AI Intelligence levels. » Forum Post by Tankor Smash

That table is in the manual. It lays out the negatives or bonuses the AI gets at each level plus the algorithms they use.

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

That table is in the manual. It lays out the negatives or bonuses the AI gets at each level plus the algorithms they use.

Actually the OP asked about difficulty level versus AI intelligence. Difficulty level and AI intelligence are related but not totally tied to one another. Also the precise bonuses the AI gets is something that has changed somewhat over the course of the different versions of the game (DL, DA, TA) and is not necessarily totally known.

The Wiki article is of some help, https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Difficulty_level. Basically the difficulty level and the corresponding AI level are listed, like Cakewalk = Fool and Tough = Intelligent and Suicidal = Ultimate. In the case where all AI intelligence levels are set the same then that tells you the difficulty level. The only real difference comes when you set different AI's to different Intelligence levels. In this case Difficulty is in some way an "average" of your opponents intelligence. How this average is figured is unknown. Way back in the day it used to be determined by the highest AI intelligence so you could play one Ultimate and 8 Fool's and still count as Suicidal but that hasn't been true for quite some time.

[edit] One final point. If you change the starting relations from unknown then in general your reported difficulty will be less as well. In my first Suicidal game, I set initial relations to "friendly" so that hopefully I wouldn't be so quick to be attacked. The end result was that the game reported as Obscene even though all AI intelligence's were set to Ultimate. Plus it didn't really seem to keep them from attacking me anyway. [/edit]

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Neilo

Join Date 04/2006

+128

[edit] One final point. If you change the starting relations from unknown then in general your reported difficulty will be less as well. In my first Suicidal game, I set initial relations to "friendly" so that hopefully I wouldn't be so quick to be attacked. The end result was that the game reported as Obscene even though all AI intelligence's were set to Ultimate. Plus it didn't really seem to keep them from attacking me anyway. [/edit]

I actually wonder if this is still true Mumble, at least in the current version of DA. The ZYW's that i have been doing, the last 40 or so anyway, have been one AI on suicidal and relations set to friendly. As you can see in Centurion Neilo's profile, my games were still reported as suicidal.

Perhaps it was changed again as i do know that it once was as you described, and i hadn't really thought of it again till i read your post and it hit me, my games were suicidal.

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

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I actually wonder if this is still true Mumble, at least in the current version of DA. The ZYW's that i have been doing, the last 40 or so anyway, have been one AI on suicidal and relations set to friendly.

Certainly that could have changed at any point. IIRC the one time I did this was with DL v1.2 so that information is pretty dated. Once burned I wasn't anxious to repeat the experiment on a 6 week game.

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Thanks for finding the right wiki page Mumble . The link on the databanks page seems to be broken and even searching within Wikipedia I couldn't seem to get to the right page.

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Okay, thanks alot, this cleared up things quite well. So I should play on Intelligent then to get a nice challenge while not getting overwhelmed instantly?

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

Okay, thanks alot, this cleared up things quite well. So I should play on Intelligent then to get a nice challenge while not getting overwhelmed instantly?

As someone else said in a recent thread tough *is* tough (where tough difficulty is the AI set to intelligent).

It sounds like you're just starting out. My advice is not to get too hung up on difficulty level. Just start somewhere and if it's too much don't be afraid to crank it down or up as needed. You'll find where you want to start out soon enough. You should be able to keep up with the AI's colony rush.

The thing is you'll start out and the lower levels can be very easy as the AI hardly does anything but the levels are not all that "smooth". There's a couple of different points where you'll increase the difficulty by a notch and be suddenly surprised at how much more difficult the AI is. IIRC going to tough was one such level. Another is going from obscene to suicidal, that can be a huge jump.

Thanks for finding the right wiki page Mumble

Yeah I noticed that awhile ago and posted a GalCiv2 site issue about it but got no response. I guess it needs to be made a forum issue to get noticed. I think I'll escalate it up the flagpole a bit.

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