Does the AI use creative tactics?

[Silent Sorrow]

I ask because in my current game I just had something interesting happen. I had a big fleet--my "Imperial Fleet" (heh heh) stationed on a planet just outside of my main territory. For whatever reason, the AI (the Ammonkrie) were making a big deal of it and seiging the planet.

So I parked my fleet there and waited for the excruciatingly long build-time to get up about six small weapons platforms, some facilities and some mines. The AI had as many as 50 ships arrayed against me but was not attacking--just had them surrounding me. Almost as if waiting for something. More ships, I figured.

Wrong.

I was retrofitting my ships in small batches--also an excruciatingly long process with one yard doing five components per turn. I had a feeling that it wouldn't be a good idea to set them all at the same time to retrofit. But as I kept on with it, I noticed the AI was still not attacking. So I decided to retrofit a bunch of my battle cruisers at the planet.

The very next turn the AI attacks me at the planet! Argghh!

But it gets better. I decided to resolve the battle in tactical/auto/fast mode. Imagine my surprise when it turns out the AI was attacking with mostly carriers and launched fighters at my planet. Before I realized what was happening, it was too late to get my ships to focus on the fighters, since in auto they appear to focus on the ships. And remember, my battle cruisers were out of the fight on retrofit!

The fighters actually took out my planet--all those turns and resources wasted! But after the battle the report showed that I hadn't lost a single ship. It appears the AI had specifically been gunning for the planet, knowing what effect it would have on my fleet. (Because I crushed it in ship to ship combat.)

Here's the problem now: My fleet is essentially stranded on a planet without means of repair and facing turn after turn of attacks apparently designed to whittle down my forces.

Meanwhile, I'm crash-building a massive missile fleet to come to the rescue. But will it get there in time to save the Imperial Fleet?

It was close. Real close. I tried running another colony ship in to set up a yard and begin repair again but the AI intercepted the ship and destroyed it. (Second time it got through, though.)

Has anyone else here seen devious, seemingly "creative" thinking/attacks from the AI--or was the timing of its attacks against me coincidence? (And that also brings up another question--when you are retrofitting, are your ships still visible to the enemy? If they are, how would the AI have known they were being retrofitted and thus unavailable for combat?)

[geoschmo]

There are three posibilities here that I can see.

1. Coincidence.

2. The AI is cheating and knows the condition of our ships. The AI does have algorithms that help it decide whether or not to attack a target based on it's analysis of the stregth of the defenders. However I would be extremely suprised to learn the AI was able to use this knowledge of your ships lack of battle readiness that it should have no way of knowing.

3. The AI had scanners on his ships and so legitimatly had this knowledge, and could react accordingly.

Either 2 or 3 would be really cool, but if I had to put money on it I'd say 1.

Geoschmo

[Rollo]

This is one area where the AI cheats. It can look at stuff (ship is being retrofitted or not, planetary defenses, etc.) that a human player cannot.

Rollo

edit (after seeing Geo's post): my money is on 2

[ July 30, 2002, 19:38: Message edited by: Rollo ]

[Puke]

i think the oddest thing is that the fighters went past your fleet. did they have planet targeting weapons, only?

[Mephisto]

I put my money on 1.

[Gandalph]

As I have seen the AI make "intelligent" attacks, attacking a non-defended planet instead of a defended planet for instance, I have to go with #2. I have also seen the AI heading for one of my planets and turn towards another because I just launched the 50 mines I had in storage. I truly believe the AI can see things the human player cannot, but since the AI is particularly stupid anyway, I have just accepted this as "the AI needs all the help it can get".

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by Rollo:
This is one area where the AI cheats. It can look at stuff (ship is being retrofitted or not, planetary defenses, etc.) that a human player cannot.

Rollo

edit (after seeing Geo's post): my money is on 2

Every so often it comes up that the AI might have an advantage in detecting targets -- I once tried to gain the advantage for myself by sending a fleet to a system and turning on the attack minister.

I forget what happened exactly -- either the fleet just sat there or flew across the galaxy to attack something else.

I just feel like guessing that it's an algoritim to determine what's likely on the planet based on size and population. And if the AI knocks over the soft target, it could just be coincidence.

Someone could build a map, with two moons, same distance from the warp point, one defended and one not, one enemy ship, and see what happens.

If I tried it, the ship would probably run away for resupply and the get scrapped

[Alpha Kodiak]

I tend to agree with Arkon. In all of my AI testing, I have never seen anything that would indicate that the AI makes use of any information to make an intelligent attack. Instead, I have all too often watched in helpless frustration as the AI ignores an obviously soft target and wanders around aimlessly with a large fleet until it finally withdraws for resupply. In the latest Versions, it has gotten better, but by no means have I seen anything close to "intelligent".

[Gandalph]

I decided to test this and spent the time necessary to create a map with only 2 systems, 1 planet in 1 and 2 planets in the other, then set them both to starting points, then saved the map and started a game with it. I used a transport to divide the population evenly between the 2 target planets, (after colonizing the second planet), then decided to test with different kinds of defenses, ie mines, WP's, fighters. To shorten the story, after everything was ready for the test, I turned on all Ministers for the attacking Empire and sent the recently built Dreadnought through the warp point to see what happened. Well, the minister sent the warship back to the planet and scrapped it. So, though we still don't know the answer to the question, it has definetively been proven that THE AI IS STUPID!!!!

[Ragnarok]

Originally posted by Gandalph:
THE AI IS STUPID!!!!

You mean you had to run that test to figure this out? *tisk tisk* We could've told you that without having to run tests man.