The current implementation of AI difficulty bonuses heavily favors the early game and tapers off towards mid and late game. This is the opposite of that we'd want. In the early game the AI is largely fine-as is. Stuff like movement speed bonuses and attack bonuses feel especially out of place, even the scaled back versions feel "unfair".
I know, calling godlike difficulty AI unfair is cringe.
But it makes sense if we consider why we want to give the AI bonuses in the first place: An experienced player is able to leverage greater bonuses then the AI can get without assistance resulting in a boring game as they massively outscale the AI past the early game. Difficulty bonuses need to scale to match the scaling skill mismatch.
In the early game, the AI is fine. You guys have a good AI when it comes to colonizing and seizing resources. But as we optimize our planets into economic juggernauts, the AI starts to struggle, and the player loses interest. The higher difficulties exist to help the AI match what the player can already do, so they can be competitive, not to provide an unfair advantage.
What we want is for difficulties to keep the AI on the player's level (or above it) consistently from early game to late game. What we want to avoid is making the AI insurmountable until the player hits that "sweet" spot where they've caught up to the AI, followed by the subsequent player outscaling the AI and getting bored.
While ideally an AI would be able to optimize their planets and fight as good as a player, in practice it's not worth the squeeze for you guys to try to create an AI that can pass the Turing test.
Recommend:
- Remove AI movement bonus completely. They get movement bonuses through tech already and the AI doesn't need help early game.
- Scale down the damage bonuses a bit on godlike so they player can fight (+100% is a little nuts)
- Make the AI bonuses multiplicative, so they don't fall off.
- Scale the AI bonuses, or make an option for scaling bonuses, so the AI gets more bonuses to compensate for the game's increasing complexity (the more complex, the more stuff the player can leverage).
