difficulty sliders?

[slo]

Hello all, I was wondering if it is possible for the modders here to make a difficulty slider? In other words, I play on king..I have no problem letting the computer build quicker then BUt I hate the fact that there happiness is +75 so I would like to curtail there happiness bonus....is this possible?
thanks
slo

 

[strijder20]

It's all right if you want to do that, but remember that the AI will have no chance at all if you do so. It's basically relying on huge boni to keep up.

 

[The_J]

Moderator Action: Moved to the modding forum.

A "slider" is probably not possible, but if you don't like the settings of your preferred difficulty level, then you should be able just to edit the "wrong" parts of the XML file .

 

[Spatzimaus]

So here's the thing.

Whatever difficulty YOU play on, the AI is playing on Chieftain. On Chieftain, a player has only 60% of the normal Unhappiness, which explains why you see the AI have those huge amounts of surplus happiness. Fixing that is trivial; just have the AI default to Prince instead of Chieftain. But, as the previous poster explained, if you do this you'll find games to be incredibly easy, as the AI will fall so far behind you in other areas that it'll be no challenge at all. The AI gets all sorts of bonuses to offset its inherent stupidity and inefficiency, and you can't remove those bonuses and not expect the game to change drastically.

Now, there are several balance mods out there that DO set the default AI difficulty to Prince, but make a bunch of other changes that help the AI. Generally, these work by encouraging the player to follow the playstyle that the AI does naturally, since it's very hard to change the AI's behavior. The AI holds back some military units in its back cities, so you add something to encourage the player to do the same. The AI won't start a war unless it has 10 or 20 Happiness to spare, so you add something to make the player do the same. And so on. Find a balance mod with these sorts of things, and you'll no longer see the AI having those huge surpluses, and yet the game can still be a challenge.

Incidentally, many of these mods' methods have shown up in the official game patches. The classic example of this was ICS, a strategy that humans were using back when Civ5 first came out to easily beat the AI even on the highest difficulties; there were a bunch of solutions to this involving specialist slots, city unhappiness, trade route income and so on, and most of these changes ended up making it into the December 2010 patch that fixed ICS.

 

[slo]

thanks for all the replies guys...
anyway...so what advantages does the ai get exactly if i play on king???
slo

 

[Spatzimaus]

so what advantages does the ai get exactly if i play on king?

Prince is the baseline difficulty, with no bonuses or penalties applied at all. So first, let's look at what the AI gets simply for being on Chieftain.

When the AI (or a player) is on Chieftain, it gets the following:
> Only 60% of the normal unhappiness, both population-based AND the fixed amount per city
> +1 Happiness per luxury
> An extra +3 base Happiness (12 instead of 9)
> Roads have only 50% of the normal maintenance costs
> Units and buildings have only 67% of the normal maintenance costs* (see below)
> A bigger anti-Barbarian bonus (+50% instead of +33%) and they get more for clearing barbarian camps
> All tech costs are reduced to 95% of their normal values.
> All Policy costs are reduced to 67% of their normal values.

In addition, if you were to play on Prince, the AI would get a few extras:
> AIs pay only 50% of the normal unit maintenance. This stacks with the above 67%, meaning they'd pay only 33% of the normal amounts. Because it's non-linear this doesn't mean they can have three times as large an army for the same cost, but it's still about double the army size.
> AIs pay 85% of the normal hammer cost to train a unit

Also, no matter what difficulty you play on, AIs always require half the normal gold cost to upgrade a unit. You can adjust this in the HandicapInfos table, it's just that the value is set to 50 for all difficulties.

The above sets of bonuses are designed to give a fair fight on Prince, which again is supposed to be the moderate difficulty. Then, to top it off, you playing on King instead of Prince does even more to skew things:
> Your own anti-Barbarian bonus drops even further, to +25% instead of +33%
> The AI anti-Barbarian bonus bumps even further, to +60%
> AI Worker units work 20% faster
> AI Unhappiness values are multiplied by another x0.9, meaning x0.54 when combined with the Chieftain bonus
> AI cities only take 90% as much food to grow
> AI players only pay 85% of the normal hammer cost to build a building, and 85% of the normal gold cost to rush either buildings or units.
> The 85% unit cost reduction is boosted to 80%
> AI players only pay 30% of the normal maintenance costs for units and buildings, instead of the 50% you'd have if you played on Prince. Combined with the Chieftain bonus, that means they're paying only 20% as much as you.

Also, for any difficulty above Prince, the AI players start with extra techs. For an Ancient Era start, on King all AI players begin with Pottery. On Emperor, Pottery and Animal Husbandry. On Immortal, both of those, and Mining as well. On Deity, those three and The Wheel. (Note that if you start a game in a later era, the AI doesn't get any extra techs.) The idea here is that the AI will sweep nearly all of the early Wonders, putting you at a severe disadvantage.

So again, the AI is getting a lot of bonuses to make up for its sheer inefficiency. If you change the game balance such that the AI's methods are almost as good as a player's, then you can remove some of these handicaps. But if you just jack up the AI's default handicap, the game will get pathetically easy.

 

[slo]

wow thanks Spatz, you put a lot of time into that and full of good info...thanks again.

I wish I can find a level that give the computer what it needs to be a good fight without giving it 75 happiness but o well, GaK is coming soon and we shall see what that offers..
thanks again

 

[Spatzimaus]

wow thanks Spatz, you put a lot of time into that and full of good info...thanks again.

It's not really that much work; you can just open up the HandicapInfos file and go down the list to see the modifiers for each handicap. The only headache was translating the names into something more useful, but most of them are pretty obvious once you know the difference between Construct, Create, Train, and Build.

I wish I can find a level that give the computer what it needs to be a good fight without giving it 75 happiness but o well, GaK is coming soon and we shall see what that offers.

It's very unlikely that Gods & Kings will change any of this. The happiness surplus is a mostly necessary way of keeping the AI from being penalized by poor choices in the early development of each city, since it picks its buildings basically at random. To change this, you'd have to totally rework the benefits of each building to give the AI more ways to add a little Happiness when it needs it, or else completely reprogram the AI to develop its cities more intelligently. While balance mods are more than willing to do the former, and the devs could in theory do the latter, there's very little chance the official game will be overhauled in a way that would seriously change this as it's completely embedded in the game's base design.

The AI's basic priority is to keep its Happiness above ~20; it'll only go into emergency "build a +Happiness thing NOW" when it goes negative, but the AI will basically be willing to expand whenever its empire-wide Happiness is 20 or higher. Cities will randomly build +Happiness buildings based on their Flavor values, but in most cases, Happiness is all those buildings DO so if you don't actually need the extra Happiness, the buildings aren't actually worth the maintenance cost; this gives a substantial advantage to a human player, who'll plan it out more intelligently to save money.
Unhappiness is 3.0/city, plus 1.0 per population.
The happiness buildings are the Colosseum, Theater and Stadium, each of which adds 2-4 Happiness and nothing else, and Unhappiness is 3.0/city, plus 1.0 per population.. There are also a couple special-case ones like the Stone Works or Circus, but generally speaking you'll offset the unhappiness solely through adding these three population-capped buildings (or adding Luxuries, of course).

In my own mods (specifically my Empires mod), I up the AI to Prince to remove most of the bonuses. But then I do things like change the Stadium to +2 Happiness, +2 Culture, and +10% gold (but a maintenance cost of 5 gpt); this makes it something a human player would want to build even if he doesn't need the Happiness AND it won't penalize the AI as badly if he builds it when he doesn't need it. Likewise, while I boosted the base unhappiness rate (to 4.0/city + 1.2/pop), I also added/modified a whole slew of buildings that add +1 Happiness as part of their effect... like the Temple (now +1 Happiness, +1 Culture) and Aqueduct (+1 Happiness, +10% Food Storage). So instead of waiting for the big chunk o' happiness for a Theater, the AI will be getting small amounts of Happiness as it goes, whenever it builds one of these +1 buildings. This makes it far less to go into emergency "need happiness" mode, even without its Chieftain bonus, and even when it does it won't bankrupt itself adding a building that's much larger than it needs since there'll nearly always be cheap options.

The point is, the system CAN be modified to make those massive boosts unnecessary. But it takes a complete overhaul of the existing building stats, and that's just not something that'll ever happen from an official source.