Making SP harder

[Maerlande]

You should try out SemiRandom by Ballbarian in any of his sigs. You can use it to set up the map by giving the AI's properly equipped SC's and thugs at the beginning. That way they won't be crappy built thugs and sc's. You can also give them starting armies. It's much like what you are doing but you can then use random starts so at least you won't know everything they might have.

There are some great threads on how to build pretenders for the AI as well. A bunch of things are critical so that the AI doesn't send it's pretender into the arena. Best is probably immobiles. I'll link the thread where I asked the same question as you but I approached the solution differently.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com//showthread.php?t=44008

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Maerlande

You should try out SemiRandom by Ballbarian in any of his sigs. You can use it to set up the map by giving the AI's properly equipped SC's and thugs at the beginning.

I have tried it, but it's really orthogonal. SemiRandom will give AIs some good thugs and/or pretenders to start with, but they still don't build effective units, equip more thugs, summon anything worthwhile, or do effective research. You can both set up thugs at the beginning AND modify units in-play. If I were more interested in fighting thugs per se I would of course HAVE to use SemiRandom, but I personally really enjoy fighting armies (which the computer knows how to build more of) more than finite numbers of thugs (which lead to a "paper" defence because once you kill them, the AI is helpless) so I have stopped using SemiRandom very much when I do play Dominions.

-Max