Hello



I've been enjoying this game alot, been playing on all difficulty's up to hard and those were awesome games. But I managed to beat hard and now I'm trying out serious. The problem with serious is that the ai heavily focuses on building units, it's insane. Before the 100 turn mark they have 4 full armies with 6 units roaming yet they don't have that much points in other areas (viewing in the score display).



Now my question is, how come? Why does every single faction focuses on building units? Is this the only way that the ai can compete with?

AI on higher difficulties get extreme boosts in production and other areas (like approval) to make them more difficult. This leads to the creation of a lot of unit stacks. On Endless difficulty it is basically an Endless wave of stacks until you go on the offensive. From what I understand is each faction doesn't have its own AI personality. There is a single AI that controls all the factions (hence the reason each AI builds units the same). The AI still needs some work.



From your prospective the best options are to build 1-3 stacks of upgraded units with a hero in each stack. The AI does a poor job of upgrading its units and a poorer job of equipping each stack with a hero, so you can usually take out multiple unit stacks with a single one of yours.



Your other option is using diplomacy. The diplomatic AI is weak as well. You can manipulate it to get resources off of them, and then use the resources to keep them from fighting you.

Caotico09 wrote:
you can usually take out multiple unit stacks with a single one of yours.

That's the kicker. You can effectively kill infinite stacks of spread out enemy units with an armor/weapon upgraded deathball.

Unfortunately, there´s little to no reason not to play an offensive game. There´s barely a cost to keep several armies on the go, and there´s definetely no choice between continuing a war and stopping it. Once your mind is set to expand and you have the armies to do so, nothing in the game makes the choice "I´ve expanded enough" a viable one.



That said, the AI just plays by that logic. On Impossible you can expect the endless waves of enemies around turn 50, and on Endless around turn 40. The best way I´ve found to handle it without giving up on empire building is to make sure you either have an initial General Hero or quickly Retrofit your intial units, along with a couple more. The retrofiting keeps your apparent Military score in a level that at least influences less people to come after you.



The AI sucks at moving too, so something else I do is to keep versions of my units which will never get Strategic-depending equipment, but will always have extra sight and movement - so that they can spot incoming threats earlier and almost always outmanuever them to engage the battles that I preffer, without their reinforcements.



Particularly on endless, every bonus to health regeneration counts, and vision is among the most useful things in a 4x game, so get those cheap watchtowers up asap.