Can the human AI fight in space?

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delor
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2022 4:21 pm

Can the human AI fight in space?

Post by delor »

I've played three campaigns that got to the point of me having multiple defense fleets around multiple celestial bodies. Two somewhere around patch 0.69, one with 0.81. In my latest campaign I upped the difficulty to Veteran and did a pretty poor opening game, to the result that during the space land grab, both the Servants and the Protectorate grabbed more mines than me, earlier.

Before that campaign went on pause due to some unrelated frustrations, I'd started to get going on a bit of a space campaign against the biggest human space faction, the Protectorate. I'd sent out a troop transport to capture a base on Ceres so I could get more water to fuel my ships, and I saw a small marine-equipped warship in orbit of Mars and took it out with my small Mars defense fleet. At that point I was wondering where the heck the Protectorate's spaceships were so I opened up the faction intel screen and saw that in the time I'd built about 600 CV of ships, they had built 150 CV despite getting a leg up on my in the space race. That made them the leader space warships for human factions besides me, too.

I don't have good notes for my previous campaigns, but I do recall when save corruption killed my second 0.69(-ish) campaign I had multiple large fleets with battleships-scale ships (2035-ish, maybe?), and the closest to any real human presence in space that I ever noticed were a couple of Servant fleets with 3-4 small ships in earth orbit. No human faction has ever attacked me in space, ever, despite me never having done anything to stop the human AI from mining resources and building ships with them. (the Ceres assault I was preparing in my 0.81 campaign would have been my first attack on a human hab or orbital, ever)

I think when the official patch 10 drops I'll probably start up another campaign and hopefully stick with it a bit longer than my 0.81 campaign, but with it taking 40-ish hours to get to space warfare being a big thing it's hard to collect data points. So to anyone else who has done longer-running campaigns: Is the human AI capable of actually building fleets and wielding them against the other factions?
PAwleus
Posts: 107
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:58 pm

Re: Can the human AI fight in space?

Post by PAwleus »

My experience is limited here because I was usually able to deny human AI factions all good mining sites (this was one of reasons I proposed changes to the game aiming to prevent them being resource-starved starting in this post) resulting in such situations as in my game that ended on 0.3.76 when all human AI factions throughout the entire game built together just one ship.

In your .81 case, however, they are almost certainly not resource-starved but I'd like to point out that the result of having less CV fleet could arise not only because they built less than you - they could also have more ships destroyed by the Aliens. AFAIK they are not good enough, yet, to effectively fight the Aliens, especially with low-tech ships, so the latter one is quite possible.
StrykeSlammerII
Posts: 23
Joined: Thu Jun 08, 2023 10:13 pm

Re: Can the human AI fight in space?

Post by StrykeSlammerII »

delor wrote: Wed May 24, 2023 2:17 pm So to anyone else who has done longer-running campaigns: Is the human AI capable of actually building fleets and wielding them against the other factions?
I'm in a Exodus campaign, approaching 2060 [v.0.3.76 on GOG]. I've researched everything I think I need to, so I'm in the process of breaking up all the countries & letting the other factions take over as I move offworld. We'll see what they do once they can research end-game tech.
I'm just hunting smaller alien fleets in search of purple stuff for Bifrost...

Two notes first:
1) Although I've kept a decent lock on research, the Servants & Protectorate both have their endgame goals researched. Everyone else seems stuck at "capture (or kill) an alien". No one seems to have spacecraft worth fighting with, and they've certainly left me alone, but I failed to lock down boost so everyone IS in space.
2) I'm also the only one who appears to understand how Alien Hate works. I think all the other factions went over the 100-whatever MC cap early; the aliens appear (I'm guessing) to have declared war on everyone, and certainly go around blowing up red and blue space stations from time to time.

With those caveats--Resistance and Humanity First both have space skirmishes with Servants and Protectorate, and they fight over the occasional station. Academy and Initiative don't seem to have the same ambition for space battles.

Aliens and R/HF also have skirmishes which I believe the aliens always win, but I don't get to see results and I don't usually bother jumping out to space to see what ships remain. Perhaps the "skirmishes" all resolve in everyone deciding to go home instead of shooting.

I'm hoping to give a better writeup once I finish this campaign, if only to show that interesting things happen with not playing efficiently ;)
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