I'm kind of a rookie player so try not to be too harsh on me.
Me and a friend started playing cooperative games against AI about a week ago. Pre-Entrenchment it was pretty easy to find a balance between fun and challenging. Then we dl'd Entrenchment.
In a multiple star galaxy my partner would build 2 starbases in our star grav well. I would hop over to new star system, place 1 or 2 starbases in the grav well, and then we wouldn't see any enemy ships for 3 hours. As soon as enemy ships fly past a starbase they engage. Mostly anything other than scouts or seige boats. The enemy AI basically suicides small fleets with 2 caps and 10-20 support ships into our starbases. I spent 2 hours colonizing a 30 planet system with almost no resistance to speak of whatsoever.
The last game we played was a 4 star, 59 planet game. There was 2 of us on a team, and we put all 4 enemy AI players on the same team. All of them on Aggressor tactics, 2 of them normal, 2 of them hard. There was absolutely no challenge whatsoever. All enemy craft would suicide themselves on any starbase we put in their path.
If I flew into a grav well with 2 enemy starbases, and I wasn't loaded for bear with a sizeable fleet, I would jump out of the system and keep on going. The enemy AI doesn't do this.
It seems our only option is to continue cranking up the AI and the number of enemy AI players we fight against. At some point they overwhelm us too early before we can get defenses up and get anything researched. But, if we can get a starbase built, it's pretty much game over. No challenge.
I guess my question is does anyone know if this is a common complaint, that there might be a future patch for? Am I the only one annoyed by this? A well configured starbase can easily wipe a small fleet with 3 capital ships. And they just keep suiciding all of their units into our starbases. It's kind of dumb.
