chanbrothers

Join Date 04/2003

AI Not Colonizing Planets (1.10)

i always play in medium size map with chanllenging (genius) difficulty.

i started a new game with 4 random AIs. By the time i had colonised 10 planets, Each of the AIs only had 2-3 planets.

i even managed to colonise a planet that its star was right next to an AI's home star.

Then i started a new game with the same settings, and this time the AIs had around the same number of planets as me at the same checkpoint of my previous game.

Question is, why is there a big difference in the AI's ability to colonise planets in different games? Has the FOW been reinstated for AIs in challenging difficulty?

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There's a few things which causes it.

If the AI is has the diplomatic trait, then it's spending priorities are horrible. Just horrible. If you picked 4 random AIs, you may have just been unlucky and ended up with 4 that were all using stupid strategies.

Alternatively, there is some weighting in the AI's choice of what to build - early on (til turn 30), it'll build constructors, colony ships and freighters. It won'r build a colony ship if it can't see any empty planets, and will randomly pick between the three (with a bias toward colony ships and a bias against freight). You can just get some unlucky random rolls and an AI might end up just building useless crap while you're expanding.

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Use Insane-Abundant Balance Mod mod and you will see how fast AI colonize planet, how many ship they create and still got alot of cash

I play on suicidal but on tough difficulty AI still got insane speed. Maybe little too much ship and planet but game with that addon is HARD. AI got shipyard on all planet and create 1 colony ship per shipyard every turn

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Quoting naselus,

reply 1

There's a few things which causes it.

Alternatively, there is some weighting in the AI's choice of what to build - early on (til turn 30), it'll build constructors, colony ships and freighters. It won'r build a colony ship if it can't see any empty planets, and will randomly pick between the three (with a bias toward colony ships and a bias against freight). You can just get some unlucky random rolls and an AI might end up just building useless crap while you're expanding.

I thought from challenging (genius) difficulty onwards, the AI can see the whole map (no FOW). Hence, they should see all the habitable planets and build colony ships right from turn 1?

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a0152570

Join Date 06/2014

+49

Quoting chanbrothers,

reply 3

I thought from challenging (genius) difficulty onwards, the AI can see the whole map (no FOW). Hence, they should see all the habitable planets and build colony ships right from turn 1?

Thats what i thought too Guess i may be slow, what changed?

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AI colonization priorities are messed up. I think it's one of a few things that allows people to win against highest level AI with it "no FoW" and insane bonuses. In 1.03 i tried to play around with Tight clusters maps and a bunch of Gifted AI. I usually observe very strange behavior where AI ignore some decent planets within his own cluster, right near his already colonized planets, but rush for a couple of crappy ones far away. He ignore them for so long a manage to colonize them from half a map away with standard colonizer. I even got a habit of sending some colony ship right to the borders of newly discovered race. There is always some planets to get there.

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From watching games "soak" it would seem that none of the AI scout ships move, at all, ever. I believe this is root cause of their very slow starts.

I believe I heard/read that the AI does not send colony ships / constructors out unless it's already seen a planet / resources to colonize / mine. Therefore, it's limiting itself to whatever it's survey ship (or whatever the other initial starting ship is called) discovers.

Edit: Nevermind, it would appear that applying the fow command, somehow affects scouts ships. Using fowtrans instead of fow, you can see the scout ships are moving about.

Not sure why the AI is starting so slow

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marigoldran

Join Date 06/2013

+41

Get the mods and your problems will be fixed.

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