I have played a number of DA games. Settings: tough, intelligent
I am playing on a huge map with two AI. My next to last game went on forever playing against the Drengin and Terrans. In this game I was surprised how well they held on. It might have gone on forever if they bother to put their planet ships into fleets.

At any rate I started my next game. I admit that I hit Ctrl-N a fair number of times to reset the initial map. If you are boxed in at the beginning, you are going to have a hard time. I like the all of the players spread out--usually near the edge. At any rate I hit Ctrl-N a number of times until I got the map I wanted and then I saved it and started playing the game later.

Two hours into the game, it seemed that the AI was not expanding. I finally sent a survey ship to their area, met them, and then realized that I was fooled again. Despite the initial settings, their intelligence was listed as "foolish" (the lowest level) and this game was worthless.

Now usually Ctrl-N leaves the settings the same. But this is the third time this has happened to me. You can't check within the game whether the intelligence level is the same as you set it until you meet the opponents. If something causes it to have the AI start as foolish rather than intelligent, you have wasted a lot of time.

There is a way to check this at the beginning and that is to check the bottom of the debug.err in the DA subdirectory when you get the map that you like. Near the bottom it should list the opponents and give a number under something like "intellence" not intelligence. In my case for tough and intelligent, the number should be 80. Everytime you hit Ctrl-N, it adds to debug.err file and so look for the last "intellence" listing.

Unfortunately I don't have the debug.err for the bad game.

I have seen this happen in both DL and DA but only occasionally. I am sure I did not have the AI opponents set at foolish. When you restart a new game, it keeps the settings that you had set before (and it was not foolish).

I feel foolish. But I feel like I better check the debug.err for every game I start.

Has anyone else seen this or am I the only foolish one? (I guess I know what answer I will get!)