Challenging standard game against AI

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>]

> I generally play the standard game and I'm having trouble finding a
> combination of options / advantages / world size that provides a
> challenging game.  It seems that either I cream the computer or it
> overwhelms me (and I can usually predict which will happen in 50 turns
> or so).

Have you tried playing with country-separation-min and
country-separation-max (you need to edit the .g files, there isn't a
pointy-clicky way to set them as far as I know)?

I've only begun to try tweaking them, but just based on the games I've
played, it seems like the distance between my country and that of the
AI(s) is the biggest factor (and the defaults for min and max are 16
and 48 - well a factor of 3 is a pretty big range!).

A few of the games I've played repeatedly are:

* Single AI of +5 advantage.  Can sometimes overwhelm me, but I
  usually win.

* Two AI's of +5 each.  Provided I can get them to fight each other
  (partly luck based on the initial map, partly skill), this usually
  becomes easy.  But up to that point it can be interesting.

* Five AI's of +3 each.  Problem is that once you conquer one of the
  opponents, the rest usually becomes easy.  Can lead to some
  interesting situations in which your initial position is sandwiched
  tightly between opponents, and you need to find a weak enough spot
  to strike at.  With that many opponents, they are never far away!

Those are all on a standard size world.  As a general rule of thumb,
making the world bigger seems to make the game easier (because I
explore and conquer independent cities faster than the AI at the start
of the game), but I haven't done as much experimentation with larger
worlds.