AI cheating?

[TigerGraph]

I recently obtained AC from a friend who hated it and wanted to get rid of it. All he gave me was the CD so I have no manual to read. I played a couple of games on the easiest setting and then moved to a little harder setting. I was suprised to see the other factions send colony modules right into my territory and establish colonies and take land away from the colonies I already had esatablished. I didn't notice this until they had already established the colony so it was to late to tell them to leave my territory. I tried to do the same in return and if I didn't start a war or at least get told to remove my forces the game refused to allow me to establish a colony. It said something like Invalid location. WTF is the deal with this? Why can the AI factions do this to me but I can't do it back? I am already starting to see why my friend hated it.

[Mongoose]

Whether you can establish a base in a given location is subject to two general constraints- diplomatic and terrain.

As far as I remember, the invalid location warning only results from a prohibited terrain type. You cannot build bases on rocky, monolith or fungus covered tiles. IIRC, the mouth of the volcano on Mt. Planet is likewise a prohibited base site. (Except I think the AI CAN build on the volcano mouth.)

The diplomatic constraints are:

- If you have contact with another faction, building a base in its territory is an act of war...no problem if you are already at Vendetta. If you are not, there will be a dialogue box warning you about the consequences and asking you to confirm your order to build there. Building will cause Vendetta with that faction.

- If you do not have contact with the faction owning the territory which you are going to violate (even if you can see some of its units on the map) you may build in that territory with no adverse consequence.

- If you have a PACT with the owning faction, you cannot build there without renouncing the pact. Doing so, however, will repatriate your colony pod (and all your other units in and about that faction's territory) to your own nearest base. If you wish to so something like this, plan ahead...renounce the pact before you move the colonypod into thieir territory! Then you are dealing with the contact/treaty situation I described above.

[Gufnork]

The most likely scenario is that he had no contact with you when he built the base, ie he had no way of knowing it was your territory. When you tried to do the same you had established contact.

[AMD4EVER]

Or is he just talking about the AI moving his ZOC? Perhaps the AI just built a base right on his border which pushed their ZOC into where his used to be. This is a little ruthless in some cases but completely legal.

[igtenos]

Not to mention a valid tactic for Players -- and a very effective one if you can push certain enemy factions to a point where they are shut off from building new bases on your continent. In the long run, they will get left behind for population & bases unless they take to the seas.

If they can....

[UnityScoutChopper]

The most likely scenario is that he had no contact with you when he built the base, ie he had no way of knowing it was your territory. When you tried to do the same you had established contact.

Note that, especially when you are playing a fast-exploring faction, especially one that often explores and leaves a region in the early game (e.g. Sven with a coastline-hugging Unity gunship), you sometimes encounter situations where you, the player, know of a faction's existence, but your faction does not (and thus the other faction does not know of you either). One particularly ruthless thing to do in such cases is to meticulously avoid contact while building in what is obviously someone else's territory, thus violating his borders and drastically pushing them back, without causing vendetta. Generally you can only milk this trick for one base per AI faction (and only a fool would try it on a human), but it can help to weaken such factions when it works.

USC