Skirmish against the AI in this game is terrible.

First you have the unit/building limit, so you can easily get stuck and not be allowed to build more. But you can use the Loader program to fix this.

Then when you do this the AI builds like crazy and easily runs out of resources, without even building an army. You can help them a bit by selecting starting resources to 10000, but then they end up just focusing on nukes.

It's like they put no thought in it and after some very challenging campaign missions skirmish is very disappointing to play against the poor AI.

OMG, you got that right!!!

I never ran up against that limit because the AI is so poor in skirmish mode that I win every time lol.

One of the only shortcomings of Machines. A real shame. It almost as if the skirmish mode was an afterthought.

@wildh0rse The reason I hit the limit is because I tend to play these games slowly, build a base, build an army, then do one final attack. I don't attack constantly or try to win as fast as possible, it is more like a relaxation when I don't know what else to play.

Another thing I noticed is that Yellow and Green machines don't attack each other at all, Also Green like to use ion cannon and nukes, Yellow don't seem to use them at all. I guess if you want at least some challenge, you could do the things above, then destroy the Blue machines as fast as possible, so they don't damage Yellow and Green, and then continue to play against the Yellow and Green Alliance that will only focus on you.

I used to leave some enemy structures so that I could build a pretty base and prepare squads in interseting formations to make cool screenshots. Skirmish, to me, is like a sandbox to play around once you wipe out the enemy, or to witness cool battles without having to build an army.

@antrad 20 Years of playing, and I didnt know that there was any difference between colors of units as far as their strategy, I will have to investigate some more, thats interesting......

@wildh0rse It seems I was partially wrong about Yellows and Greens. They sometimes do not attack each other, but today they did. It probably depends on the map, or maybe the position on the map, or maybe it is just random. The Blues always end up destroyed first when I play, they are the worst.

And something interesting happened today. The Yellows attacked my pod with three nuclear rockets at the same time, I never saw something like that. Luckily it was the one I captured from the Blues. They ended up being stuck because of resources and I destroyed the launchers with only one unit, then finished them off with 4 nuclear rockets at one.

We will have to tell they guy who made the 1.5 patch to maybe enable unlimited resources, it would be interesting to see how they would behave, since they always get stuck.

Try this mach1.met. Just copy it it your game folder. Don't forget to backup the original file.

Play only new skirmish maps with:

• default starting resources
• low starting tech-level
• fixed position

Every skirmish map default BMUs is 50k. Low tech-level means low for you and medium for the AI. Fixed position makes the AI always ally with each other. Constructors and technicians are faster and better.

If you want any other enhancements just follow Judas modding guide. It's simple and can let you adjust the skirmish levels to be quite challanging :)