this is always the case in my games, and it was also the case in gal civ 2 as well. the ai always rush builds lots of individual basic units to get its power rating up, whereas i don't really build a military until i have the techs and income to build something i can be fairly proud of (and know that i'm not going to scrap 50 turns later). i know a lot of people swear by the tactic of spamming a load of spearmen in the early game and wiping out the ai before it can build anything, but i've always thought that sounded like a boring way to play. trouble is, once i've got that semi-decent military, an army of a sov + 2x4 melee troops + 2x4 archers + one summon (usually the demon, with it's free, individual destroying 5-damage-to-everyone spell) can pretty much walk into any city unopposed (ironically, this is also pretty boring, so i guess i just wait longer for my boredom fix).
fixes:
- ai doesn't build groups or archers. their huge armies of individuals are destroyed by area spells and can't regenerate like mine can. my archers give me a better ratio of attacks:counter attacks, because they don't provoke counter attacks. no brainer here/
- ai builds a military and doesn't use it. my strategy of waiting until i've got groups and armour is nowhere near as risky as it should be. a few peasants are usually enough to scare off roaming monsters (and that is how it should be, i like the monsters as they are now), and their military cripples their fledgling economy just so they can extort a few pennies out of me that will make no difference to the big picture.
- teleport allows human players to concentrate their forces better than an ai ever could. this is not because teleport is too cheap, putting up the mana cost is missing the point. if it wasn't for teleport i would never bother with the adventuring side of the game because it would be just too fiddly. the real fix is to make the low level teleport spell affect the caster ONLY, and make a the stack moving teleport a high level spell up there with curgen's inferno. also add a spell that increases the movement rate of an entire stack, not just one unit. now that i would actually use.
- finally, and i can't believe i'm still saying this, LET ME UPGRADE MY UNITS! everyone has been asking for this since day one and i can't believe it's still not even being talked about by the devs. i'm starting to wonder if they've got some philosophical issue with the idea of upgrading units, because we never got it in GalCiv2 either (not properly anyway), not even after 2 expansions. until i can do this i'm always going to avoid building troops in the early game, because i don't want the hassle and lost investment of deleting and replacing them all the time. this absence really works against those who build an army early, because they don't even get to keep the experience they've earned.
