When you play SP, what settings do you tend to use and now many nations do you play against?

[Danksama]

I'm just interested in hearing answers from the community about the above. I'm a new player and am nearly done with a small game (10 provinces per nation, 1v1) and am not sure whether to scale up or what to try in terms of settings next.

[Red Bat]

Enormous map size, 5-11 impossible AIs, mostly default settings.

[Mount Nomad]

Medium map size, 9 Imp AIs, more random events, all story events, unlimited artifact forging, 15 Hall of Fame heroes, 7 Globals, standard research, 8 level 1 thrones, 4 level 2, 2 level 3, 12 Throne Points to win (half plus one is pretty standard), Cataclysm in 91 turns (default).

[sanguinis]

Everything at maximum. Well, except gold, it's good as it is and scales just fine with more conquest without throttling my megalomania the way resources or recruitment points do. 9 globals, 20 hof, maximum sites, 1500 provinces, all thrones w/60 out of 80 points to win, cataclysm at about 120-150 turn (yet to see one), slow or very slow research. That's for one age mod, which I prefer playing in 15 disciple teams. Desperately waiting for nationgen to be updated for Dom5...

[applenta]

Large map size (20 provinces), max nations x all impossible AI, strength of independent 9, more random events, all story events, limited artifact forging, 20 Hall of fame, 9 globals enchantment, standard research, random start research, 11 lvl 1 thrones, 8 lvl 2 thrones, 3 lvl 3 thrones, 28 points to win (so capturing at least a lvl 3 to win is always needed). Anything else not mentioned is default.

[Sombre]

What I personally use is small map size, ~8 nations, difficult AI. Above the difficult level it becomes too onerous to actually roleplay or play thematically because you're forced to use anti-AI-horde tactics constantly which makes the game quite a bit less interesting.

I generally don't use thrones because I'm ok with the game ending when I just don't want to play it any more. Sometimes I will use them but not allow them to realistically define when the game ends.

[Uncle Al]

I vary settings a bit between games, not least because I'm significantly better at battering the AI with some nations than others (cough, Niefelheim, cough) and had a rather good 1 v 2 v 2 disciple game recently. I think I'd struggle against 2 teams of Impossibles with just about any other nation, and almost got domkilled in that one.

I'm leaning more to coming up with settings that provide a challenge without setting the AI too high, now, for just the reasons Sombre mentions - the top 2 levels of AI throw ludicrious chaff hordes at you that require very distinct tactics to beat, but don't offer any more variation in gameplay, probably less, than the lower difficulties.

Things that seem to help the AI out a bit include:

Setting them to 'Standard' because Defensive AI's let you turtle half the game and Agressive ones start six wars before they meet you.

Setting supplies to x3 because the AI isn't good at managing them, and it stops throne defenders starving before they ever get to fight.

Lowering, or at least not raising, site frequency, because you're better than the AI at site searching.

Making research more difficult.

Keeping indies at 5 or lower (Even Impossible AIs struggle badly with their expansion at high indy levels).

Playing on maps with very little water and avoiding water nations, as the AI doesn't usually play them well. Leaving water area at 45% and bumping water province size to 900 gives you a map where only 5% of the actual provinces are water but there's still a fair few seas to break up the land and make it interesting.

I like thrones but playing without them is probably more fair to the AI. I've tended to avoid level 3 thrones at least, as a human is a lot better at coming up with ways to take them at relatively early research levels.

Playing with score graphs off so I can't cherry pick opponents.

I usually go for 10 nations total on a 150 province map as that makes for meaningful interactions with the other nations without slowing the turn resolution down in late game, although I've been trying some 1 v 2 v 2 disciple games on 80 province maps too.

One thing I did find very interesting, but only tried a few times in Dom 4 and not at all yet in Dom 5, is playing with the 'all sites revealed at start' mod. This seemed to really level the playing field as far as the AI's unpredictable site searching goes and meant pretty much gem income is directly proportional to land owned.

I'm pretty sure a version's available for Dom 5 already. It made for really interesting games - I couldn't keep a global up for more than 2 turns, because an enemy would just dispel or overcast them, and the variety of summons coming at me meant enemy nations were fielding really diverse armies which requried rather varied tactics to fight.

[wilson.max]

Originally posted by Danksama:

I'm just interested in hearing answers from the community about the above. I'm a new player and am nearly done with a small game (10 provinces per nation, 1v1) and am not sure whether to scale up or what to try in terms of settings next.

I tend to play on disciple mode (me controlling pretender + disciple), Events: Common, Globals: 9, Renaming: On, Clustered: On (unless it's a special map like Archaea), against 5 or 6 teams of 3+ Impossible AIs plus a few loner Impossible AIs (so, 20+ Impossible AIs on the map against two human-controlled nations).

Lately I've been finding myself dissatisfied with random maps because the terrain is too open and too boringly similar. I've therefore been playing more on custom maps of 300+ provinces. I really love Archaea: conquering Madagascar (Ruins of Lanka) feels so much more interesting than conquering random-forest-tile-on-a-huge-random-mamp.

I also usually quit the game around year 4 because at that point I can tell that I'm unstoppable. Occasionally I will play a bit longer just to see if I really am unstoppable or if AIs are on the verge of getting much stronger with new research; so far they haven't come close. (Not to say that I never lose, but if I lose it is typically around year 2, and usually when I'm learning a new nation.)