What's the difficulty differences

posted on December 12th, 2009, 9:17 am

I beat the ai on the highest setting, but it seems to cheat.  I would like to know the differences between the different difficulties if any of you have them.  Also it may be just me, but when I play against one ai computer set to the hardest difficulty with me and other ai against it, it seems to gain bonus cheats or something than compared to me just playing it one on one.

posted on December 12th, 2009, 10:08 am

A hell of a lot of ships is the most noticable difference... Hardest gets a massive build cost and time reduction and makes ships out of nothing (unless they are your allies...) while medium only seems to get the cost reduction.

posted on December 12th, 2009, 10:56 am

Ah, guess I'll just play on hard than.  On the hardest I'd defeat a huge a number of ships at their wormhole and than warp in thinking they were weakened only to find my fleet and allies out gunned.  Than they would warp in, kill my camp and I'd quit lol.

posted on December 13th, 2009, 4:58 pm

You can try messing around with the Build Cost/Build Time handicap sliders to control their "cheating".

posted on December 13th, 2009, 4:59 pm

The AI needs its build time/cost reduction to keep up with Human players, because it happens to be quite dumb.

posted on December 13th, 2009, 5:25 pm

The AI isn't necessarily dumb, it's just that nobody knows how to make it smart. However, Freyr at A2 Files has succeeded in making a human like, non cheating AI that will adapt it's playing style according to the situation by making use of some code that it would seem only one person of the original dev team fully understood. Here is the thread. The thread details how it works, how to make one, and how badly you can be beaten by this AI.