Genius AI not a challenge?

from GalCiv3 Forums

I just finished a game with AI set to Genius, and found them to be kind of pushovers.  I was expecting the AI to gang up on me after I started conquering them, but none of them seemed to notice, not even making much of an effort to build a military even though I had conquered half the map and was clearly a threat.

I'm curious if other people have found this to be true.

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Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Oh yes.  Late game is boring as heck after you've gotten to a dominating position.

I've been recommending that the AI should gang up on you with massive secret negative diplo modifiers if that happens.  

The modders will probably the ones to change that.  Hopefully they designed the game to be readily moddable like Skyrim....

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

In Gal Civ 2 when one race got too powerfull (about a 1/4 of the galaxy) the other races did gang up on them with a nice 'The War is Expanding' cutscene of lots of ships heading towards a hapless planet.

 

I would recommend a return to such days.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The AI gets relatively weaker the bigger the maps get. Try a more crowded smaller sized map.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


I just finished a game with AI set to Genius, and found them to be kind of pushovers.  I was expecting the AI to gang up on me after I started conquering them, but none of them seemed to notice, not even making much of an effort to build a military even though I had conquered half the map and was clearly a threat.

I'm curious if other people have found this to be true.

End of quote

 

Yah, I've experienced this, and I think it's due to two things: The AI gets progressively weaker compared to the player as time goes on because of current limitations in its ability to specialize planets. Secondly, the AI cannot handle large maps, which is actually kind of a compounding of the first issue - the more planets a faction has the more powerful the difference between the awesomely specialized player planets and un-specialized AI planets becomes.

 

Unfortunately, beyond Genius the 'Godlike' AI is just a tad too strong (with its 8x manufacturing multiplier and some weird stuff going on with tech) - I'm hoping this will be fixed with 'Incredible' Ai being a step between them.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

IME the 'cleverness' of the AI doesn't improve with difficulty; it just gets more mechanical advantages to play with.  The AIs don't react to an emergent threat, i.e., the player, or even a present and growing threat on Normal difficulty any more than they do on Genius.

When playing against the AIs the game is pretty much over once you've got 25% of the galaxy to yourself against more than three remaining AIs.  At that point the only danger you face is your own boredom.  (Most 4X games fall into this pattern tho.)

When playing against Humans it's not quite as clear cut, mostly because even a seemingly beaten Human can deal a sneaky blow that shakes the game up a bit; however, the advantage of playing against Humans is just as much a bust as it is a boon because the game is so absurdly exploitable that PvP isn't all that enjoyable of an experience.