1.1 Beta AI

The AI has improved a little. Still easily beatable but it does provide a good challenge on hard, and unfair.

What does the unfair mean? That the AI is at its best, or that it gets an unfair advantage in terms of extra credits and resources.

Unfair gets a bonus to resource incomes.

Hard: best AI with no extra bonus

Unfair: best ai with extra resources i think

On second examination, the only unfair AI I have trouble with is the TEC unfair AI. I can still thrash it pretty easily if it's Vasari or Advent. I guess the TEC's already superior economy plus bonus resources is especially a nasty combination.

Or it could be that I just ain't as good as I wished I was.

I think the AI is still very disappointing. Still very beatable, even on unfair. Several major problems that they just can't seem to overcome:

1. The AI just allows you to have any and all resource extractors on asteroid belts, gas giants, etc. They don't try to capture them, or put up a fight trying to get them first. This advantage alone makes the game hugely unfair in your favor.

2. The AI spends huge amounts of its resources on siege frigates, even in the early game. WTF? These things are expensive, use tons of fleet points, and so easy to destroy it's like a joke. In every battle I find that my fighting ships outnumber the AI's as a result of this, and I am easily able to destroy all the siege ships before my planets are significantly hurt. Oh, and the strategy where they send siege ships to your planet whenever you attack theirs is not exactly hard to predict or counter either. To top it all off, slaughtering fleets of siege ships gives my caps TONS of experience!

3. The AI sucks at micromanaging, and doesn't do things like focussing on caps when they should. When they actually do get this right, they are easily diverted from the target --just run away to the edge of the system and they usually break off the chase, even when they could have gotten you if they had persisted.

4. The AI is very easily confused. If there is a fleet that you can't win against, just attack a different spot. Chances are the moronic AI will divide it's fleet and send half to defend the new spot your attacked. All you have to do is slaughter the half they defend with while keeping the other half busy with your planetary defenses, and before long your single full-strength fleet has killed both of their half-strength fleets. Sometimes they will even divide the fleet even more, and send groups of ships off doing basically nothing at all.