Something I’ve been noticing from my Rebellion AI skirmish games is that the AI doesn’t seem to be coping well with the Rebellion changes.
I tend to play the game like this: (hey, it makes me happy, YMMV of course 
)
- Grab a few systems while fending off early rush attacks and pirate raids.
- Build some serious defences, dabble in a bit of diplomacy to make nice with at least one neighbour
- Research and build a honkin’ big FLEET-O-DOOM
- Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum. (Bubblegum optional)
When playing vanilla and entrenchment this used to give me cool defensive fights as I research and then going out and taking on big enemy faction fleets, well defended systems, etc. All good clean fun.
But what I’ve been finding in Rebellion after the initial attacks have been fended off and I begin to seriously scout is…. somewhat depressing. Shattered and collapsing AI factions - in my most recent game about 80% of systems were uninhabited – most of them had been inhabited (as evidenced by a few orbital facilities) but since abandoned. Of 7 Unfair AI factions, three had been defeated, and the other 4 had just… collapsed. They each had a few core systems with poor defences and no decent fleets at all.
The only scary fleet belonged to a defeated faction. Defeated factions seemed to have a lot of cultural output too. There were no threats, no serious military actions, no-one expanding or even reclaiming lost territories. It just felt like the AIs had given up, or had no idea what to do.
This (broadly) is my experience in all my Rebellion AI skirmish games so far. No serious threat from AI factions after the early game.
I don’t know what causes this. Contributing factors may include:
-overly strong pirate raids that just destroy planets, and the AI doesn’t seem to be able to defend or recover from.
-overly strong super weapons, or lack of any defensive strategy to cope with super weapons.
-inability to recover from economic set-backs, i.e. if fleet support research is high, a massive proportion of money and resources goes to support it. The loss of a big portion of this fleet plus the loss of a few systems means the AI needs to do some serious rebuilding and has almost no income to do so… the AI just seems to stop doing anything, even without any more pressure.
Also, the new victory conditions are great, I especially like the Capital planet one, but the AI does not seem to understand these *at all*. Capital worlds are left totally undefended, and it seems absurdly easy to kill an AI faction by just fleet-rushing his Capital. Surely the routes to Capital worlds should be defended like crazy by mines, pimped-out starbases and reserve fleets at the least. Not to mention shielding capitals to prevent “Oh I scouted your capital and I have a Novalith therefore I win” cheese.
Maybe I’m setting up the games wrong, but Cruel+ difficulty just seems to get an insurmountable early game advantage. But I do remember Hard/Unfair AIs giving me a good run for my money in previous versions.
Anyway, I’d be interested in anyone else’s thoughts/experiences around this.
