AI Surrender

Okay, so..

I got into Sins a few weeks ago when me and my roommate started playing against several computer players, mostly to find out how long we could survive (3 hards on a team against two noobs. Fun times!) We've gotten much better and are now winning the games.

Well, a week ago I bought entrenchment to mess around with whatever changes were brought to the game. One major change I've noticed is that computer players, after a certain ammount of beating, surrender. On normal and easy, this threshold seems to be about the time you get a jump or two away from thier home planet. However, on Hard, we've had the comps surrender a couple of times the moment we sneezed in thier general direction.

My question is this: Is there a way to lower or turn off the computer's tendency to surrender in the face of mass desctruction? I find the game a lot more fun when you actually get to use that fleet you just spent 4 hours building.

Thanks for whatever answers are given,
Matuin

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The AI surrender behavior was introduced a few updates ago. I believe a successive update made the AI's less prone to surrendering on a hair-trigger. If you don't have the most recent version, that could be your problem right there. I don't have entrenchment, but I understand that the surrender behavior is the same as it is in the most recent version of vanilla.

One of the underlying problems was that some players would just build up fleets up to the 2000 fleet limit, and only then attack. The AI, which has had a smaller economy all game, is in a hopeless position where it's greatly outnumbered by more technologically advanced units. The game has been a forgone conclusion for hours, and you've only consolidated your advantage in the meantime. The AI is unlikely to kill anything, much less actually win a battle, so it surrenders.

In my experience playing vanilla, the AI rarely surrenders, but when it does it's often unpredictable. Usually I have to reduce the enemy's fleet to ashes and be bombing its homeworld before it surrenders, so in my experience this isn't a huge problem. Sometimes I do get a surrender early, but it's rarely before I've toasted their fleet and am bee-lining for their homeworld.

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In Vanilla, I was in the same position you are in. In fact, it actually annoyed me when we'd play a 10 person game and it was 5 AM and I still had a few worlds to go before victory but they wouldn't give up.

Since Entrenchment, though, the AI have simply been dropping the moment look at them the wrong way. I'll see about updates and see if that helps.

An Irony in all this is that the point of Entrenchment was that the races found new ways to hunker down and play defensively, yet the computers in Entrenchment give up the moment you attack.

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So, update:

I played a single player game yesterday after our chat against hard difficulty players on FFA. Something wierd happened: No one surrendered. Ever. I had to eliminate them by demolishing everything in sight to win.

So, I applied this to my next game with my roommate. We played against hard players but put them on teams. And, lo and behold, so far none of the comps has turned tail (Except one that was defeated by another comp. Unrevealed system, so no idea what happened there.) Two of the comps actually only have 3 planets left, but because they have allies backing them up, they have yet to chicken out.

So, I guess you have to try your hardest to make everything about the game a fair fight in order for the computers to feel safe enough to die valiently.

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