Computer AI ...

Its not easy but its not impossible either.  Its mostly a matter of knowing what the AI tends to do and countering it by having the right mix of ships and not overexpanding your empire.  I do like your slider idea though, the AI choices are a little limited now. 

I think the slider idea for AI difficulty levels would make choosing an appropriate difficulty level easier.  Great ides.

I expect that programming the AI on a slider might be a bit of challenge.  Of course, I wouldn't mind additional options for AI difficulty.

In the meantime, I have two suggestions that helped me and that I pass on to you for what they are worth.  I'm not a great player by any means, but can pretty much hold my own with hard AI most of the time and get killed by unfair.  If I play FFA, I usually have some hard AI and some normal AI as the other players. 

First, I keep track of where I rank among the players using the information in the lower panel of the screen.  If I see that my ranking in terms of the size of my fleet is not in the top 1 or 2 in the game, I know I'll probably be in trouble if I don't concentrate on building ships.  If you're not doing that already, its worth a try.

Second, you can create locked teams, with say, you and a normal AI, against a team of a hard AI and an easy AI. Or you and two hard AIs against an unfair and 2 easy AIs.  By mixing up the teams, I can usually create matches that are challenging for my skill level, and still win (which is what I prefer!).

I think it would be a briliant idea to do it this way, inact I wonder why a lot of RTS games dont employ such a system cause it makes the entire process easier

I totally agree that AI intelligence and cheating levels should be separately controlled.  The cheat level could be a slider, but intelligence could remain at easy/medium/hard settings.  I know that often I don't want to waste time with a hard AI that is just going to spam extra units to delay my victory with its resource advantage, but also I don't want it to pull any of its punches intelligence wise.

for nao you can start on normal save load and bump the difficulty up once you have a good lead astablished

i just generally interpret the AI settings a bit differently than their actual names would suggest, for me its like this:

easy = training mode, only suitable for your first day or two with the game

normal = easy mode, when you want a guaranteed quick victory

hard = normal mode, a reasonable challenge but you are likely to win every time if you know how to play

unfair = hard mode, you might actually lose this one

the resource advantage the AI gets on Hard mode doesn't really bother me at all. humans who know how to play are naturally so much better at optimizing the efficiency and productivity of their econ that the AI needs to be given a boost in order to compete. they usually still fall behind economically even with the free crap they get. its only on Unfair mode where the AI gets such a ridiculous quantity of free resources that i really feel at a disadvantage.

I still see that no one has really commented on the original issue that was raised.

If Normal has full use of resources but a crippled AI and Hard has full AI but bonus resources ...

WHERE is there the setting for Full AI and full use of resources WITHOUT bonus? That's what I would like to see. Often times for casual game with friends against the computer it's too easy on normal but with the extra resource bonus, Hard just sucks to play against. Really ... how hard is it to just set full ai without bonus resources? If they run out of em, oh boy, they run out. That's what players deal with all the time.

Excelent point, boshimi336, and well put too. 

To the developers - would it be possible to put this in an upcoming patch?  Also, is there a line of code we could edit to, say, reset the AI resource bonuses on hard to 0 (regular income rate)?

Is it actually stated somewhere that the AI behaves differently on Hard than Normal, aside from the logical consequences of having additional resources?  This would be somewhat unusual -- more typical is that difficulty level corresponds to a combination of starting resources, numerical bonuses for production or free reinforcements or the like, combat bonuses et al; but retains the same fundamental behavior.  There are exceptions (like the AIs in AOE series being content to play "follow the leader" in ages and capping peasant counts at lower levels), but that's somewhat rare and still fairly basic.

When Sins first came out, I recall that behavior of the AI did change from Easy to Normal to Hard.  You can see, for example, that the Easy AI tends not to spend all of its Credits.  Hard did not at first get a resource bonus, but was just "smarter".  Then Unfair took the Hard brains and added a resource bonus.

There was a lot of complaining at the beginning that Hard was too easy, which I think is why Hard eventually got a resource bonus in one of the patches.

Too bad the search function does not work better on this forum because if it did it would be easier to find the old threads on this topic.

Go to google and type in "<key words> site: sinsofasolarempire.com" - without the quotes, of course.  Make searching very nice.

i erpsoanly think theyneed to make the ai much harder and more to combat what you make. even if theres a spammer would be nice option where it will randomly spam lrfs flak carriers ect as alot of ppl in online dobut either way just make them much much harder

i did try to comment on that a little bit in my post but i suppose i could have engaged the issue more directly.

what i was trying to say was that Hard AI actually needs the bonus resources just to make up for the inherent shortcomings of its "full intelligence AI" setting. even with the AI intelligence maxed out it isn't as good at organizing an economy as a human player so the bonus stuff just barely covers the shortfall caused by its own inefficiency due to inability to properly manage an economy.

i suppose there could still be room for an "extra poor Hard" AI but i fail to see the appeal in fighting against an opponent that has a massive resource disadvantage. i do sincerely believe that the current implementation of the Hard AI is the appropriate "standard" difficulty level for single player mode. as suggested in my original post, i would just relabel the difficulties as training, easy, normal, and hard.

A resource boost isn't a problem as the ai doesn't use them all. I would like to see the ai reorganised so it used resources better.

It's kinda disappointing to invade the ai's homeworld with 16 caps, 50 carriers and 50 heavy cruisers only to find a defence of 2 caps and 50+ light cruisers waiting for me. Then when exiting the game you find the ai has 100k credits and 20k metal/crystal left to spend...