Diff. in AI levels and other factors outside of editor?

[Dearmad]

What factors are there in the difficulty levels outside of the things we can modify in the editor? I noticed: Passive villages always have barbs at Sid. But what else goes on? Anyone know any facts on this?

Reason I'm asking to set the level of difficulty for my game where I want the AI at its peak but not always warmongering- then I'll mod back the buy bonues to reasonable levels...

[Dearmad]

No ideas, huh...?

[Bamspeedy]

Other than goody hut results, I can't think of anything other than what is in the editor and a few things that affect the human.

I assume you mean that you want to change the 'AI default intelligence' level? Like if you set it to chieftain, then the AI would start out with 4 content people on any level. The AI normally always plays by Regent level standards (2 content). Goody huts are worse for the human on higher levels, but not for the AI unless you change what 'level' the AI is playing at.

I don't know if changing the intelligence level would affect the AI research. The cost for the human to research is based primarily on the AI cost factor (costs more to research on higher levels. If you set the AI cost factor to 1, then it costs you 10X more beakers to research than it does on Regent where the cost factor is 10). The amount of beakers required to research a tech for the AI is the same on all levels because it always plays 'regent'. I wonder if changing this would affect how many beakers the AI needs to research techs.

On higher levels, the starting attitude of the AI towards the human is lower (worse), by a little bit. I don't know if they start out worse towards each other, but I doubt it.

One thing I'm not too familiar with, but there is a thread out there about it, is that on higher levels there is a 5-20% trade penalty when the player deals with the AI. (They will charge you more for stuff you want to buy).

[Dearmad]

So the standard difficulty level set in the general tab is for the AI- meaning if I set it to Emperor and then make that diff. level mean 1 initially happy person per city, the AI would get only 1 initial person happy?

And your bit about the techs taking more beakers if I manipulate the cost factor made sense until you seemed to sya it didn't matter... I'm confused.

[Bamspeedy]

If you leave the 'AI default intelligence' alone, then only the human is affected by difficulty level. If you change it, then I'm not sure if the AI is affected or not.

If you change the AI default intelligence, then they will follow the rules that the human does according to the 'difficulty levels' tab (content people, corruption, combat bonus vs. barbs, goody hut results, etc.)

Under the difficulty levels tab there is two basic areas. The left side (for free units, cost factor, etc.) is based on what level you select to play and the AI will follow those rules when you select that level. And then the right side is for the human and you follow those rules when you select that level, and the right side the AI always follows according to Regent rules (unless you change the default AI intelligence).

So, you can either change the AI default intelligence, or you can just change the rules for Regent level (but just don't select Regent level yourself). But if you change the rules for Regent level, that won't affect the stuff that you can't change in the editor (like goody hut results).

[MaximusParthas]

Sid level with normal aggression.

[Dearmad]

Sid level with normal aggression what?

Bamspeedy- I took the AI default on the GENERAL tab to be just a selector that meant when you first loadf a scenario it sets this as the default selcted difficulty level- not that the AI will play using those human rules. Huh.

Also, while you explained everything else really well, I'm still too dumb to parse the bit about the AI having to research at 100% but then maybe at 80% of cost as well. How can I change that if posible?

[Bamspeedy]

I don't know if it's possible. The only way I can think of is by changing the default intelligence (if that even works). If changing the intelligence doesn't affect their research capabilities, than I don't think there is a way.

Someone could test this in the debug mode (so you can easily watch all of their cities and see how much science they are investing every turn). I might, but it probably wouldn't be until next week.