Rebellion is no fun anymore

My experience has been very different than your's. I recently returned after a relatively long absence, and while I've noticed differences in the AI I haven't found it any harder. It still struggles to handle well-defended choke points, while spending copious amounts of money on highly ineffective defenses of its own, and is terrible about committing to losing battles and feeding capital ships and titans with huge amounts of XP. It still can't handle large swarms of bombers and basically auto-loses if you reach late-game. There's one aspect in particular where the AI is significantly worse: handling unit production. Its fleet often collapses not due to lack of resources but due to not having enough factories to produce replacements. I've checked replays afterwards and seen the AI with dozens or even hundreds of units queued up that it can't build because it lacks a sufficient number of factories or has upgraded too many levels of civilian specialization on planets with factories. For my part, I still find unfair difficulty too easy and welcome efforts to make the AI more intelligent.

Defenses mean nothing anymore with the unbalanced titans and all the money bonuses the computer gets. I build maxed out defenses on a planet and the comp just rolls over it like nothing. And I've never experienced the bot players not being able to build a lot of ships. On the contrary, it usually has a titan and superweapons built in about 20 or 30 minutes. 

Again, that hasn't been been my experience. Titans are powerful, but starbases still hold their own against them and with proper support will beat the poorly-commanded AI fleets quite easily. Moreover, if the AI's are allied with each other they have no way of getting experience for their titan other than fighting my forces... and I'm not going to let them kill much of anything. It's rare for me to allow the AI titans to get higher than level 2, if they can manage even that.

With regards to how quickly they come online, I'm very puzzled. Even vicious struggles to have titans or superweapons online within 30 minutes, and certainly won't have both. My favorite comp-stomp format is a timed speed-runs against an unfair difficulty AI on random small, and I have a pretty good idea of its timing. By 30 minutes it usually has around 5 planets under its control and is furiously spending its money on unnecessary technology and on maxing civilian specialization on any desert/terran/ice/oceanic worlds it owns while shifting its unit production towards carriers. This leaves its other needs - particularly raw frigate power - severely under-funded. It's exceedingly rare for me to see titans earlier than 45 minutes, and when the AI does pull that its fleet will have suffered for it leaving me in a position where I can just bum rush the unsupported level 1 titan and destroy it with frigates.

I'm playing medium large random maps usually. Same thing just happened, though. Bot player somehow has a huge army with star bases in just a few minutes. 

This is the worst game I own now on steam. It's absolutely unplayable. 

It is important to invest in logostics. It isn't like galactic civilizations there is a limited number of routes you can be attacked.defend them move your fleets as you take territory. This is probably an issue of tactics.

I must agree with Darvin, your timelines are off my friend. Do you actually have a clock nearby, or are you guesstimating? I play on unfair or above, and they're not as fast as you seem to think they are. Even Vicious level seldom kicks out a titan in under 30-40 minutes.

There are many guides out there to help you improve. I would suggest improving your game play, or reducing the ai difficulty.

I didn't have problems before. 

Take this other example for instance: Last night I played a medium map and had 6 capital ships plus my Titan and a ton of fighters/bombers and other ships, probably 30 other ships vs a bot player with just his titan which was fairly high lvl like 8 and two other capital ships and I lost. I destroyed his cap ships in just a few seconds and went to work on his titan (It was that annoying Advent rebel titan) and got it down to like 1200hp but I kept noticing that suddenly and for no reason that I know of, it restored like 2500+ of its own shields out of the blue. And there's lots of stupid crap like that which happens in the game now, and there's not always a mechanic listed for it. I'm telling you, it's bullcrap on many different levels. 

It's game breakingly stupidly moronically unabalanced now for some reason. 

I tell you what, if you guys want to taunt your own gameplay and tell me I'm bad, fine. Post your video of a brand new game with the latest update using fast ship speed, fast evolve tech tree, fast whatever else and lets see your amazing gameplay on a medium random map with open teams. Because I highly suspect that the way lots of people are getting wins over hard is in the way they are setting up the game beforehand.  

Each titan has its own strengths and weaknesses, and you sometimes need very particular strategies to take them out. High level Advent Rebel and Vasari Rebel titans are two of the hardest for new players because they require tactics you wouldn't normally use in other circumstances to defeat efficiently.

For level 6+ Eradica titans, its ultimate ability grants it the ability to survive after death for a few minutes and it rapidly reduces the cooldowns on its abilities as it gets damaged. If you know you destroyed the titan (it will start glowing blue), RUN. It's already dead and will wreck havoc on your fleet in those few minutes.

The Eradica can also heal by consuming other frigates on its own team and absorbing their hitpoints, shield points and antimatter. For this reason using powerful AoE attacks on the Advent Rebel support fleet is ideal, as it will stop its source of healing. It then makes the run away strategy easier to do since the titan will be the only thing left attacking you.

Also a good tip for handling any titan - Every race has a capitalship that can drain antimatter from enemy titans. Titans cannot use most special abilities without antimatter, and they are much easier to shut down as just weapon platforms. These are the Dunov battlecruiser, Radiance battleship and Kortul Battleship. Learning to make good use of your race's ship is very helpful in getting better at defeating titans.

Also this is a somewhat old video, but I cover a lot of tips you can use to kill titans here.

Come on guys let's just all admit AR titan is too stronk AI too stronk pirates too stronk gamma ray burst too stronk, really everything too stronk game is hard, time to go back to playing trinity...

I also think Unity Mass should do chaining damage....

Ah, a classic I was almost beginning to miss. 

Dude,

Try the mods.  Most change the game completely.  You won't even recognize it.  Plus the learning curve is fun.

Sacrifice of Angels 2  (Star Trek Mod), Star Trek Armada 3, Sins of a Galactic Empire, Star Wars Interregnum, Sins of the Prophets, Stars, etc...  These are all delicious feasts waiting to be savored.  http://www.moddb.com/

Hope this helps.

backs out of the room slowly...   

Well I see they made an update for the game but there's still no button to toggle off annoying superweapons and the pirate nonsense is still the same where they attack you every 5 minutes and putting money on another bot player doesn't work to get pirates off your back because the bid is instantly outbid by the bot players and it just goes back on you. It's garbage. It shouldn't even exist. 

There's also several things I noticed about how the mechanics don't really work in this game like advertised.

One has to do with culture not working correctly in conjunction with bonuses you're supposed to get. I was using a tactic the other day with TEC Loyalists where I thought I would be smart and load up a planet that I controlled with broadcast stations. Then I would attack the next planet over and wipe out their broadcast towers first, at which point I thought my culture would easily start affecting the planet I was attacking and since I was TEC Loyalists, my ships would get the massive in culture bonus that you are supposed to get when fighting in your own culture. But noooooo that doesn't work unless you actually control the planet itself, which makes the entire tactic worthless.

There was also something else sorta like that I noticed wrong with the mechanics of the game but I cant remember it right now. Maybe it will come back to me later.

I'm pretty dissatisfied with the whole thing and won't be buying the new DLC or anything else unless this stuff is addressed. 

Well, most people do turn off the pirates. The winner-take-all bidding system isn't very popular. As for superweapons, I do feel they're an important stallbreaker mechanism given that Sins can often get into stalemate situations. If you don't like them, you can always mod them out, but ever since the Kostura nerf (it used to be obscenely powerful) they've been pretty well balanced in my books. Even a little on the weak side.

You're getting two different abilities mixed up. The TEC loyalists have defensive technologies that gives them bonus damage and armor in gravity wells they control, but culture has no bearing on this. There is a general civic tech that gives you bonus antimatter regeneration in any gravity well where your culture dominates, and that does not require you to own the gravity well.

I dont think so but I'll go back and look at it again. 

OK well what about the phasic barrier mechanic? It doesn't work like advertised either because what you can do is take manual control of your ships and tell them to keep bombing a structure even though PB has supposedly 'phased it out' and it just keeps on taking damage. What the mechanic does is simply invalidate the structure as a target for a split second which annoyingly makes your ships stop targeting it. They should just replace it with something else. 

I went and watch Goas video of him and another guy fighting and it was kind of helpful. Im actually winning a game right now on hard if I dont screw up. I started making lots of fighter/bombers early and got lucky with finding relics, but I was still way behind in producing a Titan and superweapons as the computer does that way too fast. But, it is hard difficulty so...

Idk how to do the mods so..

Honestly im shocked no one here has said it directly. Though indirectly they have.

youre exhibiting major lack of knowledge and understanding of the game, you don't know or Titan abilities and label something unknown as too strong or broken. Hard ai is so simple to beat it's unplayable in my opinion.

now I don't expect you to be an expert but when you start bashing a game for whatever reason I do expect a little time put in to learning said game and trying diff things. For instance you losing to advent rebels, how about playing them. Learning their tech tree and Titan, cap ships ect?

An example is a block of illuminates, repulsors, eradica, defence ships, some destr and a bunch of their t5 healers(don't remember the name now) it's insAnd. You outrange almost anything and can chain push everything back out of their range. And if you're good you can warp or move some repulsors around to blob the enemy cluster more so your eradica can burst them to death.

you mentioned a fleet of yours with 30 something ships and bombers with a Titan. Think a lot bigger Man. In multiplayer of you don't have 100+ ships in 15-20 mins on Wing or star bases up in 10-12 as suicide you really don't have a chance.

so aggressive rapid expansion against ais until you get a nice choke point, fill it with a star base and repair platforms and whatever sparkly defences you want. Have a balanced and synergised fleet. the advent one is just an example of good synergy. There are others. Once you feed your caps and Titan a bunch you can role over the cpu quite easily.

I'd agree the implementation of phasic barriers is annoying. It does provide 33% damage reduction, but this isn't really enough to be a worthwhile effect given that production shuts down while it's phased out. The primary benefit is annoying your enemy as his units continually retarget. Definitely a technology I'd rather the game be without.

Idgaf what cheaters in multiplayer do. I seen people spawning in ships using developer code. And I been playing since Trinity came out and I paid for all my sins stuff legit, so I can say and do what I want and play how I want. My tactics used to work just fine, read what I wrote OK. 

A lot has changed since Trinity, and you cannot use the developer.exe in multiplayer. If you do in fact spawn ships in a multiplayer game it causes a desync and will kill the game at the next autosave.

I did, you can't beat hard. 

Therefore you aren't doing ok or just fine.

You don't attempt to learn anything other than what you have been doing. You have little knowledge of the other races and you've been playing since trinity? Really?



Those figures from multiplayer are examples of how you should be playing, we don't cheat. We just know how to play the game. Instead of bitching and moaning, how about you ask for help? Ask for openings. I gave you many examples how to synergies and beat an ai.

Hard isn't hard at all. 



I'm not going to argue how you want to play, sure we all paid for sins, get over yourself.

However if you want to play badly or "your" way, you can't complain that the game beats you when you play your way.

I like to play fifa like a shooter, but my players don't carry guns.. I lose every game so the game is too hard... FML  

Agree with Freyja in a big way.

Struggling with the game? Improve. There are abundant guides and resources available that you clearly have not used.

Nerf the game just because you're too lazy to learn how to play?

Lol

No.