An AI just repulsed me!

Hey, Jay’s been tweaking the AI, I see. It had two stars close to each other that it was happily sending fleets between. It had managed to get almost the same number of ships on each star and was sending a nearly matching number of ships in the two fleets that were exchanging places. So I assumed if I sent enough ships to take out the total of the star plus a fleet, I’d be fine. But no, it turned around and sent one fleet back, but the other one stayed put, giving it enough ships to defend successfully.

Now, I suspect what happened is that it simply stopped sending ships away from the star since there was an incoming fleet. But in this case, combined with continuing to send another fleet back, it was enough. Nice to see it getting a little smarter. I think.

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I have a game where before the player quit, there was a strong front line. The player quit, I launched over the front line. The AI took ships from THREE different stars, including the front line star, to successfully defend my attack.

Now, that didn’t happen with all attacks, but that was the biggest one. I was shocked. That’s the way it SHOULD act.

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The AI doesn’t consistently toss ships immediately upon having an available carrier. In fact, it isn’t even behaving the same in game to game. Recently I’ve seen games where it sits and does nothing, while in another game it does the shuffle. I’ve run tests where it will jump at an abandoned star after some random number of Ticks between 3-8 Ticks, but in a real game it ignored an abandoned star for 20.

I have a feeling that Matt’s experience was more the AI doing the shuffle, and just happened to toss 3 carriers at the star he picked, without any consideration for the incoming fleet. I don’t know what it is supposed to do now, but in my opinion, the random shuffle and joint tech planning of a few months ago would be much better than the broken chaos we have now.

The AI has definitely gotten tougher … to echo what MattS said, that’s great!
And I think it should NOT be predictable … just like humans do Crazy Ivan moves.

In a game I’m in, they have a handful of stars … several of which are juicy and several of which are rocks. So in the old days, the AI would just shuffle ships around to keep the ship count about even everywhere … so I, of course, would wait until the carriers leaves the juicy star for the rock, and then attack. You could even send the attack early, “knowing” the AI would leave taking ships away.

But now, the carriers move much less frequently and much more randomly. PLUS, there seems to be a weighting factor on how many ships to have at a star depending on its resource value. So it is rightfully so defending the juicy stars with a LOT of ships … and hardly any ships at the rocks.

Great stuff Jay … this is going to be scary when the AI attacks us … no more just ignoring 'em once you capture a star!

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