I've only played two comp games so far, but I have to agree that the AI in fact seems less competent than before, even on the "Unfair" setting. They built almost no units. Bug?

Heh. Yeah. I played a 3v3 online, and people started quitting(They give up, for whatever reason.) and AI takes over....


WOW. They moved ships around yes, and made ships. But utterely useless. He just kept a small fleet of his capital ship and 15 disciples sitting at a dead asteroid while his colonies were getting destroyed.

Can't say I've noticed that it's any better. The only difference I've noticed is that once an AI surrendered when it was down to one ice planet, and once a fleet stuck around getting killed rather than running. Other than that .. still not even as good as a total newbie human player.

I actually had a decent experience with the AI last night while messing around.

Granted, the Unfair AI had one of the best starting areas it could hope for (Homeworld, Desert, 2 Ice and a Volcanic all very close) but it fairly fast got up a fleet of two capitals and 30 or so Light Frigates, with which it attacked me in reasonably short order. It still turned around and ran once it lost one capital ship, and didn't seem too keen on ever going beyond Capital Ships and Light Frigates, so once the Heavy Cruisers came to play it didn't have long.

I don't know why this was so different from everyone else's. Maybe the Unfair can only do decent when it's given all the right worlds around it. The AI that takes over for players though I've seen be pretty bad, it's taken planets but built little things of use (including multiple capital ship factories, bizarre).

I would say the ai is better in the following areas

1) base defense: more intelligent building locations and choices
2) fleet compostion (no more worthless 60+ light frigates). Much more powerful ship mix now. Seeing alot more lrms now and heavies now. Before I wouldnt even blink at engaging the AI unless he had at LEAST 2-1 numbers on me. Now it seems to actually throw some good punches. THANK YOU!
3) Combat: partly due to fleet compostion but the AI also seems to be better about which targets to attack and focus firing
4) Diplomacy: less eratic

What its gotten WORSE at
1) colonization and general early game: Seems considerably worse than before. Ive played 2 games and in both the ai's were really really slow in the intial land grab. I saw one that only had 3 total colonies by the time I had 8 and he had plenty of free space around him. Really not sure what it was doing all that time. This is probably my number one plea in terms of things to fix in 1.04

2) Still seeing a poor ratio of support cruisers. 25+ robotics cruisers when you only have about 35 lrms and carriers? Thats just called cannon fodder

3) Robotics cruisers still dont seem to be all that intelligent about auto-healing/auto-disabling.

4) planet upgrades. Im thinking that one of the AI "personalities" is just broken because the one that had only 3 colonies (in 2 different games) also had done next to nothing to upgrade his planets. I saw 2 AI's though that seemed to roll along quite nicely in terms of planet management and colonization. WIll have to play with AI's on the different personality settings to figure out which one it is. Have just been going with random