Making SP harder

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Ironhawk

I was working on a summonable AI thug mod, at one point, and had fair success with it. Basically I just made really cost effective spells (that the AI would like to cast) which summoned custom-built thugs. Of course, the AI doesnt understand how to then use those thugs effectively, but it still made for more interesting battles and you were always assured that the thug itself was good.

Good approach. You don't have to do this with spells though, the AI will take some advantage if you make them normal recruitable units. The AI has absolutely no concept of unit valuation--you could give it 1 gcost Seraphs and it would still only build them sometimes--so if you really want a challenge you need to eliminate the worthless commanders from his recruitment list.

This is the same reason that I find NI/BI insufficient, although they do help a lot and I always use BI. But it's just so much hassle to try to coach the AI into building decent units, compared to simply transforming his worthless units wholesale into something exciting. This is particularly fun with --comptrn because you can actually watch MA Mictlan's 150 Ozelotls getting savaged by 200 Ermorian War Trolls. YMMV though.

-Max