OK I started up a new game over the weekend on a six-arm spiral galaxy. I was playing Lumeris.

When I started I ran into the Vodyani as my neighbor. Relations went south after a while and I did some diplomatic damamge to them etc. Later in the game when we went to war I found some disturbing things happening with them.

1) For a very long time they fielded beam-only fleets. Literally thats what was on all their vessels including leechers. 

2) They used nothing but Get Lucky for pretty much every battle.

3) Even though I consistently used missiles, they put absolutely no flak on their ships no matter how many times I won with missile-heavy fleets using beams to supplement and my support ships with kinetics. This kept up right til near when they were wiped out and I saw some lasers get thrown in but no flak/kinetics and no bombers/fighters.

4) In general I'm finding that the AI is not using strategics even when they have them (mabe I'm missing it) but the Vodyani home world had titanium and hyperium and they seemed uninterested in using either. I would have at least expected hyperium beams.

5) Do the AI create mixed fleets by default? Or do they need to wait until they see what the enemy has? With the new weapon balance, mixed fleets just make sense period. The AI needs to understand that just using armor plating will not save you from missile heavy enemies by itself.

6) This has been discussed before but there is a problem with fleets inheriting the limited battle card set when including pirate vessels from lairs or other rewards. I have a save where this persists even after the pirate vessels are destryed or removed from the fleet.

I'm attaching some saves for any dev interested in seeing what happened in the game.

Lumeris Vodyani Poor.sav 

Lum Vodyani Beams only.sav 

Lumeris Incorrect Battle Card set.sav

Playing standard difficulty but I'm not sure why that would make a difference in this case.

hmmmm... Well slashman, you can't really expect AI to achieve perfection, but if you want to face a true battle filled whit strategy, i think multiplayer is always there for such, eh? :)

Velorace wrote:

hmmmm... Well slashman, you can't really expect AI to achieve perfection, but if you want to face a true battle filled whit strategy, i think multiplayer is always there for such, eh? :)

Who said anything about perfection?

Velorace wrote:

hmmmm... Well slashman, you can't really expect AI to achieve perfection, but if you want to face a true battle filled whit strategy, i think multiplayer is always there for such, eh? :)

Let me just make clear that I have zero interest in multiplayer for this or any 4x game I play and next time you feel like suggesting that as a solution to an issue...don't.

LOL Slashman, the AI design's increase there counters as you increase the difficulty.  They are not perfect but you will get smashed for being consistent on hard or above.  Normal the AI just sticks with what suits the race (the vodyani being white beams) sophons would have been white beams too.

As long as you've been around your asking for more difficult AI designs on normal difficulty?  Its possible the vodyani just were terribly behind as well, normal the AI is really bad... really really really bad.   Endless is actually getting there. I remember ES1 when I started I still can't beat hard, and there were higher difficulties. Anyway, the AI does improve its counter play if your playing on at least hard, not sure if a dev could clarify but I know on the endless slow games I play they counterplay even resource weapons pretty well.

There needs to be some explanation of difficulty effects on AI. The Ai gets more aggressive the higher you go in difficulty. That I know from a dev for sure. Are they using better logic the higher you go? If so, that kind of needs to be explained because most games do not do this. Generally normal is the best the AI can do and higher levels are bonus based. Even if the AI is doing badly, they should not ignore what the player is using. THat's like actively hamstringing the AI on baseline performance.

Xen0n wrote:

Slashman wrote:

6) This has been discussed before but there is a problem with fleets inheriting the limited battle card set when including pirate vessels from lairs or other rewards. I have a save where this persists even after the pirate vessels are destryed or removed from the fleet.

Oh, I wasn't aware of this, are there other threads talking about this issue?   I just submitted a bug report about one of my fleets only having 2 tactic cards available, and hadn't considered pirate ships being a factor, since some of my other fleets which also had ships obtained from assimilating Minor Factions worked correctly, while this one didn't for some reason.

From what I can tell, each pirate fleet has two battle cards. Once you incorporate them into your own fleet, those cards start to become your default and even though you have 3 or more unlocked slots, you only get the two slots from the pirate vessels.

I think it's when you acquire that fleet, the fleet keeps its battle cards. If you disband the fleet and make a new one, or move the ships into an existing fleet of your own, the issue goes away.