So last weekend we (4 human players) played 4 AIs, 2 Sorian adaptive and 2 Sorian Aix Adaptive on Seatons clutch. So that is two cheating and two non cheating. It was not the best played game, I was eating, another guy had to answer the phone build orders were messed up blah blah. We got stomped so hard. The cheating AI was producing ships in such numbers that my gunships could not lift the seige on a player near the coast. Anyway, it was a cheating AI and it did its job.
Fast foward to three nights ago and we are playing Alpha 7 Quarantine with 8 players, 4 human vs the same combination above. I am hosting, I crash, game restarts a friend hosts. Both games were easy. We make our way to victory without much effort and note that we have had a harder time before playing vanilla using the same setup. Before we actually won, the game crashed again. Never seen crashes in FAF before, now we have two in one night.
And yesterday, we played Seatons clutch again same set up as top paragraph. We pay attention and stomp the AIs. The sorian non cheating were better than the cheating ones. The cheating ones were making masses of tier 1 fighters while we had upgraded to T3. Before, they were making naval forces (tier 2 and 3) in such numbers that if left unchecked we were not able to deal with them. Now, those cheating AIs had a poorly build base, no tier 3 factories or units, only a handful of naval units and not a single experimental.
We have played this over and over, as observers and watching the AIs fight. Its clear the AIx is broken and not functioning properly, maybe the Sorian regular is also broken. We can also see that it is the same regardless of host.
What can we do here? We have all tried redownloading the game, verify files, but its really hard to identify what has gone wrong. Our settings are all the same between matches, we just play with double resources mod and always have done.
EDIT: Last weekend we also played Shuriken island, 5 humans vs 2 cheating sorian and one regular sorian. The sheer number of naval forces and T3 bots being spat out made it an impossible game, they had artillery, experimentals etc but we managed to win. The AIs were pushing up to the doorstep of two players bases, almost wiped both players, one who was actually good at the game (lol). But that game was so much harder than our Seatons clutch last night.