"Incredible" level AI and game balance issues

from Stardock Forums
I've spent the last weekend playing against (and beating) the "Incredible" difficulty AI on medium maps. I'm using the patch Brad released on Friday (the first patch to have the auto-pop-from-orbit checkbox).

1. It is my opinion that Cultural palaces need to be removed (or severely nerfed). In my current game, the Altarians were right next to me with more overlords, more tech, more economy, etc, etc. I built 3 starbases with cultural palaces on them in my main system. Combined with my various cultural wonders, that sector was putting out 1.5 MILLION influence points. Needless to say, the Altarians effectively ceased to exist within two years -- a more powerful race than me destroyed for the insignificant cost of 15 constructors.

2. The AI is not intelligent about how it plans its attacks, even on "incredible" difficulty. The AI seems to be content to produce ships and simply fling them at the opponent with no particular strategy. It is slow to follow up with transports, and will often spread its attacks out against a single planet over so many turns that the defending ships have ample time to heal. The AI will ignore starbases unless they are closer than the planets. This leads to the strat of tucking a defense 3 starbase in the far corner of a sector and loading it down with all the +attack modules. The AI will bleed itself white against the super-augmented defenders in the sector without every trying to locate or destroy the starbase that is making the defenders so buff.

3. In general, the strategy of simply sitting back and defending is too easy. Unless the human player is "killed in the cradle", carefully researching your techs and paying the correct bribes will ensure that you can keep your military high enuff to avoid being attacked by the AI. The various AI players will then fight amongst each other, often with massive economic losses (see point #2), enabling the defensive player to get a culture or tech victory with minimal difficulty.

The above is based on my opinions and play experience. It is offered as (hopefully) constructive criticism and feedback. Please don't hurt me. :-)

(the thread in the avault forums dealing with the avault review has me just a teeeeeny tiny bit scared of saying anything bad about the GalCiv AI....)
2,255 views 38 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Yeah, if the AI can learn that, it would good.

But the AI is also having trouble not being consistently taken advantage of through simpler diplomatic means as well- how to teach it to manage it's economy sufficiently to build enough constructors, escort constructors adequetely, and plant them effectively sounds pretty difficult.

Maybe Brad is more interested in doing that, though, so this problem will get looked in to.

~SDC~
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I have felt the absence of any planned attack on part of the AI over and over again now.

Unless the AI is much more powerful in terms of economic or military muscle, they usually fail to capture even a single planet against the stubborn human. They just keep attacking the closest planet and move onto the next one if all its defenders are dead, wasting its already damaged ships on it. Only then the AI will send out btransports to capture it, but of course it will be too late by then as the human will have built another bhammer in there. It boils down to endless repetition as the war drags on. Perhaps laying siege to a single planet and waiting there deliberately until btransports arrive will alleviate the problem somewhat.

On the flipside, all it takes to bring down AI's best system is nothing more than a few battleships or dreadnaughts or battleships and a couple of btransports - the AI is very slow to respond to force buildups, does not defend in depth, nor does it launch immediate retaliatory strikes against the human. What this means is that even the strongest AI empire can be reduced in a few turns to rubble. All this on 'genius' setting, mind you.

This is not to say the AI is entirely incapable of taking planets. No. Its just that if you reach a certain point in the game (say Battlehammers with 3d phasing) it becomes almost certain that you will survive against even the best equipped AI, whereas the same does not true when the AI is defending.

So perhaps the AI can be programmed to react to buildups quicker, deploy patrols around its systems and go after battletransports and starbases as priority targets?



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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Akaste: Yep, that's exactly where I was trying to go, I just couldn't put it to words as well as you did. :-)

Kavok: No, they need to be nerfed, imho. When you can fling influence around in the hundreds of thousands and millions, but you only need an advantage of 500 in order to take a planet from culture, then something is wrong.

It makes about as much sense as being able to build a module on a starbase that gives +200 attack. It makes all the other techs that affect attack pointless... you either have the one "super" tech, or you don't.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
I partly agree here. I'm being outplayed by the Drengins and Yor in my current game on a huge map, but my defenses are holding pretty easily. I guess a military conquest will be hard, but I'm going for the research victory, which is faily easy to get, since the AI cannot go 'beyond Drengin' or 'beyond Yor' anyways.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
This is certainly the type of input needed to tweak the AI - as much as I hate to say "hey, please nerf my strategy," I'd rather have a challenge than get bored with an easy game. I firmly believe it's crucial that the AI take space stations more seriously. Make them bee-line for the stations and destroy them; make them understand that space stations are the key to a successful invasion (taking them out, that is).

As it is, if you get 3 stations built up in the back corner of your closest sector to the enemy, you become near invincible with a much smaller fleet. Above "bright" empires should really use strategies such as sending fleets of fast ships to attack stations in an attempt to cripple your defense network.

Is it possible to teach the AI flanking techniques after they evaluate the defenses? (Ex, if they see fleets in front of a supporting starbase, can they go around, possibly on 2 sides in an attempt to get at the base). Tweaks like this should make it much more challenging at the high levels.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
It isn't quite so simple as teaching the AI to hunt and kill starbases, tho.

The game can be divided up into little mini-era's depending on what techs you have. There are times when starbases are absolutely invincible. Realistically speaking, any time in the early game, a maxed out starbase is unbeatable unless if you have battleships or better. One technique I use in early wars is to place a starbase as close to the AI as possible and max out its defense. Battlecruisers or smaller will die in droves, leaving the AI planets vulnerable to a focussed counter-attack.

So in addition to looking for starbases, either starbase defenses need to be nerfed (or the initial defensive techs spread out thru the tech tree some more), or the AI has to know, based on its scouting, to simply not attack or sue for peace.

Or better yet, if the human player has a "fortress" sector, go AROUND. It is very rare that I have the resources to super-buff more than 1-2 of my sectors. The others are usually very vulnerable, but as long as the AI always attacks the closest planet or ship...
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
I have seen the AI build culture starbases in my sector, but that was a slow buildup, and pre-cultural palace. In general AIs design starbases in a very strange way. For example, in my last game I checked what modules were actually installed, and it was common to see starbases with +15 defense, but the base +5% mining bonus, and culture mods of all things. This was deep in the AI's territory, as far away from anyone as possible.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
i agree with most of the sentiments expressed in this thread. as long as you can last through the beginning of the game, once you have battleaxe/battlehammers, you're not gonna lose any colonies unless you fall behind massively in the tech department. i don't even bother with stacking defensive SBs, i've never had the need.

taking AI planets is trivially easy and the AI never escorts anything so you can gleefully slaughter all their transports, constructors and freighters.

the only mildly challenging thing in war is to protect your trade routes and mining starbases. note: this is all on intelligent settings.

anyway, i'm sure brad will upgrade the AI over time to provide increased challenge. the AI in this game is still vastly superior to any other 4X game i've seen. but as it stands i'm worried i'm gonna get bored of this game...and this is only after a handful of games.

cheers

h

Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
As far as the fleet strategy of the AI goes, it really only needs three things.

First, it should never throw away equipment. It should be able to analyze the defenses of a single ship/fleet at the least ( a sector + move radius at best ), and know whether it statistically has a chance of killing the given unit. The endless stream of lemmings into a starbase / survey ship has to end.

Second, it should be able to use repair a bit more effectively. I haven't seen it ever retreat a damaged ship, and it rarely researches repair techs. They work well for me, but this point is less important than the other two.

The third thing is it needs to maintain a reserve of attack ships to be used on defense. These should be spaced based on the speed of the AI's ships vs the enemy's and ideally sight range. The ai should move to intercept any transports it sees that get within a 'threat range'.
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
Awesome. Nice to see that you posted your game to the metaverse. That gets past the initial "Yeah, yeah. Where's the score?"

FWIW, though I'm still "mastering" normal before I move on to bright, I use culture as a tool to control the opposition. I research the "culture bomb" path (cultural palace) as directly as possible, keeping planets with a good supply of defenders in orbit and many constructors in route to maintain the military ranking. It does work too well.

With the volume of games being submitted, surely there must be an automated way of categorizing them. Hopefully, after the first wave of analysis, Stardock can post some interesting stats.

/ds
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
"The various AI players will then fight amongst each other, often with massive economic losses (see point #2), enabling the defensive player to get a culture or tech victory with minimal difficulty."

I think thats how I've won every game. I maitain a military strong enough to act as a deterent, and then just sit it out building culture and maintaining trade.
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
Actually, I haven't submitted my game against the "Incredible" level AI yet. Incredible AI games give a "Masochistic" rating, I think. I kinda got bored with it after the culture destroyed the Altarians, who were the only real threat, but I'll prolly finish it in a bit, just to see what a tech victory looks like.

Dunno how many people are playing against Incredible level AI's yet, but if the fleet & culture issues aren't fixed fairly soon, I suspect we'll see a lot of them. :-(
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
Submitted my first game - found out that I needed to register here first only recently.

It was painful difficulty, on large map. Easy -very easy- victory for me there; and I started in the smack middle of the map, with everyone surrounding me. After I got past the battleship stage and got dreadnaughts, it was smooth sailing.
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top
And to think I just finished playing my first game with all the other empires set to the "fool" level. (For the record, I ended up winning culturally, although by all rights it should have been a military victory; I spent most of the second half of the game using a survey ship upgraded to the teeth from anomalies to soften up all the civs I hadn't been trading or friendly with, and then conquering them with transports.) The way you make it sound, I probably could have bumped the other AI's up a notch or two and still cleaned up. :p

Oh, well... I was just kind of screwing around in that game anyway, learning the ropes and trying things just to see what would happen (and then reloading if/when they didn't turn out so well). I did just download the newest updates, and next time I'll probably try not only smarter opponents but a bigger galaxy too, and now that I know what I'm doing I'll actually plan my research and building projects toward a specific type of victory. The next game should be much more interesting... :d
Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
Interesting thread...

I've only played enough to agree with the relatively ineffective invasion tactics used by the AI that people are mentioning. It seems to me that it makes sense to make "invasion stacks" consisting of a number of powerful fighting ships mixed in with a squadron of full transports. This allows you to exterminate the defensive ships and capture a planet in one or two turns, all the while protecting your transports. With two or three such stacks, you can strike devastating blows in the first stages of a war against an AI opponent if you pick the right planets and assemble enough force. Not that this is necessarily easy, but...

As others have mentioned, the AI tends to wait until enemy planet defenses are down, then sends a stack of transports, unguarded, on a plodding invasion route that can take a large number of turns. And since they seem to take a straight-line route to the destination planet, with a little practice, the human can park interceptors literally right in their way. The entire transport force gets blown away, and you just set the AI back another ten turns or so. If they ever do manage to get to your planet, the whole war can have turned dramatically.

It seems it would be more effective for the AI to make killer stacks with transports in them, and send them off to invade. Done correctly, they would require the human player to play a much more defensively alert game: drones, heavier concentration of defensive forces at planets, more scouting, etc. As it stands now, I feel like I have a huge time lag between when a war starts and when I'll actually have a planet threatened. I can literally build for war after it starts.
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
Especially insidious would be human style sneak attacks by the computer - with a large invasion that serves as the decleration of war. Perhaps for 'genius' and up, but this would even things a bit, and make the human a bit more paranoid, making the game that more enjoyable. Careful defensive planning and use of scouts and sensor drones as a recon screen would be paramount.

I can see invasion stacks as suggested by Godzilla as not too hard to implement, as the game already provides stacking of ships in a fleet.
Reply #17 from Stardock Forums Top
On genius and incredible, the AI does seem to protect its transports with military ships, but it still suffers from all of the other problems mentioned above (attacking closest enemy, frittering troops away piecemeal, etc). The few times I've seen it protecting transports, however, it was only using a few ships.

The only problem with "killer stacks" that include troop transports is that the troops transports are usually slower. To me, the added security for my troops is usually worth it, tho.
Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top
Yeah, I can see problems if the AI exclusively used killer stacks, especially if it hasn't researched much to enhance speed. I do think they would be devastating in surprise attacks like akaste describes, but in order to be totally effective I would think they would need to occasionally deviate from the "straight-line" path to enemy planets.

One thing that might help make the game more difficult in the interim would be to prevent players from seeing what ships opponents have at opposition planets unless the players have ships within sensor range.

In my current game, it's down to me an one other civilization, and I closely monitor what they have at their three main planets, and can do this even though I have nothing near them. I've been watching them make a slew of battleships, and have geared up my production because of it. If those ships leave their planets, I know that something is going to break loose soon, and I'll really crank up the military end of things. If I had no idea what was going on there, I'd have to send drones to see what's going on.

But then again, maybe that would result in players just parking drones all over the place, which might just create a micromanagement mess and slow down the game. Humm. Maybe this is not such a good idea after all.
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
I've noticed that AIs usually start war without having any fleet anywhere near your planets and therefore you usually have plenty of time to build your defences. This happened even in my last game where I had 3 AIs at Genius and 2 at Incredible. Therefore I never even bother to keep the defences up (I never build any war ships if I'm not in war) and I have no real problem keeping my planets.

One thing that I noticed though in my last game was that Drengin AI goes for starbases if it cannot find any defences on planets: I was something like 25 turns from technology win and 5% from cultural win and I had only few dreads, when I happened to build one new starbase too close to Drengin. They asked me to remove it, but as my relation with them was friendly I decided to reject the demand - they did not like that and started war. Their dreads were bit better than mine and as my empire covered something like 70% of huge galaxy, my few dreads could not hold the borders (Drengin had planets all around me actually). I again decided to just build the best ships that I can (Overloards at that point), but I only had money to buy 2 of them immediately, so they really could not help that much with keeping the borders. As Drengin got into my space and found no defences on planets, they started to kill my starbases. As I was trusting my friendly relation, I had only like base+8 or +5 defences on the starbases, so most of them were piece of cake to Drengin dreads. It took me 10 turns to get my overloard fleet up and running and during that I lost something like 15 out of 20 starbases with maximum production bonuses, maximum cultural bonuses and maximum resource bonuses and some with maximum trade bonuses. Oh boy - that felt bad at that point ;(. And this incident made the game last like 150 turns longer than I originally thought as losing those starbases really dropped my economy and productivity down. But still the Drengin could not colonize single planet from me and therefore they could not stop me from winning the game (If I would have lost 5 of my best planets I would have been in major trouble).

This game is submitted to Metaverse (>5000 points with crippling difficulty).
Periz
Reply #20 from Stardock Forums Top
Periz, that is because the AI seems to simply go for the closest valid target to attack. Once he killed the defenders at your planets, they weren't valid targets anymore, so your starbase was the next closest. At least, that is what I'm assuming happened, I've seen the same sort of thing myself. The AI almost always goes for the closest target, no matter what it is, what its defenses are, or what the strategic impact is or isn't.
Reply #21 from Stardock Forums Top
Unfortunately some of the analysis you guys want used to be in the AI but had to be taken out. The game has to be able to play on reasonable hardware. If thousands of ships had to make these kinds of calculations every turn, it would take minutes between turns. Even as is, on a gigantic galaxy it can take quite a while.

What I hope to do as we move forward is make the AI even more intelligent in basic strategic terms. There are a lot of things it could still do that I've just not had time to do. And obviously I won't get time to do that as long as I'm having to fix the diplomacy cheese tactic of the day. ;)

~SDC~
Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top
frogboy,

perhaps you could add optional advanced AI code for those of us with patience and/or fast machines ( i only have the former :p ). it seems unfortunate to deny it to everyone based on the fact that some may suffer performance-wise. of course then you'd have to support/debug it...ugh.

i'd much rather have to wait a little between turns and face a challenge than have a quick cakewalk ( this is on "intelligent" without abusing diplomacy ).

in any case, your dedication to a more savage AI is appreciated.

cheers

h
Reply #23 from Stardock Forums Top
Just having the AI mass for invasions would be a HUGE improvement.

Also, having the AI analyze 2-4 possible targets for invading instead of almost always hitting the nearest planet would shake things up a lot.

A "forking" tactic could also be used when attacking in systems with more than one viable target. The Attack fleet moves to a square in space that is in between two targets, then picks the least defended target to actually attack.

--Soulfire
Reply #25 from Stardock Forums Top
For the person complaining about the Cultural palace I think the problem isnt the palace but that while cultural bonus on a single starbase are additive between starbases its multiplicative i.e. if each starbase is a 100% bonus to culture and you have 3 its not a 300% increase (x4) its 2 x 2 x 2 (x8) so with multiple starbases and a culture bonus resource and some bonuses on the planet the numbers can get silly. I had over 250Million culture points in my home sector on a tiny map. Funny as the game decided to start 2 minor races in that sector. The first lasted about 30 turns since my influence was about 8k but the next one appeared when i had 200K and converted within about 2 turns.