Difficulty level vs. Difficult AI types

[quickstix]

Hello again, I have another question to bother you all with.

What is the difference in increasing the difficulty level, as opposed to playing with harder AI types? As a baseline, I play on difficulty 7, but only against random easier AI types. I'm yet to really feel like I'm on the back-foot, the only times I ever get into trouble is when I leave a gap in my defences during CPAs and AI ships get through, or when the AI rushes my planet when I attack theirs. Essentially, the challenge for me is keeping all the gaps sealed up. Even then when things go wrong I'm usually able to recover though.

I enjoy 7 and random easier types as it's a fun, yet still challenging game. However, I find the challenge for me isn't overcoming enemy ships, but the challenges of the map layout and keeping my defences shut tight from AI incursions such as waves, CPAs and rushes from attacks. Stuff like attacking enemy planets is usually a fairly trivial exercise and I never feel like I'm in any real danger from AI ships outmaneuvering me, only sheer ship numbers.

Is it that picking easier AI types is what's keeping the difficulty down? From my experience moving up the difficulty levels, the difference I saw was in things like waves and CPAs because I'm still having no trouble mowing down the AI when I barge onto their planets.

Thanks in advance.

[Lancefighter]

try a special forces AI once or twice 
it will certainly give you an idea of whats to come.. even at diff 7

[x4000]

It's really pretty muddy and vague when it comes to the AI types in particular, because different people find different playstyles more challenging.  Basically, those three tiers are named easier, moderate, and harder simply to differentiate those into very broad categories based on what most people feel like are easier, harder, etc.  Some of those harder ones are very much harder, though, for sure.

In general if you're snowballing AI ships on their planets, though, probably I'd say that means you should move up to diff 8 or so rather than increasing the difficulty of the AI types... yet, anyway.

[quickstix]

Sounds good. Enemy ship difficulty was what I felt like wasn't giving me much of a challenge. I wasn't sure how to go about increasing the difficulty after hearing about other people's experiences with 7, but with more difficult AI types. Other stuff brought on by AI type behaviour like waves, CPAs and special buildings as well as map layout (size, type) are pretty much right at the moment, even with the easier AI types.