The Ai has its share of problem. 

But i would say you can t really judge until you play impossible and beyond.

I started a Impossible game. And things are diferent... i haven t been able to say for the best or not. 

There s still problems but i can t judge them much ay this stage.

Voydani is still quiet but at least not simply passibe it defend the colonization tries whitin its laylane planets. But that s only that.

There are still stupid stuff like peacefull AI for Cravers.

Sophon reamins the greatest threat as it colonize aggressively and seem to be the only one, which should happens with horacios, but i don t haven t met them yet in this game, assuming the RNG has put one of them.

Also no matter which difficulty you are on AI is totally unable to create alliance by itself... so create alliance and win the game... Or AI works doing alliance itself, or remove alliance in single player game.

I also think i would be in better shape had i not put the quite aggressive settings on me. (pirate maxed by Aliens specimen maxed). i ve almost put all that can be put agaisnt the player on and maxed.

So if my feeling is true the AI need really an overhaul.

Slashman wrote:

I'll wait it out for a few months after release I suppose. As much as I loved seeing EL grow in the AI department, I'm not all that keen on getting the game early again only to have to wait for major improvements. If these problems are quickly fixed after launch, I'll consider it again.

Indeed I feel the same.EL A.I was terrible at release adding just massive cheats to try and hide lack of development....It took them 6 months to even make the A.I understand that trade routes tend to be good.We will see.

Common issues :

• The actual IA only strategy is to "swarm" you with small ships. They got a strong timing push when you, as a human player, is making the transition to medium ships, but after that you can simply crush most of the IAs with finger in the noise. I already feedback this on another topic and i am sure dev read it. They was confronted to this kind of problem on EL and they made a great job fixing it.  
• IAs also avoid every single fight when you get a too strong fleet, in a counter-productive way. In the end they hide their fleets in their system's hangars and the hidden fleet are destroyed when you capture a system. So instead of weaken human's armies by '(forced) sacrifice, they lost their ships for free. They loose any single chance to defeat you.
• edit : they are not able to predict and defend themselves against miltiary rush. I tryed to rush impossible IAs this was always super easy, as sophons, cravers, and vodyanis. If they are too much near of you, you can slaughter them  with a decent military build. They put a lot of energy in contest your territory and your outposts. Most of the time in impossible they win at this phase, but forget the fact that your natural reaction after getting rebooted is to go for war, and they don't build enough armies in time.

More rares issues :

• I got a very weird problem that an IA didnt capture one of my system with 0 manpower remaining during a war. Sometime IAs do some strange things like that. Looks like they don"t know everytime when they can capture a system or not. 
• Also i have seen them sometime make a lot of weird mooves on the map. During a war i have seen enemy armies going everywhere but where they needed to attack and defend... IA was probably confused because i was attacking many systems at the same time.

I hope the A.I understands the game mechanics.It took a fair while before the EL A.I.