RTS with a good AI?

On Battle for Middle Earth....I never played the first one.

I did by BfMEII, and it sucked. The graphics were nice, and it was cool being in middle earth and everything, but the stories were short and lame, more like an afterthought, and stories are important for campaigns IMO. Makes you fee more immersed.

Anyways, I played it for two days, and then I gave it to my buddy.

Battle for Middle Earth II = nice graphics, and that's about it....

I wouldn't recommend it...

I personally am very much looking forward to Sins of a Solar Empire.

Ugh, Battle for Middle Earth II is terrible. Don't ever play it. The first one is much better. Still, for a challenging AI, Warcraft III's AI still makes me nervous, and Company of Heroes is an intense, fun piece of work as well, although I never played enough custom battles to really get a gauge on how the AI works there (I didn't play enough custom battles because I enjoyed the campaign too much. ~;))

Cheers.

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Originally Posted by bovi

GalCiv2 was really easy in its first version, the AI was poor then and I could beat it on the hardest difficulty without too much sweat. During the countless updates it has been improved quite a lot, it will be a good match for most at whatever the level that gives them 25% extra income is called. I can't say I experienced the AI in GalCiv1 to be anything special, but then again I only downloaded a pirate copy to test it and see if it was going to be worth buying GalCiv2 (oh yes indeed it was), so it was probably the same "initial version can't think straight" going on there.

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Are these free updates of which you speak, or are they the expansion packs? (which seem to be as expensive as the original game, and there also seem so to be a ton and a half of them)

Free updates. They're only available to registered customers through their StarDock Central software. There's also an expansion pack with a bunch of new features, but the main game is still being updated (last 4 days ago) and has received quite a few new features as well in the I-don't-know-how-long it's been out. I don't know how many revisions it has undergone, but it's at 1.50.129 now. The expansion is at 1.80x.

I can't say I know any software developer with better support for their products than StarDock. Blizzard comes close.

Hmm the pound is nice and high ATM, so I bought it (the gold edditon), after using the demo to make sure my poor old comp was capable. Anyone got any good advice for a noob player then?:help:

Play a small game on an easy sandbox level (or the campaign) to get into the game, what to research first etc. Don't be afraid to overspend in the first part of the game, and lower your tax so that you get more people quickly.