Experimenting with Civil Wars

[RecursivelyEnumerable]

I've been trying out different scenarios with the "AI Civil War" option.

When I tried 5 AIs plus several hostile-to-all third parties, thinking it would basically be like a typical free-for all strategy game...well...two of the AIs on my borders became extremely aggro early on despite the AIP being less than 100. With extremely aggro, I mean waves totaling 700+ strength. And I was mostly unable to play them off against each other due to the relative positioning of my homeworld and their attack vectors. My two Level II fleets fought pretty well and held them off for a surprising amount of time, but eventually they overran my HW and I lost.

Does AI-spamming in the Civil War setting Always cause something like this to happen, or is it a bug?

And what is it with the Communication Nodes? I don't quite understand them. Isn't it always a good idea to target them?


My next mad experiment is going to be something I call "Collaborative Pest Control". I'll use the "Allied AIs" setting and include several powerful Nanocausts to be the ersatz antagonist. I just need to figure out how I can meaningfully help the AIs contain the Nanos, since I can't take any planets to begin with...

[BadgerBadger]

Civil wars are flagged as "Experimental" for a reason! The intended scenario is that you should activate the civil war after some hours of play when you already have a powerful fleet. I don't know that the game is actually winnable from starting the game in civil war mode, it was intended as a sandbox for people to watch AIs and other factions fight it out.

That said, if you have some save games then I could take a look.

For Communication Nodes, killing all of them starts the civil war. So you want to kill all but 1 of them for the AIP reduction, and only kill the last one if you actually want to start the civil war.