Slitherine

What does AI difficulty scaling effect? Does the medium AI play "Dumber" than the harder AI's, or is it just a matter of how much they cheat?

My last game on medium, I see a lot of really bad behavior on the AI's part. I noticed some of it before on different modes, but I haven't played all the way through to be sure.

Here are some of the most glaring problems I've had:

1. Diplomacy doesn't make any sense to me. There's no indication of why AI's propose a trade deal, and then cancel it later. Why they sometimes like me, and sometimes declare war on me. I just have no idea. It's completely unclear to me what the mechanics of the trade and research deals are as well, so I'm not certain why I would or would not want one.

2. AI's don't seem to properly account for the value of special resource tiles. I saw a number of my opponents build cities that neatly avoid the special incredibly valuable tiles.

3. The tactical AI doesn't seem to be aware that transports are vulnerable. It repeatedly moves units into the water, in striking range of units that it can see. This completely breaks the AI's ability to conduct invasions, or even defend it's own cities if they're next to a lake.

4. AI's declare war against vastly superior opponents, and then don't send any units to invade.

Currently the AI does not cheat on medium, but gets morale boni and mali on higher and lower difficulty settings; I might change it so it gets a small bonus on medium.

Your third point is at the top of my AI TODO list, since it's really gamebreaking.

While the AI considers food and mineral boni, it doesn't properly take into account other bonus resources yet.

Concerning trade and research deals, empires share a percentage of their income/research with the partner (grows over turns, up to 10%), so the empire with less income/research profits more from the pact. We have planned to add hints to the deals so people actually know how they work.

The AI offers and cancels deals based on a weighted formula that considers standings, aggressiveness of the leader, how much they get out of the deal, how strong your empire is overall, and -- in the latest version that we still have to publish -- how close you are to a victory. So if a faction starts to become too dominant, other AIs will start to cancel deals or even declare war to bring it down (which can lead to your point 4).

void wrote:The AI offers and cancels deals based on a weighted formula that considers standings, aggressiveness of the leader, how much they get out of the deal, how strong your empire is overall, and -- in the latest version that we still have to publish -- how close you are to a victory. So if a faction starts to become too dominant, other AIs will start to cancel deals or even declare war to bring it down (which can lead to your point 4).

Can there be a game option for allied victory? I'd rather not *always* have AI factions stab me in the back...