AI Tactical or Strategic Moves that Surprised You?

well, it doesn't really surprise me anymore because the behavior is a repeat offense at this point, but the first time i saw this happen i was incredibly surprised.

the AI will routinely abandon economically important planets to reduce damage to their fleet. you can show up in a grav well, destroy all of the trade posts, broadcast centers, and extractors, and then leave. the AI will not try to bring in a fleet to stop you. if they have an existing fleet there they will run away to an adjacent system if you even lightly tap on the window glass of one of their cap ships with a few bomber squadrons.

it seems completely backwards to what a competent opponent would want to do. generally the economy that produces the fleet is many times more valuable than fleet itself. the ai doesn't seem to get this.

So far I haven't seen the AI do anything strategic or tactical.

It is pretty lame.

My friends and I are able to beat the computers 4 of us vs 6 Hard computers last night.

The computer never seems to tech up much. It seems to have one tactic:
Spam their base light frigate
Tech up to their first siege frigate and build those.
Build Capital ships

Attack.

They'll turn tail and run if you show any resistance, but sometimes can take out planets due to sheer numbers of siege frigates.

The problem is as the game draws on? They don't change their tactics. We were able to defeat the computer despite being outnumbered because we techhed up to different ships and two of us got Novalith cannons to wreck their planet economy. The most annoying part was they kept running and recolonizing planets. I can't wait until the next patch where the AI will surrender.

Try winning at 2v8 against Hard AI. It got hard at points, but after the first 2 hours, was more tedious.

Yeah, rather than slug it out, they more than often turn tail and run if you jump in with anything approaching equal numbers. Funny thing is that they tend to stack their massive combined fleets in adjacent planets, so when I have a fleet that is larger than any individual part of their fleet, they scatter like rats.

lack of focus firing plus predictable reaction to losing a cap ship or 2 makes the AI a bit lame unless he's got you way way way outnumbered.

7 cap AI fleet + some Hvy Cruisers, etc vs my little 2 cap fleet w/some mixed ships - AI had me outgunned at least 3 to 1 - but all it took was focus firing on his caps one at a time and after 4 caps went down he turned tail and ran.. lost 1 other cap on the way out of the system... hope they fix that part of the AI in the patch

60 Cobalts.

I lol'd.

Medium random map, 3 AI, locked FFA.

I had taken half the solar system and removed one AI.

Another AI had a MASSIVE fleet just one jump from my weakest front line planet, i had to make a mad scramble to rush everything i had to there and build more ships to prepare for a battle i thought i would lose.

I go to place bounty on that AI and find that he is quite dead, with that huge fleet still one jump away from me while my scouts reveal the other AI's fleet leaving his homeworld.

I just couldn't get over the fact the AI had this massive fleet he didn't recall to defend his last planets!

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Another is when i have taken 2 planets from a AI a equal jump from his territory, sometimes you will see a constant stream of ships jumping back and forth between planets over and over again. The AI can't make up it's mind on where it wants to attack/mass its fleet.

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I had taken a planet from a AI, he had a fleet getting ready to attack me for the last half hour but doing nothing. Figure the AI is bugged so i march straight to his homeworld, which resulted in him rushing his fleet back which promptly kicked my fleets ass.

I flee through his planets back to the one I had already taken, AI doesn't follow. As soon as i get my fleet back he launches a all out assault on another front line planet which i was in danger of losing so i rush my fleet back, THEN another AI attacks said planet taken from the first AI, but i have nothing to spare.

So i build a second fleet from scratch and send them into the fray small groups at a time and keep rebuilding defenses.

After 20 minutes i regain the upper hand and push back the second attacking AI and fortifying that planet, and smash the first AI's fleet which allowed for a final march on his remaining planets. Best timed assault i've taken.

me vs 9 AI lockd teams every body fights every body but 2 AIs attackd a Economik important world to me and then both left with out shoting ech uther
to my that is fuking brilant

well I havent seen anything that surprises me in the good way, maybe in the stupid way.

after 1.03 I will try to go vs 3 hard a.i (same team) on a medium random map and see how well the a.i was really buffed, if it becomes a successful human stomp (killing me), I will be happy .

Last time I played a huge random map, an enemy TEC faction was stomping all over the other AI in its region by spamming Hoshikos, and Percherons. When I made contact with him, even a well supported group of 40 gardas bolted onto my main attack fleet couldn't break through his fighter/bomber screens. My attack ships couldn't touch his relatively few attack ships since they were supported by the Hoshiko spam. There were times in those battles were I was confused about what to attack first, The Hoshikos seemed like a good first target but with them self-repairing and supporting each other it would take outrageous amounts of time to destroy them, even with my massed fighter groups, which were getting shredded by his squads. Meanwhile, his bombers would cut apart my attack ships. If I attacked the Percherons first, same difference, as I couldn't destroy enough of them to really make a difference before I had to withdraw. I could go for his low-level cap-ships and force him to withdraw, but he'd just retreat to his heavily populated adjacent territories, which had numbers too large to approach, as I was also fighting another faction at the opposite end of my empire with a sizable fleet. We stalemated, and i eventually quit that game...

That's the only time I've encountered a troublesome AI fleet, mostly because his local dominance allowed him to mass such outrageous numbers of support spam, and there was constant trickle of replacement ships coming from his core worlds.

I should have made a bee-line for his core to wreck his economy, just ignoring our frontier, but I was rowed out with him.

It kind of surprised me when three maxed out fleets with maybe 25 combined cap ships, after destroying a single turret on my outlying world, ran in terror from my system for pretty much no reason and proceeded to sit in an asteroid belt for the rest of the game while I destroyed all three of their empires. I added this scenario to my list of reasons why I believe I'm somehow stuck in Oppositeland, where the opposite of what is possible is what actually happens.

One time the AI sent about 15 of those planet destructor ships on a suicide mission through my defenses to kill my planet's population. That was pretty surprising.

Then it happened every 5 minutes in every game I've played ever since, so the novelty wore off.