Hmm. Let me try and convince you otherwise 
As long as this remains good-spirited fun, I'll bite ;]
This is its greatest strength. If you know where it's going to attack, then it's predictable. If it's predictable, then you can hit the AI where it hurts and do a better job of defending. If you can do that, then the challenge greatly falls. If it greatly falls, then you don't have a good AI.
Agreed, and that's why I suggested an option to remove the wave announcement.
http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,4336.0.htmlSee, you want the AI to be able to poke you at you most vulnerable point in order to suprise you and hit you hard, because your most vulneraboe point is often one you're not expecting an attack at. Attacking in weak spots is sommething you'd expect any good player to do
Yes, but the AI doesn't specifically choose a weak spot. Instead, the AI likes to randomly choose to pick every spot, over a long enough time period. A weak spot is not intentionally exploited by the AI, it's simply eventually hit. A good player wouldn't always bash a good amount of units over your time-and-tried proven strong spots. AI does.
See the attached picture for system name references. In this game, against 2 Vicious Raider 7's, I quickly cleared out Manchester and Gaia. I colonized Manchester almost right away, but left Gaia alone. Sigma-19 (My home planet) had defenses at both wormholes, and Manchester had defenses at the Gaia and Chisos wormholes. My weak point was an attack on Sigma-19 through Gaia.
This never happened. The enemy will 100% of the time send a wave directly into your system, before sending them across an empty sector to hit you.
This is predictable. Later, as I was clearing out Cella Dor, Sigma-13, and Dover, all of the backwash hit Manchester, not Sigma-19. Why? The Wormhole from Cella Dor was much closer to Manchester, rather than Sigma-19. Sigma-19 didn't get hit through Gaia until the command post at Manchester fell due to vampires.
Point of all this, even this AI can be forced through a "Hole in the wall" rather than the actual weak spot. This AI just has more random factors, and more units to throw, but this doesn't mean the intelligence cannot be bested. Most of the "Hard" factor is the sheer number of enemies, and the fact that they will hit any sector next to theirs, rather than just any one per given circumstance.
And this is where it gets hard: you need to maintain a good enough defense everywhere, but there's not enough turrets/FFs/etc. to do so (trust me , i know) on qa decent number of worlds. Thus, you must both pick and choose your targets, and also make sure that you can properly defend your important stuff. Otherwise, the ai will find a weak spot (as it's oh so good at doing) and poke it just a little to hard for your comfort
I agree 100% on the importance of defending only what you can defend. "He who tries to defend everything, defends nothing" or something like that applies as well. The most important part of any defense is proper strategic positioning. In that example, one of my biggest priorities is to capture and hold Maine. I can then literally funnel every attack into one position. Even then, my Home world is not without turrets. The other sectors are generally undefended simply because they will need no defense. Everything there can be rebuilt, but my Home world can't.
-----
Map Planet names taken from the game "Freelancer" PM me if you want a copy of altplanetnames.txt
-----
Edit: P.S. a CPA did throw quite a few units at my weak spot, so I'll give it that ;]
