IMportant question on AI behavior

[johndmuller]

I think I tried the 'build lotsa missiles' once in a game I CMN'd after being inspired by one of yours where Yang was pretty effective at terrorizing the neighborhood with missiles - I figured that setting was probably behind those missiles; is that view of Miriams F7 screen the kind of thing it does with missiles too? If so, and if Yang were building so many missiles that he stagnated his economy, it would be a pretty good defense, cause invading him would be doubly bad for you, first you'd get clobbered by all those missile, and at the same time you'd be helping his economy by freeing up all that support. Of course, you might have just given him a big stockpile of independent missiles - its too bad there isn't a faction parameter that gives them a free unit in every base (just the one free unit at the beginning) - a free Battle Ogre in every base would be a pretty nice way to beef up an AI faction, especially if you could get them to stay at home as defenders/cops.

[Googlie]

The best I've been able to do has been to give an AI faction, say, SotHB, AMA and sentient resonance, predesign a slew of 8-res AAA trance sentinels and put them across its territory in what I consider to be the most likely base sites, then remove those techs from its tech-list.

Set those units to lurk for a century (you have to tinker with the "years to lurk" command, inserting numbers such as 537 or 339 to get it anywhere near 100 years - don't know why) and mark them as objectives (so the AI won't move them), then give the first few starting colony pods orders to go to some of those locations. Of course you can't control where the AI will build, but I've found that maybe the first three or four bases get built over those scouts (and put sensors there too) thus giving those early - and likely to be most important - bases a really strong defense.

After those first, closeby ones it's generally hit-and-miss whether further bases get placed over the units (but they are usually adjacent enough to be effective.

And as they are lurkers and objectives the AI doesn't seem to reverse engineer from them either, which is useful.

(a bug also lets you put a bunker with the sensor and the AI will still sometimes build over the bunker, thus giving another defensive bonus)

G.