AI difficulty levels

[Arralen]

question on a related topic:
If I turn over a player nation to AI control, which difficulty setting does the AI use? Obviously, it cannot change the pretender or the scales (can it?), but does it get the production bonus from the difficulty level I set on the game startup screen?

Does the AI hamper itself by pretender and scale choice too often?
I experimented with severaly nation design I turned over to AI control after 1..3 turns, and I seems to me that a pre-build nation works much better and more consistently for the AI than most nations it comes up with.

It is especially prone to kill C'tis, Vanheim and Joutmheim off by itself using heavy death scales .. I mean, how far do Niefel Giants Last with death-2, especially as on most maps procinves and therefore supply values are rather small in everage?

[Gandalf Parker]

Standard AI programming: what you cant make smart, make random. If you start out trying to make the AI smart, you make the AI too predictable to be a challenge. If you start out random and work your way backward to smart (by adding code to knock out the worst choices) then its a smoother road.

But yes, there is definetly an advantage to using a .map file or a .dm file to create a computer opponent of some worth. I wish the people who have strong ideas about how the AI should play would do some more of those.

One of the extensions of my "random opponents" project was to collect lots of good castle/pretender/scales/magic settings for Ermor and have it randomly added to the daily generated .map file. And of course working from there to do the same for every other nation. I never got to it but if someone wants to tackle the project (collecting setup files) I will take it to completion and host it in their name

[Arralen]

question on a related topic:
If I turn over a player nation to AI control, which difficulty setting does the AI use? Obviously, it cannot change the pretender or the scales (can it?), but does it get the production bonus from the difficulty level I set on the game startup screen?

Wasn't all that, err, clear here .. at best.
(Better have to turn on preview to re-read what I post)

What I meant was:

If I switch over a player nation to AI, can I control the difficulty level the AI runs at via command line parameters for AI settings?