One of my main frustrations with Victor was the AI. I played on the highest difficulty a couple times, and I had a lot of issues with the AI falling behind in power. Sometimes they kept up with fame somewhat, but they were clearly weaker in pretty much every measurable category, from gold to science to production to pop count to military strength, it was only a matter of time until I snowballed out of control. And yet, at the very start the game felt punishing and unfairly so at times. For those who don't know, at the highest difficulty you pretty much always need 2 tribesmen to defeat 1 tribesman of an AI. Even with high ground you don't have a secure victory in a 1 on 1 fight. Which also makes it a bit random, if you never run into AI tribes by pure luck, you have a significantly easier time and may feel like the difficulty setting isn't even there, whereas if you by pure chance are spawned in the middle of a bunch of AI tribes that by chance decide to keep attacking your tribesmen, you'll think that the difficulty is insanely unfair. But neither of those are the truth, it's just RNG.

So here's what I was thinking, I got the idea from Stellaris, they did scaling difficulty, but not very well. However, I think Humankind's era/culture progression is practically MADE for this.

Instead of granting insane combat strength from the start, how about +1 strength to all units whenever the AI progresses an era?

Instead of giving them giant % modifiers on production and science and gold from the start, what if they instead got bonuses whenever they advance into the next era?

They start out with some minor increases that help them out, so the early game is fair, and they gain new bonuses as they advance and they start to snowball same as the player would. What if for example the AI unlocked a certain amount of techs for free from the previous era whenever they advance to the next era? What if they just were given a set amount of gold or influence when they advanced to the next era?

It's not a solution to the AI being rigid and not as smart as humans, but I think the AI is good in battles, it's just that their macro, their build orders, they just suck and it's not something that can be improved much without tons of effort, I know that, I understand how hard writing a really smart AI is. But perhaps a balance of sorts could be struck if the AI snowballed at just the right rate.

Honestly it'd be even better if the player could configure some of these settings manually. If I could choose exactly what bonuses and when the AI got them, maybe there would be a setting that was just right for me, and everyone could find that for themselves? Have the pre-sets, sure, but give options to the player to customize exactly how much the AI gets and when.

I think this is something indie titles absolutely nail nowadays. Hades' pact of punishment, Thea's configurable difficulty settings, Monster Train's covenant ranks and mutators, Rimworld has customizable difficulties too, they do this so well I am shocked it's not more widespread...

I agree with your post. AI scaling would be nice as a game option. In CIV VI, AI scaling mods were a must-have for me, so I would love something like AI scaling in the base game. Of course, I think there should also be an option for no AI scaling for those who don't want it.

Just agreement from my side. I would love to have control of the bonuses that the AI gets, especially as I am a near exclusive single-player person.