromanaging his units around his defenses, throwing up repair facilities, retreating to the back of his gravity well and then coming back. It was a fairly tense fight and although I had a superior fleet he was holding me off because he had the home ground advantage. After about 30 mins of fighting over this one planet he dropped out and the AI took over his fleets, although my opponent was managing to hold the planet and had been doing so for the past half hour, the first thing the AI does is retreat all its force and give me the planet - after that it was just a matter of cleaning up.

I think the AI retreating when it's attacking and is outnumbered is a good thing, but I think on defense the AI needs to be more resolute, it needs to "know" the value of holding planets, and realize that giving up planets without a fight will cost it the game.