How do you activate / deactivate this option? I can't find it anywhere.
All optional features can be turned off by editing the GlobalDefinesAlt XML file, in this case by setting DYNAMIC_DIFFICULTY to zero
I have been playing a bit more with your tweaks, and this is what I have to report :
- CPs tend to get suicidal with their ships : their privateers keep attacking my ironclads, which is not a good idea. Even worse, during a war, the Spanish caravels kept attacking my protected cruisers (4 vs 14), which didn't help them...
Yeah, I've noticed this sometimes too. I think it's because the AI now considers the relative costs of units when attacking, and caravels are so much cheaper than protected cruisers they are more happy to throw them away. When combined with the fact they probably outnumbered your protected cruisers, and AI sea units attack with quite low odds to begin with in some situations (when the city is blockaded or a threatened with a naval assault) then they will make suicidal attacks. I'll try and tweak this to make them less suicidal. On the other hand, the other option would be for them to hide their caravels away in cities, which if you overpower them so much probably wouldn't have helped them either, so I think the AI was probably just doomed in this situation.
- CPs are way too greedy in resource trades. Recently, in exchange for their clam, they demanded no less than three resources including a horse.
This looks like anti-human bias. Punishment isn't synonymous with challenge.
I assure you there is no anti-human bias, as I agree with you that it's not fun or challenging for the AI to punish you. It would simply be that the AI decided the clam was worth the same to you as the three resources it demanded in return. Without knowing the exact situation I can't decide whether that would have been true or not, if you can attach a save game I could find out exactly what the reason was and perhaps fix it.
- It seems anarchy turns have been increased. Most switches now require at least two turns (on Epic speed), which is way too costly for my taste.
I've not changed anarchy turns.
- I don't know wether this is related to "flexible difficulty", but even though I have "tech diffusion" turned off, most civs end up at roughly the same tech level. It gets ridiculous after a while : in a recent game, the Sioux, with three un-spectacular cities, somehow beat me to Liberalism and kept ahead of me for much of the game, while I had had an overwhelming lead in all statistics for at least a millenium.
There could be several reasons for this:
-Dynamic Difficultly doesn't give the AI a direct tech boost but it does give the AI cheaper buildings, units, and upkeep costs which could help them catch up when behind.
- From the Renaissance era onwards, all techs are more expensive for you but not the AI. This includes Liberalism as it as a Renaissance tech.
- Bigger civilizations are research techs at a slightly slower rate than smaller ones. The effect shouldn't be large enough to make growing your empire counter productive, but it does allow smaller civs to catch up.
- The rate of inflation is now partly based on how advanced you are, so backwards civs will again pay less upkeep and be able to keep there science sliders higher.
All of this is explained in the main
ModMod Thread. All of these options are configurable as I understood some people would not want them. So you could just turn them off.
Finally, the AI does manage it's economy slightly better now, it would likely be running bureaucracy for a small empire and would prioritize Liberalism if it could see there was competition. This of course cannot be turned off.
