Omniscient AI is lame

The storyline tells you why the aliens know where everything is. Range was put in just for this reason. You can get planets other ways than being the first to colonize them.

Also, there have been a number of commets from Brad that the AI is still rather primitive and that there is considerable tuning to be done. Perhaps the problem is that the distribution of good planets needs tweeking.

To make up for the AI advantage in knowing where the good planets are (which is based on the plot), the humans get an advantage of good planet distribution.

Hence you'll regularly see the AI stuck with other alien civs right there in the same sector. By contrast, you won't have a major civilization sharing the sector with you.

Lucky Jack is correct though, beta 3A still has all the AI using the same base class. Beta 3C is the one tha twill have inhereited AI classes which will start to make things quite interesting.

Which reminds me, I need a feature to allow the AI players to play against each other letting the human player sit back and not have to do anything so that the AI can fight amongst themelves (good test to see who's the best AI player).

I can't wait till this baby has full blown AI! It will be great...

I'm excited about it too. In the OS/2 version, it was written in C. Which meant for the base AI I was copying and pasting thousands of lines of code. So if I made a base improvement to the AI, I ahd to copy and paste all that code around. It was a royal mess.

But with C++, you can inherit from that base AI and really see different strategies and behaviors in action.

Plus with the metaverse, we can look at your strategies and see what you're doing and..well rip them off!

I'm looking forward to a better AI. As it is know,
I think the computer players have a hard time, especially since their initial population has been reduced.

I think (but I will test that) that independantly of the AI, a player that put 100% into production of colony ships can get a major lead very early... and the gap only widen thereafter.

BTW, great geat game (I don't think I had the opportunity to say it, as it is just obvious )

I would like to be able buy star maps from the other civs (an important thing in another well known game LOL ). Even though they other civs already know the good planets they dont seem to know the resources so maps may still be worth something to them and minors may also want to buy/trade maps.

We could also be able to trade the communication link with the civ they know. It is a commodity that could be either bought or spied.

Is there a risk that GC will become too much like other strategy games? I like these ideas, but what risks would SD have to assume in copying them?

I don't even really think this is necassary... I've never had a problem scouting the entire map rather quickly..