Painful difficulty level

Hi!

Shouldn't be. IIRC the Painfull level gives AI 5% more output (money, research, production). But the game depends quite a lot of simple luck at obtaining habitable planets. The AI(s) may just be lucky, or you unlucky at obtaining (good) habitable planets. I'd suggest you to check that first.

BR,  Iztok

I was under the impression Painful and Crippling were economic bonuses only.

Granted, I haven't played at either (skipped past to Maso)...

Well... It sure feels like a cualitative difference to me.  The AI is much tougher!!!  Any way, do you guys have any advice?

Thanks.

Could it be, not so much the difficulty level but the "maximum CPU" ?

You really shouldn't see THAT much of a difference in the AI going up just one level, no matter what that level is.

Could it just be the Race of the opponet you are playing against? Some are more aggresive than others go right for weapons. It depends on what you mean by getting you behind handed to you. Is that in military and research and colonies etc. ? Or just in one area.

It all difficulty levels there is a teetering point where you pass the AI in most, then all, aspects of the game. On the higher levels that point is just further in the future. Winning is a matter of surviving until you can get to that point and beyond. Very simplified, I know.

And if you really find it that tough to beat, enjoy it while you can.

The game is most fun when you are struggling to survive.

Read Principle2 from Steffen Gerlach's opensource cEvo game project on that page...!

http://c-evo.org/text.html

Then, scroll all the way down to the Score section...

http://c-evo.org/faq.html

Afterwards, try to determine what matters most; Difficulty levels *OR* the actual context (however static or simulated) upon which these variable conditions are applied.

Plus, if you play a game with all evil civ's in it, and leave out the Torians, Thalans, and Terrans (unless you are playing one of them), the game should be a walk in the park... since you would have all the time in the world to pretty much settle the whole universe on larger maps.

The other way around, no evil civ's, with all neutral and good will make the game much tougher.

Unless it's from Crippling to Maso, where the bonuses go from 125% economic to 200% economic, production, and research.

On a percentage basis, it's the highest change there is (apart from Cakewalk to Easy, which is only an economic factor from 10% to 25%).

Sole Soul, just to ask out of my own curiosity... what is the highest difficulty you have beat? And also, I have tinkered with for hours and yet to discover your terror star trick to beam it around the galaxy at will!

I play Maso.  I used to play Tough.  I had an ethical dilemma centered around the hidden bonus to research when a research bonus is present that a player gets at the higher difficulties, in addition to it messing with my overall initial strategy with regards to research numbers, such that I stuck at Tough for months after I should have gone to Suicidal.

I should probably play Suicidal, but although Maso isn't a challenge anymore, either, I like it better than Tough.  Besides, I like perfecting my rush.

Well then you'll just have to keep tinkering!  Better hurry up, before they fix it. 

Just to add – after regularly trouncing the AI at ‘tough’, last night I started my first painful difficulty game and I agree with the OP. The AI is much more aggressive and seems to research faster. They even protected their transports (sometimes) and responded far quicker when I changed weapon type.

To be honest, whilst I was still enjoying the game, it never really felt like ‘tough’ used different algorithms to the easier difficulties – my experience at painful feels totally different – the
AI is pretty tricky.

I’ve played several games at tough and think I’m being pretty objective in my assessment.

I play EU – perhaps the difficulty was tweaked for this version?

As far as I have heard, EU is the same as the individual games, just combined into one. Same as the whole ultimate bundle pack... of course, Sole Soul is the expert on all this type of stuff, his immense knowledge of EVERYTHING never ceases to amaze me. lol

When I first started playing, with DL at least I found the move from Challenging to Tough the most Challenging (no pun intended), if I can remember right. I had to change my tactics quite a bit. Same with when I went from Maso to Obscene (DRASTIC change there, although I absoultely refuse to ever use the all-factories or all-research stategy). I will attempt to beat the toughest difficutly without using those strategies one of these days.  EDIT: I forgot Suicidal is the toughest difficulty... it's actually not too difficult, bummer I thought there was one above it. I started a new game and am going to post an AAR for it soon.

It is said in the GalCiv WIKI: 

"Brad has yet to fill us in on the details of what exactly the AI does at each of these levels."

This is probably old news, but it also states that from Tough difficulty and upward "from this level up to the highest AI expertly picks abilities and all known human tactics are searched and countered".

It is likely that the AI builds social improvements more aggresively on Painful compared to Tough, and the research improvements built are what is most likely to show. Since the 5% increase isn't enough to explain the huge difference, the Global difficulty probably cause this (see below).

ALSO: it is said:

"There are two different sorts of difficulty level - one that acts on a global level, and one acting on individual AI's."

 It is likely that one of the difficulties is making the game more tough, and that is likely the Global difficulty level, not the AI difficulty level. The Global difficulties are: ...Challenging, Tough, Painful, Crippling, Maso, etc.... The AI difficulties are the corresponding: ...Bright, Intelligent, Gifted, Genius, Incredible, etc... These both can be adjusted in the game startup screens.

And even MORE interesting!:

"When you select a game each race has a varying degree of intelligence based on the game difficulty selected above. Exact details are not known, but AIs on higher levels (masochistics and higher) get significantly more "points" to spend in race creation and are not bound to the same point-spending rules the human player is (e.g. they can have 80% bonus in military production); and bonuses to economy, production, research, influence, diplomacy, range, sensors range and miniaturization. These bonuses vary to some degree in each game. Please note it's hard to distinguish invisible bonuses from AI abilities until a player gets first spying level on the AI"

This means the AI get's more spending points, and many invisible bonuses that players are incapable of getting once you go into Maso and higher.

I've had the same experience moving from challenging to tough (in DL, DA and ToA); suddenly I wouldn't be able to keep up with or stay ahead of all AI's - usually one of them would pull ahead in the weapon race.
It seems to be a bit of a snowball effect: as long as you're the most powerful race in the galaxy everything seems to go smoothly and even an occasional outburst of war is easy to deal with. However if you let the AI outrun you and either
- start extorting money or declaring war on you when you're not ready (e.g. Drengin)
- aggressively taking over other AI's
- expanding its influence at an alarming rate (e.g. Torian)
it seems much harder to fight back

The same happened when in DA I went from tough to painful. I've yet got to try painful in ToA since I still need to get used to the stricter early economy and different tech trees - haven't played much between the beta-testing and now.

Quick question for those of you experiencing a fairly drastic difference from Tough to Painful:

Tech trading on or off?  (And for TA, brokering disabled or enabled?)

I've only played with tech trading on.

Reading between the lines of your post; do you think the AIs are more actively trading behind the scenes and the resulting boost makes it seem more difficult?

I guess this is possible – the main thing I noticed about ‘tough’ was the fact that even if you were declared war on it might take several turns before you even saw an enemy fleet in your territory and even then they had so few transports (or none at all) that as long as you chose your battles carefully you could usually see off the AI relatively easily.

In my recent painful game the AI was in a decent position and invaded the turn after declaring – they had a decent number of transports and protected them too. It was unusual to see the AI behaving so aggressively. Furthermore I usually beat the AI to all the decent trade goods and unique structures – for the painful game they seemed to get more than normal and certainly more than I’d expect, considering the only difference between tough and painful is a 5% econ bonus. Finally the AIs had techs that I tend not to see until near the end-game; specifically quite high weapon and logistic scores.

However, I’ve given it some more thought and in hindsight there were a few things that were different about my recent game compared to previous ones. Firstly I was trying an all factory strategy for the first time, so this could account for me lagging behind WRT research. Related to this, the all factory approach is actually quite simple – you don’t mess around with the sliders very much, so I was quite possibly doing each turn a lot quicker. Also, I ‘might’ have been somewhat obsessive, concentrating on getting the top manufacturing and economy structure techs so I could best apply the strategy (in my mind at least!).

All told, it’s quite possible that I was racing through the turns and neglecting to properly balance my research – so that even though it seemed like I hadn’t been playing for long real time, in game time things had progressed a lot further than I’d realised? Related to this, unlike previous games where I attack, or am attacked relatively soon after the colony rush – in this game, this didn’t happen. So when I was eventually attacked it was something of a shock for the AI to be quite so organised?

Finally, even though I was being attacked by two AIs simultaneously and had no military to speak of, they only ever took one planet and despite it being a bit touch and go at the start I have since forced them to sue for peace. Yes they were a bit of a challenge at the outset, but they weren’t actually ‘that’ tough.

In a way I hope I’m wrong because it would be nice to see the AI behave more intelligently at higher difficulties – as it stands the wiki documentation says that past ‘tough’ they aren’t smarter, they are just given more bonuses than the human player.

Yes.

It may also have something to do with the fact that at some point the AI starts reevaluating its position every ~2-3 turns rather than every 10 turns (I believe it's from Tough-->Painful), which would tend to result in it doing more.

That's likely.  It's not too hard to keep ahead in the tech race with all-factory, actually, but the first few games you try it, you will almost certainly lag behind.

I take it this isn't normal for you?  AIs become much more aggressive when you have no standing military, as you (probably) know.

Hey!!! It's great that so many of you decided to contribute to this thread.  Thanks all.  There is something that I did not include on my first post: I am playing with the slowest tech setting.  Maybe that is affecting the difficulty because it means that I need to plan ahead better and I have to put much more thought in balancing the economy, my technology advencements in every field and my military production.  I am also playing with tech trading on, so maybe that is the reason the AI is ahead of my all the time (taking into account that they may be trading ability enhancing techs behind my back).  Anyway, it is much tougher than my previous game settings.