New difficulty/intelligence levels?

They added more levels of non-cheater AI, and the AI is also improved in every patch (bar 1.2 original, due to Stardock being busy dealing with a troll).

I'm having a hard time on normal now whereas before it was usually pretty smooth sailing. For the first time on normal an enemy declared a pre-emptive war on me and are being really aggressive.

Normal also got made harder, with the AI allowed more algorithms (since there are new levels inbetween), and it's closer to it's 1.0 self, which was pretty close to tough.

In other words, you'd probably be playing 1.0 tough right now

I think they would be better served by completely separating the AI selector, and the amount of cheating. this was suggested in the dev journals and it would make a lot of sense.

well c that in the expansion i think

Up to 1.2, the difficulty levels remained the same in terms of the bonus/penalties given , though they all played better as you patched them due to AI improvements.

It's much more confusing in 1.3

Instead of merely adding new levels (two) in between maschoistic and sucide and one between easy and normal with scaled amount of bonuses,

This happened.

+ More difficulty levels: Dunce at the lower end, Godlike and Ultimate at the higher end. + AI intelligence levels above and below "Intelligent" adjusted in difficulty (so i.e. Normal will be tougher than it was because there's a new easier difficulty level and Incredible will be easier because there's two higher difficulty levels).

It's unclear to me what this does to the bonuses and penalties now.

I played one game at crippling. I have no idea whether it was better or worse...I beat it easily as I did in 1.2 and before. I have a bad feeling that monstrous leap up to masochistic is still there. Anyone tried it and can report back?

Hmm I typically don't do betas, but I tried the patch and did Macohistic, medium map, I won after some struggle, I don't know if this means the Ai is better, worse the same, or my own skill level has improved.

i'd love if somebody could tell us what exactly the new levels do, specially the 2 new levels.
does this mean 1 level now gets 150% bonus and the other 175% bonus, just to compensite the big gab in between 125% and 200% bonus ?

Yes, mystic, I think that was the original question, though no one has been able to answer it yet. I'd also be interested in knowing.