Stardock have toughened up the AI in their expansive sci-fi 4X strategy game, Galactic Civilizations III, after they realised that players were taking down their computer-controlled adversaries too easily. Now, after the developers rebalanced the AI, this should no longer be the case, and artificial opponents will hopefully put up more of a fight.
"When GalCiv 3 shipped, the AI was 'pretty good' but it didn't take long for expert players to find ways to crush it," the developers revealed on the game's forum. "So how did we solve it? Data mining. We started looking at how these experts were playing the game. Sure, stalking YouTube players may seem wrong but then again, people openly posting their strategies are fair game right? And with GalCiv 3 being a 64-bit multi-core game, we can toss a lot of computing power at the problem. So we did."
Check out the full forum post here for more details on the latest update to the strategy game, which includes bigger galaxies and a variety of additional tweaks to both single- and multiplayer.