> Making the AI "way too fucking smart" at insane/hard difficulty and then dumbing it down seems way, way, way better than hitpoint modifiers. In principle, su

> Making the AI "way too fucking smart" at insane/hard difficulty and then dumbing it down seems way, way, way better than hitpoint modifiers. In principle, sure. However, taking a "way too fucking smart" AI and dumbing it down believably isn't necessarily that much easier than going the other way, taking a dumb AI and smarting it up. Problem is you can't just slap a "dumbassness" dial onto a smart AI in a way that appears natural. Possibly the simplest attempt could be to take a "way too fucking smart" AI and represent the dial as a probability that the AI takes a random action instead of the way too fucking smartest move. That gives you a very nice smooth continuous dial that will correlate monotonously with difficulty level. But if you were to play against it (by which I mean you, cause I suck at videogaming, myself), you'll probably figure out soon enough that it's a strictly artificial handicap providing the difficulty, in a very similar manner to changing the monsters' HP or speed. Also it's not a lot of fun, if close to the hardest difficulty, you just luck out and the monster performs the most stupid move, and trips itself or something. Such a dial doesn't represent cleverness. I suppose you could attempt something a bit less artificial, like limiting the search-tree depth for the planning algorithm or something. Question becomes how granular that dial would be (search-trees aren't that deep usually) and what settings correspond to what difficulty level, you'd need to playtest this. Also the question remains to what extent this artificial limitation will appear obvious or not.