Does anyone know the reasoning behind Ai bonuses being removed? I can't find the option anywhere and it was the only thing keeping games challenging.
Ai bonuses removed
- Thread starter deathstarp
- Start date
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The change note must have gotten lost. AI Bonuses and Game Difficulty were merged into a single difficulty setting, because it didn't make much sense to separate "AI difficulty" and "game difficulty" given how much correlated they are, and it complicated development to have to consider them separate things.
We might need to add more difficulty levels, however.
We might need to add more difficulty levels, however.
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From what I have heard (have not been home to check), it was built into the difficulty settings instead.
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I know this is your(Paradox) game, you can do whatever you wnt with It but I do like the AI been agressive towards players with opinion penalties but without any other bonuses. Now I'm been force to play with your preferences .
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They are separate things, though. One is AI behavior and the other is AI handicaps. A lot of people, myself included, want to be able to change one without changing the other. This was one of the things that sold me on EU4 when I originally started playing from CiV. I hate that in CiV the only way to add challenge is to make it so the AI plays pretty much an entirely different game. Now that's no longer an option (w/o disabling achievements via mods).
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This would appear to be the threadspam feature of this patch.
"AI bonuses" and "meaner AI" have been folded into a single difficulty setting.
"AI bonuses" and "meaner AI" have been folded into a single difficulty setting.
The problem is, to make decent AI, I need to play with it all the time in the particular circumstances the player will encounter it. The more different degrees of freedom there are in the settings, the more complicated it gets to understand the implications of changing something in the AI solely under one setting. Having 3 ordinary difficulty settings and 3 AI difficulty settings means 9 possibilities, do not underestimate the impact of this on quality of the game experience. I'd rather make e.g. 5 different well balanced difficulty levels that take into account how good the AI presently is to minimize bonuses given and that were all actually tested by QA at some point.
And with the current level of the AI, how many players do you think would opt to play with a less smart version? There are some cases where we can actually dumb the AI down or make it nicer towards the player on lower difficulties, but the opportunities for such are not really that frequent.
So to summarize above two paragraphs, we want to make (and maintain) an AI that cheats as little as possible to accomplish a given level of difficulty, and where a level of difficulty advertised as "harder than normal" really is that.
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wait what? So on normal AI no longer gets bonuses? I thought AI got free upkeep for border forts.
AI always cheats on some things where it's deemed to seriously underperform, we try to reduce and be transparent about what these areas are.
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What are the default settings for ironman mode now? Does the AI still get historical lucky country bonuses, or has that been folded into the other settings?
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I completely get the difficulty of having to test multiple settings, but it still seems like a shame to lose the ability to selectively make the AI more aggressive towards the player without all the other settings changing.
In my experience, the AI bonuses always seemed to screw up game balance (things like Europe getting overbuilt/developed, etc.), so I liked being able to turn them off, yet still have the AI play "mean". I really hope the future difficulty levels allow for that option. E.g. if there are 5 levels, something like:
- Extra-Easy (player bonuses, AI plays dumb)
- Easy (no bonuses, AI plays dumb)
- Normal (no bonuses, AI plays to full ability)
- Hard (no bonuses, AI plays to full ability, and targets the player)
- Extra-Hard (AI bonuses, AI plays to full ability, and targets the player)
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Not much sense if they aren´t attached to achievements. Is there any data about how many people even play on Hard, and until the game´s end?
I think the game could have a set of achievements for the harder difficulties.
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i dont rly get it, even it it "appears" logical u already had it split so u was offering MORE possibilities to the players
why on earth you REMOVE possibilities for nearly no clearly seen reason ?
i know alot players just wanted the ai being agressiv and not giving them bs boni xD
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Please keep it at 3 difficulty levels. Most will play the middle one regardless?
Nice to see that you are merging the difficulty levels from the current 12 to 3, if i understand you.
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Thank you so much. AI Bonuses what I detested about an otherwise perfect game.
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It isn't problem that AI bonuses and AI being meaner merged into one settings. AI bonuses itself is also lowered. It was 50% more navy 50% more army and cheaper idea cost, core cost, developement cost but all of them are gone except unrest reduction and manpower boni.
I, as typical EUIV player, did many campaigns so far. After played minors few times, I mostly play as mid-sized or majors with hard ai bonus settings because they have many flavor events which many hopeless minors doesn't have at all. Without forcelimit and cost reduction, AI is not more difficult than normal. They are just bit more stable. As you said, EUIV really need more difficult AI bonus (such as more forcelimits as before) than newly implemented AI bonuses.
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