Has anyone ever beaten Cruel AI in 1v1?

The difference in difficulty as you start pushing to unfair and above is quite substantial.  At "hard" and below, the AI doesn't have enough cash to balance all its needs optimally, so all you need to do is figure out the right time and place to strike and its own inflexibility will do it in.  At "unfair" and above, you need to move very quickly and efficiently if you want to win, and even then you may need to pull some borderline exploits for the higher difficulties.

The way to beat the AI at the highest difficulties is to take advantage of its flaws.  A guy like me isn't really challenged by unfair (I can do a speed-run and have an unfair effectively down for the count within 30 minutes), and the way I beat it is by applying just the right pressure at just the right time.  The AI may have a far superior economy, giving him a larger fleet and higher tech level, but I compensate by using what I have more effectively.  I put my units to work more efficiently and get more use from them, and I also preserve them like a hawk so I need to spend less money replacing them.  This allows me to compete with an overwhelming force. 

Some tips:

1. Expand quickly; the AI is very bad at managing its units.  At unfair difficulty and higher, its ability to expand is no longer limited by cash, but rather its own ineptitude in managing units to capture planets.  You can easily expand twice as quickly as an AI; In my best historical performance, I managed 4 planets for every 1 the AI colonized.
2. The AI tends to waste money on minefields and starbases.  Mobile Vasari starbases notwithstanding (THOSE are a pain in the neck) you can completely avoid these if you pay attention.  The AI will happily fight you outside of the starbase weapon range, leaving this massive investment completely pointless.
3. The AI also tends to run into your starbases and minefields rather easily.  Putting even one of these up at a key "flashpoint" world early in the game is a great way to provoke the AI to suicide its fleet.  The more money it spends on replacing units, the more you dull its resource advantage (not to mention the valuable capital ship XP).
4. You can use scouts to distract large groups of enemy units.  So long as there aren't fighters in the gravity well, the enemy will never catch up to the speedy scout and you can keep hundreds of frigates occupied for ridiculous lengths of time.  I once kept an entire enemy fleet occupied for 30 minutes with only two scouts (plasma storm - no fighters).
5. The AI's only combat strategy is brute force, which means that you can usually run circles around it with any form of finesse or combo.  It's particularly bad at fleet management (both on a larger scale and smaller scale) and this allows you to outmaneuver it.  The player should always have the initiative and be deciding when and where battles will be fought.  The AI is so slow and clumsy with its movements that it's easy for you to control the battlefield even when greatly outnumbered.

There are pro players out there who can beat the Vicious AI 1v1.  However, those guys are all experienced with online multiplayer.  I would imagine that it would be hard to be able to beat a Vicious AI without having ever learned to play it against human opponents, because playing against real opponents forces you to learn the finer points of the game.

I usually am able to do this, and can far surpass the AI's colonization speed at unfair at the very least, but it sometimes seems like such a huge risk and gamble.  If there isn't an obvious choke point that I can focus on defending, then I can sometimes get hit hard and lose a lightly defended planet because my defenses and fleets were spread too thin, or my main fleet is too far away to respond.

Besides what you pointed out about exploiting the scouts to distract fleets (if, and only if carriers with fighters aren't around, which is rare), do you have any specifics on how to "run circles around him"?  What kind of units do I make, how many fleets should I be managing, and how exactly should I harass him?  Also, I don't really see the AI as being slow or clumsy, unless I am just simply even more clumsy.  Most of the time when I take the initiative and act first, the AI seems to respond appropriately by exploiting opportunities or my weaknesses.  He either decides to send his nearby superior forces in to defend against my attack before I am able to do any significant damage, or sends them to attack my lightly defended planets and take them over far faster than I am able to take over his.  Sometimes, he'll even send in a single siege frigate if he knows my planet is undefended just to harass me.  And what about defenses?  Since I'll be colonizing like crazy, surely I can't spend the resources to build defensive structures for all of them, short of a lucky choke point.

Not nearly as rare in the early game, where stalling is most beneficial.  As well, you can still do this if carriers are around, it just won't last very long, but if you only need to stall for 30 seconds or so it will do the trick.

You're basically asking for an advanced playbook.

A relatively straightforward tactic is "kiting".  This involves moving away from the enemy, usually moving around the gravity well.  This forces them to chase you, getting drawn out and separating their forces as they go.  The AI usually uses a relatively tight fleet cohesion setting, so it will almost never catch up to you, even if you employ slower units like carriers.  Human players will turn off fleet cohesion altogether so they can keep pace with faster units and shoot at you, but this has the effect of thinning out their forces and rendering them very vulnerable to strike craft.  The AI is particularly gullible, and you can usually coax it into running through a minefield while doing this.

One of my personal favourites is to take advantage of the slow turn speed in Sins.  If I identify the enemy focus firing on a single target, I will run that target through the enemy ranks.  They will have to turn around to keep firing.  Around the 90 degree (half-way) point in the turn, they won't be able to attack anything.  Once they complete the turn, I'll run past them again.  There are more complicated variations of this strategy, some involving pincers or strike craft support or kiting, but they all basically come down to getting the enemy to spend its time moving around rather than shooting.

The Vasari Subverter and Advent Guardian are two of the best support cruisers for these kinds of antics.  The subverter can disable clusters of enemy units (great for the cohesion-addicted AI) and the Advent guardian can use "repulsion" to push enemies away, allowing you to create a protective bubble area that the AI cannot enter. 

Those are small-scale examples, within the battle over a single gravity well.  At a larger scale, I'm more speaking towards the placement and movement of fleets.  It can take several minutes just to move a couple jumps, so positioning your fleet well is critical.  By attacking at the right places at the right time, you can keep the AI's fleet pinned down (they will almost never create a second assault force, preferring one big "fleet of doom") and not give them the time to reposition. You don't actually have to commit to attacks, instead just give it a light tap to "aggro" its main fleet and keep it from repositioning.  This enables you to control where the AI will attack, because you will never give it the opportunity to reposition to the other front.

All three are situation-dependent.  Sometimes a map is clearly a 1-front map, other times it's clearly a 2-front map, and how you choose to react to the situation is up to you.  Generally you can't go wrong with a large force of LRF, a few good capital ships, and a single fleet applying constant pressure.  If the AI is busy defending, it's not really in a position to attack ("best defense is a good offense" is very applicable in this game, since it's hard to attack when you're busy defending).  However, if you hit a solid defensive line or need to regroup, a second fleet to cover your other front is pretty well mandatory. 

A good strategy when running a two-front approach is "bait and switch".  You will attack with one fleet to attract the enemy AI to defend the planet.  Once the enemy AI has been distracted (ie, it's on the move), your other fleet moves in, but this one sets up a starbase and maybe a minefield in the gravity well it's attacking.  Your distraction force will retreat when the enemy AI shows up to defend.  When the AI returns, your defensive formation will be set up (heck, you may even control the planet if you bombard fast enough) and it will likely be defeated.

If he sends a stronger force to attack your smaller force, retreat to a defensible location.  If he attacks you there, it's your advantage.  If he moves away to attack something else, come back and hit him again.  So long as you're careful to knock out any PJI's, you can keep this up pretty well indefinitely.  The AI always reacts too slowly and will never be able to catch you off guard.

These aren't nearly as bad as you might think.  Scouts get a x2 damage multiplier against siege frigates, and are dirt cheap and quite fast.  Just keep a pack of scouts on defensive duty and you can smack any siege frigates that attacks your less defended flanks before it does any damage, plus they make great scouts

Carriers also work for this, but scouts are more expendable.

Unless you expect a major battle will be going on there, the only thing you should build are repair bays.  These are good because injured units can retreat to them, so a battle doesn't need to be raging there for them to be worthwhile.  Another good defensive structure is the frigate factory.  It's able to build units that can actually defend nearby planets.  Having frigate factories near all your front lines is a great investment since it lets you pump units where you need them rather than building them far away and having to wait for them to arrive.

Thanks again as usual Darvin for your very helpful advice  (again) :]

I'm going to try putting some of your advice into action the next game I play.

By the way, do you happen to have any replays uploaded of you going up against a Cruel or greater AI?  I'd love to see how an obviously more experienced player handles his battles.  Or if you don't have any, do you know of some replays from others I could watch?  Just as DirtySanchezz mentioned earlier, the fact that I have yet to play online against anyone in any form, is indeed most likely why I haven't been able to grasp and adopt some of the more complex tactics and strategies yet.

*edit*

whats up with my text? O.o

Nope, sorry.  I don't have Diplomacy yet (long story) so the highest difficulty I can face is the unfair.

I've seen that before.  It happens whenever you copy/paste someone's account name. 

Manick2005 - as you can see I have the same issue when I copy your name. 

But it goes away when I start a new paragraph.

I went against Cruel AI (FFA, 3AI and me) and if unfair is not that much of a challenge, the economy of cruel AI makes you overwhelmed both in fleet quality (techs) and quantity (number of ships). Expect cruiser spam early.

In my game, i made everything Darvin3 said (except 4 or 5 because i find using the AI flaws not funny) and i killed many ennemy ships with my advent starbase but i made a mistake : i attacked an ennemy fleet witout enough strikecrafts in a system with a PJI and the moment my Halcyon ran out of antimatter, his reinforcements popped in and destroyed two thirds of my fleet before i retreat. 10 minutes after, he was attacking my starbase and the remain of my fleet with LOTS of cruisers.

Without entrenching yourself and attacking&expanding very carefully, i don't think you can win if you go head on without using some tricks like Darvin3's 4 and 5 points. The AI eco is five times more efficient than yours (unfair is two times) and you feel so much military pressure that i find it very difficult to sustain a good economy. Maybe with a good Illuminator spam you could do something but i wouldn't bet on it.

And, like Manick, i would appreciate some replays of someone's victory against a cruel AI. Should be very interesting.

I played a 1v1 against a cruel AI today Advent (me) against Vasari (took a while because I did it inbetween work pausing every now and then and can't say I was real efficient as a result, but...). To say the AI glady sacrificed himself against star bases would be an understatement. The AI when we first met had a huge fleet and could have simply passed my star base and entered my core worlds. Instead it went against a star base with meteor storm and Induced Reverence... over... and over again leveling up my two capital ships at the time. Although I did sacrifice a bit of my fleet early on too thinking I could take out his star base, lol.

While the AI had up to 3 times as much planet income (mid-game) at it's highest point compared to mine it managed trade very poorly to the point we had the same credits earned at the end of the game counting planet and trade income.

Feel free to view if you like: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5790092/Advent_vs_Vas_cruel_1v1.7z

I've also been successful with TEC against a cruel Vasari AI and only resorted to Self Destructing the starbase shortly before invading his homeworld to quicken the game.

I'm sure Vasari would have the same success but would probably need Subs and Overseers with the star base since it doesn't of any AOE if you want to stop the AI with starbases.

there is definatly 3 different things that happen when fighing the ai... perhaps we should judge them differently, because quite simply, when one person says he can beat a hard, he might have done a shitton more work than a guy who beat a cruel if they were playind differently.

You see, the AI is stuid, so you can get away with a few tings players wouldnt let you get away with. 

THe first thing i see is rushing. Ai cant handle rushing very well, so if you pick a small enough map, and place your sova(maurader?)  on their hw, you can conteract alot of thier income bonuses.  since they are also trying to build trade ports and such nonsence, you can uasually crush an ai rather quickly if you know what your doing.  This does work against human players, and so is rather viable as a measurment of player skill... but its more complicated than just level, you also have to take into account how far away the AI is. 

Another thing that seems to happen is starbases.  one can let 9 unfair ai just throw themselves agaist a starbase, while you sit back and laugh at them. eventually you get enough high level caps and fancy research you can walk over the ai... with either your invinsible   donov fleet/missle barrage/subverters/holdposition bombers+skirantra/repluse spam/superweapons/whatever overpowed gameending combination you can come up with.  Humans wont let you get away with this.  This is prolly where most of the "I beat X AI's at y difficulty" comes from.   

And there there is straight fighting.  AKA, you actually beat the ai the way you would beat a human player. no hiding behind a starbase... no getting away with rediculous capitalship combinations... just, refusing to do the things that you know the ai just plain cant handle.  with the new diplomacy AI, i must say i am challenged on a small random (even!... the small randoms can be so unbalanced at times.) map agaisnt one unfair AI if i swear myself off things l can easily rely on to hold back the ai.

I have to agree with this. It is more satisfying to play the unfair AI and not use the obvious OP strategies the AI can't handle like missle barrage or AOE affects. The problem with the Cruel or Viscous AI's is the incredible amount of ships and research they can pull off early game due to their income cheats. However, the levels are there and most people will try to play against them at some point and want to know how others fair which is why they ask.

That said, It's definately a different game online and much more fun strategy wise as half this crap just won't work against a real player. I hardly ever build more than two capital ships online unless the game goes long, but against the AI it's fun to splurge because there are no reprocusions. I also tend to play longer over a period of time as I can pause and come back etc (i.e. draw it out a little).

I'll also add it is good to learn to beat atleast an hard to unfair AI as it can be frustrating to see a player get stalled by an AI enemy when a player drops from a game. Beating a Cruel or Viscous wouldn't have the same benefit IMO.

Unfortunately, "playing fair" with the AI means hamstringing yourself and not using the game's more powerful abilities.  It's essentially playing with a handicap because the opponent doesn't know how to counter these things.  It's also a bit of a tough call.  Where do you draw the line as to what's just a strong strategy and what's something the AI cannot handle? 

I agree with you in principle that abusing the AI's blatant stupidity gets really old really fast, and games where you don't have to do it are more satisfying, but that doesn't change the fact that it's really nothing short of taking a handicap.

Cruel even vicious ai 1v1 is really easy to beat once you know how.

Vicious AI gets 50 cred ps at start. His research and building ships time are much faster than humans. And I bet they get some other bonuses as well.

Cruel AI gets 30 cred ps at start. I'm not sure about other bonuses but I'm betting he has some

But for start its perhaps better if u do play 3 or 4 players with locked teams. That way not all of AIs force will be attacking you.

Strategy to play against cheating AI (fairly simple to kill vicious ai and with luck with map 2 cruel allied against you with same strategy) - It works with all races but easiest is with vasari.

At start build 2 mil labs and scout build carier cap ship (with fighters) colonizer and colonize roid. If vasari research sb if other race u need 1 more mil lab put it on roid. Sb your choke point as far towards ai you can get. I don't build any frigates at this point just cap cariers. You need fighter cover to kill his building destroyer ships and AIs bombers. Now when I'm up to 3 cap cariers sell cap ship factory.

At this point ai will be attacking you with serious forces so be sure you run your cap ships when they get damaged and heal them asap. Make sure your sb is fully upgraded as well. If you are vas build till you have 4 mil labs and research hangars and phase upgrade both levels + oveseer frigate. If tec   go for hoshikas cruisers. Advent needs to have spin upgrade on its sb and if you can meteor (both 2 levels). Its better to have meteor control than weapon upgrade if you need to choose.

Once you have 10 overseers and first 2 AM research with vasari + 3 cariers with repair cloud your sb should be able to withstand anything AI can throw at you. Now build 3 civ labs and research capital ship resource collection thing. This will boost your economy and you will be able to do research and build fleet at much faster pace. At this point you should be able to win the game with no problem. Just defend that choke do research and build your fleet. Game can get a little boring since you have already won ...... its just a matter of time as long as you don't suicide your fleet.

With tec you need to get repair platforms hangars with flak burst and carrier cruisers to help defend your sb. And since your sb cannot move toward AIs building destroyer ships you need to be able to take them out and at the same time heal your sb so it can destroy rest of ais fleet. Once you are able to defend do your research buid fleet ........ same thing.

As Advent you need to get hangars with shield bestoval and multiple repair platforms. Again strategy is to be able to defend your sb do research build fleet and then attack.

Now I haven't been able to beat vicious without this strategy. There is one map (point blank) where u can rush ai but again wasn't able to beat him every time while rushing him. It pretty much depended on what ai decided to build. I did kill him but that win is 1 in 5 games or something like that and only with vas.  

Edit: That vas rush on point blank. Well i used skirantra spam 3 to kill constructors and factories. Again it depends which race u play against and what ai builds first. That goes for structures as well as ships. ..........  

AND with TEC sb. Docking boons and repair structures + support ships complement each other beautifully. That combo is very useful.

does the vasari autosalvage work on enemy ships? cause, if it does... woah... but i dont think it did.... but if it does... wowzies... that tech just move significantly up on my list of things to get.

Autosalvage is structures and capital ships only.  I presume it works on starbases, as well.

It's a bit pricey, and your own capital ships need to be in range (not exactly sure what the range is) but if you're blasting structures it's well worth your time.

well it says only capital ships.... in the description... but it also says captial ships and strikecraft only for the last vasari armor research, and frigs get that bonus...

Autosalvage works for cruisers as well.

I'm pretty sure (90%)range works for whole gravity well. It works for everything you just need to have cap ship in grav well 

But anyway ai always comes to you so i keep my sb near repair platforms and that's where my skirantras are as well. I didn't mention it's very useful as vasari to get missile structures (3-5) and upgrade them with disruptor nanities (name is probably not correct). Target caps and suport cruisers with those. No AM no abilities....... U only need to hit it once then move to next one ..... effect works for certain time.

The only thing I'm sure it doesn't work for is for fighters. Perhaps it does work for bombers not sure but since you get experience from killing bombers it might be possible to get some income as well.

And you get everything credits, crystal and metal. 

Ah and if you have pirates on pirates have disruptor nanities upgrade on their ships so it brings another lvl to the game.

The auto salvage should only work on enemy structures if you have a capital ship in the gravity well.  It isn't supposed to work on enemy ships, but I can't say I ever did a specific test to see if it was working as intended.

according to the string file it is suppose to be both structures and capital ships

Once on mp game i had my caps parked near my defenses and was up against 4 cap ships and 50 carrier cruisers circling around in grav well. I did had hangars with phasic trap (both levels) and had enemy aircraft trapped. I also had overseers to heal whatever he damaged. Game was pretty much decided and this was last battle( i had kosutras so he needed to be attacking). Now when battle started i had 10k in credits and fight lasted for about 10-15 min. I did had 30 carriers of my own and some skirmishers. My income was about 70 cred ps. Auto salvage was researched all 3 levels.

While i was upgrading my other planets buying minerals and pumping more ships in fight with another player after this fight I ended up with having more than 50k in credits. Now i hadn't actually tested auto salvage but cannot see how i could get so much money while spending a good portion of income on both of front i was fighting.

So I'm pretty sure that it works on cruisers as well.

Another thing that convinces me is that when AI attacks (especially vicious) he tends to retreat once he has weaker force than me. I rather attack cruisers than caps while going against AI because they die quicker and while there is a lot of them combined they have more firepower and faster fire rate. I do not build pjs against AI. Not early on anyway because you need to be really tight with your spendings. And after Ais attacks I always end up with huge amounts of money. Now if it was only for cap ships I would get 1-2k per raid at most (that is very optimistic guess) but sometimes i get 3-4k bonus in credits after single raid. At that point my income is about 20 cred ps so.......