Reworking the AI bonus system
The issue here is simple.
The AI will never hope to match human strategic planning so it needs to cheat in order to get a chance.
The question is: how do we do it so it's challenging but not frustrating?
Imho the actual system while challenging does not give a chance for the player to just play slow if he wants, making the game a blitztrieg before AI starts recruiting overwhelming number of troops.
Especially as Pontus or Armenia the player will need to be Hannibal reincarnated to survive, and even then the risk of ending up like him is substantial.
For those with less historical knowledge, he won every battle until Zama but all his tactical skill was nullified by the fact that Rome would just raise more armies after each defeat. Not exactly a desiderable outcome...
What I propose is:
1) drastically cut down the discounts and tax bonuses for AI to half for normal bonuses and completely for reduced
2) remove all pop growth bonuses except for the very first town level
3) replace the colony cash bonus with a small happiness one
This first step will make cash tighter for both player and AI.
Now, how to give AI an edge?
The answer is again right in XGM.
Take a look at this line from the carthaginian monument:
What it does is allowing AI to recruit libyan heavies everywhere as long as the monument is owned by the faction.recruit "libyan heavy infantry" requires factions { carthage, }
With this, the number of useless levies fielded by the AI is drastically reduced while you're assured to face decent numbers of heavy troops.
Doing this for all factions will ensure the player to face challenging armies while keeping their numbers reasonable.
All we have to do is to elect one or two units per faction that will be allowed to have privileged AI recruitment and test how it works.
AI vs AI balancing:
Some might be worried that without bonuses the smaller factions will crumble quickly against bigger ones.
Let me assure you that it's quite the opposite. Without a blitztrieg player I've had games in which the first faction was wiped out around 230BC instead of the first 20 turns like now.
If loosing faction patterns will develop those can be easily countered by giving them some bonuses but not on global scale like before.
After all, any global AI bonus will only give an accelerated snowball effect, meaning that the bigger they are, more substantial the bonus is, cancelling in fact any hopes of balancing.
What is advisable here is to just give the monument some local bonuses in order to make smaller factions relatively wealthier and at the same time have the effects get proportionally smaller as the faction grows.
By strenghtening the anti-snowball system already in place we could actually make expansion less and less profitable like it should be.
So, just to sum it up:
1) toning down the global tax bonuses and contruction discounts
2) giving more sensible growth bonuses
3) allowing privileged AI recruitment
4) giving localized bonuses where needed and strengthening the anti-snowball system
will bring us a campaign that will be challenging but not frustrating, giving fewer but better AI stacks while giving more weight to player development decisions and slowing down the benefits of expansion as the game progresses plus the added benefit of having a less blatant feel of AI cheating.
What do you think?
Any ideas or alternate proposals?
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by RedFox
Is there any hope for me left?
