5 mn vs 30 mn increase for AI progress (game setup)

[Nibelung44]

Hi,

I'm wondering what is the proper setting? By default it is at 30, but the tooltip advise for a 5 mn increase.

[Haagenti]

My preference is 5 minutes. This does provide some sense of urgency. On 30 minutes the increase is too small to notice. You can play 10 hours for a +20 increase.

[x4000]

Bear in mind that Haagenti is fairly hardcore with this.  Others that want something more relaxed set it to be something like 1 AI Progress every 30 minutes, simply to not have any time pressure in that sense.  It all depends on what sort of experience you're looking for, but any settings you want are considered canonically "valid" as a way to play.

[Kjara]

I'm more with haagenti, as I feel its too easy to just run around and raid with 1/30, but I think 1/10 or 1/15 is a good place to start(still only 4-6 an hour), then start bumping it up(or down) till you are comfortable with it.

[Quitch]

Bear in mind that Haagenti is fairly hardcore with this.  Others that want something more relaxed set it to be something like 1 AI Progress every 30 minutes, simply to not have any time pressure in that sense.  It all depends on what sort of experience you're looking for, but any settings you want are considered canonically "valid" as a way to play.

It does strike me as a little odd to have a recommended setting, then not make it the default.

[darke]

The recommended setting for ai difficulty is AI7, yet last time I installed it defaulted to AI1.

The reason the defaults are set to something "easy" rather then the recommended is that first time players aren't going to read the details of how things should work, they're going to go into the game and get confused, and get crushed, and think "this game sucks".

Which is pretty much the opposite of how you advertise things with good word of mouth.

If the player goes in and plays things on the "defaults" and finds the game really easy ("yay, I'm smarter then the AI, I won!"), they're then going to replay it on a harder difficulty level if they enjoyed the game. At which point they'll probably actually read the tooltips and alter things accordingly.

[Quitch]

According to Chris on Three Moves Ahead the AI should be defaulting to 7 because he found players tune down better than they tune up.

[x4000]

According to Chris on Three Moves Ahead the AI should be defaulting to 7 because he found players tune down better than they tune up.

Well, apparently I mis-remembered and it still defaults to 1.  But, the tooltip was added and that was when the complaints about it being too easy stopped.  So perhaps just that bit of extra explanation in the tooltips was enough, I guess.  (So much history here, sometimes it is a challenge to remember every detail exactly right.  My bad!)