Quote Originally Posted by Slaists
As to the Strategic AI: it seems, on "harder" difficulties it just becomes more aggressive.
Well trawling through the file I saw that on Hard and Very Hard your diplomatic relationship with the other factions will constantly degrade by a small amount every turn (thus requiring constanst small gifts to stay on an even keel). Of course this includes factions you have no contact with. In fact this also sort of occurs on Mediium as well...


To explain H and VH are normalised to Abysmal and will shuffle that direction every trun (with VH moving faster).

Easy is normalized to Perfect so relations will continually improve (provided you do not do one of the other many things to anny the AI).

Medium is normalised to Neutral so if bad relations will improve but if good they will worsen.

Add to this the AI is effectively set to Medium difficultly when the AI factions interact with each other.

And the relations for the top 3 scoring factions will tend to worsen with everyone as well.

Lastly when you fight a member of a particular religion everyone else in the religion will start to take a dislike to you.

You can see how easy it is to get bad relationships with everyone, especially on Hard or Very Hard.

Additionally look in the Campaign AI XML doc in the invasion_decisions section at the end is the following:

"SPECIAL CASE EXISTS HERE IN CODE FOR FORCING ATTACK ON HUMAN IF AT PEACE WITH EVERYONE FOR TOO LONG (hard = 4 turns, normal = 10 turns, easy = 20 turns)"

This is the only bit of that doc that mentions difficultly levels...