Ally AI Moon Theft

posted on January 21st, 2010, 1:47 am

When you have an AI ally it will go out of it's way to mine from your moons, no matter how far away you are. It's amazingly difficult to get any funds when there are two 'friendly' freighters on each of your resource moons. They even do this to expansions that you capture. I've tried destroying them but the AI just replaces them. Is there anyway this could get fixed?

posted on January 21st, 2010, 3:05 am

By 'fixed', do you mean lower thr priority so they go to yours only after running out of their own, or not using yours at all?

If you mean the former, I agree. If you mean the latter, that defeats one of the main purposes of an alliance.

posted on January 21st, 2010, 3:09 am

Anything as long as I have resources.

posted on January 21st, 2010, 6:03 am

if you just destroy the freighters it seems to take longer for the AI to replace them but yeah if this could be fixed it would be nice

posted on January 21st, 2010, 8:23 am

yes, this is more or less a known problem of the ai, this is on our todo list for a while now. a fix is currently not possible.

posted on January 21st, 2010, 8:39 am

The AI when it's your ally seems a lot less competant than when it's on a team or solo against you. Not sure why, it could have to do with this, but the AI does it to each other too.

Then again the AI cheats with its resources so it probably doesn't affect them as much.

Not sure, but it's one of the many annoying quirks of the AI.

I've taken to playing FFA style games as the AI seems to work best in that scenario, unless I'm playing 2v2 or 3v3 with human players vs the AI. Anytime the AI gets paired with human players it seems to fall apart and not function correctly.

I've seen the AI when paired with a human player never advance beyond the destroyer stage of the game, even though it has plenty of resources. Not sure what causes it.

posted on January 21st, 2010, 8:53 am

we have observed the same phenomenon. i haven't found out yet why the ai seems to performs so bad sometimes when playing with human players but may be related to occupying the expansion they want to use

posted on January 21st, 2010, 3:39 pm

I never observed this. Usually because I am usually beaten by the AI to my expansion point. But they usually flow quite well if you let them take what they need. Appearently it may also be because I usually put up allied repair points at my expansion yards encouraging the AI to continue forward.

[Tyler]

posted on January 21st, 2010, 3:59 pm

Last edited by Tyler on January 21st, 2010, 4:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In my games, the AI works better when allied with me in certain repects... especially in the 'spam a fleet 4x the size of the Merciless AI enemies and wipe them all out quickly' aspect of the game.

I rarely get to fight anything because the AI enemies are as aggressive as the allies, but built a lot less.

posted on January 21st, 2010, 4:02 pm

yeah, one of the reasons I don't like to play with the ai on my team.  they don't like to keep to themselves, they like to expand, even if it is as your expense.