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Difficulty Enhanced

Increases AI difficulty by fixing a few pain-points in the AI. Encouraging them to build more cities, use powerful spells more often, and use more summons, and level leaders more. Multiple difficulty options included.

(Note, do not play your first ever game with this mod on Brutal difficulty. If you do so, you will probably be sad. Try Hard first. Hard is the intended difficulty of this mod, and is balanced.)

TLDR: If you want games that are hard, but end quickly. This probably is not going to help, this mod makes AI build a lot of units, which tends to make the game long. If you like long games, 100+ turns, and want the AI to continue being somewhat of a threat beyond the typical 30-60 turns. This will not fix it entirely, but it will make it a little better.

In short, with this enabled, AI will build many more cities, level their leader much faster (And heroes, if their heroes survive a while), and will have much bigger armies. Making it a little harder to steamroll through them in long games. In vanilla, the AI kinda stop being a threat after turn 30-ish. With this, they continue being a threat until around turn 60-90-ish and they will still have at least a little bite beyond that against most builds.


This mod does not use the vanilla difficulty modifiers. So you can turn on challenging+ combat AI if you want the added difficulty, the mod works both with and without it. You can also edit their starting cities/levels/etc for even more difficulty. (All screenshots were taken with no starting bonuses. All those AI started at level 1 with 1 city.)

For even more difficulty, you can create custom leaders and ascend them, then pass those to the AI.

And for even more difficulty, you can do what I do. Use my other mod, Enhanced AI Societies and make custom leaders that have extra traits to be even more of a challenge. I like to have a mix of AI, some normal, some using the two tiers of this mod.



What specifically does this mod do?


This boosts AI resource multipliers by a large amount, and gives them a few advantages that counteract the usual painpoints. All difficulties have been edited, to give options on what you prefer.

All difficulties have these changes.
- AI starts off with a city cap of 20. They will now expand much more.
- AI priorities have been changed to always migrate or raze. So they will be more coherent and less of a mish-mash of random units.
- AI should get and use more enchantments and transformations. All personalities have these set as a priority.
- AI formerly had a 5 turn cooldown on almost all spells. This has been reduced to 1 or 2 depending on the spell. They can now spam powerful spells more than once a fight, and will summon much more now.
- AI's mana costs on spells has been reduced, and the AI was given extra global casting points. To encourage more enchantments and transformations. This will make them cast more global spells, and better combat spells.
- All AI players start with teleporters unlocked, and teleporters are a higher priority for them. So hopefully they use them. (Some continue to be stubborn, unsure why)
- All AI players will get a 3x exp boost for heroes and leaders. Killing their heroes will actually matter now, if their heroes survive for a long time they will probably get to high levels.
- Everyone (AI and Players) has +30% movement speed on the world map. While this helps the player, it helps the AI more (IMO) and lets them attack things that are a bit farther away.



Difficulty specific changes:

Very Easy: - AI has no economy bonuses. Just the general changes to all AI written above.

Easy: AI has all the same economy bonuses as the vanilla "normal" difficulty. Plus the general changes to all AI written above.

Normal: AI has all the same economy bonuses as the vanilla "Brutal" difficulty. Plus the general changes to all AI written above.

Hard: The main feature of the mod. AI has significantly boosted economy multipliers. 20 draft for free, and then big economy multipliers. Notably, 5x magic, 3.5x gold, 3x unit production, 4x imperium (plus others, all resources are boosted). In addition to the general changes to all AI written above. being multipliers, not free resources, you can deny these to the AI by razing or capturing their stuff.

But, to balance out the difficulty and keep it more fair. The AI will no longer get free ranks on units, or a free TH2. So while they will have large armies consisting of many stacks, they at least won't be all legendary ranked.


Very Hard: For those who enjoy suffering and would be upset about the balancing changes for fairness I made in the above difficulty. Very hard is a copy of the above difficulty settings. But but with a 4x EXP multiplier and without said fairness adjustments. AI will get the TH2 upgrade for free, and they will get all the free rank upgrades a brutal AI normally gets. I have tested this, it is intentionally unbalanced and not recommended unless you find the previous difficulty too easy. But it's there for those who want even more of a challenge than my intended difficulty offers.