Does AI cheat all time ?

[Slimak81]

Sending a recon to enecmy system , showing 300 fighters + 4 bases tier 1 . Sending fileet to them and suddenly see 800 + figters and this is a problem for almost any fleet. disinformation or cheat ?
Why Ai is so stupid at start and soooo strong at mid late game ? endless resouses ?
ps / badly needed a quad laser AA turret with range 1000 + as mosqito fleet is a real trouble in this game

[mianmar]

Sending a recon to enecmy system , showing 300 fighters + 4 bases tier 1 . Sending fileet to them and suddenly see 800 + figters and this is a problem for almost any fleet. disinformation or cheat ?

Both the AI and player can provide false data to espionage efforts of each other, most like your spies have been feed with bad data.

Why Ai is so stupid at start and soooo strong at mid late game ? endless resouses ?

Hard to tell since you didn't tell what difficulty level you play, if you play on "Challenge" difficulty the AI does not have any bonuses and does not "cheat".

why is the AI easy in early game but strong in mid game, well from my experience from this and other 4x games this means you either didn't expand fast enough (the AI is close to being uncatchable) or you forgot to develop your military and now the AI started to exploit your weakness.
This is especially true if you play against strong AI on large maps with too few AI's.

Usually if you play against strong AI setting, and you do all correct then it's opposite, the AI is very strong in the beginning but as you expand and develop their bonuses are less and less detering.

btw, there is no such thing as AI cheating, in most games if you set the AI strength above normal difficulty then what that means is you intentionally gave bonuses to the AI in exchange for more challenging game.

[Darvin3]

if you play on "Challenge" difficulty the AI does not have any bonuses and does not "cheat".

This is incorrect. I've caught the AI cheating quite egregiously on challenge difficulty.

I often have sabotage ships running perpetual missions on border worlds, destroying surface buildings to earn XP (you basically can't even attempt to steal techs until two stars, and it takes A LOT of missions to build up to that). These ships sometimes spot buildings just spontaneously appearing out of nowhere. In one particularly egregious case, I had a single sabotage ship running missions on an earthlike planet. When it left to recharge its espionage points the earthlike had only research centers (no factories). When it came back only about a year later the planet had a full set of resource extractors (gravitonium, reidium, plutonium, some metal and organics... the works).

I've see similar things happen with orbital satellites and fighters. I'll blockade a freshly colonized world by surrounding it with my own colonies so freighters can't show up, but that still doesn't stop orbital satellites from popping up within about 10 years or so. I think corvettes and other larger ships will only appear on worlds with orbital shipyards, so it wouldn't be nearly as obvious if one just popped up out of nowhere, but given everything I've seen that seems very likely. The kinds of fleets the AI amasses within the first 100 years of the game make me pretty sure it's not just the production it's getting for free but also the resources.

btw, there is no such thing as AI cheating, in most games if you set the AI strength above normal difficulty then what that means is you intentionally gave bonuses to the AI in exchange for more challenging game.

Semantics. There is a difference between an AI whose difficulty is increased via better intelligence, and an AI whose difficulty is increased by letting it break the rules of the game. Cheating is a perfectly apt description of the latter.

[mianmar]

This is incorrect. I've caught the AI cheating quite egregiously on challenge difficulty.

I often have sabotage ships running perpetual missions on border worlds, destroying surface buildings to earn XP (you basically can't even attempt to steal techs until two stars, and it takes A LOT of missions to build up to that). These ships sometimes spot buildings just spontaneously appearing out of nowhere. In one particularly egregious case, I had a single sabotage ship running missions on an earthlike planet. When it left to recharge its espionage points the earthlike had only research centers (no factories). When it came back only about a year later the planet had a full set of resource extractors (gravitonium, reidium, plutonium, some metal and organics... the works).

Your observations sounds logical but can't be taken as correct since you didn't take into account that the AI can feed your spies with false information, which is most likely the case in you observation.

Semantics. There is a difference between an AI whose difficulty is increased via better intelligence, and an AI whose difficulty is increased by letting it break the rules of the game. Cheating is a perfectly apt description of the latter.

I'm sorry but can't agree with that either because what are you talking about here is the setting known as "AI handicap" which I used to see in some older games but it is no longer popular in today's games, since most players seek strong AI instead of handicap'ed.

If you read random game forums you'll see the the "AI cheating" idiom mentioned quite often, but just because it's often mentioned doesn't necessary need to be true.
I personally relate such comments with those who simply copy/paste opinions from one forum to another and those who are usually lazy to read wikis and manuals so the best thing they can do is say the "AI is cheating".

[Darvin3]

Your observations sounds logical but can't be taken as correct since you didn't take into account that the AI can feed your spies with false information, which is most likely the case in you observation.

Except I actually did invade the blockade worlds and there really were orbital satellites there. Spy ships weren't even involved in that case.

I'm not aware of any means to feed false information about surface buildings, nor have I ever encountered a case where on invasion I've found the surface garrison different from what was reported. Again, I really was able to carry out sabotage missions to destroy them.