"god" allows you to control AI players. It has nothing to do with enabling or disabling fow. (At least - visually to the player). Even if "god" allowed the AI to see everything, I only activate it after it starts sending them to planets, and AFAIK it doesn't change destination mid-turn.

"fow" then lets me see everything. I could just have used "fowtrans" instead to just see the planets

ninja'd:

Ok, that makes a bit more sense. I had been cloning the starting ship in order to show that they'd not explored at all.

The key help was that you used the Krynn.  They only have 1 planet in their home system.  With the others, they have a second planet so they would build in their own star system and then not build any more colony ships until one of their scouts found a world.

@ Frogboy will the AI use the 3 free constructor Pragmatic Ideology reward and quickly turn them into colony ships exploit/loophole that human players can use especially in the more difficult AI options?

I'm not sure if its a Bug or smart AI, but the Yor are building empty colony ships,(on suicidal at least) minimum allowed for a human player is .5 pop each.. unless they are gaming the system and upgrading constructors or something to colony ships. Kinda smart actually seeing as synthetic races could just buy the minim pop for a planet or build it later. I haven't noticed this behavior for any of the other races.

No.

I can post a bug report if you want Frogboy, otherwise here is a pic to show what the Yor are doing as i said in my above post

Thanks, for the answer Those are always neat things that would be interesting if tricks could be put in, however, I know that can't be easy to do   Thanks for all the hard work, much appreciated

Yes - I've noticed this too. When I clone a colony ship, the copy doesn't have any population, but the AI can still send it to a planet and colonize. If they can build ships like that, then it certainly needs looking at.

The funny thing is that the same bug happened in GC2 as well.

In the Community Update I also doubted that the AI needs to scout planets before sending colony ships in, but Gaunathor was adamant the AI had to. So I fired up the game in order to recheck on this, but I took Thalans in order to see what their initial colony ship is going to do. (they also are the only one who have no secondary planet in their system). And they could send this ship through halfway the galaxy on turn 2 (if given enough range).

But it is beyond me how the same bug could re-appear into GC3 unless you used the code of GC2...(?)

The AI is just as passive and naive with trades as before 6.2, if you play with little to no planets in your galaxy. I am playing against genius AI, with opposing ideologies, on a medium map with very few planets. After the land grab I have 2-3x as many planets as each AI player. Once the land grab was over the AI started to fight each other instead of me and I have yet to build a ship. All my planets are most developed and I am working on research to try and tech up to the AI. I looked at the few planets the AI has and they are very poorly developed if at all. Those poor planets are spitting out ships and research left and right.

I really think most of the AI problems can be fixed if they could get a build order right on their planets and work to fill up all tiles. I would rather play and lose against and AI that out does me vs just cheats. When the AI just cheats I do not even want to play. I almost never felt the AI cheated in GalCiv2 and I played a ton trying to be better than the AI on the hardest settings. As the game progressed I just had to lower the difficultly rating down to 6/9 out of 12 to get a very hard challenge.

I can assure you that on, at least, masochistic, obscene and suicidal the AI in GC2 get bonuses to sensors, range, military production, social production, economy, miniaturization in the magnitude of 25% to 50% to 100% and a hidden research modifier bonus of (IRRC) 2.6 or 3.6 on suicidal with the sensor bonus virtually enabling the AI to see most of the map.

I have no idea why this is called cheating because this is essentially what you're asking for when you decide to pick up one of these difficulty setting. The general argument here seems to be that the devs should program the AI in order to be so smart as a human player or outsmart him, but this is totally unrealistic if you just keep in mind what a human player can do with the game, the time he has to test, examine, use loopholes, exploits AND learn progressively from experience while the AI is nothing but a huge conglomerate of routines that do nothing but calculate, and these will stay 100% the same from the first game to the very last.

We aren't asking for an AI as smart as a human player. that's unrealistic - at least today.

What we are asking for is an AI that is reasonably "intelligent" and executes basic build orders and economic setup so it doesn't need to cheat quite as blatantly to keep up with a human. 

Just got the latest patch and started a soak, the AI on normal still knows where relics and resources are, they send constructors straight for them without exploring.  I left the fow alone just soak and hit next turn.  Is that intended?

Which is exactly what it does - for Normal. But some people find that too difficult, and some people find that too simple - then values are modified to give (dis)advantages to the AI.

Which it already does.  

Seriously. If you want to have a reasonable discussion we can't just hand wave away the obvious. The AI knows how to play the game. It builds colonies, researches technologies (fairly intelligently), designs ships, sets reasonably good tax rates and generally builds things on its planets that make sense.

What we are discussing here is that infinite gray area between can play the game and play the game better than most humans.  And that is something that it gets better at bit by bit over time.

Working as designed for now.

So, here's the underlying trade off: If we let every player (potentially 128 players) manage their own unique fog of wars that are exactly the same as a human's then either we have to make the minimum HW requirements be 8 gigs or we have to make the maps smaller.

Instead, we are able to ping objects (like planets) as to whether they have come into sensor range of an AI player and tag them.  Similiarly, your ship is "known" if it comes into sensor range and occsioinally a job is run to check to see if it is still "known". (humans actually have a tremendous advantage here because we can make an intelligent guess where a ship is even if it's gone out of FOW, the AI may not know this).

While this can be done for other things (like ressource) but it won't be done in the near term until we come up with a new algorithm for exploring with scouts.

Thus, the sausage factory that is game development, my friends!

Just had the AI offer me my pants after the kicked my...rear... out of them. This is one player who is happy to say the AI can outclass players. Trading looks to be better balanced though I havn't gone hand over hand with all the stuff but they are not as willing to hand me keys to the city anymore. Perfect! I'm not stating that balance won't continue to be needed. Thats a point not one person here would argue. I guess the main focus is on the Ai is "human" enough on beginner for even a novice, and the godlike is well, godlike, as the name suggests. I personally would like to see a difficulty that gives them some of the bonuses above normal, but does not give them the ability to see all the planets. Which if I am understanding correctly is the case currently. I like the ai bonuses but I'm also a fan of the AI having to stumble around looking for planets and resources. All in all, the AI in my opinion is pretty damn good. and it seems like each day brings it a whole new level, so i'm very optimistic. 

I had never thought of turning those into colony ships... I might have to do that once just because but that to me just doesnt seem right.

que the Kasparov quote about Deep Blue possessing an "alien intelligence"...

I hadn't thought of that either until now - especially with the Benevolence Ideology skill that starts all colonies with 5b population - they don't even need to stop anywhere and fill up with poor dupes being sent out into the great unknown...

cheers

I did it, and I just felt like I was cheating lol. Although after doing it I had a need for constructors more then colonys. Game karma got me