Braindead AI. Is there a way to make it better?

Stardock is known for improving AI with patches after releases, and they become very good when Frogboy spend his time on it.

GavCiv was like that

I don't think the graphics is "top notch", but I guess it's a matter of personal preferences.

I played a game last night and the AI didn't even do anything on normal difficulty?  They never built anything beyond the starting city and that had no improvements well into the game.  The sovereign never even moved.  Braindead is one thing but they need to at least actually try to play the game.  Does the AI work for others or on other difficulties?  I know this will be fixed shortly if it is happening to others but I'd actually like to be able to play tonight so I want to see if there is a workaround in the meantime.

Those are minor factions. You can trade with them and I hear you can also buy special troops from them or something. But they are not real factions which you should realize from their name. So go out there and find a real faction, they do plenty.

But they do suck at defending.

Just fired up another game on the hardest difficulty, took over 7 cities in 50 turns with just ONE unit. Of course the AI had a HUGE warband roaming around (something like 400+ attack power) doing nothing....

Probably not going to ask for a refund because I have some hope, and I really enjoyed GalCiv 1/2. Come on Stardock, let's get the ball rolling again!

Frogboy's planning on taking a considerable amout of time off from CEO-ing duties to work on the AI (and couple other things) soon.

" What’s next ?

For me [Stardock CEO + Lead A.I. Designer], it’s AI AI AI.  Elemental is a lot more complex of a game than Galactic Civilizations was.  I do want to emphasize that the difficulty level at the world setup is not related to AI difficulty. It has to do with how tough the monsters and such will be (crazy shrills late game type stuff).  The player intelligence is set up on the opponent set up screen.

If you’re able to beat the AI at harder settings, please feel free to post your strategies and such.  I am not only happy to incorporate your strategies into the AI but relish doing so. [...]

I can tell you this: Regardless of whether Elemental gets good or bad reviews or sells well or sells poorly, this game is the ONLY game Stardock’s development studio will be working on for 2010 and much of 2011.

One of the benefits of being a small, privately owned company is that we can focus on things for reasons besides quarterly earnings. This is a game we love and will be expanding for years to come. "

Stardock CEO "Frogboy", Elemental Journals, August 25.

Something I found... AI on "Normal" is pretty passive.  I had the game difficulty on Challenging, but I noticed the AI players themselves were still set on Normal (as soon on the "Select Your Oponents" screen).  By changing these AI to challenging, they became much more aggressive and were actually building some impressive armies.

Now, they weren't that great on how they used them.  They captured a couple cities, but didn't ever seem to garrison theirs very much.  I pretty much waltzed through most of their empire with my Sov and a few summons, but at least I saw the AI as being active and was a bit of a threat.

So if you haven't yet, make sure your opponents are set to Challenging, not normal.  On Normal they never seemed to do much of anything.

The AI just needs to learn how to use the teleport spell. 

Currently the easiest way to completely confound the AI (if and when it's putting up a fight) is to build as large of a stack of archers as you can. The AI just can't deal with that, and hasted archer stacks demolish everything I've fought.

What the F is a "Minor Faction"? If it is a faction at all it should be doing something. Weaksauce Excuse for a beta. I don't know what release was worse Dungeon Lords or this game. Pathetic.

Not trying to insult the OP, but are you sure you put the AI difficulty on the hardest for each opponent? There's 2 difficulty settings, the AI for the wilderness stuff (raiders, monsters, etc.) and AI for each opponent. You set each of THOSE to the hardest difficulty and still found it easy? If that's the case, then I'm fairly disappointed as well. I've been playing on normal to learn the game, but I hope they fix it soon if it's that weak.

Honestly, this could make any AI opponent a beast, assuming he is trucking around with enough firepower. If not, make him teleport into any major city that has some already somewhat powerful defense to pick up some friends and plow through your invading army.

Another trick they could let the AI use is summoning up a ton of creatures right before they attack or you get into range, so that they go from being an easy target with whatever displayed army they have to suddenly having an extra boost Perhaps allow summoning to happen in combat so that it is explained to the player what just happened - and to keep the whining down from the kids who just got their behinds kicked

I still think having some passive defenders that cannot leave cities would help cities defend themselves. Maybe some kind of function where half the population up to 50 units could become passive defender militia, keep the smaller early towns weak until they've grown, and not make the huge towns completely unassailable.

I've done this. Game was a bore - AI posed no challenge.