With regard to starbases I guess we are talking two different approaches to playing single player - I like a long game on a large map with multiple systems and am not into rushing the AIs - I don't know if such an approach would work on a huge maps with four hard AI's - I can't rush them all at once.
Everything depends on the map layout. In the case of massive maps, you can swap out "hobbling its fleet" with "hobbling its economic expansion". The end result is that the player is far more developed than the AI and will cream it at some point in the future. I personally have never played a game that's ran past the 7-hour mark; I find these quite pointless against the AI since it doesn't build superweapons, so invariably reaching the late game is an automatic win for the player (if the AI hasn't defeated you by now, it's never going to).
The fact remains that a starbase on its own is a speedbump, not a bulwark. It will slow down an enemy's advance, it will not stop him. The AI is the worst of both worlds, running headfirst (foolishly) into a starbase's guns, and placing starbases as if it expects you to do the same. If you don't oblige it, those starbases will mostly end up being wasted cash. They will slow you down, but not nearly by enough to merit the huge amount of cash the AI spends in their construction.
With 4 hard AI's on a 5+ system map with lots of planets neutrals etc economies tend to ramp up quite fast so the cost of starbases is not so much of an issue.
This has more to do with AI stupidity than anything else. The AI is stupidly aggressive in some respects and stupidly timid in others. Often times it will allow you to build up forces rather than opportunistically attacking you, or attack you recklessly where your defenses are strongest. This has the effect of reducing the number of casualties you can expect to sustain. Against a more competent opponent, you might have to divert 90% of your income just to replace dead units.
I personally find these types of games to be quite uninteresting against the AI. The AI doesn't build superweapons, so your eventual victory is assured if it drags on past the 3 hour mark (that's practically a forgone conclusion on large multistar scenarios).
The AI seems to build decent sized fleets which it promptly suicides against one of my starbases somewhere. Over and over. Endlessly.
I'm aware; this is a huge problem that needs to be addressed. I believe the AI has a behavior where it will never reteat when a starbase is present in the system (because it doesn't want to take the hostile phase penalty), which causes it to suicide. This is half of the problem. The other half is that the AI is an extraordinarily poor judge of combat strength, and seems to constantly get itself into battles where it is clearly disadvantaged. It's one thing to launch a desperate gambit, it's entirely another to launch futile assaults on clearly superior opponents.
To me the AI wrt SB's seems to have been left out or poorly thought out when Entrenchment was released which seems odd beacuse vanilla SINS against hard AI's is a much much harder fight.
Gotta agree; the AI got much worse in entrenchment. It seems the most notable improvement is the way the AI uses siege frigates; this is something of a moot point, however, as many of us have remarked that the AI would be much more difficult if it stopped wasting its money on siege frigates and instead bought combat frigates.
If most people like MP why has this game sold so many copies and there are so few MP players?
It's no secret that most gamers are singleplayer gamers. I've heard of research that indicates that upwards of 90% of gamers (MMO's excluded, obviously) may only play singleplayer. The problem is that these people are invisible; we rarely hear from them on the discussion forums. Usually even if they do pop up it's for technical support; you're a rarity among your kind, hdaboy.
For a lot of people the AI is the only opponent they will ever have so why not make it as good as it could be within the limits of the technology?
There are a few issues there. IC isn't a large company, and they don't exactly have the resources to have someone build a world-class AI. As well, the game is designed to run on low-spec systems, and as such the AI has a very tight budget in terms of CPU resources. They can't go over-the-top and cause the AI to lag up a low-end system. That said, there's lots of room for improvement, and at very least some of its questionable resource utilization priorities need to change.
The new stuff seriously is fun.
This is true, but the fact remains that the AI is much easier right now because it doesn't know how to use it properly or how to deal with it properly.
