AI most equal to human player

[SurvivalistMerc]

I'm fairly certain this has been asked before. And maybe I once knew this but forgot the answer....

But I would like to know the exact effects of choosing a specific difficulty for the AI beyond whether the AI will "play better." Specifically, I would like to know if difficulty affects the AI's nation points, resources, or income in any way.

And at what level is the income, resources, nation points, and whatever else is affected (outside "playing better") most equal to what the human player receives?

Thanks

[Johan K]

The standard AI has the same amount of design points, income, etc. as a human player.

The more difficult AIs get bonuses on income, resources and design points. The easy AI gets penalized on income and resources instead.

[SurvivalistMerc]

Thank you

[Boron]

Johan K said:
The standard AI has the same amount of design points, income, etc. as a human player.

The more difficult AIs get bonuses on income, resources and design points. The easy AI gets penalized on income and resources instead.

Could you please give exact values or percentages for that ?
Like difficult ai : +50% gold , very difficult +100% etc.

Thank you in advance .

And one related question :
What determines the AI building decisions ?
Mainly resource costs ?
Could i make e.g. a very hard ulm ai by modding the resource costs of ulm knights down to 1 for them and then they build mostly the knights ?
Or are the building decisions way more complex ?

[Verjigorm]

What I do a lot of times is to create pretenders for the nations I want to play against and then set them to AI on turn 1--It keeps them from selecting crappy scales and the like.

I once had an AI pretender for Mictlan with 3 Turmoil and 3 Misfortune--His main castle was beseiged by Knights on an early turn and he never escaped his castle. Of course it's not to say that 3-Turm, 3-Mis is necessarily a bad choice...I suppose you might be able to handle such a thing as a human perhaps with Ermor, but the computer doesn't have a good enough strategy to work out the problems.

[von_Schmidt]

Verjigorm said:
What I do a lot of times is to create pretenders for the nations I want to play against and then set them to AI on turn 1--It keeps them from selecting crappy scales and the like.

That is interesting - never thought of that. Am at work right now, so cannot check: is it possible to give the nation a huge bonus (ie: 'impossible AI' level) while designing, so that it retains that advantage when set to AI in turn 1?

Trying to improve the SP challenge here!

[Arralen]

No, you can't. You have to create a 'regular' nation (without excessive points) which you hand over to the AI.

I don't know -and the devs never answered my question-, if the production-bonus etc. does affect those nations if you set the AI strenght via command line option.

Found out that with some designs / nations and pre-placed castles the AI does significantly better.

[johan osterman]

The AI will avoid crappier scales at higher difficulties. That combined with the extra design points should mean that it for the most part does not make totally unviable pretenders.

[Ironhawk]

von_Schmidt said:
Trying to improve the SP challenge here!

Best way to improve the SP challenge is to play MP!