Looking for challenging level / setting

[civherde]

We play with three players offline.

Due to the unfortunate numbers of players we play co-operative (to avoid going two on one in our precious freetime, it would be very frustrating to be on your own against two friends).

On Civ IV, Vanilla we are able to beat the AI on Deity / Immortal vs. about 6 AI driven enemys, huge map, but only after a challenging fight.

Now we are interested in Fantasy and play FFH2. But we experience the AI in FFH2 as very crappy, ie. the AI plays bad, is not challenging , makes stupid mistakes.


Can someone give advice to challenging settings for FFH 2 within the given parameters?

 

[Breunor]

Your observations match my experience. Please remember that Firaxis built and certianly playtested the game, obviously with its own rules. Modders change parameters, but usually don't have the resources to change the entire AI based on the game changes.

In addition, a lot of FfH II is based on being 'overpowered'. That is, there is a lot of cool, really powerful stuff, and the only counter is having your own really powerful stuff.

The AI is esepcially weak at sea, so playing on a Pangaea map helps. The single biggest change to help the AI probably is to use the option that it doesn't need its specific buildings to build units - the FfH II AI has a real problem in that regard (understanding it needs the building to build the troops, a feature not in vanilla Civ IV.) If you are a real good player, playing with no tech trading or tech brokering may be a good option to try; this woudl be especially important if you are playing cooperatively. You may want to elimiante any victory besides conquest/domination, I don't think the AI really does the others (unlike the 3.19 BS AI which can be very tricky). You can take Acheron out, the AI spends a lot of resources on him often.

Unfortunately, though, at the end of the day, FfH II is just much more tactically and strategically challenging and humans are better.

Finally, I never played it but I've heard the AI in Master of Mana Modmod may be better than 'base' FfH II, so you may want to check that out.

Best wishes,

Breunor

 

[Tholal]

I also encourage you to give my mod a try. It's main purpose is to improve the AI of base FFH. Click the link in my sig to go to the thread about it.

 

[Copper Golem]

Tholal, your mod can merge with master of mana mod?

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

nope. tholal's mod installs on top of vanilla FFH2 patch O, fixing bugs and improving the AI.

MoM is a different mod, although based on ffh2.

 

[Jarrema]

yes, I strongly incourage you to try Tholal mod! it makes AI really better at seas (and not only) and does not introduce tons of new stuff like other modmods

 

[Copper Golem]

nope. tholal's mod installs on top of vanilla FFH2 patch O, fixing bugs and improving the AI.

MoM is a different mod, although based on ffh2.

well, It would be to good then. MoM gives me real nuts, with tholal's mod it would be too great.

PS
downloading MoM encouraged me to add Faeries to my crippled roguelike.

 

[civherde]

Thank You all for the input.

I will try both ways.

Regarding my first post I want to state that I like CIV and FFH2 very much. But I / we are looking for challenges and by this we noticed that in the long run the AI would be not a satisfiing opponent.
I did not want to insult anyone.