AI difficulty levels

[deccan]

Just some ideas here, so please don't be offended.

I think that Dom 2 could do worse than pick up the example of what Aaron Hall did with SEIV. In SEIV, higher difficulty levels determine which of the AI's "ministers" are turned on, meaning I suppose which sub-components of the AI responsible for handling a specific thing. At the same time, the player can explicitly choose how much of a production bonus to give to the AI. This handily solves the common problem of players complaining that the AI cheats.

As for making AI opponents smarter, granted that given technological constraints, it would be impossible at the present time to make a truly intelligent AI, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to make game-playing AIs that "seem" reasonably sneaky and most importantly, "fun" to play against. Making the AI do things semi-randomly seems like a poor way of doing that.

One way to make this work for Dom 2 would be to make the AIs moddable. So a modder might create, say, an nation-specific AI that tries to rush to a particular spell or unit, or builds masses of a certain type of unit at a certain point in the game, in order to achieve a fairly consistent strategy. Of course, once you play against that AI a few times, you're wise to it and can do things that specifically counter it, but the point is to have a lot of different AIs and so increase replayability for SP.

Would take a lot of work though, so maybe for Dom 3.