EricLarsen
Posts: 458
Joined: 7/9/2002
From: Salinas, CA Raider Nation
Status: offline
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I finally got around to trying out the new 2.1 patch. I selected a large 150 star galaxy and challenging pirates, wormholes, and random events on the advanced level. After looking at a few starts I settled on a spiral galaxy where I had only 1 visible star instead of several and a little less money.
After flying around collecting artifacts for a while I saw that there weren't going to be many aliens to contend with. After I got about 2/3 of the galaxy explored I finally found my lone AI contender. I still was able to keep exploring and managed to explore atleast 3/4 of the stars which meant I got about 3/4 of the artifacts. Certainly not very promising for the AI.
Atleast it took quite a while before the AI decided to take the plunge and declare war on me. By that time I had 6 worlds to his 3 and about 10 ships to his 8. I held off attacking anything until it attacked one of my resource worlds and then I sent off several resource attacks of my own. It did try to build up ships as did I but I was already one age level above it and I knew my ships would be better.
One thing that impressed me was the AI didn't try to attack any of my worlds, even new ones I was just setting up near his territory. I was even more surprised since it did retrieve a planet killer. But I also found that the AI didn't try to steal any wisdom artifacts nor money. I had as much as $40,000 in the bank and never did it try to steal money even when it was flat broke and had to scrap ships to keep within it's meager budget as I took out almost all of his resource stars. It never tried to steal a wisdom artifact when it had only 2 and I had 7! By the time I stopped my game I was well into the Singularity Age while it was stuck in the Fusion Age.
I got 2 positive random events early on in the game whch was nice, but after I got going and started to build up a good lead the random events turned negative. While it is an improvement over previous random events it still needs some work on the randomizing factor. Random events should be just that, random, not balancing as that means random events are no longer random but specific. Atleast rerunning could get a different less unsavory random event instead of getting stuck with the same bad one over and over again.
I did not see any improvement in the interstellar standoff routine. I still never saw a shot arrive even though I was centered on the world when shooting at it. There should be some kind of reporting for results, either it missed or it hit and was absorbed, or it hit and caused damage. I shot off about 15 shots from 10 different worlds (love that double maximum shots artifact) and didn't cause any damage to a fusion age world with only single-phase deflectors.
While 2.1 did fix a few problems it did create a new one which is the lobotomized AI. While I wholeheartedly support smartening up the AI by making it less suicidal I definitely don't want to see an AI so lobotomized that it doesn't undertake any serious offensive action. Plus to make the AI better it needs to explore better in the early rounds. Getting those artifacts really helps and knowing how and when to use them makes them all the more beneficial. Too often the AI wastes good ship artifacts on scouts instead of saving them for the cruisers.
Since this game is intended for solitaire play against the AI and has no other mode of play it is imperative that the AI is smartened up to a point where it is challenging. After my one lackluster and rather boring game of 2.1 I don't have any inclination to want to play any further. Maybe if 2.2 comes out with a smarter, better AI I'll give it a whirl but playing against a lobotomized AI is just no fun!:(
Eric Larsen
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2.1 Lobotomized AI - 
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