A strategy the AI fails to cope with well (warning: long, rambling)

While it is a fun way to play, it could be argued that it isn't really much of a strategy. You still have to go conquer his planets ultimately if you want to win by any other way than tech victory. Once you move outside your web of death, all the time and investment is gone. I'm not going to argue that it doesn't work because it's certainly important to get a good military starbase up to protect your assets but turtling only achieves maintaining what you already own.

On one of the scenarios I played recently, there were 4 races in a totally balanced map. They all decided I was enemy number 1 and proceeded to war with me exclusively for the rest of the game. I scraped through and scraped through by using a military starbase and a couple of fairly low end fleets to stave off the waves of doom. Then I got a bit deeper into the tech tree and started building up a mass of medium hulled ships. Once my economy (which was in good shape at the beginning of the buildup) went into the yellow, I had a look at the military graph. I was so far off the bottom you couldnt even see my coloured line on the graph.

The AI had hundreds of ships. Now, I could've gone the way you stated above and sat and built up my core and kept them all at bay but there were literally 10+ fleets of each AI coming in from 3 directions at every turn. It really would only take a few bad rolls to see them (however temporarily) clear a path for one of their transports. Sensing this, I grabbed a few turns of building transports and drove a wedge in the nearest enemy, the Arceans, and grabbed 2 of their 5 planets. Now their number went against them as their economy wasn't strong enough to maintain all that was going on. Not long after, with a few more fleets destroyed and me in position around 2 of their other planets, they surrendered.

What I am trying to stress here is 2 things.

1) It really really really depends on the difficulty you play, the size of the map and the combination of races against you.
2) Sitting in your corner only wins you a long and dull tech victory..... furthermore, taking the action to them can take enemies out of the equation, open up new frontiers, new resources and new victory conditions. Once you move beyond your network of death, the time invested in them makes the less appealing to focus so heavily on and actually has the counter effect of locking you into them.

As I say, I'm not casting scorn on your idea - it works within certain situations and for certain points in the game, but I wouldn't want to rely on it. For one thing, I'd vastly prefer to have 9/10 of those starbases be overlapping economy ones to drive my tech and manufacturing up to a point where I can take the battle to the enemy, not wait for him to come to me.

Pretty much, every time I've made it to mid-game I've been "winning". Out of curiousity, what difficulty are you playing at? I almost never end up making military starbases (i tend towards econ or incluence). Also, how long (years) does it end up taking for a victory (tech or otherwise)?

Usually, for defense, I rely on having two "fast"(faster than the AI) engines and eyes of the universe... first strike + all attack has worked pretty well so far, unless I mess up range or forget about a squad.

As an added note, the one game I was losing around mid-game was in a large galaxy, intelligent opponents... the drath got RIDICULOUS tech and would have gotten a tech victory, but I eft the game on overnight and got a crash the next day, so I gave up... they had techs ive never heard of...(the last starbase tech??) and were 2 away from tech victory (i think they had all the other techs....)

Anyhow, had I gotten more aggressive and taken out a couple of other opponents sooner, I probably could have influence victorie'd them..... so I'm wondering if you've run into that by sitting back... I was at peace with the drath in that situation, but a couple of other AI's declared war on me.

you can always easily expand the network
one factor that the Op didnt mention is that you can kill over hundreds of ships that might be 3 times as good as your ships(excluding the starbase bonus that makes your ships sooo good) and barely take any dmg = farming enemies =>have fleets with massive amounts of hp.

Hi!
H3lmut, your approach to the game has a distinctive name in multiplayer environment: "bunker n00b". Such a player usually wins the game because other players got tired of assaulting his multiple times fortified positions, and they just quit, looking for a better game.
AI will not quit, but when it will learn:
- to use more speed,
- to avoid your starbase-enhanced ships and take out those starbases behind them, and
- to go after your remote mining starbases,
will your approach start failing in more and more games.
BR, Iztok

I dunno, I don't 'turtle' completely, but I often use military starbases to protect good planets or planet clusters. Letting the enemy strike where he thinks you are weak is actually a pretty slick strat, I like the first posters idea.

However, sounds like it would be too slow for me, in the long run.

I try to avoid building SBs as much as possible simply because I want a very strong challenge without giving the AI any econ bonuses so I play on the Intelligent level in gigantic (common all) with a full board of AI players and I find my games are quite the challenge to behold and endure.

I play on exactly the same settings, and believe me it is a real challenge. I do wonder if there is a difference in the AI intelligence if you set the races individually to the same than using the global setting. Maybe its just my imagination but it appears the AI plays better when set individually (all to intelligent)
Phil

Pretty much, every time I've made it to mid-game I've been "winning". Out of curiousity, what difficulty are you playing at? I almost never end up making military starbases (i tend towards econ or incluence). Also, how long (years) does it end up taking for a victory (tech or otherwise)?

I just did a Tech victory on a med. map, with full opposition. I got the tech victory late in the year 2230, and on therge of an alliance and influ victory.

I have also noticed the AI behavoir that h3lmut mentions and taken advantage of it on occasion. I expand much more aggressively in my games though and don't build a massive web of doom. However, if I'm in a war with multiple opponents I will usually "turtle" against all but one. I'll space a few good fleets out in those border regions and make sure every planet has something just in case the AI bores a hole through my defenses. If the war is protracted I'll get some starbase assist going to extend the life of my fleets.

So I'll fight defensively on every front except one, and plough over that oppenent until he is dust. Then I'll turn my defensive ships on another race's perimiter into the first wave of offense. Here's where I notice what h3lmut was talking about. The AI deals poorly with turtling. PIck it apart however you like as a general strategy, but the AI does not deal with it well. If I saw a crazy network of overlapping, heavily upgraded starbases I'd be looking for some way to crack that open, and it wouldn't involve the typical fleets the AI throws around.

But I don't use a web of doom, so the fleets it throws at me are perfectly viable when I'm fighting three other races and my military rating is only average. However, as my faster ships blow him out of space and carefully avoid losses (by dropping damaged ships from fleets and merging partial fleets while damaged ships move back out of range to repair) the AI is bankrupting itself to fuel its offensive. Eventually I can tell that most of its fleet stockpile is spent and its ability to throw more ships at me is limited by its current production capability. That's the time to move in, sometimes whether or not I'm done with my primary war.

The AI does not turtle, of course, so once its thrown everything against a brick wall it has only paper defenses left (and usually gets serious about suing for peace). My highly experienced defense ships turned to first wave cut through whatever is left and hold the lines open for a wave of transports that finishes the job.

I think I may have been a little misunderstood -- I would totally love it if the AI was evaluating its situation with me more "correctly" (for lack of a better word), and started doing hit and runs on my defensive net with fast ships, or came up with some other solution. This isn't with the gimped AI either -- my game settings (since I forgot it in the original) are usually huge or gigantic maps with rare stars (usually loose clusters or scattered). Ideally, I'm going for around 6 colonies per side with lots of empty stretches; it feels more "realistic" to me then having everyone right around the corner. Opponents are half set to bright, half set to intelligent.

Right now, because I know the AI doesn't handle the situation properly, yes it is kind of cheesy. Like I said, I'll have to see how the AI handles it in the next patch, but so far it's scaled up to higher difficultlies pretty well. And, like zela posted, I kind of understated just how one-sided the fights in the Web of Doom are. As in, you can be outnumbered 2-3 to 1 against ships with better "real" stats than yours, and never lose a single ship. As I see it, these are the the actual mistakes the AI (or the game) is making, that are combining to hand me the universe on a silver platter:

• The game doesn't assign any "Military" value at all to military starbases filled with ship boosts.


• The AI won't build highly mobile ships, ever (I know this one's going to be fixed soon).


• The AI doesn't recognize it's on the wrong side of the war until it's way too late (if it's "Military" score is 5x mine, down from 20x mine a couple of turns ago, it seems to think it's winning)


• The only kind of war the AI will fight is a total war, so it will destroy itself throwing its ships into the Web of Doom.

In response to Spearthrower:
"You still have to go conquer his planets ultimately if you want to win by any other way than tech victory. Once you move outside your web of death, all the time and investment is gone..."

Indeed, but by the time I move out of my Web of Doom, his entire military is gone too, so it's a fair trade, I think

"For one thing, I'd vastly prefer to have 9/10 of those starbases be overlapping economy ones to drive my tech and manufacturing up to a point where I can take the battle to the enemy..."

Economy bases stack too?! This changes everything! (I'm not being sarcastic, I hadn't realized that yet. I should have, considering the other ones do.)

This can be a very serious offensive strategy too. Build constructors with several engines, and build tiny ships with one attack, one defense, and as many engines as you can. This is a surprisingly fast and powerful offensive force. The constructors can move many spaces, build a starbase, upgrade it, and support your fighters all in one turn. Your combat ships rarely die because of the big starbase bonuses, so they gain lots of experience. You only really have to reserach engines and the starbase mobilization line, you can largely ignore weapons, defenses, hulls, and miniaturization. The main cost is that the starbases become useless as the front line moves, but it's better than losing experienced combat ships, or paying to upgrade them.

In response to Spearthrower: "You still have to go conquer his planets ultimately if you want to win by any other way than tech victory. Once you move outside your web of death, all the time and investment is gone..." Indeed, but by the time I move out of my Web of Doom, his entire military is gone too, so it's a fair trade, I think "For one thing, I'd vastly prefer to have 9/10 of those starbases be overlapping economy ones to drive my tech and manufacturing up to a point where I can take the battle to the enemy..." Economy bases stack too?! This changes everything! (I'm not being sarcastic, I hadn't realized that yet. I should have, considering the other ones do.)

As I said.... playing on one of the scenarios, the Drengin quite literally never ran out of ships - if anything, their military rating was increasing the gap between me and them for every turn I waited. If I hadn't taken the battle to them, they would eventually have managed to swamp me. I'd really like you to see that game just to see what I mean - your tactic would have meant a slow death, I am sure about that!

Hell yes - economy base overlap is very powerful too. Playing when you only have 1 world (like a medium or smaller map with all planets/sun set to rare) you actually need to get a number of econ starbases up to stand any chance - you can see the AI do it too!

Since the AI suks at building any kind of starbases I don't exploit it by building a web of military starbases. There's more fun and challenge taking them on at their own speed. The only starbases I've ever seen the AI build up are the resource starbases, but, I see 10's of different types of starbases they never add anything to. Just a shell of a starbase and then they go build another one and another one instead of building that one up. I'd be in deep chit if the YOR would have built up the many influence starbases they've planted the shells of. Hope they fix this in a patch or update.