The AI cheats - the devs make the AI able to do things the player cannot ever do and it does it with less resources, faster, with no player limitations that are tightly collared around the players neck no matter how much time you spend tweaking and building your little empire a half pint AI which the UI states has half your military capability will decide, at random, to join with 5 other AI and without declaring war they will all attack in coordinated invasions where their 10K force will immeidately defeat your 25K defense forces in less than 30 seconds on every planet they want the AI can apparently slipstream through space at at least 2x the speed of any player ships and appear at will across the map - while the UI still will claim your military capability is 2x the AI. There is a reason there are a million mods for this game - its not because the game is good - its players trying to balance the game against the devs intentionally cheating AI - the devs are not able to build a game with an AI that is challenging and still plays by the same rules as the player so the devs enable AI cheating across the entire game one you get to mid game and have a decent federation or alliance going you should just quit, delete the game, and start over - because thats where the devs have decided you will flip the trigger that will launch the AI - there is no way to tell if any AI civs are in a combine so when one little AI gets in a skirmish with you the system will not tell you that 6 other civs are now at war with you and there is no way to stop it. I've tried to like this game for years and the frustration is just not worth it anymore.
right from the start the game is unplayable the instructions even for the tutorial are not even possible there is no way to even finish the tutorial..lol.. much less actually play the game the UI provides no feedback for understanding how to complete an action nor does it indicate when an action has been confirmed or accepted overall this game should be deleted from history and forgotten
