The Tao of Gaming

It depends on the format. It looks like two player with goals, any expansions, takeovers if you like, is best. As you add more players they tend to get stupid. Like all producing continuously as you Consume/X2 each turn.

I estimate I win ~60% of the two player, ~50% of the six player. Which means I'm winning fewer games with more opponents but I'm winning way more than I should if I was playing an equally competent opposition.

I recently tried a few games six-player. I won most of them. I don't know about "randomly," but it seems as if the AIs almost never settle after the first two turns. More or less, you can consume trade for the first half of the game and consume double for the rest. Someone is going to produce, and you can build anything you want. Unless it's a key world...they might not settle for a couple of turns. I would have thought that goals are very hard to get in six-player, since there's more competition for them, but that appears not to be the case.

Three-player, it seems pretty strong. And it's 50/50 whether the one that's losing will help you or will help the other AI. I win about half those games, and it wins by a lot from time to time. It is amazing that they can completely crush me from time to time.

Overall, they produce way too much. Comet Zone is enough to get them producing if nothing else looks great for them.

There are a few defects. It is way too easy to hit the done button accidentally. And if you can't do anything (yeah, that's bad, but sometimes I want the bonus for the first six-point development), you have to scroll back through mounds of notes to find out what they did. 0.5.3 is a big improvement over 0.5.2 in terms of display.

I've noticed that they really like Damaged Alien Factory, Alpha Centauri, Ancient Race, and Galactic Developers. They almost never start with New Sparta. They strongly prefer produce/consume to military. They are better at it, too. They also like New Earth way more than I do. I can understand their attraction for Lost Species Ark World, but New Earth? They never defend against takeovers, so it's a good idea to look for opportunities.