Senate Victory

[swilhelm73]

If you come close to a Senate victory, the AI powers will get mad, and start to scheme against you. Not bad in regards to AI, I suppose, though it would be nice if you were told this is why your long time allies are turning against you *anywhere* in the game.

However, it seems that this is not the case for other AIs, AFAICT.

For example, in my most recent game, I got a great start and was in the senate.

Well, pretty soon my allies were turning against me, all declaring war on me, and eventually kicking me out of the Senate.

Ok, I'll win an X victory I thought, and sent off 4 expeditions, as I had one X already.

Well, 2 Senate elections later the AI power that had engineered, AFAICT, kicking me out of the Senate wins a Senate victory. ARGH! If those other empires turned against me for getting close to victory, shouldn't they have turnined against this other empire also?

[Strifeguard]

This hasn't necessarily been my experience. Infact, I can usually achieve a Senate victory around turn 200 in a huge 3-arm spiral with 16 empires (my favorite setup) if I really try for it.

It isn't too hard, you just have to balance the "fear" that will make other races hate you against things they like.

For example, to keep 2 of my allies happy, I had to construct a series of artificial interstellar wars. (not artificial as in wag-the-dog, but artificial as in they involved 6 parties who wouldn't have fought if not for my intervention)

A really easy trick to keep people happy is to fight a piecemeal war against the harvesters. If you're constantly attacking the harvesters (while never completely destroying them, as you then lose this bonus) other races will start loving you, as they all have extremely low casus-belli against the harvesters. I like to thing of this as the 1984 plan. You set the harvester's up as the purpetual enemy, and line up the galaxy behind your war "effort" even though you're not really committed to victory against the harvesters, only toward furthering your own private goals.

If fighting this sort of war agains the harvesters isn't an option, you have to set up another empire to be the "fall guy". It seems the major motivation for the AI is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and they then subsequently vote for their "friends".