Problem with the AI

I usually play in the 2 largest maps available, and so far, the AI never create any "fast" ship (which IS absolutly a must in these big maps). Nearly on, my frigates and figther can run a 9 pc/week, while the Computer build ships with a lousy 3 pc/week.

It gives me a too big of an advantage to be fair, will this situation be resolved?

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Yep, noticed the same. If I understood him right, Brad mentioned in chat yesterday that the AI will focus more on fast ships with the next update, which would be a good thing.
(I'm not entirely sure though since I was crushing the Torians on my other monitor and didn't pay to much attention to the chat.

)

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I've noticed the following in my current game with intelligent level AIs.

AI problems:
- Definitely noticed the same problem with the AI not building fast ships. They had the tech before I did.

- If you leave a planet with no ships in orbit, the AI will send a stream of single troop transport ships at it.

- I've had the AI send combat fleets after one of my planets. I'd continually reinforce the ships in orbit. The AI sent into the vicinity some undefended troop transports. A fleet with 2 troop transports and a combat ship. And another fleet with 2 combat ships and a troop transport. This kinda made sense but after I reduced their combat fleets they didn't pull back their troop transports. I've never seen the AI pull a vulnerable ship back.

- The AI will seem to forget about a ship for a few turns. A race is sending some fleets to attack. I pay up to get peace with them. These fleets stop where they are and remain in place for 5-10 turns or longer.

Gameplay change suggestion:
- Currently the only way to defend troop transports is to put them in the same square with a fleet of combat ships. So I have separate combat fleets escorting my troop transport fleets. Pretty easy to comprehend.

The AI doesn't do this. If it is too hard to get the AI to do the above. I suggest making troop transport ships use only one logistic point. This would make it possible to group a few of them with combat ships and not have the fleet be a sitting duck.

You would also have to give them more than just one hitpoint. In any case, one hitpoint doesn't make a lot of sense for that size ship. I'd give them a lot of hitpoints but prevent them from mounting weapons.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

That wouldn't do anything but help the human player.

One idea: create a large-capactiy transport as a default ship, maybe ones with 3 and 5 troop modules, and let the AI build those...

You can also use a regular hull to make a tougher transport, but without weapons, it just means it dies slower.

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I've made combat enabled troop transports. I just used large size hulls, and slapped a single weapon, and a little defense on them. Worked really well. I wouldn't want them as my main attacking force, but damn it was handy to have some defense and firepower when you got surprised by a maurading ship, or got caught on the bad side of a battle after your main combat fleet got toasted. It's a little more expensive to use a hull with hitpoints as opposed to the standard transport hulls, but in the game I used them, they were very effective.

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In this vein, I noticed on normal difficulty in the first mission of the campaign the bad guys will send a steady stream of troop transports to their doom. They send them 1 transport at a time, no escort, while I have 2 fleets of 2 defenders and 1 lone defender patroling to keep my planets safe. I've blown up a dozen or so of their troop transports so far, they really need to add a 'hey we should stop wasting resources' thought process to the AI. Something that says "We've done A 3 or more times with the same results - our utter destruction. Time to change to B."

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The AI doesn't do this. If it is too hard to get the AI to do the above. I suggest making troop transport ships use only one logistic point. This would make it possible to group a few of them with combat ships and not have the fleet be a sitting duck.

The problem with this is that you'd be able to create massive invasion forces early on. Currently, you need decent logistics just to group 2 of the 1-1.5k troop transports for a combined invasion of 2-3k troops.

Granted, once you get up the invasion tree a bit, you're soon building 4-6k troop transports, and at that point I think that invading with 8-10k troops is really no different than invading with 100k troops... you're almost always going to win.

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I've only been playing on normal so far, but from my experience the AI usually has at least a few ships guarding every transport. That said, they are only small, weak ships that are easy to take out, but it does provide at least a little protection.

I think that it would help if the AI actually used sensor ships. That way they would be able to move transports to a safer location when there is danger.

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If it's a problem that can't be fixed on the AI's side because of whatever difficulty it would cause, why not just put humans in a situation where they need to put transports into fleets in order to protect them? If there's a stack of fleets, some combat ready and some helpless transports, have the weakest fleet/transports be attacked first. If transports were put into combat fleets they would still be attacked last. Have the AI distinguish which fleet to attack based on which has the most total troop capacity rather than attack so you can't just slap on a laser cannon and have the AI no longer recognize it as a transport.

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