Furious or Coward Aggresion?

[Secret Master]

Having played a number of grand campaigns, both regular and ICG, I just want to ask everyone whether they think its more difficult to play against a furious AI or the cowardly AI? And when you set the actual difficulty, does it do anything other than adjust starting money?

Im looking for little ways to increase difficulty of the game that don't involve just changing the diffculty to very hard or playing Ragusa for 300 years.

 

[unmerged(2156)]

Ive found very hard/aggressive to be the hardest

the very hard setting also makes all troops types more expensive throughout the whole game

 

[State Machine]

I've never played at anything other than normal. I understand from other posts, that the more aggressive difficulty levels actually make it easy for the human, since the ai beats itself senseless in all wars, making ai countries relatively weaker. I haven't heard anything about the weaker aggressive difficulty levels.

For something different (if you haven't already tried), try using the other economic options in the IGC. Chaos Hurts, for example, severely restricts income when you are at lower stability - it's a challange (for a while). When it takes 8 to 15 years to recover from a religion change, you really appreciate having money (and high stability). If you are really interested, check out the IGC+ threads in the Scenario forum - the objectives of several people (I am one), is to reduce the amount of money in the game by a very large amount.

Another alternative is "role playing". Adopt various rules to govern your own behavior. For example, don't exploit various ai weaknesses, only do some aggressive action if there is a good, "real life" rational for it, etc. If you are in to England, it's huge fun to do all the religion changes that actually happened (especially combined with restrictive economic settings, like Chaos Hurts). Play Austria as "defender of the faith" and so on.

 

[BiB]

If u want it a bit harder, very hard is the very least u should pick. Otherwise I prefer normal as agression.

 

[Carolus Rex]

I usually go for Normal/Normal...

 

[unmerged(3627)]

Cowardly means the AI won't ever bother you, but it'll have all its troops still intact when you want to fight it.

Furious means the AI nations beat each other to death, so if you have any talent at all for staying out of wars, it's ridiculously easy.

 

[Secret Master]

What I gather from the posts (and some experimenting I did) is that changing AI aggression doesn't make the game easier or harder, but rather calls for a different winning strategy to beat the other countries. I particularly like the "role-playing" idea. I have been playing as the Pope, and have set out foriegn policy objectives that are independant of victory points (i.e. I will say I "won" the ICG if the Papal States unifies all Christian people through war, vassalage, or alliance). Thanks for the comments...

 

[Pewe]

Go with coward. This means that it always will be you that has to declare war, with all the disadvantages.