game 257 is a full run with the Orthin. The things I noticed:

- AI is much better at expanding, but doesn't protect its colonies at all. I was still swiping new Teros colonies with Destroyers and Drop Ships (Transports with Planetary Assault Forces) until he quit sending out Colony Ships.

- AI is building Planetary Defenses, but isn't putting in any PD, meaning I easily took down the Teros colonies that had Planetary Defenses by building a half dozen Escort Cruisers loaded with missiles and staying out of range of their planetary beam weapons.

- AI doesn't seem to be doing a good job of estimating its chances against defenses. I had the Teros sending the same four ships against the Planetary Defenses of several planets and getting wiped out every time without much damage to the planet. Sometimes, I'd rushed the defenses, but the AI still attacked and the defenses were built before he sent the ships in at least one instance.

- Toward the end, I tried to actually get enough Transports to take all the trade routes, but I would have needed to continue the game a couple dozen more turns, at least, and have every planet build Transports to do so. Is there a bulk Transport coming at some point? or a tech to make trade routes more efficient so they don't need so many ships?

Gyrfalcon wrote: - AI is much better at expanding, but doesn't protect its colonies at all. I was still swiping new Teros colonies with Destroyers and Drop Ships (Transports with Planetary Assault Forces) until he quit sending out Colony Ships.

Yeah, this is a real problem. Among other things, it means that all AI-vs-AI wars are tending to end in stalemates atm -- as AIs fighting with other AIs will usually end up creating a no-mans-land where each intermittently establishes colonies, only to have them destroyed by the other.

Defending a number of frontier colonies from an enemy who you can't always see and who's motions you can't reliably predict is hard enough that the AI will never be able to mannage it perfectly, but, it can certainly get better. If nothing else, it really ought to be rush-producing defense bases on particularly exposed worlds.

Gyrfalcon wrote: - AI is building Planetary Defenses, but isn't putting in any PD, meaning I easily took down the Teros colonies that had Planetary Defenses by building a half dozen Escort Cruisers loaded with missiles and staying out of range of their planetary beam weapons.

Yeah, I should probably mandate mixed offensive/defensive loadouts on default planetary defense designs.

Gyrfalcon wrote: - AI doesn't seem to be doing a good job of estimating its chances against defenses. I had the Teros sending the same four ships against the Planetary Defenses of several planets and getting wiped out every time without much damage to the planet. Sometimes, I'd rushed the defenses, but the AI still attacked and the defenses were built before he sent the ships in at least one instance.

This is another AI glitch I'm hoping to improve on. It's fine, I think, that the AI *initially* underestimates your defenses. But, if it keeps on mindlessly sending the same ships into the same clearly hopeless situation, that's a problem. A tiny capacity for "learning", in the form of a threat-estimate bias that gets updated when the AI losses fights it expects to win, could help cut down on the most ridiculous of these sorts of behaviors.

sven wrote:Yeah, I should probably mandate mixed offensive/defensive loadouts on default planetary defense designs.

As easy as it currently is to reconfigure planetary defenses, I kind of expected to find PD at the second planet I tried this tactic.

sven wrote:This is another AI glitch I'm hoping to improve on.

I can click on an enemy fleet within scan range and see both the ships and their loadout. Is that something the AI can't do or is it a feature that will be removed for human players?

Gyrfalcon wrote:I can click on an enemy fleet within scan range and see both the ships and their loadout. Is that something the AI can't do or is it a feature that will be removed for human players?

No -- everyone can see everyone else's loadouts, that's working as intended. The AI just isn't particularly good at predicting how dangerous a given opponent will be.

game_277 is a Yoral run. I like the masses of small ships, although the difficulty in having to maneuver each of them into position makes for some slow combat. Otherwise, the AI is still letting me have even its better developed colonies without a fight and, in fact, I managed to lure away the Phidi's big stack of Heavy Cruisers and sacked their main colonies after they were gone.