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Does anyone know how the AI is made more difficult with the higher difficulty levels? The reason I ask is that I have this thing for artificial difficulty. For instance, say you are sailing a historic ship and increase the difficulty level and the result is that your ship now sails slower then it should. Yes, that makes it more difficult but is not realistic. Does the GoA AI handle it this way or has it been "dumbed down" on the lower levels, ie, just not making as good of decisions as it could?

The difficulty levels are just the old "give the AI more resources" thing. The reason is its hard enough to get decent play from an AI, I can't imagine why I would want to leave out anything that made it better.

The reason is its hard enough to get decent play from an AI, I can't imagine why I would want to leave out anything that made it better.

Well, that would be one way of making difficulty levels - having poorer (less likely?) decisions at the lower levels. But, I agree 100% on the difficulty of programing an AI. I've been blaming that for years on the lessening popularity of PC games since it takes so much effort ($$$) to develop an AI and it is so much simpler to make great graphics. The bottom line is that computers do not reason, just number crunch so every possibility has to be thought of ahead of time which is probably an impossibility. This AI has been competitive but I've played many that I annihilated on the very first play thru (the old John Tiller battlefield games come to mind)that I was forced to play like the old board games - against myself. Still had fun though.