Growth/Industy/Tech vs. World Size/Difficulty

[DavidByron]

"Unsurpased" bonus appears cumulative (multiply by .8 not subtract 2 from AI number of columns).

With Tiny / Transcend / Unsurpassed the AI has just 4 coloumns for food and industry as standard. (Not 3)

You can't get better than -50% to the food box width (growth) because you just get population bomb at -60%. Otherwise you'd be able to get a one (zero?) column food box with Democracy / Planned / Eudamonic / Creche / Golden Age.

I produced a 2 column wide production box for the AI with Tiny / Transcend / Unsurpassed = 4 columns, and Drones / Wealth / Planned / Eudamonic = -60%. Actually that's more than you need slightly. Still works if you take off the wealth or planned.

[Lefty Scaevola]

The only game where I have seen AI strategy, rather than just bonuses, clearly improve when going to a the higher difficulty levels is Warlords3. The AI clearly uses stratagems and mechanisms at the higher level that it does not use at the lower. There are only three levels (maybe only two) to the AIs strategy, but further increments of difficulty are provided by the use of optional rules such as fog of war, not seeing past the top unit in a stack, etc, that limits the sentient human strategy more than they limit the mechanistic AI strategy.
Does anybody know other games where the AI get smarter, rather than just lukier and beefed up, as level increases?

[DavidByron]

Sure. Chess and so on. You simply increase the time to allow the computer to think.