Good A.I. Empires to easily blackmailed by Evil?

from Stardock Forums
Has anyone else noticed that the good A.I. seem to cave at the first sign of agression by the evil empires? I've been playing with the Torians, Altarians and Arceans set to pure or chaotic good, the Yor and Drengin set to evil and myself playing neutral. In several games so far the good AIs and all minor empires are handing over all of their money to the Yor and Drengin to the point of bankruptcy. Every turn the Drengin and Yor rake in 1000s of credits and dump it into ships and technology to then wag war on the whole galaxy. Even at times when the good AIs are more powerful they still hand over the money with no argument, turn after turn after turn. I've confirmed this by going back into the debugging log just to see how the hell the evil empires were getting so much money so quickly. They are literally going from last to first in military, productin and wealth in a couple turns.

I've also noticed that the AIs trade technology back and for with eachother way more than I expected. The good and evil AIs trade freely with each other and although they have smaller research budgets I always end up behind even with a 30% advantage put into my ability scores and spending 50-60% of my income on research. They seem to split up what technologies to research and then just trade all the techs between themselves. On the victory screen I always have researched the most techs but the AIs always have the lastest research because they just trade amongst themselves. Usually I have researched more than 2 or 3 empires combined but they just pool their resources and its frustrating to have the good AIs just hand over everything to evil AIs who are weaker.

Its kind of frustrating when your trying to help stem the tide of evil and the good AIs, who are more powerful than me and, initially, more powerful than the evil just give up.
606 views 6 replies
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
kill them all, those touched by the evil precursor guy will know their own.
CursorFX - Customize your Windows cursor
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Hey money talks.. How many non-proft orgs accept money from drug dealers and murderers? Last I checked all you had to do to buy an audience with the pope was help fund the building of a new a catholic church..

~SDC~
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
That's evil giving money to good and has nothing to do with the situation I presented. The good AIs are paying off evil AIs when the evil empires are weaker. The good AIs seem to give in too easily and this sometimes unbalance the game. The Evil AIs can go from last to first in a couple of turns. Its not a smart move on the part of the good AIs but they do it all the time.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
I agree the AI gives in much too quickly to blackmail; I tell the evil empires to pound sand every time they demand something of me. (If I'm worried about them, I'll offer them something of my own choosing.)

On the other hand, this behaviour does kind of mesh with a "peace at any price" attitude: war is so horrible, we should do anything to avoid it - because of course the bad peoples would never turn our gifts against us, would they? This is common in "terrans" and might be more so among races that are homogeneously good.

As far as the tech trading goes, it's a little annoying but I don't think there's anything that keeps us from doing the same thing except the tediousness. I chalk it up as one of the equalizers that keeps the AI players in the game.

(HTML test? Is this underlined?)