AI or Why I Stopped Playing (for now)

[X3KJ]

My AI vassals overrun every empire with their gene warrior armies in late game if i cleared the spaceports/defenses.
It could be just an issue that the AI doesn't built enough assault armies early on (or that it depends on AI personality).

 

[Cossack8559]

The a.i needs some serious work unfortunately. I have 96 hours in Stellaris now and can declare war on multiple enemies without fear. My allies will stick to me like glue and my enemies will simply run from me if i have a larger fleet or be too easily kited by me if i have a smaller fleet. Once destroying the enemy fleet they usually start sending attacks of 1 ship at a time rather than holding back and trying to rebuild a force back up. Which given how long it takes to build and upgrade fleets there is no chance of that happening and thus the war is usually won after the first major battle. Defence stations are utterly useless and need a serious buff to help both the a.i and player in defence.I have mixed feelings over the a.i invading planets... my allies seem to do a fantastic job, sending large amounts of ground troops and taking over every planet i bombard. Yet i have not experienced the a.i successfully invade a single one of my planets in over 96 hours. The only systems i have lost are to a Fallen Empire and the Unbidden.

With that said, Having seen EUIV's a.i improve massively since release with each patch i do have faith that much will be improved.

 

[kazper]

Why not? That mechanic seems like one that could literally be taken and migrated to this game. I don't understand why they wouldn't be able to do that.

Because changing the AI does not happen in a vacuum (of space). If you allowed this setting, how will that change each other action the AI makes. EU4 (or CK2) has a much simpler strategic setup. There is easily defined pathing through nations, and "easily" calculated risk/reward scenarios for any action the AI takes. None of this is in Stellaris. There's a reason the AI seems weak compared to earlier PDX games. It's a much more complex strategic situation in most cases.

So attaching to the player is the safest way to ensure the AI doesn't make a blunder at least. Otherwise we'd have tons of threads on how the allied AI was so stupid and got its fleet destroyed, etc.

Improving the strategic AI in Stellaris will be a continuous task throughout the lifetime of the title. The simple inclusion of three (four) different FTL drives is an incredibly ambitious move that no other 4x has dared - partly because of this challenge to any AI having to deal with it.

 

[catnipaddict]

Intergalactic guerilla warfare isn't that complex honestly. The way defenses are right now and the lack of obstacles to enemy raids, the AI just has to be programmed to raid all your spaceports and that's it.

The AI I fought against did this pretty well when I had a small empire (core planets + some random planets) but once the blob starts to form, AI deficiencies starts to show. The inane obsession with your home world and then your core planets, ignoring the other 30 other sector planets, transport ships getting stuck in snares and leaving their own planets defenseless. If you plant enough snares in your empire, just watch the AI fumble around because their transports are stuck in a snare and cannot retreat.

Just seems like a lack of testing on what is the optimal strategy and hence bad strategic AI

 

[BmB23]

There is easily defined pathing through nations, and "easily" calculated risk/reward scenarios for any action the AI takes. None of this is in Stellaris. There's a reason the AI seems weak compared to earlier PDX games. It's a much more complex strategic situation in most cases.

This is some BS, the pathing works fine for ships using any FTL tech. If pathing was the problem ships would have troubles too. The problem is the strategic AI doesn't know how to use the pathing.

 

[kazper]

This is some BS, the pathing works fine for ships using any FTL tech. If pathing was the problem ships would have troubles too. The problem is the strategic AI doesn't know how to use the pathing.

You clearly didn't understand me. The point is the AIs weighing of its various options - including pathing because there are no borders and a nearly infinite number of ways it's ships could be ambushed by the player.

 

[Bertie87]

This is some BS, the pathing works fine for ships using any FTL tech. If pathing was the problem ships would have troubles too. The problem is the strategic AI doesn't know how to use the pathing.

Looking on the screenshot
I am curious how is that possible to have such weak fleet with 6k minerals stored and 90 years in game?

 

[BmB23]

You clearly didn't understand me. The point is the AIs weighing of its various options - including pathing because there are no borders and a nearly infinite number of ways it's ships could be ambushed by the player.

This is also BS. The AI does not weigh any option. It sends it sends all its ships in one fleet to your homeworld or sector capital.

Looking on the screenshot
I am curious how is that possible to have such weak fleet with 6k minerals stored and 90 years in game?

First game, not wanting to start losing income to upkeep? Doesn't really matter. The point is they should have beat me easy.

 

[kazper]

This is also BS. The AI does not weigh any option. It sends it sends all its ships in one fleet to your homeworld or sector.

I'm gonna try this one more time. Please read what I write and not what you think I write before you throw around the "BS" moniker - it's really rather tedious.

Making a strategic AI for a game like Stellaris is VERY different from making a strategic AI for eg EU4. In EU4 during wars you have fairly limited options in targets, paths and enemies that make it relatively easy to code an AI that can weigh a number of parameters and arrive at a decent course of action.

In Stellaris you have a much more fluid battlefield. Someone else compared it to fighting on the seas instead of inland and that's a good illustration. You do not have strong borders, fortifications and simple paths through a few provinces. You have a scenario where at any time you can get ambushed by the enemy, and where your targets are nearly limitless as are your liabilities.

Because of this - which humans have a hard time dealing with as well - the team behind Stellaris have coded the AI to be "safe". That means the allied AI always try to stack up and enemy AI go for what it perceives the highest value target in a bunch of more or less equal targets - the home worlds.

The reason the AI is so bad is because coding an AI for a dynamic and fluid battlefield is EXTREMELY hard. Why do you think most recent 4x games in space - including the remake of MOO - have ONLY hyperlanes? Because with hyperlanes you can severely limit options and thus improve AI weightings.

Stellaris has ambitiously decided not only to not use only hyperlanes, but not even just to use Warp exclusively which would be the second easiest AI to make, but Wormholes as well - simultaneously! This is unprecedented in 4x and will demand more from the AI than in any other such game. If they can make it work well it will be truly impressive.

 

[Toranth00]

Stellaris has ambitiously decided not only to not use only hyperlanes, but not even just to use Warp exclusively which would be the second easiest AI to make, but Wormholes as well - simultaneously! This is unprecedented in 4x and will demand more from the AI than in any other such game. If they can make it work well it will be truly impressive.

It's actually possible to represent the Warp and Wormholes drives as connected graphs, just like the Hyperlanes. Since each drive has static characteristics, and there are only a few drives (Warp 1-3, Wormhole 1-3, Jump, Psi, Hyper) a mere 9 graphs in memory provides the same complete pathing and evaluation options to all races and tech levels.
The Warp and Wormhole graphs are much more connected than Hyperlanes, but even on a max size map, you aren't look at more than a few 10,000s of connections per map. For modern computers, that sort of computation is pretty trivial.

I think the real problem with the AI is more simple: It doesn't seem to plan ahead. When it attacks something, it just orders all units to that location. So fleets dribble in as 10 small groups of 1K or 2K, instead of one 15K-20K megafleet. Transports simply happen to be the absolute worst example of this.
If the AI gets fixed to handle transports and invasions better, then I will begin to fear it. But right now, even if it sneaks a big fleet past me to attack one of my worlds, it won't amount to anything.

 

[BmB23]

I'm gonna try this one more time. Please read what I write and not what you think I write before you throw around the "BS" moniker - it's really rather tedious.

What's rather tedious is that you keep spouting BS with no understanding, as if it's correct. None of what you have said is accurate, none of what you have said justifies anything. Please stop.

I think the real problem with the AI is more simple: It doesn't seem to plan ahead. When it attacks something, it just orders all units to that location. So fleets dribble in as 10 small groups of 1K or 2K, instead of one 15K-20K megafleet. Transports simply happen to be the absolute worst example of this.
If the AI gets fixed to handle transports and invasions better, then I will begin to fear it. But right now, even if it sneaks a big fleet past me to attack one of my worlds, it won't amount to anything.

The real problem with the AI is even more trivial; it doesn't exist. A few simple behaviours can be seen. When acting alone it targets the nearest sector capital or homeworld. When acting in an alliance with a player it sends its fleet to follow your biggest fleet. It only ever appears to use a single massive blob consisting of every ship it has, except when sending armies which are left undefended. It is only interrupted by the overriding rule of diverting its blob fleet to a planet that is under bombardment. It does not send fleets to defend from attacks against stations so you can freely and unopposed target mining and research stations. Only planetary bombardment triggers the recall behaviour.

It does not "weight" anything, it simply follows one of these extremely simple rules. None of which are impeded by pathing in any way. While it may eventually send invasion forces to a planet it has bombarded, something keeps it from doing so in most situations, I'm not clear on what that issue is.

 

[Zyrious]

The lack of any AI, the fact they all feel the same, and lack of late game optimization are why im currently not playing until 1.1. And when i was playing i avoided alliances and federations like the plague. Might as well label Alliances "disable wartime AI". Not to mention the flavorless optionless Federations. I was expecting way more from the AI, this is a disappointment unfortunately.

 

[kazper]

What's rather tedious is that you keep spouting BS with no understanding, as if it's correct. None of what you have said is accurate, none of what you have said justifies anything. Please stop.

Nor wasting more time on you now. You keep thinking you know diddly squat about AI programming. Come back when you actually do.

 

[BmB23]

Still not fixed, or even attempted to fix. Nothing is on the roadmap that even remotely looks like a fix. Like I said, if it wasn't prioritized for 1.1 you could safely assume it would never get fixed, and I was right. Maybe in Stellaris 2.

Absolutely pathetic.

 

[praftd]

Still not fixed, or even attempted to fix. Nothing is on the roadmap that even remotely looks like a fix. Like I said, if it wasn't prioritized for 1.1 you could safely assume it would never get fixed, and I was right. Maybe in Stellaris 2.

Absolutely pathetic.

AI will always be a WIP and there have been quite a few improvements since launch. Shame you don't like the game, but your unproductive whining and passive aggression does nothing. Even worse, you revive a dead thread to do so.

You are objectively wrong. Every major patch contains AI improvents. Is their AI perfect and amazing? No, far from it. But it is slowlygetting better and it is quite a bit better than release.

Maybe you should move on then, eh?

 

[Army Pea]

AI is much better than it was at launch.

Especially on hard / aggressive difficulty.

But I get the feeling you won't accept that answer.

Feel free to complain to your hearts content.

 

[General Retreat]

AI is much better than it was at launch.

Especially on hard / aggressive difficulty.

But I get the feeling you won't accept that answer.

Feel free to complain to your hearts content.

I agree with the general point you're making, but I don't believe the actual 'intelligence' of the AI changes between difficulty levels. Mostly I think the difficulty is adjusted with resource and fleet cap multipliers, so harder AI just ends up with more stuff.

Aggressive definitely does what it says on the tin.

 

[dskod1]

Please don't neco 6+ month old threads to say "this is still a problem", start a new thread to do that.

Closed for necro.

Thanks,
Dylan