I played two games on Normal, one with Alpha 2 patch. AI seems to colonize too slow.



Basic strategy is like that:

1) Build Basic Isotope Refinery and maybe +Food planetary exploitation (if i can colonize one more planet in the system fast)

2) Keep taxes as low as possible (preferably at zero) for a growth/production/research bonus. Spam colony ships just after two basic buildings.

3) It's very hard to capture enemy planet so "offensive colonizing" (near enemy) works the best, i send colony ship forward on turn one and scout parallel lanes with a faster scout, colonize on contact with an enemy.

4) No other buildings until the end of colonization phase.

5) Defence ships only when nessesary (a hero with Civil Engineer +25 production can make fleets on a planet where i need it).

6) Overwise, if it's seems safe, transfer Civil Engineer every 6 turns on newly colonized stars with many planets so to kickstart their growth (6 turns is more than enough time to make basic buildings).



Since it's so fast, i don't even get many pirates because it's already colonized so i don't really need defence anyway.



The problem is that as far as i see, it's THE best way to colonize everything, and after that it's already game over (hard to play when i have 13 stars and AI has two on my half of the map). So, either AI should know that trick or it should be rebalanced somehow. It's a bad thing if there is one best way to play in a strategy game.



Turn 20



Save: Save - turn 20



Turn 49:



Save - turn 49



P.S. Overall game looks good. Balance and AI is as good or better than the one in some releases of 4X games so it's an outstanding achievement for an Alpha release.

First of all, can we get a bit more about the scenario, like size of galaxy, AI level, etc?

smitty1110 wrote:
First of all, can we get a bit more about the scenario, like size of galaxy, AI level, etc?

Everything was on default settings. I don't remember what it was because i didn't change anything.



And, it doesn't really matter IMHO. Basic Isotope Refinery and Colony Ship cost too little for their effectiveness, it's too easy to be at 0% taxes, later builidings are useless without population (and the only way to speed up early growth is to stay at 0% taxes), Civil Engineer +25 production is way too much in early game, it's too hard to capture even lvl 1 planet, pirates are balanced for a much slower rate of expansion so it's clearly an exploit tactics (game is not designed for it).



It doesn't matter what is a size of a galaxy or AI in that case. Maybe it will not work in exactly the same way on other settings, but a balance problem will not disappear anyway.

Reminds of the zerg rush in SCII... Don't prepare for it properly and your screwed. With that strategy do the enemy even bother making a couple warships to take surrounding systems back off you? But the difficulty is only on normal which is painfully easy at the moment. As long as harder difficulties give a solid attempt at taking surrounding systems off you.

samboy29 wrote:
With that strategy do the enemy even bother making a couple warships to take surrounding systems back off you? But the difficulty is only on normal which is painfully easy at the moment. As long as harder difficulties give a solid attempt at taking surrounding systems off you.

Yes, AI attacked me with Defender II + Defender III (two ships total) but i transferred +25 production hero and made 3 Defender I ships (no extra techs) on the spot. With my to-be-combat hero and race HP bonus i easily lifted blockade, researched a couple of low-lvl combat techs and made a 5-ship stacks on both systems that lock the enemy. He tried to attack several times with stacks of various size, to no avail. I moved my stacks to blockade his systems. AI even tried to lift the blockade with his own 5-ship stack (at last, smart AI in a strategic game that doesn't sacrifice units one at a time!), but i had a high-lvl combat hero and my own 5-ship stack so it failed.



So, AI is relatively good even now. At least attacks more or less properly, it's more than we see in release in many 4x games, and this is just alpha.

If AI plays inefficiently it can be fixed with a higher difficulty. If AI makes completely retarded mistakes or doesn't do anything at all, it can't be fixed. Unfortunately, most devs don't realise it. So, so far i'm satisfied with AI performance. AI just doesn't know one specific way to exploit the system, but devs don't know it too, judging by pirates' respawn delay settings.

samboy29 wrote:
Reminds of the zerg rush in SCII... Don't prepare for it properly and your screwed.

Yeah, it felt ridiculously natural and streamlined, as if a game was designed to be played that way.