I'm out for now

[Seravy]

Oh, you mean the change the chance of personalities based on difficulty levels.

But this would assume some difficulties are easier to beat than others and I have doubts about that.

Maniacal uses curses a lot, but keeps more summons in garrison so their attacking forces are weaker. Ruthless uses less curses than maniacal but might send massive forces to attack. Chaotic is average but diplomacy doesn't work on them at all which makes them bad. Peaceful is friendly but ally with the others and attack you for that.

[Suriname]

It's simple. More aggressive personalities are more difficult, because you have less control over the course of the game. You've had the same opinion by a number of players already.

[Domon]

can a diplomatic bonus/penalty be given to personalities or personalities combinations, in the same way books give alignment? this way you can maybe "put maniacals under reins" by making them even less likely to have friends, or something like that.

[Nelphine]

They already follow those rules. But if the manical wizard wants the treaty (say because he's weak), the peaceful wizard is inclined to accept.

There are a lot of factors in diplomacy - relation based on realms, relation based on actions, desire to do certain actions based on relation, desire to do certain actions based on personality, desire to do certain actions based on actions.

[Seravy]

"good" wizards are more likely to have good personalities and bad wizards are more likely to have bad personalities. Making the personalities also hate each other would be redundant and would make no sense.

If we accept that more aggressive personalities are worse we can make a difficulty modifier based on that but I have doubts. I think the worst personality is peaceful, then chaotic, then ruthless, then maniacal, then aggressive and then lawful in that order. Because peaceful and chaotic are the least controllable (in case of the former they ally with others against me). But this changes a lot depending on game state. If AI relation modifiers are positive, lawful is worst because they are less willing to ally with me than a peaceful but still as willing with my enemies. If the maniacal has no city curses they are the best because they keep the most forces for self-defense and are the lowest threat in a war.

[Nelphine]

Maniacal is undoutedky the worst on higher difficulties, due to the propensity to use city curses (and the higher the overland bonus, the more city curses favor the ai, and in worst cases can literally result in the AI reducing multiple cities to 0 food before 1408); after that, I agree with you seravy about the difficulty of personalities. Although I might move chaotic down a bit - declaring war on other AI is inevitable, and a boon to the human.

[Seravy]

Certainly but they also do things like ally with 2 others and declare war on you...and only backstab their allies after you are already in a 4 way war...

[Nelphine]

Yeah bit they're very randomness is almost predictable. Their alliances with other ais always end in wars, and AI AI wars are still the greatest advantage the human has. Any other persinality can potentially never go to war with another AI depending on other factors. Chaotics always will.

Now I'm not saying they're not hard. I just wouldn't rate them as hard as you.

[Suriname]

Peaceful won't attack you without a wardec. That is more than enough to make it easier to deal with than any of the aggressive ones. You can leave your cities empty and deal with the others with 100% of your units if you are close to a peaceful.

Sure then they get allied and after a while you get wardecced. Still plenty of time to prepare for that. Any aggressive just attacks you immediately without a wardec. How is a peaceful maybe (in case of alliances) eventually attacking in the long term worse than that??

I even prefer to have a chaotic neighbour to the other aggressive ones, because 50% of the time it will randomly offer an alliance and give you respite from the opportunistic attacks. You know that the war is coming, exactly like any other aggressive. So it's 50% of the times easier to deal with than other aggressives.

[m59gar]

Not to belabor the point, but here is an image of my current game at January 1402 (basically just started):

https://imgur.com/a/2AYQu

I'm alone...

I'm expanding...

Suddenly I'm surrounded by enemy wizards. I thought picking Myrran meant there'd be less wizards on my plane? Nope.

And guess what.

Maniacal

Aggressive

All Chaos, all the time

This is every single game for me. This is unplayable.

And there they go. Instant war declarations and corruptions appearing all over my territory. Time to restart AGAIN.