Am I killing the AI somehow ?

[Arreghas]

Hey guys.

I'm having a little issue with the custom games I make.

Seems that when I play a normal single player game, the computer always has at least 2-3 civilizations that make me work my butt off to catch up to them at the Monarch level.

However, every time I play a Hot Seat game with one of my friends in a custom game, the AIs just seem to behave weirdly. They will develop aggressively and develop technologies REALLY fast until they hit the Industrial Age. At that point, they just consistently fail to develop almost anything at all past the first 3-4 techs. At that point I usually completely outpace them and the game becomes really boring. I've had this happen at Regent, Monarch and Emperor levels.

I have noticed that when I set custom starting situations like what kind of units exactly you start with, no matter what the AI level I set for the computers, when you get into the game the message says Regent level. Is this normal ?

So, how do you guys actually make the AI more difficult to play against all the way into the late game in multiplayer ? Seems single player is usually not too problematic, but it does happen sometimes.

Thanks for suggesting anything. I'm open to any ideas to make C3C a challenge still.

Arreghas.

 

[GamezRule]

Try Bug Reports.

 

[Optional]

Better Creation and Customization, since this is a problem with a mod. Modders can help you identify the right settings for what you want.

The AI always plays at Regent. I think that determines their bonus against barbarians and the amount of content citizens the AI starts with, since that remains the same, whichever difficulty the human player chooses.
You should be able to adjust that, though. I've done it sometimes and I can tell you it's nice to see the AI struggling with barbarians as well as myself on the higher levels. However, I don't know of any in-game message that says at which level the AI plays, so that confuses me a bit and I can't help, sorry.

 

[CKS]

I know that in the play by email game DD04, they had intended to set the level to SID, but when they put in custom starting units, they ended up at regent, too. I think this is a bug, but I don't know if there is a workaround.

Are you sure the beginning of the industrial age problem isn't just the AI deciding to research nationalism, communism, fascism, and espionage while the rest of you ignore these techs? Maybe before this they are researching different techs than each other, and then trading, while they all follow the same path through the first part of the tech tree in the early industrial age.

 

[Bowsling]

In the ISDG (there is a link in my signature), the difficulty is on Emporer (although there are no AIs) and it seems to work fine.

I am playing a hotseat game with a friend in Age of Discovery, and we just changed regent difficulty to have the properties of Emperor. And it seems to work fine.

 

[vmxa]

I would doubt that changing the setting of the AI will matter. There is only one AI and it plays the same regardless of the settings.

The only things impacted are the bonus and that is not a function of the AI setting, it is a function of the difficulty setting. That would be my guess.

To get a tougher game you have two options:

1- play at ever higher levels
2- add variant rules to your play, such as AW/NOW or whatever you can dream up.

You could also make custom map with pre-placed town/units.