I played the game for over 200 hours. This game is very deep. It will be a very enjoyable experience if you calm down and give this game a lot of time. But for casual gamers, the game may be a bit too slow. So I will provide a casual setting to enjoy the game quickly in this guide.

This is a setting example for a speed game. If you have plenty of time you can enjoy it enough with the game default settings.

About Race and Deity Ability, please choose according to your preference.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1738296934
There are 7 rival AIs. The game speed is "4. Above Normal". The AI ​​difficulty can be selected according to your preference. If you want a strong competitor, use more than this.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1687896077
As for map size, I recommend this size at first game play.

Besides in-game settings, you can change various parameters by directly editing the settings file. Edit the file in the folder where you installed the game as follows. (Maybe some of them will be added to the in-game with upcoming patches.)

game_settings.txt

Increases the mana gained from the city population by 2 times.
If you want more mana, increase this value.
----------------------------------------------------------
piety_to_mana_factor = 20
----------------------------------------------------------

Increases the gold gained from the city population by 5 times.
If you want more gold, increase this value.
---------------------------------------------------------
city_base_tax_rate = 50
----------------------------------------------------------

Configuration is complete. Let's start the game!!


Supplementary information
If the map feels narrow, please expand it or reduce the number of rival AIs.

Example images of Ridged and Not Ridged Map
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1691020508
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1691020607

Originally posted by Tlaloc:

Ridged makes elevation features appear more ridged, or more sharp.
From another post:
Ridged will make the terrain appear "ridged" or "jagged". The best way to see the difference is by generating a full-land map at the Map Generation screen (set Continents to none, Islands to none) and switching from Ridged to Not Ridged. You will see the difference with the mountains and hills.

For more info about what it means behind the scenes, you can google "ridged noise".
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36796829/procedural-terrain-with-ridged-fractal-noise

Originally posted by Tlaloc:

Originally posted by MiyabiSFG:

About city radius outline, I want a more transparent color. I feel that color is too strong. I want to adjust the color transmittance rather than the line thickness.

You can edit the following keys in ui_settings.txt when the game isn't running:
city_radius_alpha0 = 1
city_radius_alpha1 = 0
city_radius_premult0 = 1
city_radius_premult1 = 1


You may try reducing city_radius_alpha0 to something less than 1.
Also for a different style, you may try switching the alpha values to the following:
city_radius_alpha0 = 0
city_radius_alpha1 = 1

city_radius_alpha0 = 0.4 is very good for me!!
It is in harmony with the terrain and units of the map!!
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1768126893
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1768126764

There are other useful parameters in game_settings.txt.

You can adjust the speed of each research.

Originally posted by Tlaloc:

v1.1.48 (2019-05-28)
• Changed the way xp needed to level up is calculated. It is now 2*level^3 - 5*level^2 + 12*level. Relative to the current system, this makes levelling up much faster until level 13, after which it gets increasingly hard. You can change the coefficients in game_settings.txt, which are named xp_coeff_3, xp_coeff_2, xp_coeff_1, xp_coeff_0. The formula for the xp needed for a unit of level to get to the next level is xp_coeff_3*level^3 + xp_coeff_2*level^2 + xp_coeff_1*level + xp_coeff0.

Originally posted by Tlaloc:

There is some (disabled) code to make the AI more "intelligent" in battles on harder AI difficulty. But it really didn't play out as that fun to have the AI hard target your weakest units and kill them off 1 by 1, so we disabled it.

And there is some enabled code to make the AI more evasive in battles on harder difficulties.

Also the AI will launch more focused invasions of your cities on higher difficulties (you are pretty much guaranteed to start losing cities to AI invasions at Hopeless diificulty. I don't win very often on Hopeless difficulty.. the AI resource bonuses + invasions usually overwhelm me).

Make the AI more likely to target hurt enemies. This key will increase the likelihood of targetting hurt enemies.

Originally posted by Tlaloc:

Originally posted by Szalbierz:

Yeah right now it is almost unplayable ...
Enemy units ignore my units completely to focus on some one remote wounded unit.
So easy to abuse it.

I would recommend changing the value of ai_battle_target_most_hurt_enemy_mod in game_Settings.txt to between 0 and 500. Setting it to 0 would match the previous AI behaviour (before ai_battle_target_most_hurt_enemy_mod was added).
In the next update we will fix this value to a default of somewhere between 0 and 200.

It means "enemy I will likely do the most damage to".

If you change this to 0 (from the default of 100), then the AI units will no longer take distance into account when determining who to attack. If you do this, you will also want to change

To a higher value, to prevent the AI units from retargetting every combat round, which will cause them to see-saw.

Originally posted by Tlaloc:

Currently an AI unit does the following (roughly) each attack to determine its target:

Checks the expected damage it will do, with each of its attacks, against every enemy unit on the battle field. It takes into account armor, resistances etc. Call this number the ai_target_weight.

It modifies the ai_target_weight by certain abilities that it has, and certain abilities the enemy has.

For example, enemies with mana regeneration have their ai_target_weight increased a bit, as they are more threatening. While flying enemies that cannot be hit have their ai_target_weight reduced to almost 0. While units that normally fly and could not be hit, but are currently immobilized, have their ai_target_weight increased drastically to take advantage of their short-term vulnerability. Passive enemy units have their ai_target_weight reduced to almost 0 (which is why workers and settlers are almost always attacked last). Enemies behind walls that are too hard to hit won't be targetted when ammo gets too low. Units with Fire immunity will never be targetted by attack which do fire damage ie the ai_target_weight for this enemy/attack combo will be 0. Sleeping enemies are less likely to be targetted since attacking them would awaken them, etc. There are a huge number of modifications that occur here.

Now every ai_target_weight is reduced by a certain percentage, with "dumber" units reducing the ai_target_weight amount more than "intelligent" units. This results in dumber units having a tendency to more equally weight enemy units and be less likely (relative to intelligent units) to target the enemy unit it will do the most damage against. So if a heavily armored enemy and a squishy mage enemy are standing next to each other, an intelligent unit is more likely to target the squishy mage with a melee attack than a dumber unit is, and vice versa (a dumb unit will often target a heavily armored unit rather than a squishy mage). The settings ai_battle_target_weakest_enemy_chance in the game_settings.txt also affects this. Notice that ai_battle_target_weakest_enemy_chance doesn't refer to weakest in terms of lowest health, but rather weakest in terms of "squishiest" enemy (and may have been better named ai_battle_target_squishiest_enemy_chance).

Next the ai_target_weight is reduced proportional to how many turns it would take to get into attack range of the enemy unit. So if it would attack take 6 turns to get to the squishy mage, but 1 turn to get to the not-as-squishy lightly armored archer, it will be much more likely to target the archer. This is because it would be able to get 5? attacks on the archer before it could even get 1 attack on the squishy mage. And it will also be getting hit for all these turns from the archer and possibly the mage, while it won't be doing any damage to either for these turns. This is why closer units are most often targetted over further units.

Lastly the ai_target_weight is randomized a slight bit (up or down by as much as 20%?), to add some unpredictability.

Now the AI unit will choose its target and its attack based on the ai_target_weights of every one of its attacks/enemy unit combinations. It will lock onto that target for ai_battle_lock_on_target_duration combat rounds (so it won't go through all the above calculations again until its target dies/disappears(invis) or some other reason).

The AI unit will move towards its target. Once its moves are done for the combat round, if it cannot attack its designated target, then it will reevaluate every enemy in range that it CAN attack immediately, and MAY attack one of them (but it may not; for example it won't shoot if it is low on ammo and the chance to hit an enemy has been reduced too much by moving, or because the enemy is behind a wall... lots of stuff is done here as well).

That's a basic summary of how the AI currently targets an enemy unit. Although I'm sure I've forgotten a few other important things the AI does.

You can adjust various parameters about Wandering Monsters and Lair. This will make your sandbox game more rich. Edit the game_settings.txt in the folder where you installed the game.


It's the number of turns between having a chance to grow.


Means the AI lairs can grow to be 10 more than the max AI stack size (which is why you might notice lairs that have 20 or 30 units in them). I don't recall if there is a limit to the lair size.


Allow lair units to randomly have extra figures.


Means every turn every 8th lair has a chance (ie 20% here) of attacking any army (that seems to include cities) that come within the set range (here 5).


The maximum number of units that can spawn out of a lair on turn number T and become a wandering army is:
(T / max_wandering_units_turns_increase). So with max_wandering_units_turns_increase = 17 you can get 3 units coming out of a lair at turn 51 (but at most 2 on turn 50).


The highest xpvalue unit that can come out of a lair on turn number T is :
(T / max_wandering_units_xpvalue_turns_increase). This is what keeps powerful units from coming out of lairs too soon. For instance, a White Dragon has an XP value of 36, so you shouldn't see a White Dragon come out of a lair until turn 396 when max_wandering_units_xpvalue_turns_increase = 11


How strong an enemy a monster army will look to fight, relative to its own strength. The default is 400, meaning an AI lair/creature/monster army will attack a deity army that is 4 times as strong as it is. This value will grow as the game progresses, I believe +1 per turn. So at turn 1000 the value of monster_army_bravery_factor will be 1400, and wandering monsters/lair will attack a deity army that is 14 times as strong as it is.


Same as Lair Density in game setting.

Same as Respawn Rate in game setting.

Same as Lair Difficulty in game setting.

It's the number of turns between having a chance to respawn (maybe).