enemy AI

[Hullu]

Regarding enemy AI.

Does the difficulty setting (easy-impossible) only make them better players, or will it also give them extra resources etc?

[Endoperez]

The AI intelligence level is the same at all difficulty settings. The only thing that changes are the amount gold, resources, pretender points and various other bonuses it gets. I think an Impossible AI gets bonuses to research and gems, but that might just be due to the other bonuses it gets.

[Hullu]

Ah, so the traditional 'buff the stupid ai' is what the difficult setting is about?

I didn't find a mention of the exact effect of the difficulty setting in the manual...

[PhilD]

Writing a good AI for a complex game is a very difficult task, Illwinter's original goal was on providing an interesting multiplayer game, and they all (both of them) have day jobs. All of this probably turned the problem of providing a competent computer opponent into a very secondary problem in their eyes.

The only thing they could have done would be to have moddable AI - but then, this would most likely be opening the door to so many bugs it's not even funny (in the sense that, to provide nontrivial moddability for AI, they'd have to let you write some actual code to be executed by the game - unless it was in the form of making the .trn and .2h file formats into open formats so that people would be able to write external programs for their own AI, but then that would not be modding the AI, it would be letting players rewriting one from scratch)

[Hullu]

I never implied that creating a good AI is easy. But I would have appreciated a paragraph in the manual about the AI difficulty level - since I have/had no idea what it affects, I actually thought they just use more intelligent algorithms. And I'm a little bit afraid I might lose the game I'm on now playing against 20 impossible AIs since I know just simply outwitting them is not enough, I have to also outwit their superior resources

[PhilD]

Actually, depending on game settings (map size, percentage of magic sites, indep strength) outwitting them may not be difficult at all. Even if, like me, you're a below average player, you'll be a much better manager of your empire than the AI - you'll be better at site searching, you'll use your gold and gems better, you'll be better able to decide that such and such provinces are worth defending actively, and so on. The AI is very bad at surprising you.

Now, on crowded maps, it may be different, because the AI's initial advantage in resources may show very fast, and an aggressive AI may well ruin your day.

[Gandalf Parker]

As far as I know, on default settings you are outwitting an AI that has the same settings that you do. its only if you turn it up that you have that problem and I dont see why that would have to be spelled out in the manual.