The game, when played against the AI, is too easy on all difficulty settings, as practically everyone here seems to agree. So some play Armageddon mode, and others ue a set of quite restrictive house rules to make the game challenging. Unfortunately, I don't like all the restrictions that come with the house rules, as they often take away interesting aspects of the game - such as having cities from other factions, using diplomacy, etc. Also these rules give a fixed bonus to difficulty, and are hard to scale. So I tried to find a more fexible set of house rules. Here's what I came up with:
* Peacenik - offer peace to everyone at turns that are multiples of 20.
* Income tax - track gold and mana income from cities, set aside a certain fraction (I tried one fourth) of it and gift it in euqal parts to all discovered AI wizards at turns that are multiples of 20.
Of course one might want to use 25 instead of 20 or so, and the gifting might be delayed a few turns if diplomacy isn't possible at the given turn, but you get the idea. The choice of the fraction of income to set aside allows for easy adjustment of the difficulty. The only annoying thing is to remember to write down the gold an mana income at the start of each turn.
Philipp
* Peacenik - offer peace to everyone at turns that are multiples of 20.
* Income tax - track gold and mana income from cities, set aside a certain fraction (I tried one fourth) of it and gift it in euqal parts to all discovered AI wizards at turns that are multiples of 20.
Of course one might want to use 25 instead of 20 or so, and the gifting might be delayed a few turns if diplomacy isn't possible at the given turn, but you get the idea. The choice of the fraction of income to set aside allows for easy adjustment of the difficulty. The only annoying thing is to remember to write down the gold an mana income at the start of each turn.
Philipp
