Open Q - What changes/settings do you use for human vs. AI games?

[Tampa_Gamer]

Now that the final patch is out for SE4 I thought I would re-kindle an old thread from 2001 (could not find it) but essentially the purpose was to poll people to find out what changes they make to the game when they are playing solely against the AI in order to "level the playing field" in terms of techs not used by the AI, settings, etc. I am interested primarily in easy changes to options, stock settings, certain techs turned off, etc. Please don't post huge readme.txt files of component changes, etc. - if you use a particular mod, just mention it and why. DISCLAIMER - All observations on what the AI will or will not do are based on player observations (including my own) - not on any actual knowledge of the program code. I'll start:

[GAME OPTIONS DURING SET-UP]
(1) Personal preference - but I typically give players a 3 planet start instead of 1 since the AI does not recover if it is hit a deathblow (like losing its only homeworld) in the first 20 turns.

(2) I typically "turn-off" certain techs. The general reason is that although an AI author can force the AI to only research certain techs in the AI research file, it is hard-coded into the game that the AI will continue researching all available tech when it reaches the end of it's personal file. Furthermore, if a particular tech is not turned off, it can still be used by human players to create an unfair advantage by their use of as value in a gift that will not be used by the AI. The specific reasons are as follows:
(A) Resource Manipulation -> the AI will not build nor use resource converters or ultra-recyclers. Accordingly, this presents an unfair advantage to the human player.

(B) Scanners -> As far as we know, the AI does not use the information gained from scanners. Removing this ability removes both the scanners and the scanner jammers from use. Furthermore, the ability "scanner jammer" is the only way that AI designers can force the AI to use "scattering armor." If the AI eventually has scanner jammers via gift or otherwise - it will weaken many of its ship designs because it will put in a scanner jammer instead of the scattering armor.

(3) AI Setting to "High" and bonus set to at least "Low"

[DATA FILE- SETTINGS.TXT]
(1) The line "Retrofit Max Percent Difference in Cost" changed from 50 to 150 so the AI does not repeatedly try and retrofit its ships in endless cycles and also helps to max their designs.

(2) The line "Maximum Mines Per Player Per Sector" reduced from 100 to 50 to give the AI a chance against minefields since it still has some trouble dealing with them (better now, but not totally cured by the patches).

[PERSONAL SELF-IMPOSED RESTRICTIONS]
(1) I only allow myself to mine warp points (not planets) since the AI will not mine its own planets.

[MODS]
(1) Tampa-Gamer\Lucas Intel Mod (on gold disk) -> creates a separate tech area for Human Intel and adds it as a prerequisite to those intel projects that the AI does not use - but will nonetheless waste intel points on anyway.

(2) TDM ModPack (of course!) -> provides revised original and new AI races for which each author spent a lot of time maximizing the individual tech trees, designs, politics and build queues specifically for each race.

That is all I can think of off the top of my head. Look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.
-TG