I set up a scenario on Monarchy, and tweaked this setting in Difficulty Levels to the Warlord setting number, everything else was at standard Monarchy settings. Ran it, to see what would happen.

I was hoping it would cause the AI to trade less with itself, since the scenario has 18 civs and it lets them all beef each other up at my expense.

That didn't happen. In fact, they seem to be trading MORE, and their science advances even faster than usual. It's my guess that the AI-AI setting in Difficulty Levels is actually used in a ratio somewhere. As in, the higher difficulty level uses a higher number giving AIs a fractionally LOWER cost somewhere.

A thread on this topic had some posts saying that this number is used to increase cost calculations between AIs in their trades, but I suspect that isn't correct. Anybody have any ideas on this?


I know, I could just run the scenario again and set the number at Deity, to see if THAT limits the AI-AI trading, but the scenario takes a long time...

My experiance is that the lower the number the less likely the AI is to trade with itself. The basis for what is traded seems cost based. And the higher the number the more generous it is in AI <> AI trades. At 1:1, the AI would probably never trade anything. Since they would make the same outlandish demands of each other that they make of you and consequently piss each other off. As you probably know it is also impacted by relationships between them as well. But the AI uses this discounted tradeing to keep the AI liking each other and as a result ganging up on you.
It sure seems to work in my game.

Oh I sympathize.. :rolleyes:

The normal setting in the difficulty levels tab for Monarchy is 140. I set it at 125 (between Regent and Warlord) and the AI was working on Medieval era techs by 600 BC. In my timing schedule, this has consistently NOT happened until at least the AD years. So, I conclude that for this test, reducing the number makes them like each other more. But then there must be some setting elsewhere (that is dependant on SCENARIO difficulty levels, as well as ALSO the difficulty setting in the tab) that is in an inverse-ratio.

Va konstig.