AI War:AI Reinforcement
How Do Basic AI Reinforcements Work?
A: In addition to the incoming waves that the AI players send against the human players, the AI gets occasional reinforcements to its own planets. These are the only two ways in which the AI is able to get new ships after the game has started.
AI reinforcements come in cycles per AI player, like the offensive waves do. These reinforcement cycles are a bit randomized, and a bit based on the difficulty level of the AI player (higher difficulty level AIs get more frequent reinforcements, same as they launch more waves).
There are two basic determinants to how an AI player reinforces: how many planets does the AI player NOT control (so, unclaimed planets and player planets), and what the AI Progress is. During a reinforcement, the AI player can do a full reinforcement to however many planets they don't control, and the number of ships added to each planet scales upward based on the AI Progress.
An AI player can never do full reinforcements on more than around fifteen planets in one cycle (the highest difficulties -- 8, 9, and 10 have planet limits of sixteen, seventeen, and nineteen, respectively). It is possible that the AI will choose to do a double-reinforcement to certain high-value planets, in which case it reinforces fewer planets overall, but reinforces them more heavily. Either AI player can reinforce planets belonging to either of them. So if a very important planet is attacked, they might together put as many as 4x reinforcements into that planet in a single pair of cycles (which might be staggered, or might come nearly all at once).
AI Alert Level
How Does The AI Alert Level Affect Where The AI Reinforces?
AI players will generally try to do more reinforcements to highly-contested planets, planets they feel are more threatened by the players, or their home or core planets. The galaxy map contains information on which planets are likely to be reinforced based on actions the human players are taking -- these planets are shown with a red border in the galaxy map, and show "AI Alerted To Your Presence - Reinforcement Is Likely." This indicator is not a guarantee that an AI will reinforce any given planet -- far from it -- but it's an indicator that the AI is at least considering it. Keeping aware of this indicator as you expand into the galaxy is a good idea, since if you alert the AI too much to your presence, the going might get too rough.
In particular, it is a VERY good idea to not get too close to the core or home AI planets until you are ready to take them. Since they both will reinforce with Mark V/Core ships, it can make things very difficult on you if you tip them off to your presence too soon. Deep raids are always a good idea when it comes to that point in the game! When the AI sees your raid, it will then start trying to reinforce, but if your raid fails or withdraws, the reinforcements won't keep ticking upward. This can make all the difference between success and a stalemate...
