Now we have boarding I am seeing some very strange ship design from the A.I.Defence medium ships with 2 fleet movement modules,a fighter.ect.Some ships not even with their full loadout after upgrade.I can see now why later game becoems a bit of a turkey shoot.

Please improve this.

this has been the problem since before the update. based on my experience, the Horatios are addicted to slugs, even at turn 150+ they are still using all slugs load outs on their battleships. 

I think the Horatios have some of the worst ships in the game: few weapon slots and not that much of utility or defense slots either. Not sure how they are supposed to compete in space combat unless they have some bonuses somewhere that make up for the shortcommings of their ships. 

I thought the AI was using decent ship designs now. I think in my last game, Horatios were using stuff like Rail Guns and bombers. 

The AI really shouldn't be having these kinds of issues. Also, are the AI using boarding pods themselves? I have yet to see this personally.

In my experiance the AI ships differ quite heavily depending on the game difficulty. The higher de difficulty, the more advanced ships/larger fleets I saw in the game sessions.

BarbeQ wrote:

In my experiance the AI ships differ quite heavily depending on the game difficulty. The higher de difficulty, the more advanced ships/larger fleets I saw in the game sessions.

I think that is in your head as these are serious level ships.

The A.I need some sort of templete so say defence ships are actually capable of soaking up damage.The A.I design just seems like some random thing with no purpose.

Higher difficulty means nothing with ships this bad as the end game is a turkey shoot.

The AI could have filled out all slots.
They may not have the advanced hull that you have researched.

Would be good to know what technology / modules the AI has researched to make a decision if this is a good design or not.

The Coordinator is a good "speed" design to increase fleet movement and the Hunter is a good all energy design if that is what is needed agains your ships.

Maybe AI never researched or found better modules and that is the best he can come up with?

Having  three Coordinators modules on a defensive ship is stupid in anyone book even early game let alone 200 turns in.

It doesn't look like a defence ship. The design suggest it is a ship that is supposed to provide more movement to the fleet.

It grants +3 movement to the whole fleet. Get 3 of those (yes that takes up 9 CP) and you have +9 movement.

That doesn't mean that you aren't better off doing that with smaller Protectors as you can get more movement bonus from them.

What I am saying is that this ship wasn't build for defence. It was build to enhance fleet movement and it that task it does it's job.

A different matter is if it was a good idea to build a ship like that or not. But for that we would need to know what the AI was thinking and with a save the devs can assist with it.

Neron wrote:

I just wanna see AI become smarter, because playing on endless and seeing how they get better ship 10 turns ahead is ain't fun for me :P
Edit: Because higher difficutly higher fidsi they get, if i remember correctly.

We'd all like to see smarter AI. Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as having the devs turn the "Better AI" dial. I actually think that the current ES 2 AI is several times better than the EL AI. 

We're facing several issues when looking at getting better AI.

1) We're asking for tougher AI through the lens of strategy game veterans with years of experience. Each game has the AI start from scratch.

2) We want more complex game systems and deeper/more numerous layers of gameplay. This makes it a magnitude of times more difficult for the AI to compete and for the devs to create more convincing AI.

3) AI does not have human emotional attributes and therefore does not react like a human would to certain situations. A badly losing AI is just as happy as a winning AI. That is to say, it doesn't really care one way or another apart from whatever reactions are programmed into it.

All that said, ES 2 sufers from some very common 4x issues. For instance: It puts way too much burden on the AI to provide challenge to the player instead of offloading some of this onto the gameworld. There needs to be some kind of AI director that can randomly create threats and obstacles to shake up games for the player based not just on how well the player is doing, but on how "quiet" things are going. If you've spent x number fo turns with no fights, no major issues and you're just hitting end turn toward your victory, that's prime "giant space monster" spawn time. 

I also think that quests and events are a little to FIDSI based instead of doing unique things and generating non-FIDSI rewards.

Neron wrote:

I just wanna see AI become smarter, because playing on endless and seeing how they get better ship 10 turns ahead is ain't fun for me :P
Edit: Because higher difficutly higher fidsi they get, if i remember correctly.

Indeed.The A.I needs to learn how to play the mechanics better.Massive cheats only really give them an edge early game and they start to fall behind because they do not design,use migration or have better plans for system buildings like good players.

I dont really see an excuse for the bad ship design as what I have seen in this game.EL designed units a lot better.