A feature request: custom AI difficulty

from Elemental Forums

I do not think I am the only person to play on different difficulties depending on the strategy I intend to use.  If I am going for a Master Quest or sovereign rushing, Insane is a good challenge.  But I want to exclusively use trained units, I cannot really play on Insane, because the enemies get so many hit points that my troops feel like wimps.  As I rule I hate difficulty settings that make my soldiers lose a one on one.  I'm OK with the enemy getting three soldiers for each of mine, but I really dislike one of his being able to take out two of mine in a straight fight.

On the other hand, I would still like to be able to give the monsters extra hit points, and let the AI have Insane growth, food, resource, and research bonuses.

I know that right now we have a lot of AI difficulties, but their growth, food, research, production, HPs multipliers scale together.  I would like to be able to define custom AI difficulties where the multipliers are separated.  So I can have a hive type faction that can grow huge cities on little grain, a research faction that can field advanced units, or a militaristic one that can produce tons of trained troops.

I do not think that this would be so hard to implement.  The AI difficulty is already divorced from the monsters difficulty, and the multipliers can  obviously be set separately.  How hard would it be to allow us to create custom AI labels?

 

Oh, and as long as I am wishing.  I would like to be able to set the bonus/penalty for fighting inside friendly/enemy sphere of influence.  People complaining that heroes can win wars all by themselves should be happy if they can play with rules that reduce their uber-tank's attack and defense by 75% if he is inside an enemy town's zone of control.

6,438 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top


This is all already possible. Look at CoreDifficultyLevels.xml. There you can make specific difficulties to your taste. Just copy one that is close to what you want, change the name and then the numbers.

 

You can also set the bonuses and penalties of ZoC. I believe the global setting for this is in the ElementalDefs.xml. Might take a bit of searching.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Awesome.  Thanks, I'll look into it.

Great.  I just tried it, and it sort of works... (Can't make new ones, just change the existing one)  It would have been a bit better if production/research/food/growth were separate settings as opposed to a combined <AIEconomicRatio> but I'll live with it.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tuidjy, reply 2
It would have been a bit better if production/research/food/growth were separate settings as opposed to a combined but I'll live with it.
End of Tuidjy's quote

Agreed, but the ability to name my custom difficulty Chuck Norris makes up for that. :ninja:

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I would still like it to be part of the normal game, not some weird thing where I have to go do stuff in my documents or wherever.
The game should not have a "feature" that is not included in the game that have no user interface.

Not trying to be harsh, I really like the idea, just hope it gets to be part of the "Workshop" section with proper User Interface so us dummies can use it too.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #5 from LittleTinyFrogs Forums Top

Chuck Norris difficulty. I like that.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 6
Chuck Norris difficulty. I like that.
End of Frogboy's quote

I think you need to rename all your difficulty levels based on The Expendables I and II.  Chuck Norris would probably be the highest difficulty, and the sniper kid from the second movie would be the easiest.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

In other news, I coined the term "Governator" for a cross-class in Path of the Defender and Path of the Governor. :rofl: