Is the AI easier in ROM?

[frenzyfol]

Hi,
I hope I'm posting in the correct place, apologies in advance if I am not.
I've only played two games of ROM now (loving it), and I'm finding the AI quite easy to beat in comparison with BTS.

Here are my settings

Emperor
Aggressive AI
Scenario Mediterranean Normal size
Playing as Rome
Marathon
No tech Brokering

Now, I would expect to get smashed by the AI on Emperor Aggressive AI. For a standard BTS game I would probably win +50% of my Monarch games and only ~20% of my Emperor games. In this game I just rolled over the Celts like they were not even there. Its 1000BC and My score is 3! times that of the next population.

Is the AI easier or have I overlooked some key setting? I'm posting this because I'm hoping for a challenging game, not an easy rollover.

 

[Afforess]

The AI is stupider in RoM 2.71. The next version (which will be released... who knows when) will have harder AI. If you want a somewhat harder AI, try the Unofficial 2.8 Modmod. It adds many of the AI improvements that are slated to be in 2.8.

The AI really hurt themselves by picking slavery and then whipping their population. Poor civic choices account for maybe 30% of the AI's stupidity...

 

[vincentz]

Im working (quite slowly at the moment) on a modification of the Emperor level.

The AI isnt that stupid. Its just the human player that is more clever.

There is a bunch of stuff in RoM that can be optimized for human players, that the AI unfortunately doesnt have a clue about how to use. This will make the AI "seem" stupid.

One of the bigger issues is the deforrestation. We, as Civ4 players, know its stupid to cut down trees for the small bonus it gives as it will remove healthiness and production. The AI (and half the world in real life) hasnt realised this
Another issue is all the national/world wonders that can be used to make super cities (either gold/science/military/production) The AI will do this in a lesser way, but the humanplayer can combine these wonders/religions/corporations so that the research % is at 100 and 1-3 cities supply the entire empire with super units (10-20xp from start)

Thirdly the AI will have massive armies. Usually placed in 1 or 2 cities. (Its not unusual to see 100+ units in those cities) And then large armies protecting almost every city. The human player can have huge areas even continents without 1 army on, reducing the unit costs to a minimum.

The AI will also spend a few % on espionage (around 20% is not unusual). I, personally, never spend any, giving me 20% more to science. (In my last game I bombarded my neighbourg with spies, agents and special agents, but targeting only my neighbourgh (in the espionage screen) the espionage produced by buildings/wonders was enough to strike him 3-5 times each round).

So in realization that with all that optimization, the human player has to be handicapped more than in vanilla BtS.

Different steps I took : Raised general maintenance for distance/number of cities. This will affect both humans and AI but will stike hardest on big empires. The Idea was that while the huge empire has different advantages, the huge empire has to maintain... a huge empire. Sometimes up to a 60% tax or more depending on civics chosen. The research amount will still be better than a small nation, but not 10-50 times faster as it was before. This modification was however not enough in itself as it will strike both AI and Human Players (HP).

So I took a good look at the difficulty settings (only for emperor as I like this level, and find it balanced all the way up to the middle ages.) I tried to maintain the core of the difficulty level and only adjusting the economically side of it.

Its still not perfect, but its definately getting there

Will be released in Vincentz Mods 1.4 as an optional feature (off by default)

 

[frenzyfol]

Thanks for the reply.
So it sounds like its not something I'm doing wrong.
Ill finish off this game and then have a look around for your AI mods..