higher difficulty settings?

[Father Beast]

OK, some people (not me) routinely play on deity and stomp the computer without thinking hard. there has been some criticism that they made civ2 knowing that deity could be beaten consistently. so how about something that could make the highest difficulty setting (whatever it ends up being called) more difficult.
The first thing I could think of is make it so that only your first citizen in YOUR FIRST CITY is content. build a second city under despotism, and the first citizen there is unhappy. that might throw a monkey into an ICS game. at least until you build HG (with one city).

[Father Beast]

How about there's a chance of civil war if your cities go into disorder? say the probability is higher with each difficulty level, and if they go into disorder on Deity, they ALWAYS revolt from your civ.

[Ribannah]

I don't think we need more AI advantages. We need better AI!

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If you have no feet, don't walk on fire

[Ilkuul]

Hey, hey, have mercy all you princes and princesses on us poor common chieftains and warlords! I've managed to win at Deity all of 3 times. It's quite hard enough for me already, thank you very much!

[VetLegion]

yes, deity level is kind of "solved". There is a way of playing that will allow you to win without much risk every time and it is the almighty ICS and the fact that 2 cities size one are better then one city size 2. Solutions have been also discussed, some are pretty good.

I first thought I want modifiable AI from civ3 but seing CTP, C2E and freeciv having that feature and still noone writes AI for them, I d like another thing now
Since nobody is willing to write AIs nowadays, AI needs to be good out of the box.

I would like firaxis to hire a professional AI coder to do AI. By that I mean someone who knows this area and not just some good programmer who is going to check out the subject on the net and code it in. Good theorethical background and math knowledge is, I think, a must.

Heh, isnt it easy to write requests

Touche' VetLegion! You made a very valid point

[Kevin Ar18]

Here's a thread on a way the AI can be improved:
http://www.apolyton.net/forums/Forum6/HTML/002307.html

[Gramphos]

Vote for a harder level in an unofficial poll!

[SerapisIV]

I don't want a harder level. I want all the current level settings to be sclaed harder. How many difficulty settings do you want? Six is plenty. The current ones just have to increase from their current difficulty (or lack thereof)

[Simpson II]

I don't want an AI pro to do the Civ3 AI. As I've said before, the problem is far away from normal AI. What I'd like to see is a good strategy gamer - or a group of them - writing the AI. It's really only the hardcore gamers who understand what needs to be done, which is why those people with lives over at firaxis make a bit of a mess of it.

[Adm.Naismith]

quote: What I'd like to see is a good strategy gamer - or a group of them - writing the AI.

Simpson II, it seems to me you are mixing the ability to build a proper AI engine, with the ability to implement good rules/knowledge into it.

The former need a professional expertize on AI systems, while the latter must be done by people how had the knowledge, i.e. good strategy players.

That said, the fact that good AI game is the always searched, never finded "Graal", I've small hopes on it.

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Admiral Naismith AKA mcostant