As most players are probably aware, there is a table of multipliers for the advantages the AI receives.
This includes :
Population Growth
Outpost Growth
Gold income
Power income
Research from cities
Production in cities
Upkeep costs
Food produced
I noticed the Outpost growth multiplier seems to not work as intended. It's a % chance to receive a fixed additional growth each turn, meaning 100% is the highest meaningful value and 0 is the lowest. Yet the game uses 100-400% for this.
I've decided to eliminate this multiplier and use a hardcoded effect of 25% chance per difficulty level to gain the additional growth.
On the other hand, I used this table slot to implement a new AI advantage multiplier : the overland casting cost multiplier. This scales down the overland cost of spellcasting based on difficulty for the AI, reducing the amount of skill and mana spent, effectively multiplying the amount of spells they can cast. I believe the AI had a disadvantage in this department because they do not use any strategy to cast spells, they just select at random, based on priorities of each spell, yet the amount of skill available for them is limited. Their skill is obviously higher than what the human player has, due to the additional power income, but power does not translate into skill in a linear way. They also build faster, so from the new Amplifying Tower building they can get extra skill, but this is again a quite limited resource because you cannot have more than one per city, while they do build them faster, they won't get more on the long term. On the other hand, a direct discount to casting costs does help this issue, and does so without providing excessive combat casting skill to the AI. Additional overland casting capacity will both help the AI fill more offensive armies with higher rarity fantastic creatures, most of which are rarely seen outside their fortress garrison, and will make them more of a threat when casting curses against the player.
On the other hand, this does make disenchanting stuff quite a lot less effective, simply because they will be recast much sooner, and the costs of dispelling will not be any cheaper, unless another AI is trying to dispel.
I'm considering to the the multiplier 100% for easy and normal (no change), 80% for hard (25% more overland casting power), 66% for hard (50% more), and 50 for impossible (twice as much spells).
I would like to hear some opinions about this because it's quite a major change.
This includes :
Population Growth
Outpost Growth
Gold income
Power income
Research from cities
Production in cities
Upkeep costs
Food produced
I noticed the Outpost growth multiplier seems to not work as intended. It's a % chance to receive a fixed additional growth each turn, meaning 100% is the highest meaningful value and 0 is the lowest. Yet the game uses 100-400% for this.
I've decided to eliminate this multiplier and use a hardcoded effect of 25% chance per difficulty level to gain the additional growth.
On the other hand, I used this table slot to implement a new AI advantage multiplier : the overland casting cost multiplier. This scales down the overland cost of spellcasting based on difficulty for the AI, reducing the amount of skill and mana spent, effectively multiplying the amount of spells they can cast. I believe the AI had a disadvantage in this department because they do not use any strategy to cast spells, they just select at random, based on priorities of each spell, yet the amount of skill available for them is limited. Their skill is obviously higher than what the human player has, due to the additional power income, but power does not translate into skill in a linear way. They also build faster, so from the new Amplifying Tower building they can get extra skill, but this is again a quite limited resource because you cannot have more than one per city, while they do build them faster, they won't get more on the long term. On the other hand, a direct discount to casting costs does help this issue, and does so without providing excessive combat casting skill to the AI. Additional overland casting capacity will both help the AI fill more offensive armies with higher rarity fantastic creatures, most of which are rarely seen outside their fortress garrison, and will make them more of a threat when casting curses against the player.
On the other hand, this does make disenchanting stuff quite a lot less effective, simply because they will be recast much sooner, and the costs of dispelling will not be any cheaper, unless another AI is trying to dispel.
I'm considering to the the multiplier 100% for easy and normal (no change), 80% for hard (25% more overland casting power), 66% for hard (50% more), and 50 for impossible (twice as much spells).
I would like to hear some opinions about this because it's quite a major change.
