Cheers. I got Endless Space last year, found that it's a pretty great game, if a little too difficult in cheap ways. This may be one, but I'm not sure...



Anyway, I was playing a game on Normal in a large Black Hole galaxy, 8 factions. I'm in third place, long story short I declare war on the faction directly above me and begin to invade them, than about 3 turns later the one above THEM, the most powerful faction (the automatons), declares war on me because reasons (this is another problem with the game, but I don't see it getting fixed anytime soon, so I suppose we just have to deal). So they begin to invade me, and ten turns later I find myself fighting to survive--and, because I'm spread so thin, the enemy manages to capture one of my systems. I immediately charge over with my most powerful fleets and start attacking--but I start realizing that the fleet numbers don't drop.



I first noticed that there were 25 fleets, when just a few turns ago there were only around 7 or maybe 10. I make note of the end of one turn--I managed to destroy three fleets in the turn--and suddenly, they're at 45. They went from 22 to 45 fleets in a single turn. They don't have another system anywhere nearby, I'd have seen them coming in--and even then, forty five? Really? I'm struggling to keep about 15 fleets, total, and they manage to spawn over 20 fleets in a single turn?



I smell the stink of scat. Is this a bug, or is it just really, REALLY cheap A.I. mechanics?

I find that the AI likes to build lots and lots and lots of fleets.



I will build enough ships to meet my needs and then stop. Or I will stop building ships while I wait for a key tech advance (assuming there is no pressing need to keep cranking ships out). Not so with the AI. They just keep building ships. I know their fleet numbers seem insane when you first go to war with them. However, if you are successful you will see their numbers decrease as you kill their fleets and take their planets. The key, of course, is to make sure your fleets are better than theirs.



If you are playing Disharmony, you might try playing a custom race with the Sheredyn affinity. It makes it a lot easier to kill off enemy fleets since they can't run away.

This is one thing that frustrates the heck our of me is fleet spamming. I thought that this was addressed in a patch but it obviously is still an issue.

It's a common strategy for AI's in 4x games : since they aren't smart enough to use a limited number of units effectively, they tend to have lots of units everywhere to compensate and tend to go for overkill.

They usually have severely reduced unit maintenance costs so as to not kill their economy to compensate, for instance, look at iAIUnitSupplyPercent line here : http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=158130



This is further exacerbated here by the fact that Automatons have an industry focus (more ships) and reduced fleet caps (more fleets for the same number of ships).

It just boggles me that they can produce such unfathomably high numbers. MULTIPLE fleets in a single turn?



I can understand fleet spam, but not space magic.

You could try loading the game from their side to look what is going on?

BlueTemplar wrote:
It's a common strategy for AI's in 4x games : since they aren't smart enough to use a limited number of units effectively, they tend to have lots of units everywhere to compensate and tend to go for overkill.

Yes, this is a common strategy but I've never seen it abused to such an extent. It's ridiculous how many ships the AI's build. It's also very boring having to go through unending battles to destroy them all.



I'd much prefer it if they just built larger ships with more weapons and armor so we could just have one or two big battles rather than literally, hundreds.

The automatons special ability is the ability to stockpile unused industry, up to, I think 3x the amount the system produces. And then gets, I think, a 15 or 20% "interest" on the stockpiled industry to boot. so they can build a huge number of fleets, yes. But then they're stockpiles are gone. That may be part fo what your seing.