changing difficulty mid-game

I was wondering if it's possible to tweak the difficulty level in the middle of a game?

For example, I have one game I'm playing on prince. It's the renaissance age and I have a commanding lead, but if I could just change the AIs handicap to deity it perhaps could make a comeback challange.

Then I have another game I started on Monarch and Shaka early rushed me while I was still producing defensive units. I'm going to be destroyed unless I can change it to settler right now.

No there is no way to do that.

only way i know of is to save it in WB, turn it into a scenario, and restart it at the new speed / difficulty / changed victory conditions whatever you like. i do that sometimes (with hubby's help so that i don't have to go into WB and spoil suspense *giggle*) when i want to "play along" with a save on the boards that's on too hard/easy a level, or normal speed when i want epic, whatever.

but doing that has all kinds of implications mid-game. for example the game forgets about all GPs everybody's already had, so your first ones are cheap but everybody has far more GPP sources than they do in 4000 BC. i think that all diplomatic relations are reset back to the default they would be at 4000 BC too. so no, there's not really a way to do it without futzing everything up /sigh.

last week i played a game with the chipotle cheat code active to figure out some stuff. i forgot it was active for my next game, which i intended to be real, but every time i hit shift or ctrl i was reminded since funky stuff comes up. well, i got too far ahead in that game and the AI needed some advantages. so i decided to cheat for them ... i went into the .xml and altered the effect of the "Washed Out" random event, which usually destroys a road or railroad in your territory, to instead give you a golden age. and then i triggered it for each and every one of them every 10 years . so, sure, they were still at the same level they were, but they got perma-golden age. it helped somewhat, and it made me giggle. hubby thought i was insane and should just start a new higher level game, but i wanted to see how that one played out, the map was really interesting!

i did remember to use the original events .xml for the next game and not that one *giggle*.

Clever!!! I might have to try the WB trick.