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Tormodino -> RE: Distant Worlds v1.9.5.5 Public Beta Update Available! (7/1/2014 1:54:29 PM)
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Nice patch. The AI plays quite a bit more coherently now. The researching is tighter, the designs are more efficient. Overall there is less crazy AI behaviour.
Font is excellent.
It still frequently sends entire fleets and individual ships off into the great beyond to test the limits of fuel and reason :D I now call it the Leap of Faith.
Still waiting for the click click click click UI sound to finally die a quiet death. Can't be the hardest thing to fix, tbh. It is actually super annoying.
The AI will suicide its finest characters. Particularly the scientists, but also captains, admirals and generals. It will, without fail in my games, place them on the vulnerable science stations to be popped by pirates or random passers-by, and send them into combat against insane odds. I like the bravery. Not so much the wasting of talent.
The scientist thing is also problematic since smaller stations fall very easily to sabotage effectively suiciding these high value characters.
Not a problem if I micro the characters, but if this is consistent with all AI behaviour for characters it is a huge problems for it. Basic survival 101 for characters is to place them on a big bad space station, not on the fringes of your empire, completely undefended. This must stop. It checks for nearby pirates, but it will still not pay them off quickly enough to prevent characters dying.
When I micro my troop recruitment I will have pretty much no pirate faction activity on my planets. When I leave this to the AI it will desperately avoid building troops until the pirates are already well entrenched on a planet. This problem quickly spirals out of control. Again it's up to the player to prevent pirates taking over planets. However, this is a problem of AI passivity towards high risk threats (just observe how the AI will let a planet building a criminal network fall without any fight at all, even though this is a huge potential problem).
The player can deal, the AI empires very frequently can't.
Speaking of pirates. Not sure how this works, but the AI will at some point which seems to be related to its military power (anecdotal, not real science) being greater than "some number" it thinks it can take them all, and will no longer ally, even when planets are being pounded and entire systems are cleared of ships and bases. This seems deliberately suicidal and unintelligent.
There are exceptions to this, but I see them very rarely and they seldom prevent the pirate siege spiral. Again, mainly a problem for the AI, since the player can decide to actually attack the pirates where it would hurt them, rather than go to the far end of the map to kill a Kaltor, or take 25 ships to kill a single pirate escort over and over and over.
The pattern of descisions made by the AI emerges as pretty much random. It pursues its goals with some efficiency, but the general collapse caused by not prioritizing major threats like pirate networks and taking out pirate bases closer to home really hurts it.
Just last night I had a big fleet change its orders 5 times in less than 5 seconds while I was watching. They were wildly different orders as well, mixing attack orders with patrol orders and whatever else.
And then it went to suicide gloriously, halfway across the map, at the mouth of a heavily guarded and indestructible large space station.
The game is steadily improving, and the last few patches have been good, so keep it up.
And please keep listening to the people who want even more modding capabilites :D
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