Currently, it starts at 0 and scales towards whatever you set as the game's difficulty and arrives there at the game's end-game date. I consider myself a mediocre player, I can do decent on Admiral with a genocide civ, but even I had no problems with a game that was set to scale up to Grand Admiral, with a relatively early end-game date of 2325.
My main issue is that early game the AI is absolutely brutal (on high difficulties) and I have no choice but to huddle behind my bastions and hope I don't have to build too many of them. With the AI alloy buff they can make a fleet AND colonise, for me, it's one or the other, plus I couldn't possibly contest their fleets anyway because they also get a naval cap buff.
Late game, the game gets trivial. After a while I get so powerful that the AI is no longer a concern and I'm just building up my fleet to kill FEs, spam megastructures and wait for the end game crisis (which I never had the patience to do so, I get bored of sitting around).
I thought Scaling difficulty might help with that, but the AI with 0 bonuses is so pathetic early I was able to claim a huge chunk of the galaxy uncontested and just snowball from there. Even though they scaled up to Grand Admiral, that still wasn't enough to make them competitive later, due to how terrible their early game was.
My suggestion would be to change scaling difficulty so not only you can set the end-point of the scaling, but also the starting point and possibly how fast it scales as well.
For example, I'd quite like the starting difficulty to be Commodore and scale the game up to Grand Admiral over a period of say...75-100 years. The purpose of this to make early game not a horror game anymore where I have to be terrified of every AI, while also making the late-game more interesting.
This could be done with a slider with 2 notches on it, thus you could adjust the starting and final difficulties. Bonus points if I could change it to scale faster than just end-game year, since that could take a very long time and I want the AI to get more competent before then.
My main issue is that early game the AI is absolutely brutal (on high difficulties) and I have no choice but to huddle behind my bastions and hope I don't have to build too many of them. With the AI alloy buff they can make a fleet AND colonise, for me, it's one or the other, plus I couldn't possibly contest their fleets anyway because they also get a naval cap buff.
Late game, the game gets trivial. After a while I get so powerful that the AI is no longer a concern and I'm just building up my fleet to kill FEs, spam megastructures and wait for the end game crisis (which I never had the patience to do so, I get bored of sitting around).
I thought Scaling difficulty might help with that, but the AI with 0 bonuses is so pathetic early I was able to claim a huge chunk of the galaxy uncontested and just snowball from there. Even though they scaled up to Grand Admiral, that still wasn't enough to make them competitive later, due to how terrible their early game was.
My suggestion would be to change scaling difficulty so not only you can set the end-point of the scaling, but also the starting point and possibly how fast it scales as well.
For example, I'd quite like the starting difficulty to be Commodore and scale the game up to Grand Admiral over a period of say...75-100 years. The purpose of this to make early game not a horror game anymore where I have to be terrified of every AI, while also making the late-game more interesting.
This could be done with a slider with 2 notches on it, thus you could adjust the starting and final difficulties. Bonus points if I could change it to scale faster than just end-game year, since that could take a very long time and I want the AI to get more competent before then.
