I am the one who responded before.  Sorry if it came out harsh.  I can't explain directly your observation.  From what I can see, my best guess would be that it is going north because it has a close neighbor to the south and that is where the next nearest stars are.  It may or may not be aware that there is a planet there.  I believe they do use colony ships as explorers.  It doesn't always wait to see an uninhabited planet before it makes a colony ship.  However, turn 3 seems unlikely to me.  One thing that can happen is that anomalies spawn colony ships.  If the colony ship has a full population load, that would indicate that event because the AI doesn't fully load manufactured colony ships.  Otherwise, my admittedly clueless guess is that the ship is wandering blindly towards the nearest stars that might be unclaimed with hope in its little AI heart.  With any luck, someone else can give you a more convincing theory.

Yeah I play large maps, Huge'antic, current game turn 115, 8 AI, I have 37 worlds, the highest an AI has is 63 and the map is full, bah 3 worlds + extreme's, and them 3 are going to be colonized in the next few turns, I see 4 diff AI sending colony ships right for them. I am running 3rd from last

My next game I will play with fowtrans on for the colony rush, and see what the AI gets up too, see if I can spot any "funny" behavior.

The last i heard, the top 2 difficulty levels get the FOW removed for the AI and it really does know everything from the start. On normal and lower difficulties it plays by the rules. That may have changed at some point.

Time to upgrade to Godlike. Don't be concerned about being way behind at the start, you can usually catch up.

Would be nice if the devs would tell us about any FOW AI cheats!

Hmm, do you mean "Fog Of War TRANSports" or a cheat that removes fow? I am just playing a legitimate custom race and build transports with scanners (which is fair, since i basicly burn all my starting money + intuitive trait on two of those things). I don't think they obfuscated the game like this. IF it was my game ^^ and I was having time to produce such obfuscation, I would rather just improve the AI to play closer to an optimal way.

I did some more testing and for normal ... well it plays fair enough that I don't care how it internally works. If it does play by other rules on normal, they did a very good job of hiding it. I think it starts on gifted where the AI just makes too many 'lucky guesses'. So it's the top 4 difficulties.

I wouldn't be surprised if scouting worked slightly different for the AI and the AI behaviour is the same on all difficulties but tuned such, that it effectively plays fair on normal. Running vision checks for all AIs each turn might become rather expensive in processig power (speculation).

Well part of the reason for players being able to catch up is, that the AI is way too late on building more food improvements. Horemvores tweaked AI should be better at this. I didn't have time to test it yet, but I was curious enough to check out the GovernorDefs.xml ^^.

I wouldn't mind them telling us either. I mean given all the advantages the AI allready gets... doesn't really make a difference^^

Hmm, possible. But I don't think we will be able to tell with the means we have.

What the AI should know and take into account are map settings. My next guess would be, that for the random generation the map is split into a couple of sections in order to remove the outliers where maps are just too unfair. The AI could have information of total number of worlds in such a section for example.

 

One more thought:

What would be really nice, if you could see the type of star on the galaxy map, along with some stats about the likelihood of habitable planets and the different ressources. I mean, we don't have deep space travel and know, that there is stuff like white dwarfs and red giants. Why can't the folks in GC3 tell more about a star then it being a star?^^

It could look like:

Pigeon-pie - Purple star

habitable planet probability: very high
durantium probability: low
thullium prabability: low
promethium probability: medium

Could bring some more depth to the exploration phase, doesn't it?

The Ai definitely FoW cheats.  The evidence is not so much with Colony ships, but with FREIGHTERS.

Stop me if this sounds familiar....

You are early game.  A race you have not encountered, who when you do has the diplo mod of "outside of our travelling range", suddenly fires a freighter into your territory from "the great blackness beyond".  That freighter must have been launched at least 10 turns ago, and would have taken several to build. There is no way a scout could have found your territory in that time frame. But the freighter beelines it to the planet absolutely farthest from it's origin point, to maximize route distance value, bypassing several closer planets along the way.

That's not a "guess".  That's not "reading the star pattern".  That my friends, is prior knowledge.

My only beef with the AI 'cheating' is when it impacts the actual gameplay. For many people the 'colony rush' phase is a lot of fun. Having the AI not really do it at all on the hardest two difficulty takes that out of the game - you need some luck - they are production boosted to hell and outrushing you. I don't often end up totally behind, though so I guess it might be the only way for the AI to stand a chance - if it can barely win the colony rush with a great start position while cheating on Incredible... it has no chance without cheating at the moment.

The other similar area AI buffs damage the game is the devs repeatedly saying 'we don't care how badly it places tiles we'll just bonus the planets to counter it' well that's all well and good until you go to war and conquer some terribly organized world and have to retile the whole thing every time... boring...

I think the AI should play most stages of the game like a 'mediocre understanding of the mechanics' human player - then smaller bonuses would be needed and less damage to the gameplay in order for it to provide a tough challenge to better players.