Odd, I have not seen this behavior. I do know that at unfair and above the AI gets cheats to income and research plus xp for capital ships but normal should not be getting any cheats.

Thanks for your replies.

Ryat : I have played SOASE for some time and in all the games what I reported happens. Have a close look. The official line is that only above normal difficulty do cheats occur. What I have outlined may not be normally conceived of as cheating, but gives a huge advantage to the enemy AI by reinventing the rules. There are many other ways it does this. For example, when I team jumped (in middle game) the program sent in a few strong units without any support and only when these were considerably weakened did the rest of the support team jump. Another example, a rather ubiquitous one, is when I order my units to team jump, an enemy scout instantly pops up from nowhere to delay the jump. When I moused over my units, all of them were occupied in defeating the humble scout. I could not choose one unit to fight the scout and jump with the rest of my team. In some cases it took some considerable time for my massive fleet to defeat the single scout or send it on its way.

SOASE is a good game, but like many games that claim to be strategic, they deceive you its strategic by giving the player and the AI a set of rules and then going on to break the rules and give the AI the advantage. I have never played human v human and I doubt these cheats would actually apply. I just find it exasperating in the single player game for the player to be deliberately thwarted in his efforts by such cheats.

Scudhawk : It was very early on in the game (about 10 mins ) with only two developed planets each. If any units were in mid-phase jump there was no red line to show such. In my experience the enemy AI can appear instantly, almost anywhere, especially on the player's planets. I found it incredible that the enemy AI could build a starbase and a second cap ship in 5 to 8 seconds and have the credits and resources to do this so early in the game.

Thanks Seleuceia for your reply. I am not sure how to watch the AI dev.exe. Presumably I need to get into the console?

I am not sure this game is any longer playable against the AI unless improvements are made, for the simple reason I am wasting my time pretending it is strategic when the program does what it likes. I tried a Diplomatic game in Trinity which resulted in a catch 22 situation. If I tried a mission given by one faction I would be jumped by the other. If I didn't take a mission I would be jumped by both factions. When I fortified the exposed planets and strengthened my fleet the time was up or only a few minutes were left to destroy 3 to 5 ships. Anyone playing this game knows how long battles can take. The pirates in Rebellion attacked me en masse even though the price I put on the head of the enemy faction was greater by far than what the enemy faction had placed on mine. If the pirates had attacked the other faction there was no information about what harm it did. which might have been useful.

I wonder if the developers have given up improving the single player mode in respect of the cheats, in favor of refining the multiplayer option?

Thanks again.

Still stands that I have not seen this kind of behavior in Normal or higher settings.

Are you making sure to research the tech that allows you to see what is coming down the phase lane? I usually know exactly what the AI is doing (especially with Vasari and 8 civilian techs) thanks to this research and I don't see any magical ship production. at any AI level. I do see the credit bump, random research trick, and XP increase for settings at unfair and up (I rarely play at hard so that may be the disconnect there. Its either normal for game test or unfair for fun.) but not what you are describing.

Wouldn't surprise me they also get discounts.

Here is a thread that may be useful for you in regards to the dev.exe...

Ctrl, shift, and "." have to be pressed at the same time....I would be surprised if the keyboard was the issue and I'm sorry to say I have no further suggestions on how to bring up the debugging window if this doesn't work...

As for the greater issue at hand...

I have noticed since sometime in diplomacy that the AI seems to "magically" get units at my planets...I'll be playing, and suddenly an enemy ship will appear at an interior world (one that is completely surrounded by planets I've colonized) despite having no notifications of them ever entering my border worlds...

The most memorable time this occured was when an AI had 2 Marzas and several siege frigates that kept harassing me...it would seem like out of nowhere I'd have a marza bombing a planet very close to my HW even though that marza would have had to go through another one of my border worlds to get there (yet I never saw it go through a border world)....

This phenomenon has seemed to happen quite a bit to me and was extremely frustrating...even with psidar technologies (and the like) and no nearby wormholes, enemy units would manage to catch me off guard and somehow be at interior worlds (capital ships and siege frigates were the most common)...it got to the point where I would watch replays just to see if I really was that oblivious, but I have never once been able to see this phenomonen in a recorded game as how I witnessed it in an actual game....as such, I have just always assumed I was mistaken...