How is the Latest Build's AI?

With a good mod and giving the AI a bonus, you can get a game for a while. Helps to give yourself some unofficial handicaps as well. For example, I never accept sharing current tech - only 2 or 4 levels behind.

Stuff like that, and it's fun. I'm trying unnamed's AI mod, and I'm around 3 years into the game. Just moved up from 10th to 9th place on the scoreboard. I'm not worried, but I've heard this mod can actually put a hurtin' on you so I won't get caught napping.

I don't think one can lose to the stock game under normal circumstances. Overall the modders have their work cut out for them, because they're starting in a pretty deep hole.

And unlike a lot of games, the AI's don't automatically start to gang up on you until you've been in first place a little while. You can set them to work as a team against you from the start, but I've never tried that.

There are random rebellions, and spies can cause rebellions, but this game doesn't take the cheap road of generating rebellions just because you're winning.

There are bugs with the game, but I haven't seen it intentionally cheat like so many others with equally weak AI.

For several reasons I'm reluctant to give the game a thumbs-up or thumbs-down just now. I know I like playing it, and I know I get tired of some things. It's getting better, and as long as it continues to improve I can deal with it.

You're asking about the AI in particular, and to be honest it hasn't made a good impression yet. But if I didn't enjoy the game I wouldn't be playing.

I think the above post just about covers it. Play one of the mods and increase the ai bonuses as you get the hang of the game.

Dv's post was accurate. I agree that a mod is required. I'm running the BM and the AI is not perfect, but its pretty good. In the games I've played so far I've been careful to keep lots of friends and only engage in a war against one AI empire at a time and so far this has been pretty easy. I've had a few "oh crap" moments as during each war at least one strong counter attack was made. Also one war was started without warning It still needs work but there is work being put into it from modders and the dev, so I think its worth getting now.

Quote: "You're asking about the AI in particular, and to be honest it hasn't made a good impression yet."

I keep seeing this pop up over and over and it really blows me away. A good AI is THE single most important thing for any PC game. I especially expected it as an improvement in SEV since the SEIV AI was lacking. One would expect that a product in its fifth generation would have a good AI. A fan mod should not be required to provide a decent AI to a series with the maturity of Space Empires.

Aarrgh! Please, MM, this should be a priority, or does the multiplayer part of the fan community control the game's development? If so, I think the advertising should say so: Lots of features, but barely adequate AI.

With BM mod and all advantages cranked up, you can get some challenge, but the AI is not top-notch, for now.

The problem is that with as big changes as the game is going through in each new incarnation( i.e. engine changes ), the AI basically has to be rewritten from scratch, thus all or most previous work on the AI is gone in an instant.

What difficulty level do you play in other games? If you're playing Civ 4 or Galactic Civilizations at or near the top difficulty levels, you will be asking yourself, "Is this all there is?" when you find yourself blowing the computer away in research in the first two years of your first game.

And yet -- designing, researching, exploring all the different things even the ones that don't work -- it's still a great game. Like SimCity, some games don't need AI to be fun.

I really can't recommend the game for all the frustration you'll have getting everything to work -- and yet I love it myself, and am really glad I got it.

Might as well buy it, I'd say. The game is fun as it is, and Aaron, the developer, is very dedicated and keeps throwing out patches. The game gets a little bit better every month.

Don't play stock game, though. Use a mod.

Heh. Yes, it should. Big bold letters on the front, back and sides of the box.

There's really no excuse for releasing a game as having single-player play when the computer opponents can't even tie their shoelaces. At the most it should be marketed as primarily multiplayer and that, oh yeah, a single-player mode exists...

Modders shouldn't be necessary to have the product be worthwhile. They should be able to start with a product that's already functional and extend it in great new directions. As it is, the last YEAR has seen the modders bring the game up to being (just barely) replayable... it's still far from being the edge-of-your-seat strategy epic.

I expected that by now (bought it when it was released, knew it needed work) I'd be playing it regularly. Instead I find that I only pop it open for a few hours, lose interest and shelve it for another month or two. That's with Fyron's and Unnamed's mods...stock isn't worth launching at all. I'm saddened by this.

I think MM is doing a good job considering the situation.

Especially since even the big boys, with their massive financial resource backing of big publishers/investors, and big development teams, can drop the ball so horribly, that a game review show called X-Play now has an 'award show' for some of the absolutely worse games around...

At least MM is working on the game still and getting bugs fixed and other things improved, and not just looking to exploit a brand name or otherwise make money and run.

This also reminds me of Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Delayed a lot, and it was semi-playable and needed a few patches to work (mostly) right after release, but it was a good game made by an apparenly small group, and it apparently also had a hard, long road to a version that worked good.
Heck, Derek Smart (sp?), the maker of that game, went as far as to make it available for free download online around the time sequel had been made, as a sort of apology to the game community for taking so long to get it working the way it should have.

Don't get me started on games where the makers apparently skip or skimp on quality control/beta testing in general... be it because they don't care and just want to make money ASAP, or because they were pressured into releasing ASAP by publishers or even the gaming community that was exposed to over hyped stuff and then rapidly loosing interest for any number of reasons.

Example of opposite, a game called Ghost Master.
Most didn't even know it even existed/was in production until ads hit the gaming magazines a few months before release. It came in 'under the radar' as one reviewer put it. It was good, it worked fairly well (apparently only needed 1 patch and a minor fix that barely qualifies as a patch). It got good rewiews AFAIK. It must have been good, I could never find it in stores except for one time I was short on money and couldn't afford it.

It's a messed-up industry, to be sure. One game that stands out in my mind is Europa Universalis. Talk about bugs! But the game was so good & so much fun I just couldn't stop playing it.

I have EU2, and EU3 is planned. They've patched and patched, and the game still has bugs. It's about the only game I ever met that was so good the bugs couldn't couldn't stop the fun.

The sequel called Victoria was good too, but when they tried to make the system work for WW II with Hearts of Iron I didn't like the result. HOI needed to be thoroughly debugged before they released it.

The cool thing about SEV (and some other 4Xers) is that it captures your imagination and you usually get to have fun for several turns before the bugs surface. By then, you're having a good time and they're usually not enough to make you quit.

Then again, every time a patch comes out I wonder how I ever managed without it, and I sure wouldn't want to go back.

What will stop me from playing a game is AI that is flat-out programmed to cheat. I'm not talking about a little bonus here or there - I mean once you get so far ahead a whole slew of nonsense triggers. I consider games with these trigger points to surrender when they pull that crap.

(Now EU had a 'badboy' rating, and if I hadn't found out how it worked I might have tossed it aside. But it's something I can put up with since it's based more on how you play, and less on your overall success. If you're just starting wars & taking land, the AI's will see you as a threat and all gang up on you. Even your own allies will bail out or even backstab you. But if you expand by other means, you can get huge and they won't care so much. The game also lets you score a good number of points peacefully, although I don't think you can reach #1 in the world without winning wars.)

At least with honest AI you can invent your own handicaps to keep the game interesting. SEV does have that much going for it.

There is a 'mega-evil empire' trigger in SEV, and it's not something I care much for. It may be that it can trigger against an AI player, and in that case it's at least somewhat fair. But I have a feeling it's only out to get the human. So far it hasn't been much of a problem, but it puts a stop to the (weak) diplomacy portion of the game when it kicks in. "You're too powerful, so we won't have any more dealings with you until you conquer us."

Don't remind me of the Mega-Evil Empire crap, I ran into it in SE IV recently... Had several treaties and a pair of partnerships, things went well, I expanded a bit and did well... they had everything go downhill fast, relationships quickly go to murderous... Didn't have much of a military, luckily they focused attacks on one of my few planets with defenses (ioslated system that had colonies with defenses since it was isolated)
Now I try to survive and plan to brutatally slaughter them all...

Needless to say, I utterly despise that sort of crap in games, especially 'rubber band AI'.

If a game gets ruthless or devious or brutally efficient at planning, no problem if it does so fairly and within the rules. But when it obviously is ignoring the rules... like Master of Orion...
If that game wasn't programmed to cheat, then I don't know what would classify as cheating...

imagine having 500 Battleships and 10,000 Frigates, few thousand ships inbetween, you are doing great and are one of the most powerful empires around... next turn, an enemy fleet pops into sensor range, you see it has 65k Battleships... they have the max number of that ships of that design in one fleet! Then ANOTHER Fleet with even more of the SAME ship design is sighted!
That's stuff I've seen Master of Orion pull... ignoring ship lmits, ignoring ship upkeep, obviously ignoring production rates...

Or the classic thing of where AIs of factions/teams that are supposed to hate each other suddenly ignore each other and only attack the human player... "Lock Teams" is fun in some games with skirmish modes... sure, they don't 'attack' each other directly, but it's nice to see them attack at the same time and have their units fire at each other on the way to the human player's base...

Then there are hard core gamers... I personally come to despise the game developers that only pay attention to feedback of hard core gamers... what I despise worse are games that "give more" to hard core gamers... be it an special or 'true' ending that only appears on the next to impossible max difficulty, or just plain being too difficult overall for most casual gamers...

Maybe big companies would do better and not have to worry about money as much if they didn't alienate the majority of the gaming community... 5-10% of casual gamers buying a game will probasbly bring in tons more money than getting 50% of hard core gamers to buy the same game...

When I play games mainly for fun, or relxation, or to relieve stress, I get extremely angry when I finish playing a new game even more angry and/or stressed then I was before I played it...

I don't see how "get frustrated, snap disk in half and uninstall game because it beaome impossible to beat" in any way factors in with a "game" being "fun".

And don't get me started on "game balance"... especially the retarded "rock paper scissors" type... or retarted economies... (I love SE, there's no razor's edge between survival and an empire/city/base/army/whatever falling apart due to lack of resources/money...)

Reminds me of a game called War Inc... sort of like Command and Conquer, but with brains... and some common sense... (120mm tank gun hitting average soldier does more than inflct minor injury like in C&C, it... um... War Inc is a war game that has graphical graphics, lets leave it at that...)

Ok, I'm done ranting now.

Mega Evil Empire is trivial to disable; just set it to false in Settings.txt. The field names are identical in SE4 and SE5. If you have a recent savegame just before it triggers, you can exit, disable the setting, and continue your game (after replaying a few turns).

AI Uses Mega Evil Empire := True
AI Mega Evil Empire Threshold Score Thousands := 500
AI Human Mega Evil Empire Score Percent := 170
AI Computer Mega Evil Empire Score Percent := 250

Yes, MEE can be triggered against an AI empire. No, it isn't very likely to occur.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

Where ya been??? EU3 has been out for months! They're working on their 4th patch...

Javaslinger

Does this Mega Evil Empire thing ever turn off once you're no longer the #1 empire?

Based on the scripts, it should only be in effect if the situation remains true. However, anger levels etc. that result from the mega evil state may hold for some time afterwards.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Mega Evil shouldn't be an all or nothing. Not every empire is altruistic and runs headlong into war the moment someone gets too large. There are plenty of empires that would prefer to be the local bully's best friend.

Certainly being exceptionally powerful should affect diplomacy, but not the way stock manages it. Or, rather, the way stock would've managed it if MEE actually worked. (Can anyone confirm if it works/doesn't?)

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A project a day keeps the deadline away.

EU3's out? May not see much of me for a while. I am purely too much of a hermit. But at least I'll get to start with a patched game.

And yes, rditto48801, MOO3 thought they had the cheats all worked out. Very annoying to spend 3 months on a game (I micromanage) just to run into that crap.

Thanks Fyron for the MEE info. Can't decide whether to disable it or not. I aught to, just on principle. I would kinda like to see if I can get it to trigger against an AI - Now that'd be funny!