Mighty Ai

[Gandalf Parker]

Actually if you want a challenge game against the AI then start a game, pick a map, put all the AIs in. Dont pick a nation for yourself. Then hit accept, accept, accept (it will choose pretender and name it for you, but you will get no scales)

[TirAsleen]

@Xietor:

better play EA with impossible AI and with vanheim and hellheim next to you.....probably niefelheim too.

its sure going to be fun )

impossible AI could be a lot harder though...but with vanheim/hellheim your pangea will have a lot of fun and do not use medusa as SC if you want some difficulty added at all.

[Xietor]

They actually need to make a MA race called Death that is AI only. To challenge experienced players.

They get ermor death dominion, Vampire queen with 10 dominion, max on every scale, except 3 death. Bane lords would be recruitable commander.

Reamination would not produce ghouls and soulless, but banes, wights, vampires, ghosts. Vampire queen would also start with 10 of every magic, and would be programmed to cast death globals, and dispel any human race globals.

Death would start games with complete line spell research from conjuration and evocation already known.

[Gandalf Parker]

That can be done as a mod. You should request it in the mod forum.

Not sure why "Vampire Queen" though. One of the complaints is that the AI sends gods to Arena or into combat. Why not boost a Monolith

[Wish]

it seems to me the only difference when scaling up is the size of the armies you face.

[Nightblade]

To improve a bit the pretender from the AI, at least when playing in SP, instead of putting an AI and its difficulty in the setup, you could put only Humans. This way you could design yourself each pretenders you want to fight against with its magic paths, scales and dominion strength.

Then you could just get the nations you are not playing going to "Computer Controlled" in the Options when ingame.
But in that case, as i don't find that information in the manual, what would be the level of difficulty the AI that takes control will use ?

[Sombre]

If you switch them to AI from human controlled they're at normal difficulty. Normal is as smart as the AI gets, but they don't get the bonus to stuff that the higher difficulties get (which negates crappy scales anyway).

[Gandalf Parker]

Sombre said:
If you switch them to AI from human controlled they're at normal difficulty. Normal is as smart as the AI gets, but they don't get the bonus to stuff that the higher difficulties get (which negates crappy scales anyway).

In a way, they kindof do.
In the case of mighty AI, they get more to play with but randomly a really crappy setup. In the case of a human player going AI then they get the same as everyone else but (we would hope at least) a much more logical arrangment. So I would consider someone turned AI to rate more like mighty than like a default standard.

Of course the best of both worlds would be to design the AI, and then set it to mighty. With map commands its not too hard, with mod commands its harder but you can do a LOT more unusual changes.

[Ygorl]

I believe that levels higher than Normal simply get more design points at the beginning of the game - no improvement to AI (and I don't think they get bonuses to gold or gems or resources in-game, except from the good scales that they can afford and sometimes happen to take). So creating a nation and then setting it to AI control would be essentially fighting Normal opponents who have the advantage of non-random pretender design. Of course there are plenty of other ways to handicap yourself, some mentioned here already.
Xietor, the developers do read these forums, though not as much as some other people. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for official features that could be implemented as mods; improved AI is always appreciated, of course, and may or may not happen, but most of the suggestions here you can do yourself with little effort.

It *would* be interesting to be able to mod the design points that different difficulty levels give you... Even a half-blind lobotomized AI could probably do pretty well with perfect scales and a quadruple bless... Yeowch, that's scary just to think of!

[Sombre]

They do get bonuses beyond pretender points - it was covered in another thread on the AI (there have been several). The benefit of a non-random pretender design is of little use compared to the bonuses they get at Impossible. The AI will still research at random, use troops at random, never follow a coherent bless strategy etc. So giving them your idea of a good pretender setup is less likely to increase their difficulty than just throwing bonuses at them.

People ask for a lot of features that can be contained within mods or even already are - just look at some of the nation requests. Improved core AI is not something that can be modded. Giving 'cheating' bonuses to the AI is entirely possible to mod, as has been discussed in the mod forum.