Making Single Player more Exciting

[chrispedersen]

Another thing
When you are playing an SP game - you will get much more challenging results if you simply choose your opponents instead of letting them be random.

For example if you wish to play caelum - choose all your enemies to be fire dominion. Abysia, etc. if you choose nations that are not, make them toughter nations.

Don't choose pushover nations, like jomon or yomi.

[Tifone]

Originally Posted by Sombre

I don't think the AI has any idea what to do with dragons, four armed pretenders etc. They might be able to use a dom10 wyrm with no magic, but anything else is pretty much a waste for them.

Dunno what you base this on, I've often found the AI send the Manticore or others on my way together with an army, surely sometimes non-optimally scripted (i.e. sometimes just put on casting offensive spells in the first turns) but generally I've had more than decent results.

More than letting the AI design its Dragon with 3 magic paths at 8, and than starving his neverending armies of militia in Cold-3 Death-3 dominion for sure

Originally Posted by Sombre

Also the OP asked for unpredictable opponents - managing the start of the AIs makes them more predictable if anything.

And the answer that comes directly from the author...

Originally Posted by NKIcan

So what do you all do to [...] to keep from trouncing the AI through them having stupid scales/gods?

All hints welcome

[Ironhawk]

I wrote a mod, a long time ago, which added cheap ready-made thug summoning spells. Playing this with the AI made the game a bit more interesting because you would occassionally be fighting against a regular AI army but with 3-4 kitted banes or somesuch. Worked out ok - if you like I could try and dig it up again.

[MaxWilson]

I'd like that mod, Ironhawk. As a human it's trivial to consider such thugs "off-limits" but the AI should have fun with it.

Unlike a real thug, I presume, you can't loot items off the bodies (there's no way to give summons *items* in addition to *effects*). That's probably for the best.

-Max

[K]

I just play against all the nations of an era on huge maps. The nations designed by chance to suck get eaten by the better ones and then the AI has their capitals and their share of provinces.