The single greatest AI issue right now is its economic management.

It's just really poor at developing a strong economy, which causes it to fall substantially behind in terms of research and production to the average player. Subsequently the AI is still running around with medium ships with 20 attack when I have huge ships with over 400 attack. It's a whitewash. Surely this isn't that hard to fix? 

The second biggest issue is its lack of military tactics / sense. but if you fix the economy, the ships the AI is using should be closer in power to the player, and so this will seem less of an issue

I think if you fix those it will actually be in a reasonable state.

I agree that the AI management of it's colonies are very poor.

The AI build very few buildings on planets and build them very haphazardly when they do. The AI does not seem to understand how to use buildings that boost other buildings and standard buildings together and have no clue how to specialize worlds.

Currently the AI seem to only manage the focusing sliders on empire levels. I just monitored my AI empire yesterday and all planets used the same slider settings or at least very close to it. It was basically around 50/35/15 (manufacturing/science/wealth) and 60/40 or 70/30 for military/social spending. This make the AI develop their planets extremely slowly and also stop developing them after they build a couple of buildings.

Most smart players set their focus into 100% production on new colonies until they built up the base of that colony starting with the industry. Despite the different terrain on planets giving you bonuses in different ways these are hardly something you bother with. Every planet are designated to one area... be it industry, science, wealth, influence or military. Given how the mechanics work there are no reason to do otherwise so the AI should be taught the same.

An efficient and smart player rarely have a slider on anything but 100% in one direction or another... almost no reason not to from an efficiency standpoint.

Larsenex, be nice. Everyone, including you and me, are entitled to an opinion. I think many of us in the forums were surprised by the release date, thinking the game needed a month or few longer to bake. The AI IS problematic right now. With the latest patch, at turn 185, my score is almost 1900 and the nearest AI major power is in the 400s. As I've noted in other threads, Challenging difficulty is simply not right now. I think one major reason is simply the AI not being able to adapt its strategy to the addition of pirates into the game. At about turn 180, one of my Explorers watched as a major power tried to move an unarmed colony ship through a pirate infested area. The AI has to be smarter than that (against itself). I am hoping this is an easy enough fix before the game is released and everything will be okay.

Theeannon, my opinion, I am holding off on "final judgement" until I have the actual release game. I will post reviews publicly only then. Stardock is a business and I assume the release strategy is part of a larger business strategy. Like the Civilization franchise, I imagine this game will become great over time. I know that, even in its current state and with all its flaws, I do have fun playing, though I have been a fan of this franchise since the first Galactic Civilizations 2 release (sorry, I don't go all the way back to the original).

I think everyone should keep posting their opinions of the AI, because otherwise this game is not going to get great.

My opinion.

Just a short reply:

0) I'm for sure not the only one; see above or link below for an older thread...

1) I played on insane and godlike with 5 major AIs (the rest "occisional"). I built 1 RnD planet, 3 Manu planets (incl. Homeworld; which has RnD, too), 1 Wealth, 4 trade routes, 2 shipyards; only a two starbases); traded a bit of my "not so important techs" for x credits per turn (as explained), got lots of money; can thus buy quickly new buildings --> get in tech lead (or 2nd) quite easily and also by far 1st in wealth; also if sliders on 100% military for a few turns, can quickly build up a good enough fleet (traded in military techs from minors by also giving them some "unimportant techs"); then I stopped because it would now be easy to overrun the AI, which has almost no ships (no defending ships on planets), so too simple...

Of course, it's necessary to micromanage efficiently, i.e. adjust sliders such that you can ramp up a few factories within a few turns (actually with all the trading money I get, I can easily buy 3-4 factories on the new planets; I have a per turn income of 700 or so, just by gaving away useless techs...).

2) In beta 5, I played a larger game. Same story.

3) Maybe that changes for 30 factions, but it has to work also for smaller games, don't you agree?

Suggestioned Improvements:

1) AI has to improve as the guys above suggested its colony management. They have to specialize planets and group buildings appropriately.

2) Fleet solutions have been suggested.

2) !!! Trading: as I already mentioned in a previous thread (Extremely dumb AI-trading behaviour spoils whole game: https://forums.galciv3.com/463156/page/2/#3539608), it's too easy to get all the techs from others and get tech leader by "trading round-whise techs" (this is still valid for beta 6) Also, as desribed above, it very easy to get lot of money via "per turn credits for useless techs" (especially that shouldnt be possible with minor factions).

4) AI should have a descent strategy to actually win the game and focus on one or two victory possibilites:

E.g. the plan could be for a certain faction to win via defeating all others, thus they have to research military tech, build Manu planets a few (not 100 shipyards), forget about the rest (except maybe more food, a little entertainment etc.) and attack quickly others with a good enough (!) fleet.

Or for another faction: focus on ascention points and persue only that, but quickly and efficiently. The AI seems not have a good focus on "winning the game quickly"...

I don't see the op as "hate" just blunt.

the message is "the state of the aI is hindering enjoyment of the game"

you may agree or disagree, but there's no spite there.

If he is playing the beta to provide feedback, then he has already bought the game.  No need to keep it on a wishlist.

I hadn't considered that pirates were having an impact on the civ growth. Civ 5 has issues with that, on the difficulty level I play the AI sometimes becomes broken because it loses settlers. In one game I played my neighbour only had 2 cities but I found 3 of their settlers in barbarian camps near by, which ended up killing them as I was able to very quickly outpace them 

I agree with your points, but I disagree that the game isn't ready for launch, there's still a huge patch (beta 6 patch 2) in the oven that made a lot of improvements to the AI.  And SD will keep supporting the game for at least a year, probably more, as they did with Galciv2 (and other projets too, I think, though I'm only interested in Galciv series and Start8 ).

Now, about tech trading, that shouldn't happen with 6.1 though... The AI is supposed to detech when it will go bankrupt by giving you too much money, and as far as I can tell, it is working on harder than normal AI.  And it shouldn't give you lots of stuff for crappy techs, unless you have a huge diplomatic bonus, wich tends to happen in late game.

You weren't around for Elemental were you? Same things were being said in the forums for that beta too. The likelihood of GC3 being released with a lackluster AI is now approaching certainty.

I don't mean this critically, most games have this problem. And it's probably a smart financial decision not to delay release any longer. Most people who buy the game aren't going to play it long enough to notice how clumsy the AI is, which will mean that the AI is good enough. If you understand the mechanics of the game and hearken back to the challenge of GC2, it's likely to be a glaring issue.

Part of the problem is that it's incredibly difficult to design an AI algorithm for a game that isn't complete. Brad and his team could spend thousands of hours honing strategies for the game and then have an engine change or balance pass invalidate all their work. Brad has talked about that specific challenge on these forums.

And yet it doesn't appear that Stardock made any adjustment their release schedule for the game to accommodate that reality. They should have planned to spend at least a month in Beta after the game was completed hammering on the AI. To be fair, nobody does that. Nobody sits on a finished game for a month and especially not to work on a "feature" when 80% of purchasers wont even notice the difference. Making games is a business.

Ok I removed most of what I (previously) posted.

Obviously the OP has issues with the Ai.

What I really love to hear is not so much the criticisms of the AI but show me a game with BETTER ai than what we have now. Tell me the game and how awesome its AI was at launch. I would like to purchase it today and make an comparable response. I say this because it seems to me the OP has played games with far better ai and is making comparisons based on that.  Yes I was around for Elemental. A disaster. I am 100% sure that Gal Civ III will not have that issue, at all. Brad has declared on dozens of posts that the AI is an ongoing work and will continue to 'need' updates for years after release. 

Again I want to hear about a superior ai and game to what we have now. 

One of the things in these kinds of posts is that people assume that AI doesn't already do common sense things.  It does. It's just not necessarily balanced.

For example:

• The AI does designate planets as manufacturing, research, economy planets.  But should it wait until it gets better tech to fill in a spot? or should it build something less optimal?  It's more an issue of AI balancing than lack of some algorithm.
• The AI already has several "how to win" strategies.  It is, again, a matter of balancing when to use the one appropriate given its conditions.
• The AI doesn't just blindly attack ships, it takes into account its overall military strength vs. yours. So should it be trying to soften you up or wait until it can kill you?

Most of these things aren't really AI questions but ones of judgment -- human AI data judgment.  

Also, people posting about Beta 5 experiences, which didn't even have AI in it (other than random stuff) isn't really relevant now. Let's stick to Beta 6 or later.

I'm afraid you show your lack of knowledge of AI and machine learning here, Neural networks have been recently designed that can learn to play twitch bases arcade games very well. No one has yet managed to teach a neural network to do the sort of long term planning and memory tasks needed for a game like this and if they did it would be way to expensive in terms of compute cycles and memory to run such an AI for one yet alone one hundred AI opponents.

In fact the people who worked on getting their neural networks to play those arcade games have set their sights on trying to crack the issue of games that require strategy and planning next though I believe they will start on much simpler games than GC3. Their current system can only handle games that give immediate feedback as to if a move was right or not and I do mean very quick feedback.

AI in strategy games like this is very much not based on machine learning, it's based on figuring out precise instructions for the machine on how to evaluate everything in the game and select appropriate actions, to beat it you just have to out think the person who programmed it or their ability to tell the machine how to play the way they would. That's true of all strategy games of this kind.

It's also complicated for GC3 by the fact that so much of how the AI evaluates thing is data driven, this makes it easier to change but also more complicated to balance right.

What I like about the AI in this game is that you can create a custom race and give it a distinct set of priorities and personality when you play against it which the AI will take into account. For me it's not important the AI can beat the best human players because for this type of AI that's a pipe dream. What I want is AI's that play with personalities and I'm excited this game allows that,

That said the way the AI evaluates somethings in your examples can clearly be improved, and I'm sure will be over time, much of it could be improved by data changes.

Can I just hold up my hands and say I’m one of those players who plays on beginner, and still find that the game has good enough AI in Beta6 to make my conquering the universe hard enough to be interesting without being hard enough that I lose most the time, which is what I really want.

I play for the experience not the competition and on normal the AI can often trounce me, because I suspect I’m too lazy to learn to play against harder opponents, I like to develop my empire the way I want to and not have to focus all the time on trying to stay alive.

One point of interest I recently completed a course in Machine Learning, and you won’t be seeing true learning AI in games like this for some years to come, because;

1)    Someone has to figure out how to make a neural network deal with deferred feedback on the success of its actions before it can even start to figure out a complex strategy game like this. Essentially we need human level learning ability though on a smaller scale e.g. the domain of the game. Then we need to give it lots of experience of playing. Figuring out causality is a really hard issue in a game where you could take dozens of different actions per turn and some of them might not prove successful or disastrous for an indeterminate number of turns.

2)    Once we have the algorithms for this maybe in a decade or so’s time we then need hardware that can handle dozens of AI’s running these algorithms and still have the computing power to run the games engine.

So basically you need to wait for the singularity.