Does the AI cheat?

as far as i know the ai only cheats to get resources. if u play a very long game and u dont build enough fleet the ai will kill u.

 

if u play with many AIs u will lose against them if you dont use the  diplomacy well.

against 2-3 normal ais it should be no problem to win when you colonize as much as possible. and build up good defence.

against 10 ais in ONE solarsystem you dont have any chance if u dont fly the missions for them, because all will hate you, .You will loose because your fleet is 1:10.

 

thats the problem in many 4x games. U have to use ALL features. If your game has diplomacy u must use the features.

 

 

 

Well I think the A.I. cheats after normal levels in the income rates and research speed to make up for being a dumb brute. The A.I. has been improved but once you learn the basics you will be playing on hard in no time. If you are playing on easy it sounds like you need to re-think your strategy. I typed tec strategy  in the search field. Also Tips and Tricks on the SoaSE wiki

Are you upgrading your fleet sizes with research? This is costly so do not upgrade your fleet sizes beyond what your empire can support.

 

Jaxx, the AI doesn't cheat at the Easy and Normal levels, to the best of my knowledge.  At Hard it gets 1.5 times our income, crystal & metal.  Unfair gets 2Xs.  Cruel 4Xs. Vicious 6Xs.

If you switch to "Locked Teams" before you start a game, it will be much easier.   Then the AI won't gang up on you.  And you won't have to worry so much about diplomacy.

A common costly mistake beginners make is not upgrading a new colony's "infrastructure" as soon as possible after you capture a planet.  Quick Start helps eliminate part of the crucial initial build order.  Get your free Cap ship, auto-scout, capture your adjoining asteroid, tech to a higher grade ship, and build a fleet as quick as possible.  Then you should be fine.

I routinely am rushing unfair difficulty AI's by the 15-minute mark, and I have never seen them have level 6's (or even level 5's, for that matter) that early in the game.

I want you to double-check your replay or post-game timeline to confirm whether this is the case.  If so, there's a high probability that this is a bug.  More likely (we've unfortunately had this problem quite frequently lately) you're either exaggerating how powerful that capital ship was or how early it appeared.

There's always the freak incident where a capital ship manages to tank through some heavy militia and gain a lot of levels early on, but level 6 within fifteen minutes is somewhat absurd.




Even on slow game speed, it should take you no more than three minutes to have your first capital ship completed, and by fifteen minutes you should have colonized three or four planets. Defeating their militia should take you to level 3, meaning there is no need for you to purchase level upgrades at all.

You're clearly doing something wrong here.  Remember that your first priority at the start of the game is to build your capital ship, and the moment it's finished construction you should send it to colonize the nearest planets.  If your capital ship is sitting idle in the early-game, you're making a huge mistake.



How long into the game is this?  I have a feeling that you're omitting a very relevant and long timeline here.  The last time a player complained about massive AI fleets like this, it ended up being 4 and a half hours into the game and he'd spent much of the early game recovering from a catastrophic military defeat.

I strongly suspect your problem isn't in the late game, but rather the early game, and your empire-building is too slow.  On big maps with few rival empires like the you're playing, it's all about how fast you're colonizing.  Colonize too slow and your opponent has a bigger and stronger empire before the first shots are fired, and you shouldn't be surprised at all that you're out-gunned.

The current AI cheats a lot at higher levels, I have found increase in research speed and leveled up caps (though in 15 minutes is a bit much) with the Distant Stars Mod (higher research and able to level up Caps to lvl 6) the AI at viscious is positively dangerous until you get a strong defense going, and even then watch out

Honestly, I use to build my fleet up slowly and explore slowly, but that was back when I was playing version 1.05. Since the upgrades, I came back in and have read up on different tactics and stategies. Yes, the very first thing I do is build my cap sation and then the cap. While this is going on, I've built 3-5 scouts and 1 colony ship and 5 light frigets. Like everyone else I want to see the entire picture of what's around me, so the scouts are set to auto and I just look to see what's what when the discover a new planet.

Back at home, while the cap "dry dock" and cap are being built I can usually send those 4 light frigets to that astroid/planet that is usually near buy with only two defenders. Once they're taken care of, I can send in the colony ship. Meanwhile I'm also doing planet upgrades. Don't want any of my planets costing me income. Once the cap dock is built I'll build the metal/crystal refiners at my home planet.

By now my cap has come out and is ready to go out and do some colonizing. As quickly as possible I want to get 2 civ and 2 miltary reseach stations built. This way I can get space ports, ice and volcano planet colonization, fighter/bomber, jarvis and gernade all reaseard asap.

While this is all going I'm looking for some defendable choke points that I can get established using my cologny cap, for planets that have more then five defenders I might have to send it some light frigates, but usually no more then 10 or so, I want to upgrade my fleet capacity and number of caps, while at the same time start researching some better weapons and such.

I do agree, grabbing as many planets as possilbe is the key to the game. However, I once grabbed too many planets. I attempted to grab 20 planets, and was burned by over extending myself so much.

This is why now I look for choke points first, get established there, then "clean up" any thing between those points and my home planet. Of course if I see an oppertunity to snatch another planet from one of the other factions, I'll do that. I'll also send out some light frigates with colony frigates to set up refineries in uncolonizable astroid/space junk areas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just incase you didnt know also the AI got a huge buff to how they spend their income. Which means they will hit faster and harder than before. There were alot of tweaks but they still follow the basic build order as always. First wave will be alot of LF etc etc etc.

 

Also I think it was mentioned that I know the new AI difficulties get a bonus to research time. I usually play on tweaked slow settings. In the time it took me to build my first lab research it. The harder AI's had 9-15 tech done to mine one.

I know that that last part really doesnt pertain to you right now b/c your on normal but its a head up warning I though I share before you find out the hard way.

Always a hazard; honestly, I consider an experienced player more at risk of a rush on a medium map rather than a small one.  On a small one, they anticipate full-out attack and respond in kind, on a medium map, they want to build a powerful economy first and it's just so easy to get a little too greedy.

Other that that, it seems to me that you've got a solid plan and easy AI's shouldn't be giving you any trouble if you're executing it well.  As Carbon says, the AI has been improved, but it shouldn't be giving you this much trouble.  I think we need to see a replay to get an idea of what's going on, because this isn't making sense.

You seem to be doing all the right things, and against an easy AI that should be a trivial win.

Okay, I've never messed with capturing game play, how is that done? I'm currently playing a single solar system with 77 planets and to apponents besides myself. Pirates are turned off and I just captured thier planet. Of the the 77 planets, I nabbed 11, one apponent grabbed 12 and the other one 13, the rest aren't claimed yet, but to get to them I must attack one of my nieghbors.

A tactic I'm trying out in with this game is spending less on fleet sized and more on caps. My actually fleets have very few friggette and cruizers, think I'm up to level 4 or 5 no on fleet size. But I've 8 cap ships.

Why did I do this.... I wanted more resources avaible to me so I could research faster. I also wanted to make sure I had enough resources on hand when I do nab a planet from someone I can get it up and running under my control faster, without having to wait for enough credit/metal/crystal to do so. Speed is the key.... get this planet under control, and move on to the next, quickly as possible.

If that don't work I'll record my next game and so I can show what's going on...

 

 

Automatically, actually.  If you played the game and it didn't crash, a replay file was saved when you quit (note: if you save and load, you will have two incomplete replays rather than one complete one.  Obviously we need the complete picture, so review your replays to find the right one).  You can check your recorded games under singleplayer auto-record and review your matches in-game.

The files themselves are stored in an odd location on disk. 

C:\Users\<User>\AppData\local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\AutoRecord-Singleplayer

Note that "appdata" is a hidden folder and you will need to go to folder options in the control panel to make it visible.

 

23-24 planets per player is positively gargantuan.  As I've already said, the map you're playing on is uncharacteristically large for the number of players you're using, and the key to victory is to build a superpower economy.  It's entirely feasible, if your enemy start positions are far enough away, for you to have over 100 credits per second income before the first shots are fired. 

 

You certainly should be colonizing faster against easy-difficulty AI's, so we need to see what's going on to make any judgments.

 

That strategy is quite risky, since capital ships need to level up to become powerful, but if capital ships are sharing experience points they will level up slower.  Generally people only do this with carrier-class capital ships in the early game, and even then they back them up with frigate power.

 

Speed is indeed the key, but you should be able to balance your budget with frigates.  If you're losing large numbers of frigates while colonizing, then you need to re-evalulate your methods, because you shouldn't be losing more than a one or two unless you're taking on very powerful militia (in which case your capital ship should be leading the onslaught[/i]). 

they have been known to spam lots of ships at the start, if your trying to build a rush, build tactical structures,

 

the pirates seem to cheat, or at least be ridiculous,

 

hard to fight them when the bot seems to have endless resources and your getting attacked on 4 fronts, 2 by the pirates

 

i swear they are cheating though, cause im getting all these "rebels" jumping into my systems, even though my culture dominates, i have no idea what the rebels are or where they come from

yes they cheat, but that isn't one of the AI's cheats, that a TEC research (tier 8 ) ability called insurrection

That sounds like "Insurgency", the final TEC tech (tier 8) down the culture line, on the civic tree.  Its the TEC'c 'cultural superweapon'.  Once it is researched, random groups of militia are sent out to attack.

edit: Aww... I see Ryat beat me to it, by about a minute.

a good defence can at least slow the pirates down but heavy fortifications can stop the pirates in their tracks. one time i was playing some lan with some friends and i noticed something very peculiar. the enemy jumped in a massive fleet to attack my ally, we had to load the game at some point back their, cant remember why. but when we lowered it, i lowered the difficulty of the enemy ai and their fleet was about half the size when it jumped in. i dont know where all the other ships went, but i never found them