3 comments on “Endless Space: Disharmony

  1. I am up to turn 95 in my present game which is set on normal difficulty, and I havent go any of the race’s ships attacking me yet only a couple of easily beat pirate fleets. I have made friends with all the surrounding races though so that might be why, picking on one at a time is important in not being swamped. Mind you I am third last in my game of eight races. I have one defensive fleets that is 11000 strong cmpared to the priates who were 2500 strong – you do that by getting heros on your fleets and upgrading your weapons often. So far I havent found the game difficult at all myself, no worse than my first game a year ago with the original version of the game. But admittedly I havent got into a war with another race yet so I may well see what you are saying in a few turns, when I plan to attack the Harmony.

  2. I’m not sure if changes were made to the AI since this review but I have found that the AI is reasonable. On normal difficulty the AI is pretty easy. The main issues are that you will generally be in a war at around turn 50 and if it goes badly you will be destroyed by turn 80. The game is multi-layered enough that if you work out the mechanics you will do well, essentially this means using tactics like building scouts to get an idea of what weapons the enemy is using and then make sure that you create fleets that can counter the constructed fleets. The main difference in difficulty settings is how the AI reacts to what you are doing. On normal difficulty the AI’s tactics remain static which allows you to make one type of ship design and then dominate, in the harder difficulty settings the AI adapts to what you are doing. I’ve played a couple of times and have found that the normal difficulty moderate in the early game and easy in the mid to late game. The harder difficulties are unforgiving and require that you constantly adapt to what the AI fields throughout the game. What impresses me about the AI is that it appears to take strategic objectives into account when it declares war. For instance if you stay in your corner of the galaxy you are more likely to be left alone, whereas if you expand into the centre and occupy strategic points, even the more peaceful empires will declare war on you. Getting peace generally requires taking at least one system off of the AI

  3. AI in Disharmony is exceptionally poor. If you play a crowded universe, where being smart is important for winning, the ship-spamming is the only way for AI to keep up – it still looses hopelessly.

    The fact that AI cheats, even on Normal, becomes pretty apparent if you select just one opponent on a big galaxy. About 50 turns into the game, with both you and the opponent having about 10-12 planets his fleet will be about 10 times bigger than yours. This is mathematically impossible.

    You lose the game because on big galaxy there are no choke-points and AI invades like 6 of your planets at once. If you even manage to destroy these fleets, new ones show up immediately, as if the computer can manufacture 20 ships a turn (considering we are on turn 70 and his tech level is about the same as yours – this is BS). Another cheat – his heroes will be the same level as mine. Since there is NOBODY ELSE to fight in the galaxy but me, and the last 20 fleets I fought had no hero, how did he level up?

    Again, that completely fake AI is less obvious when there are multiple enemies in the galaxy and a lot of action going on is fake-AI on fake-AI. However once there is only you and the computer – you can see that computer fleet heroes level up without fighting and his 10 planets crank out 50-60 cruisers per turn, while doing research and building improvements at the same time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *