It has a nice AI. SOTS AI is still way better tough.
:coughs: ... me thinks you need to play both games longer LOL.
There's nothing wrong with preferring one game over the other and if that game is Sots for that's fine as well... gaming is a subjective matter overall.
... however and that needs to be pointed out: AI capabilities are not quite so ... subjective.
It's not necessarily a matter of difficulty either. You can give the AI 10x as many ships as the player and yeah the game will be "difficult" even with a braindead AI... and that is pretty much the whole point.
It's the varied tactics and adaptability that the GalCiv2 AI is capable that constantly amazed me. Any AI will on occasion still do something stupid, sure, the point is that Galciv2 was pretty much the first game where the AI kept positively surprising me by doing "smart things" much much more often than something stupid... and yes, that does make the GalCiv2 AI absolutely unique. Sots AI again... is functional, but as AIs go is no more or less a "stock" AI as you can find it in any other game. GalCivs2s AI is one of the games features that ate up a huge % of the games developpment time and it shows every time you play.
Seriously... if you can't appreciate the difference... then i would have to conclude you simply haven't bothered to properly compare the two.
Galciv2 has its flaws, as does any game and there certainly are games out there that have more features and longer tech trees (even Space Empires 4 would fit that bill ironically) or flashier graphics and tactical combat resulution (i.e. Sots)... but nope, haven't seen a 4X game that featured AI that was even remotely in the same ballpark. Galciv2s AI likes to do things differently and has a habit of being quite devious at times. I wouldn't call it as adaptive as a real human player, certainly not
... but it definitely does show just how limited most other games AI really is, similarily as playing these games with a human opponent shows the same thing.
Ironically it's also one of the issues i actually have with Galciv2. They deliberately focused on singleplayer and spent a huge amount of developpment time on the AI. It really shows in the singleplayer experience too.
Yet me and my friends are mostly looking for games that you can play
together and that's something you can't do with GalCiv2 heh
. But you gotta give credit where credit is due, and GalCiv2s AI definitely deserves that credit.
In conclusion: GalCiv2 was pretty much the only strategy game that "really wow-ed" me with its AI.
This doesn't mean that other games haven't been "fun" or "difficult/challenging"... but that just proves that AI is only one factor out of many for "fun" and "difficulty" alike.