Some help for the AI |
I have taken to logging in as the AI in my current game to help them along a little and a couple of things have come to my notice that I think could be changed to give the AI a more level playing feild with us humans.
Some of these have been often mentioned here and I know some modders are already dealing with in their mods, but not everything
1) Diplomatic stuff.
Stop the AI from making no research, no intelligence and no other treaty treaties.
Make the AI like treaties or gifts that give it tech. (I have been known to do this even to races that are at war with me, and for some stupid reason they ignore my offers)
Make the AI like the BIG resource trading deals.
Make the AI aware of the value of migration (more needs to be done on this and will be mentioned later in the post)
Make the AI want to make treaties when it is loosing a war. (adding a fear modifier as well as the anger one will work brilliantly for this)
2) Ship / base / unit building.
Get the AI to calculate how many life support and crew quaters it needs when designing new ships (and upgrading old designs if it does it)
Use Sensors (tech research), combat sensors and ecm, they are vital for mid - late game ships.
Use Point Defence, this is vital. Us humans can to easily just stick to CSM or Organic seekers and missile snipe to our hearts bored content.
Recognise the value of different armour types.
Recogise what are the best weapons it has availble to it, and specailise in them.
Avoid stacking armour (and other components) that gains no benefit from being stacked. This could easily be done by making those type of components 1 only. This includes stopping bases from having solar sails and emergancy propulsion.
Any troop, fighter or weapons platform needs weapons!!!!
Colony ships don't need ordinance (in fact I make them as cheap as possible with no armour, sheilds, weapons, point defence or anything really but crew controls, sensors (best I can get), engines and solar sails when i get them, the colony type and maybe some cargo.)
Ships attacking warp gates work far better in fleets than in solo runs. Oh and colony ships aren't blockade runners.
If it builds carriers it needs to build fighters (with weapons) to use with them!!!
The AI doesn't need hundreds of frieghters, mine / satalite / drone layers. In fact you can actually combine mine / sats and drone carriers into 1 ship with a couple of each type of components and a load of cargo bays.
3) Planets.
Planets need defences, more or better milta troops, and maybe some milita weapons platforms as well. Even with both the AI needs to learn to build these to protect important worlds.
It should not build resource gathering facs on planets with less than 75-100% of the resource.
It NEEDS TO BUILD AS MANY RESEARCH CENTERS as it can.
It needs to think about building Intel centers fairly early in the game.
It needs to build 1 medical center per system. (having seen how badly the AI gets ravaged by plauges this is VITAL.
MOST IMPORTANTLY THE AI NEEDS TO PRIORITSE UPGRADING FACS FOR AT LEAST EVERY OTHER YEAR I would just have it use the auto update facs ability us players have.
The AI needs to know how to deal with migration or have the game handle it better for the AI, when a imigrant race becomes available and migrates to a colony they can live on without domes then the esiting population should pack their bags and leave asap (say 10% of pop per turn until less than 10mil left and they go as one the next turn). This way the AI will be able to take full advantage of of migration.
The AI needs to build space yards on every huge breathable planet (personally I would also include large and even medium, but at least huge) as this makes building lots of facs so much quicker and the same for upgrading them.
I have more to add to this list (like dealing with technology research) but have to go, please free to add any more suggestions of your own, or argue that some of my choices are wrong, and why they are wrong and what you would think is better.
The AI really really needs a
The AI really really needs a comand that halts ships at warp gates it has flagged as guarded and collect them into a fleet, then at the end of the turn send them through the gate together.
Using the next ship button you can tell when everything you want to move has moved, can't the AI use this to decide it has gathered all the ships it can (that turn) for a gate push, whilst this might not grant it victory it would definatly be preferentail to drip feeding them.
The AI also needs sensible limits on how many carriers and drone launchers it will build as part of its total fighting force, say no more than X per Y combat ships (I tend to run at about 1 fleet carrier for every war group of about 8 or 9 ships) It should also priotise filling its carriers and drone launchers with the relevant craft.
The AI seems to be unable to think of fortifying Warp Gates by any other method than using fleets of ships, I have built space ship yards for the AI and flown them to warp gates, but they (sometimes) wander off and only seem to build ships. It should be told that bases are good for this job, as are mines, sats, drones and fighters.
The AI also seems unaware of the benefits of asteroid feilds, once you enter the midgame its simple to make a mining base or a load of sats and dump them in an asteroid feild and watch the resources flow in for minimal outlay and freeing up colonies for those all important research and intel centers. Its war fleets also seem to avoid these obvious targets.
In my game I "cornered" one
In my game I "cornered" one AI player into it's system. We had a treaty with him but he keept attacking me trying to pass the warp point almost entire game.
So I put a few mines there and after one time he blow on them he become very quete for good.
How stupid this can be ?
I mean if he wanted to fight me off the instead of sending one ship every 2-3 turns could just build up a fleet and why stopped right after "detected" a minefield ?
Also why all my diplomatic warnings "to stop border conflicts" did not stop him ?
AI
There are soooo many things the AI needs to do... IMO the most critical is that it needs to be able to remember blockages and react to them with force. Like others have said it will send masses of ships through 1 or 2 at a time probably because it's not thinking of busting the blockade but is trying to send those ships somewhere past the blockade to gather for a totally different attack... The AI should treat such blockades as temporary "no fly zones" until cleared... same with minefields and other such hazards putting any and all goal/missions past the blockage on hold til the blockage is cleared. Right now the AI is utterly incapable of breaking warp point blockades because it just doesn't seem to see them as a permanent thing it treats them as if they will not be there the next time it wants to use the warp point despite seeing 20 starbases there last time 
(ok so I rarely use more than 2 since the AI is brain dead enough that this can take care of anything the AI bothers to send :/ )
The AI desperately needs to learn defense instead of it's bullrush braindead lemming offense only tactic. Right now I never have to worry about if the AI might have something defended because I know it doesn't... Or if it does it's negligable. Some people report tons of WP's on planets but I have yet to see more than 2-3 myself... The AI is FAR too dependant on ships and planet based yards...
I tend to make some 10-20+ spaceyard bases around one major planet as a massive staging ground hehe. (I tend to make em with a couple fighter bays and/or drone launchers with insane supply capacity just so I can use em to resupply ships faster) so even though they might only have 4-6 launchers each 20 of them makes a massive defense on the rare occasions that's needed and in the meantime they can resupply my carriers and larger fleets with supplies/ordnance/fighters/drones build new large fleets etc. It's slower than planet based construction in one way but because I can build so many of them and it allows me to build them all in one hex and at a controlled rate (all ships of the same type will build at the same time because space based yards are unaffected by population vagaries hehe) in the long run it just proves better than having a ground based yard on every planet 
(not to mention I can run myself into lack of resources too easily with too many ground based yards early game hehe)
Another thing... the AI seems to give up on expanding after about 20-30 planets or rather it just drops the priority to almost nil... now that seems like a LOT but sadly with the AI in charge it's not... I have 5x the AI's resource/intel/research with the same number of planets... EVERY game... and that's MINIMUM I often have 20-50x and go mega evil too early for real fun the AI even if I play an ALL tech game uses LOWER tech than it can for facilities... often using L6 facilities when it has L100 available :/ It's just ludicrous. It can often do the exact same thing for ship components... I've seen it use L20 guns in an all tech game... It's just a waste since a frigate with L100 guns/comps will nuke 100 dreads with L20 comps without any problems.
Basically the AI is crippled atm... It's kinda like a proof of concept where the AI is there it does things but it has no point other than to prove that an AI can be made at all... :/
AI Construction queues.
The AI needs to be told to keep a minimum of 2 items in the construction queue at any one time so it can take advantage of over spill from 1 item to the next.
If its possible can you get the AI to total up how much its current construction is going to cost and always make sure it has more than 1 turns worth of construction queued? There are times when doing fac upgrades (which hopefully the AI will learn to do) when you can upgrade a number of different facs in the same turn if you have a good enough space yard and set of bonuses.
If thats not possible then adding a 2nd item to the queue is a good stop gap but can lead to some problems (far more so if you where to set this to 3 or 4 items) when it comes to building the latest versions of ships, facs and units. Imagine the AI queues building a system defence sheild at 20 turns and then a storage fac, by the time those 20 turns are up that storage fac could be generations old.
More Defense
I agree with DimmurWyrd that the AI needs to learn defense. In every computer wargame the AI's are cluelessly offensive and cluelessly hopeless. It would be nice to see AI's play more defensive and make us come root them out when they have homefield advantage. I saw where the AI's have multiple movement/attack orders at one time and I think that helps make the AI even dumber because those excess orders become staledated by the time they try to execute them.
It sure would be nice to see an AI upgrade facilities so they can pump up their production/research/intel. Building atmosphere converters and production/research boosters would also help the AI be more challenging. Picking good weapons would also help.
It really looks like programmers work from the same lame book of programming AI's and it's long past time for them to toss that book in the trash where it belongs and to come up with some new programming techniques for AI's.
Omnius
Interesting
DimmurWyrd said
Good long post which raises a couple of points I would like to add to.
AI expansion rates, I expect these to go through a cycle of expand consolidate expand that’s how my empires work generally until I come up against an other empire. Even then I will expand away from it if I still can. The present AI however expands once and then consolidates for ever more or less regardless it would seem of outside influences. 20-30 planets is a good phase one expansion in my opinion and it is reasonable that the AI then slows its rate of expansion down until it has built up those colonies to an extent. What I don’t get is why it sits there still consolidating even after that. When I and many players would be expanding into another system of two at least if that was possible and would probably have started colonizing a system of two during that period if one where easily available. I miss the competitive colonization AI of SEIV and of GC2 where the AI at higher levels was better at colony rushing than most players
The AI should at hard level try to maintain its fleets and facilities at or close to the limits of its technical capacity most players would yet it does not. In a game where I am playing a race my facilities will be within two Tl’s of my researched ability on average the main reason for which is that beyond a certain point upgrading every thing at once is economic suicide if you aren’t careful so I will upgrade in smaller batches but still mass upgrade. The same goes with ships my warships are continually upgraded as are most of my support ships and the only reason that they are not is that they are on prolonged missions. The spy ships with cloaks and lots of quantum reactors and stealth armour which sit in enemy systems for years might be state of the art when sent out but don’t get recalled and refitted all that often. Like wise I don’t recall and refit ships in a fleet on active service generally. In the unlikely event that they are seriously outclassed by the AI I would. So far I have not lost a fleet action against the AI even with the Balance Mod though they are closer single ship battles yes as quite a few of them will be fleets of frigates vs. one unarmed scout coloniser though the later scout colonisers which have Pd battery’s and light armourment and shields have given the frigate fleet something to remember them by and softened the defenders up for the following battle group
KISS
I think the key to producing as strong an AI as possible as quickly as possible is to follow the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid
I would tell the AI not to build any carriers at all since they seem to be completely bugged at the moment... most fighters launch with no supplies. Additionally, the AI seems to be incapable of filling the carriers with fighters.
The balance mod has the AI building planet bombers, ramming ships, carriers, lots of freighters etc. I think all of this might be too complicated for the AI at least for now (although I'm sure Kwok is in the process of implementing some devious scheme for these things).
Let's just have the AI build ALOT of two differe types of warships both of which should have alot of armour or sheilds (or both) and point defence: (i) a beam ship packing a bunch of mounted beam weapons all of the same type... start out with DUC and work up to meson blasters or APB or PPC (althought let's keep this ship restricted to weapons that don't need ordinance to keep things extra simple for AI), and (ii) a missile ship carrying lots and lots of seekers of any type. Kwok has his AI add one missile launcher to every attack ship... this is insufficient to break through any decent PD, although it does keep me honest in forcing me to add PD to all of my own ships. The key to missiles to fire density... if you don't fire enough missiles, you're throwing them away.
At least initially... forget fighters and forget drones... these just add complexity, and the AI doesn't use them properly anyhow. Instead, focus on getting the AI to build enough mines, weapons platforms, and troops. Have a set number for the AI to target: 50 troops per planet... 50 mines per planet, 2 WP per planet (scale these numbers based on the facility capacity of the planet... huge undomed planets should probably have 3 times as many units as suggested here). This doesn't make the AI inpregnable, but you're gonna regret ever even comtemplating attempting to capture a planet without some heavy bombardment before hand. Have the AI occasionally scrap the troops and WP and replace them with more modern units (like once every 2 years or so and staggered... year one: replace WP, year two: replace troops... repeat).
As for research... focus on applied research, one beam weapon, one missile weapon, hull sizes, mounts, obtaining solar sails, and engines. Speed and range are the key to winning a battle... make sure the AI ships are competitive in both departments.
Finally, please please do all of us a favor... have the AI set its colony ships and freighters to ram or at least stay with the fleet... Not only is it a pain to chase down those ships when they retreat, but also... the retreat of these ship types is disrupting fleets... after one battle, the fleet no longer has its support ships because they all left at the first sign of trouble. The AI just isn't smart of enough to clean up the mess that is made from the retreating.
Of course... this isn't a long term solution for the AI. We can add the complex strategies back in later once we're sure the AI has the basics down. For now, as high-school coaches are so fond of saying, "let's stick to the basics".
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The goggles... they do nothing!
KISS Theory for AI
I think Keeping It Simple and Stupid would be best for the AI. Instead of building lots of esoteric ships it doesn't know how to use it should concentrate more on building good warships.
I build a resupply depot and ship yard on every planet I colonize. I build a ship and fleet training center together on a colony and spread these "Military Installations" out along my path of expansion. I park my ships and fleets there until I need to use them. That way my ships and fleets gain good experience while chilling for their next mission.
I only colonize large and huge planets with a bad atmosphere but I always build an atmosphere converter and climate control first to get those worlds to turn in their domes and to maximize population growth. I only colonize medium planets with a bad atmosphere if there are ruins present. I do colonize medium planets with a good atmosphere. I ignore small and tiny planets regardless of atmosphere or ruins.
I keep my R&D simple and focused on getting good basic warships (frigates through dreadnaughts, no stinking carriers or transports) and improving production/research/intel facilities. I upgrade one type of facility at a time on a fairly regular basis of level 5, then 12, then 20, then 30, then 45, then 60, then 80, then 100. I also go for medical centers to prevent plagues which is something I see that plagues the AI since it doesn't know how to heal itself or practice preventive medicine. Since the AI is so pathetic at this I turn off random events to help it.
Only after I get really built up with good fleets do I go for the esoteric stuff like carriers, fighters, mines, drones and such. I go for mine sweepers and repair ships early on to keep my fleets from running afoul of minefields and to repair damaged ships on the fly.
I also build those wonderful production/research/intel boosters, both planet and system wide. I sure would like to see the AI's building them too to boost their production.
Omnius
The AI really needs some
The AI really needs some help with Technology research as well.
Having looked at the AIs tech trees in my current game I am baffled in the extreme as to its priorities when it comes to research. I have seen AI races that have 6+ levels of resource manipulation, yet only 2-3 of resource gathering. Giving the AI a list of prefered techs in the early game is a must, we can all argue about what should and shouldn't be on the list, but thats something we could let the AI decide over.
A number of AIs also seem to be developing several different rival weapons technologies at the same time (4 or 5 differnt beam weapons and 2 or 3 different missile techs), when they would be far better served restricting their tech research too 1 type of beam and 1 missile (yes these can change as new techs become available). All races seem to develope phased weapons, but I have yet to see an AI race use them, they all also seem to research weapon damaging weapons as well, although these they do tend to use.
The AI also seems to put a lot of effort into developing higher levels of "Colonisation" which is just plain silly as its an extremely expensive tech that gives no real bonuses (cargo is a far better way to make bigger colony ships). I am not sure how early the AI does this as I am now mid - late game.
When researching cultures the AI seems to be doing them on about 2% which seems to me to be rather pointless. The AI should be instructed on researching expensive (in regards of current RPs) techs that it needs to put enough research into it to do a level in less than X turns or late (we can argue about how many turns I would say 3 - 4)
Other Ideas.
The AI needs to be told that if it is suffering (sabotage) from intelligence projects against it then it should stop doing all attacks and defend itself 1st and then start building more intel centers before starting reprisals.
If the AI is suffering from a plauge then it needs to make a medical ship (or research the needed level of medical to combat the plauge asap) and send it to the plauge planet pronto. It should also be encouraged to build medical centers in important systems.