A.I. too overpowered

Ooo, any dates? =p

they invented bombers for a reason guys.. I tend not to build nukes when I can land rush and bomb the nuke , the amount of bombers needed to pierce fighter cover is usually cheaper compared to spending it on a nuke, or anti-nuke. Unless you completely ignored T2 air..

T2 bomber possibly, but T1 bombers have a hard time killing dox's.

I use scouts instead. I'm looking forward to the gunships.

Inspiration for you guys - the AI still suffers from some issues. He's not invincible or all knowing. If you do enough damage to his economy you'll completely destroy his ability to attack you.


That's just a quick and nasty video. It's 13 minutes long - 80 powerpoint slides at 10 seconds each. 10 seconds so you can enjoy each image at your leisure. Captions are there for fun.

Key points - the AI doesn't allocate his troops wisely, will fall apart on base defenses, and won't counter your units. If he doesn't have lots of metal available he won't expand to get more metal. His growth basically stalls from 10 minutes into the game.

I play badly, my economy is a mess most of the game, and my troop allocation is terrible.

If that video is too long, just give me feedback and I'll reduce it in length. The screenshots are all available on my steam also, in better quality.

Would have been more eventful if the AI wasn't blocked by those mountains.

That's true. But taking advantage of the terrain is an important behaviour, and so is moving your base after a crappy start

It's definitely smarter, and overwhelmed me in the first game. But it doesn't defend well if it doesn't have a lot of units. So it's actually not that smart.

I'm trying to get a game where the AI is more competitive.

A small moon?

Maybe. I played on a type 5 planet just now. They had quite a good start in terms of metal. I defended poorly, they got into my base and wrecked havoc. I fended off the attack, wiped out most of their base, but my anti-nukes didn't go up before their nuke. So they nuked my base once. Nuked my commander a second time. And immediately after that happened, the game crashed.

There is a recording. It will take an hour and a half to upload and wont' be commentated. It really just shows all the things I do wrong with my economy and unit control.

Just a friendly pointer I discovered last night, the AI will now not only expand to other planets, it will planet smash you. I turtled up just to see what the AI would do, and got quite a surprise. If I had to choose, I'd rather have an AI that's too hard than too easy. Keep up the good work.

I know Sorian has said that the Commander preservation behaviour isn't in yet, nor are all the unit threat values, nor do I think base defence is in yet. He hasn't commented on expansion, but I'm hoping this is something he plans to work on because right now the AI produces no more than a couple of fabbers (and makes a poor choice in producing aircraft fabbers) which is no where near enough for this game.

The replays I see from people like Zaphod, there's a factory pretty much dedicated to fabbers, and when you see how quickly players like him expand you see just what a poor job the AI is doing of it right now. The upgrade it most desperately needs is to build more fabbers, followed by never sending them in anything less than pairs, a single fabber just doesn't get the job done.

I think a type 4 or 5 planet is the one to play on. If he goes advanced you're in trouble. On 2 or 3 planets it seems like you can do enough damage to him to prevent him from building nukes.

I assumed that was actually a commrush? If it was just the AI being stupid, that's kind of sad...

The AI currently treats the comm like any other unit AFAIK. So it's aware of its health and power, but it doesn't understand that losing it loses the game.

sorry to say, but if the current AI is too strong for you, youre really bad at the game. Watch games on youtube to get better

Something Sorian will add sooner or later.

Nononono, that's the WRONG way to do it.

The AI difficulty slider should control how aggressively it expands and how many APM it uses, not give it magically more or less eco. That's fake difficulty.

I'm assuming that's only one way of controlling the AI =p

Sorian talked about limiting APM and more advanced tactics depending on difficulty, though that was back in Jan.

anyways right now the AI needs to build like a human player, that is : not build mass points and other structures no matter what : it currently builds mass points inside mountains if the mass point is on top, mass points and energy on the ocean floor when they should be floating mass points and energy.

and have a spotless eco.

currently the AI's eco management is pretty crap, it seems not to give a **** about stalling, not that I know if AI's stall or not it's hard to tell, but clearly it tries to produce too much for it's puny eco to handle.

I just realized the AI dosn't know how to rebuild generators after you raid it's base.

I tried to turtle up and see what it would do lategame, but because It started really close to me, and I didn't want it to be expanding so fast, I sent some light raids into it's base.

Only problem is what I considered light raids cut a huge gouge into it's eco from which it never recovered. I tried to turtle up on the north pole under the range of a single anti-nuke and I used fighters to see what it was doing, and all it seemed to do was build a few new Mex, while cranking out offensive units from it's three remaining factories for quixotic raids on my line of death.

It's comander and three engineers were just standing there doing nothing. Eventualy for some reason the comander seemed to get tired of this and started walking towards my line as if to commit suicide by pelter. I had to go into the chronocam to see why the game told me I had won the game :v

Please fix.

The game is in beta.

What you describe sounds like a bug where it thought it had more energy than it did. The AI seems pretty bad at telling the difference between "active building" and "destroyed building".

Amusingly when I played an AI game and destroyed some of the wreckage in it's base, it rebuilt.