Changing the difficulty settings to a cost reduction method

Casworon

Prince
Joined
Aug 9, 2014
Messages
548
Currently the difficulty settings work by giving the AI bonus yields. https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty_level_(Civ6)

I have seen many mods that change the AI's bonus yields to use a scaling system that allows them to still hold up in the late game.

However i think there are a number of problems with the bonus yield system which is making me think about replacing entirely with a cost reduction system.

For a start it completely changes the game for the human player. An example of this being a number of early wonders are effectively removed from the game from the players point of view on deity difficulty. Good luck ever getting the Great Bath on deity for example without repeated use of restarts. It also doesn't account for the weak area's of AI play. For example AI is generally weak at launching invasions and defending, but a improvement to all their production yields doesn't reward them for investing in more military over building more buildings or districts.

Completely scraping bonus yields and swapping entirely to a cost-reduction system allows much more tweaking to improve AI play and keep area's of the game competitive for the player.

For example the AI could have no cost-reduction for wonders. So early game wonders are still in play for the player even on diety since the AI lack any bonus production.

Unit's could be given a higher production cost-reduction for the AI compared to buildings and districts. To allow them to quickly build armies when needed for either invasion or being able to quickly gather a defense force when invaded by a player.

I am relatively new to modding. Having only made some basic balance mods and AI flavor tweaking mods for Civ V. But since it looks like the DLL for Civ VI is never going to come and we aren't going to be seeing any DLL level AI mods, i feel that tweaking the difficulty settings is the best method we have available to us to improve the challenge and experience of the player in terms of effort to results ratio.

This is more of a statement of intent at the moment and thought i would post it up to see if anyone had any advice or idea's. No idea how quickly or slow i will progress with this.
 
Eyyy thanks dude!

I was planning to try a 'proof of concept' version first which is just a simple 50% cost reduction to units and a 50% cost increase to wonders and applying this to the existing difficulty bonuses just to see how this would effect things.

I hadn't yet got around to doing the code but I am about 80% sure I know how to do this from my past modding experience. But I might maybe hit some roadblocks.

If it works then the real fun begins and i can start designing the different difficulties and then running AI autoplays to see how the changes effect things
 
Sounds like a very solid todo-list to me, just yesterday i wrote up a lot of sql stuff for a similar effect iam playing around with, scale bonuses over eras for AI, nothing brand new in general, but hey! :)
I could take a look at this specific requirement you just made if it helps, if i find something useful i would drop you a message, may be a good starting point.
 
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