I have been playing for while, and I have been beaten every time by the AI. All the AI's! I get pretty far, get pretty well built up, and then they send a NEVER ENDING RAIN OF UNITS! Even with a 100% handicap I get my arse kicked! I need an easy AI, or a way to make it easier to play please!

You got beaten by NullAI?

I advice that you review your tactics a bit. Try to expand, and make many units quickly, dont try to just hole up and defend. This is true for any game.

Currently it is not possible to set eg the difficulty level of an AI, but this will come. spring lobby now supports it since version 27, now we need AIs to be using options.
But there are really so many options you have now already. First of all, real players online, if they are not noobs, are still much better then every AI in spring. best is, as Johannes said, if you get better. The easiest way to do that is spectating online games, and right after doing a game agaisnt AI, you may see that it will alreayd be easier after the first online game you watched.
Other options to make it easier:
put some AIs in your team, for example, play 3vs3. When using SpringLobby, you can manually specify the start positions for you and the AIs, so you can even set them up in front of you as a shield.

What mod are you playing? It is possible to change the config for AAI to make it easier. If you let me know which mod you are playing I'll make a config for you that will give you an easier ride.

thats quite puzzling because all the AIs are very poor at the game compared to say, a low-skill player. If you build a powerful defence, the AI will send units single file into it to be killed, and if you make air the odds are the AI will have no anti air.. what are you doing, exactly?

maybe upload a replay of you playing?
they are automaticly saved in spring\demos\

Hi,
Here's a nice replay of a game I've played with a friend of mine against 11 KAIK. (link here (it is 17M and hosted on my home internet))

i want!!!

11 KAIK would be very easy to play against, none of them would ever have enough resources in the long run to make it a challenge.

If you want a challenge from an AI change you can change the handicap in the script. The lobby only allows handicaps up to 100, the engine however doesn't seem to have a limit. try a couple of KAIK with 500 handicaps and see how you get on.

by that I mean limited upload.

The currently developed AI's are quite extrapolated ... what I mean is, some are quite good in early stage and then don't really make any sensical strategy, while the others just spam units and do nothing with them for some time to send them slowly towards the player.

When you play against real player you are motivated, against the AI it's quite often a mix of 'I want an easy game' and 'AI sucks so much so why bother doing something smart' ...

What I'm getting at - if you don't queue up build orders and have some kind of time-efficient strategy when it comes to setting up your base then yes, the AI might eventually overrun you before you build up serious forces or defences.

Seed of truth, passive-defensive players will have a harder time than aggressive-defensive players versus the AI any time and more often than not against real players as well. I kind of understand this attitude that you want to slowly build up, play relaxing at your own pace and thrown your weak units against AI weak units, then your stronger units against AI stronger units, then build experimentals/nukes and finish the game after an hour or two, it's part of the fun too ... but, that way you give the AI highest chance of running you down. If you so much want to 'sit' the AI, then rush them early and make them unable to build mexes and expand beyond initial base and when you feel confident - stop harassing them and let them build up in disadvantaged position.

Btw, every time you give handicap to the AI you increase their resource bonus, not decrease it by set %.

Try Kernel Panic's Fair KP AI. I coded it to never build more than you have.

Make sure you're giving the right player the handicap. When I first tried that feature I put it on myself thinking it would make it easier for me, but after getting rocked quicker the higher I set it I realized the handicap goes on your opponents.

The "handicap" gives whichever player who has it a % bonus of resources. That means to make the game easier give yourself a handicap, you will generate more resources per unit, e.g a mex spot will yield more metal. To make the game harder give that resource bonus to your opponent.

in SL it is called bonous, which is, in my eyes, the propper name, while handicap would suggest the opposite (eg, higher number -> more handicap -> the player wiht the handicap is handicapped/will have a hard(er) time)

I'm really sorry to say this but you might try lerning2play...

Ai's are all worse than any player you may encounter online...

Not always. I sometimes lose to RAI, and I'm a gold star.

BaNa if you want to post snidey comments at beginners go do it somewhere else on the forum.

Everyone has to learn somewhere.

Can I suggest this thread is locked it's getting nowehere

No, I think midknight is making a perfectly legit point.

the topic is 'AIs too hard'.

For 99.9% of the community, AIs are too easy

If your problem is that you find the AIs too hard, the problem is with yourself rather than the AI (because, as mentioned, AI play standard is very low) and so you should take steps to improve your play (spectate online games).

Warning: a bit rambly...

Well, I feel that it would be nice for AIs to have difficulty levels, which they almost do. It's not that hard to do. Personally, I'd like to be able to play against an AI that just defends itself and attacks me plausibly rather than just annihilating me with a spam rush at the start.

That said, I found AAI fairly beatable, by doing what ivory_king said in essence earlier I think: on smalldivide, just put loads of really strong defence in the centre, and AAI will just dribble units into it, a couple at a time, as ivory_king said.

I feel that against AIs:
- if you play by their rules, they're really quite hard, eg if you're playing against an AI that doesn't use air or defenses, and you don't use air or defenses either, it's going to be tough. difficulty levels could be helpful here.
- if you use what Everquest would term 'exploits' which means things that are perfectly legal according to the engine, but which get through a 'loophole' in the AI, well then the AI seems trivially easy.

Personally, I never really found playing against AIs that fulfilling in Spring, since games would tend to fall into one of these two cases, ie either horribly unbeatable or trivially easy...

.. but really, what I think I was missing was missions. Relaxing missions that you might have to retry once, or at most twice, but then can move onto the next one.

Personally, I got my most satisfaction by either:
- getting an AI to play for me. Much easier for lazy people like myself :-D
- watching replays of other people playing. Again, good for lazy people like me :-DDD

I kind of think it would be fun to have 'computer-assisted' matches, where you're allowed to use as much AI tech as you want AND you can actively participate in assisting/guiding that tech during the game. I feel this could be really fun.

Sort of like using group AIs, but really full on, no holds barred.