So the other day I was playing Civ IV, because apparently I’m still desperately addicted to it, and I was playing a single player game and I decided to bump up the difficulty by a notch. You know, jump up from “Noble” to whatever is just above Noble. Prince, I think?
It seemed like a sensible thing to do. I’d played up through the ranks– Settler, Chieftain, Warlord– and each had been a reasonable ramp up in difficulty level and finally I’d landed on Noble, which is the game’s default “average” difficulty level. And I could beat the game on Noble with few issues, so why not tune it up a notch? It makes sense, right?
So, fairly confident in my own abilities, I started up a game on Prince.
…within about ten minutes I knew I was going to have some problems when all of the other AIs were mysteriously doubling my score, and then by about twenty minutes in I was cheating via the World Builder because all of the other AIs were mysteriously tripling my score.
Needless to say I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the outcome!
I think the reason why this happened is because the Civ IV AI is built to pretty much act the same regardless of difficulty level. The easier difficulty levels are “easier” because they give you bonuses in terms of your population’s happiness or health (and, on Settler at least, the civs seem slightly less likely to declare war on you), and the higher difficulty levels… well I don’t know, they give the AIs crack or something. It feels somewhat “false”, regardless, and reminds me of ten years ago when I’d play Starcraft for hours on end and you were always reasonably certain of what the computer was going to do so it was easy to exploit it (You knew there was always going to be an initial attack of zealots or marines about ten minutes into the game, and then another group of the next tier of units at about twenty, and etc.)
I’d like to play a difficult Civ game against an AI that isn’t just “the regular AI but CHEATING”. I think there are mods that improve the AI; I’ll have to look into those.
Anyways! Your stories about ridiculously hard AIs or difficulty levels?
Galactic Civilizations 2 is the game you want to be playing in that case!
A lot of games seem to resort to “the AI is harder because it’s cheating”. More and/or higher level enemies are very common in any game; that’s not really harder, it’s just more bullshit, since in a lot of games “higher level than you” means “this guy can kick your ass without really trying”. In Guild Wars, your counter is abuse of skills that make your party invincible; in Fire Emblem, your counter is “this unit has ridiculous defense and can’t die and will thus solo half the map”. Another common AI buff is reactions; Smash Bros Brawl AI can perfect shield anything (even multi-hit attacks) that doesn’t hit them instantly and then grab you.
I would really like it if all hard modes ever meant that the enemy used a different or smarter strategy, had better reactions, or suchlike; however, there are a few games that have used interesting but not quite awful methods of making the game harder. While I don’t like how Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn makes the game harder by giving you more enemies of higher level, I do like how they reduce your experience by a flat 5 every combat encounter (compared to ~15-20 exp gain, more on a kill, and 100 required to level up). It gets old eventually, but it’s not too bad.
Modding the AI generally seems to be the way to go for hard-but-doable challenges.
It really cool to watch the AI in an RTS at the higher difficulty levels. Turn on a cheat that lets you see the map, and see how it does things. It can help you get ideas for new strategies.
I got so I could win against higher AIs, but my strategy was always the same; hole up behind a wall of bunkers and siege tanks until they ran out of resources…not exactly deep thinking strategy there lol. But it was still fun.