AI too easy?

[Mesix]

I've read a lot of comments about the AI being too week to make the game challenging. Many players turn the difficulty up for a more challenging game, but this is essentially letting the computer cheat to compensate for the weakness of the AI.

This past week I have been experimenting with some of the settings in the custom game. I have found that checking the "always war" option makes the game a lot more challenging, even at the lower difficulty levels. With this option checked, the player will automatically declare war on any computer civ encountered. I would recommend the "always war" option to anybody who wants a more challenging game in single player mode.

Has anybody found any of the other settings to change the game for better or worse?

[A+ombomb]

Yep the AI is horrible, doesn't prioritize the proper things that well. Playing against humans will step up your game quite a bit more, and also is better for balancing purposes. I don't really know about using always war, because it messes up the barbarian trait, so it's probably best not used. You might want to try classical era for a little better competition, because that way the computer will have more farms and probably use both agriculture and aristocracy more frequently.

[R0GERSHRUBBER]

Originally Posted by A+ombomb

You might want to try classical era for a little better competition, because that way the computer will have more farms and probably use both agriculture and aristocracy more frequently.

This has been my experience as well. When I start from year 0, I tend to outresearch and outproduce the AI such that I have reasonable tech and expansion/development lead by the time the "classical" period is reached. Starting in a later period removes that lead and makes any given difficulty setting more challenging than it would be otherwise.

[BeefontheBone]

There are a couple of people working on AI improvements (or at least talking about it from a coding perspective), and getting it to use magic properly will certainly make it far more competitive.

[onedreamer]

Always war could be interesting in FFH if it was implemented by default for "favourite enemies". For example Svartalfar vs Ljosalfar and Malakim. Or it could be a FFH option, if possible.