Mighty Ai

[Xietor]

I am a very experienced Dom player, but i have typically played on the difficult level. For the 1st time, i stepped up to mighty, and on cradles map, with 15 computer opponents, i got a crappy spot Valoga(bottom left of top right section) next to the water. By turn 10 1 was at war with ryleh, abysa, ulm, and oceania. Having never played mighty, i feared for my forests. But I took out abysia rather quicky with centaur longbows and mercenaries. I kept a big army at my home castle and defended that against repeated attempts by the 2 water races9oceania coming by land from the west.

Now I have ulm's main castle, ryleh gave up its attacks, and oceania is being driven back. Mother oak, gift health are up. my gorgon is doing very little, while my armies of hoplites, centaur bowmen, white centaurs, and war minotaurs are crushing all they fight. Within 5 turns i will have haunted forest up and its basically game over, even though i own only top eastern part of the map.

I was expecting a much bigger challenge from the AI on the mighty setting(: I only play MA, and i have to say the old ermor in Dom II was tougher challenge.

[jutetrea]

I saw an increase in difficulty from easy to difficult, and now i've moved on to mighty as well.. not so much. Admittedly i still use about 25% difficult (so someone else can fail early), but i really haven't seen a discernable spike in AI. Moving up to impossible next

[Nick_K]

Well, you don't /have/ to use SCs. I don't think any dominions AI has ever been able to deal with them.

[Sombre]

I've voiced this in numerous threads so I'm not going to go into details, but personally I find Impossible AI to be a serious misnaming. It's no smarter than normal AI, it just gets more gold, gems etc. That makes it technically harder to play against, but no more challenging. Even people who RP, use suboptimal units, mess around etc should still whomp this level easily.

If you want to make things harder for yourself I suggest you just skip the first 10 turns then start playing. This way you don't out expand the AI in terms of provinces at the start of the game.

[Xietor]

Some big issues with the Ai:

The AI that has astral gems do not use them to dispel spells.
Ai seems somewhat oblivious to the disadvantage of fighting someone that has gift of health up. And it also does not seem to dispel burden of time ever, even if it is capable of doing so and the spell is crippling it.

If the AI has the capability, and is at war with someone, they should try to dispel their beneficial spells.

AI also sends it god in solo to fight against silly odds, when it has big armies near by that can be led by the god.

AI does not take scales to fit its race theme. In my present game, on the mighty ai no less, ulm was playing with 3 sloth. The designers should make a few strong themes per race, and let the AI stick with those.

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmmmmm.....
AIs with unmoving gods. Set it to logical scales. Give it enough gems so that it will use them for things farther down the priority list. And Im guessing remove units from its castle that people dont think it should use.

That can be done. Map or Mod?

[Nick_K]

Or the human could give themselves a similar starting situation to the AI. Try taking an AI-style pretender: a chassis that is not appropriate for SC work, no level 9 bless, problematic scales.
The AI's usual bad setup goes quite some way towards nullifying benefits from the difficulty level. Have a look at some AI scales, then try playing with them. See if you can still beat the high difficulty AIs with a weak god - it's probably not realistic to expect massive improvements in AI design unless, as gandalf suggested, someone goes through all the hassle of making a specific map.

[Xietor]

I do have a SC, but usually only use her early in the game. Mid game she makes artifacts, and just patrols my own dominion.

I do handicap myself by not using any blood magic, and no spells that kill people. I do not even use stealth to take provinces and set tax rate to 200. I never set the tax rate over 100.

[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.