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Dynamic Difficulty - Adaptive AI Bonuses - MCT Tweaks

This submod adds two new options to the configuration for Jadawin's Dynamic Difficulty - Adaptive AI Bonuses: base empire score, and minimum empire score. Full credits to Jadawin for his amazing mod, I merely tweaked a few parts of the script and added some new MCT options.

Dynamic Difficulty is an excellent mod which introduces a much more reasonable difficulty scaling that also helps the AI keep up as the player expands. It does, however, make the early game easier than in vanilla by reducing the initial amount of cheats granted to the AI. These MCT tweaks were made to give the player some more control over how difficult the start of the campaign is, as some may find the early game too easy in some cases.

Dynamic Difficulty grants bonuses to the AI based on a value it calculates called empire score, which is mostly based on settlement ownership. More information can be found on the original mod page. In the early game, the player owns few settlements, and so their empire score is low, and so the AI cheats are low. This leads to an easier early campaign compared to vanilla, especially on the harder difficulties.

In the original mod, empire score starts at 0 and scales up with settlement ownership. In general, one settlement equals 10 empire score. There are some other things that factor in depending on what faction you are playing (i.e. undercities, hordes, wood elf trees).

This configuration option allows the player to adjust where the empire score starts, in increments of 10. You can think of this as adding a flat amount to the player's empire score.

This configuration option allows the player to adjust the minimum empire score, in increments of 10. If the current empire score is lower than this amount, it will be set to this amount. Once the player's empire score is higher than this amount, it will increase as normal.

The original mod already provides an MCT option to increase the potency of the AI bonuses, by +20% per increment. However, this does not affect the baseline level of bonuses determined by the empire score, so the AI still gets far fewer bonuses in the early game. Additionally, this option will apply to the whole campaign instead of just the early game as the minimum empire score option does. As the player's empire score naturally increases as they expand, some might not want the AI to receive an additional bonus modifier.

Of course, you can use the Extra Difficulty option alongside the new options added by this submod, and it will work as intended.

I expect that most players would prefer to adjust the minimum empire score, so that the only change over the original mod is that the AI gets more bonuses in the early game.

With some rudimentary testing, using Display Treasury of AI Factions to see the upkeep and income of the Servants of the Conclave, a minimum empire score of around 100-150 (as if you had 10-15 settlements) seems to give the AI money/upkeep bonuses similar to the vanilla values on legendary difficulty on turn 2. They had lower upkeep reduction but greater income, such that their net income per turn was pretty close. They do seem to build up to T4/5 faster than in vanilla, but I did not directly test this. Finally, AI received unit recruit rank bonuses from the start of around 2 ranks. Obviously these results can vary, but this is a good way to test out different values. And of course, the original mod also provides a configuration option for increasing the potency of the buffs themselves.

Overall, I find somewhere between 50 to 100 minimum empire score along with +1 to extra difficulty to give a reasonable challenge without making the early turns too easy or too difficult.

In the future I may add additional options such as minimum buff levels for each individual bonus given to the AI.