Brad and company, with one exception the AI has come along nicely overall. As I have been doing, I played two games this last weekend on an insane spiral map (can I just say how much I love the spiral map), 12 majors, all minors, abundant stars/worlds, abundant and common everything else, Challenging difficulty.
On Saturday I played as the Terrans and got my behind kicked by the Krynn.
On Sunday, I made a custom race that had the Patriotic trait so I could avoid the large empire penalty (kept my global approval between 90-100% without much difficulty). I ended up near one of the custom AIs I had created that was peaceful but expansionist. We competed for many of the same worlds. They did not try to settle planets nor build starbases (and they built A LOT of them) in my influence area (I really like this) and would even turn colony ships around if I got to a planet first. They were, however, very competitive for star systems (again, good job). What really impressed me is that they would build fleets and sweep an area clean of pirates (though not bases) and follow up immediately with colony ships. (I even took advantage of this once I realized what they were doing and took some planets before they could.) This is a very advanced AI behavior and I was really impressed. Diplomatic trades were harder but just about right for the game. Some techs they prized and wanted more for. This has come a long way and, again, I was impressed. The ship designs that I saw were also better than in previous builds. The AI took full advantage of weapons and defense techs to build balanced ships early on instead of building just a single weapon/defense type, which was smart given that the pirates had beams, I had missiles, and the Krynn had kinetic weapons.
On turn 120, I lifted the fog of war to see how everyone was doing. I had 56 colonies.The AIs that were doing well had roughly 50-60 colonies.The 3 majors not doing so well had between 20-30 (this was mostly due to starting position: two of them must have started very close to each other in a spiral arm and their territories were intermixed). The only standout was the Krynn. At 123 worlds and a huge fleet of military and colony ships, they were double everyone else and growing fast. Minus the Krynn, everything was what I expect from a Challenging (genius AI) game.
Again, great job on the AI and I know it's only going to get better. Good luck and good business.
