Mighty Ai

[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.

[Ballbarian]

No guarantees, but I will look into modifying my SemiRandom project to support adding custom gods and nation starts to existing maps. At least this way you could be guaranteed that an ai god would have scales appropriate to his/her nation. I am not into boosting starting sites and all of that myself, but no reason that it couldn't be designed to allow others to if they so choose.

[Gandalf Parker]

Ive started a thread to come up with a better designed LA Ermor. I will probably release it initially on a map with a set position but you will be free to grab it and work what can be done as a programmed positioning. As for sites... well LA-E starts with only 1 site so there is room to specifically add 3 more. That could be interesting to choose

[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.

[Xietor]

Modding is good, but the "official" game should not rely on the players to improve their base product. If simple steps can be taken to improve the AI, it should come as a patch, not as a mod by a player that 1 percent of the player base will download and use.

[Nick_K]

I believe you can setup pretenders in map files, although I've never tried anything like it. Presumably high-difficulty AIs with custom pretencders could be created that way. I still think that giving the human a bad setup might be easier though.

Improvements to the AI would be quite nice. Second to UI improvements IMO, but still quite important. We did see a big jump from doms2 to doms3. The AI is far more effective now.
AI coding is notoriously difficult for complex games and there are generally complaints about AIs for most strategy games. Things that seem obvious to a human can be very difficult to implement without adding new weaknesses for the computer player. There are very few games indeed which actually improve the AI at higher difficulty levels - unless the AI has been deliberately handicapped at lower ones (for instance, in HOMM4 the easy AI cannot use the 'wait' command in battles). Giving them bonuses and occasionally tweaks to aggression seem to be the way things are usually done. I wouldn't complain about the AI 'cheating'... anyway, it's hardly cheating if the human player has specifically requested a harder opponent.

I'd quite like to see some scenario-type map files that can challenge a human player... but most map files are quite large and I dislike playing anything much over 100 provinces so they probably wouldn't be for me.

[Graeme Dice]

Ygorl said:
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).

The impossible AI has double the resources and gold of the normal AI (or a human).