Slitherine

Hello everyone,

I'm currently playing as the Allies in an AI game with the Axis advantage set to "Moderate". I'd previously played a similar AI game with everything even (no advantage), and won somewhat easily as the Allies. Set to a "Moderate" Axis advantage, it's quite a different story. Not only does the Axis AI seem much "smarter", but the Allied casualities also seem much higher (regardless of the pre-battle odds).

What exactly does each level of advantage provide and/or take away?

Thanks,
Aufbach

I think what is does is alter some parameters in the general.txt file.
I can imagine one of them being the military_advantage_ratio, which tells the AI if it should be aggressive or defensive. And German manpower is also increased with moderate axis advantage. Tech probably also increases.
But I don't know exactly what happens.

Each advantage level adds to the PP, manpower, and war effort percentage side with advantage and takes the same percent away from the other side.

The AI stays the same. It might seem better, but with more PP its mistakes are easier to hide.

Jyri

...and takes the same percent away from the other side.
I'm pretty sure that is not accurate, certainly not the manpower and PP's. I think the biggest impact of each advantage level is the increased tech labs and PP's. At the highest levels the available AI labs is 20+, in other words - maxed labs. You can see what happens with these increments and the impact on labs and PP's if you play as the axis side and assign France as an axis partner within the *.SCN file. The game will allow you to max out France's tech labs right away - I guess they are hard coded somewhere else in the game as always being an allied country.

The increased challenge of higher difficulty levels certainly does not smarten up the AI - the AI is weak regardless of your difficulty setting but as mentioned, with more PP's the AI can get away with some of the poor decisions. It is still going to be a ridiculous challenge at harder levels since the AI's tech will be near maxed by mid-late 1942, and at that point a single AI INF corps can often take out a 10 strength armor unit by itself. It's so extreme that it is actually not much fun to play after mid-1942. I prefer to play at an even setting, and manually edit the files so that the AI side has unlimited manpower/oil and increased PP's, but no maxed tech in 1942. Also, IMO it's much better to play as the axis side since the AI can at least do a passable job as the allies, while the axis AI is nearly worthless.

I am pretty sure it takes away PP's - you can't mobilise a standard France defence becuase you can't buy the normal units - and that hurts against a person!

Thanks for all of the responses. The bit about quick max-tech probably explains why the combat results seem to heavily favor the Axis units, especially early in the game.

The reason I suggested a possible improvement in the AI is because in the "Even" game, the German AI never invaded Denmark, Yugoslavia, and Greece, while in the "Moderate" game, it quickly conquered all three. Also, the German submarine warefare seemed much more aggressive in "Moderate" than in "Even". Finally, In "Moderate", the AI also seemed considerably "smarter" when invading Russia, though like you all have suggested, that could be a result of much better tech units.

All of this said, there are definitely limitations to the Axis AI even at the "Moderate" level: for example, I had basically lost Russia (only Perm left, and not for long) -- but, was able to invade and conquer all of Western Europe, including Berlin, one round before Perm fell. No way a human opponent would ever have allowed that to happen.

Anyway, as a relatively new player, the AI still challenges me, and I still really enjoy playing.