Playing in a game where right now 5 out of 10 players are quit or AFK. And currently, they’re all kicking our asses in terms of research. It’s unbelievable watching how high they’re getting over human players. I’m not worried (yet) about them being overpowered, but you can no longer walk all over them, especially when there’s a lot of them. It’s kind of nice!
Yes, they get harder the more there are. Can’t wait to see what kind of impact they have in our team game. They do take a lot of effort to clear them out now. Not easy at all if you are fighting a war with someone else at the same time.
Don’t forget you can still trade with them if you have a tech they don’t have.
Yes, but they since they work together, and trade tech every few Ticks, you get a very limited window to trade each tech. That also works against you, if you have to trade them something useful. I prefer to only give them Scanning if at all possible!
Trading with AI is still a mystery. I had heard that you could trade to an AI any tech level and receive any tech level in return, however I cannot seem to get Hyperspace 4 despite wasting hundreds of credits trading Terraform 5, Exp 5, etc.
It isn’t a mystery, it is actually straightforward, following a couple rules.
- Only sending tech will result in a return tech trade.
- The AI must have something you don’t, and you must have something it doesn’t. Tech and level do not matter.
- The AI will then send tech to you 80% of the time IF and only IF it has the money needed to send it. Best to wait and send immediately after Production or gift it the money if it is an emergency situation.
- The AI players will coordinate and share research with each other. They do this when a player becomes an AI, then I believe every 4 hours after (if I recall the number Jay stated earlier) Again, only if they have money.
- The AI will coordinate research based on which ever has the shortest time for Weapons as the primary, then each other will be assigned a different research goal. Jay didn’t make it clear if they do that based on similar research time comparisons or randomly.
So you can “milk” the AI’s for tech. That doesn’t sound good.
Well, you can… It got a lot harder now that they work together, and you make them stronger too. They generally still fall behind because they don’t expand their empire, and I’m not sure at what rate the actually buy more Science.
Personally I feel AI trading might need to be toned down a little bit. I’m currently in an 8-player game down to two guys who haven’t quit/AFKed. Both of us have at least 3x as much tech as any AI player, but with AIs now trading with each other, they’re starting to simply run away with their tech lead. The other player and I aren’t really close enough to wage full-scale war and the game has slowed down to taking maybe 8 AI stars between the two of us per day. If this keeps up another week, it might take a full half of my fleet to take down a single AI start with their massive weapons advantage and the simply fact that their ships are more concentrated since they have fewer stars.