Correspondingly, anything below normal difficulty, you cheat.  

+300% raw production
+200% economy
-50% manufacturing cost for improvements and ships
+20 morale
... Yes, there is more... but you get the big picture from this. (taken from DLC/EXP2_Crusade/Game/GalCiv3AIDefs.xml)

They basicly took the values from pre crusade and kept them, while reducing a couple of mechanisms for the player to stack boni. So effectively it cheats even harder than in GC3 vanilla now.

Sorry... did I say cheat? I meant getting handicaps ofc. (Froggy insists there is a difference)

It also used to cheat away fow at genius or gifted+ difficulties. Not sure how it's now. But to me even normal feels kinda fishy... I would really care to know, what exactly the AI considers in its guessing algorithm. I can't shake the feeling it has an unfair advantage.

But it is getting less and less. The axed AITechGovernorDefs in Crusade. Froggy stated he doesn't like the AIStrategyDefs.xml. Modding the AI behaviors has gotten harder. There is no reasonable way to take influence on the AIs asteroid building strategies.

The cheats you can edit (AIStrategyDefs). woooohooooo... /sarcasm

Haha, "handicapping" always confuses me in bowling and golf.  I get it in the context of a computer game, however.

Hmm, if they had handicapping in swimming, they would let the slow swimmers go first, then make the fast swimmers catch them.  Or else they would wait until everybody touched the wall at the end and then either subtract seconds from the slow swimmers' times or add seconds to the fast swimmers' times. 

And that would be the death knell of competitive swimming, because nobody would care to watch it.

If they wanted handicapping in swimming, they would be much more likely to use calibrated ankle weights or something.  A similar system has worked for handicapping horse racing and seems to be easily understood.  Your example is a very poor argument for your point.

BowIing and golf do handicapping by comparing your individual average against a baseline set by the total group. I have no idea why that sort of handicapping makes sense to thousands of local bowling leagues and yet confuses you.  If that is true, then your logic and preferences are very unique, and therefore, unlikely to represent a statistically significant portion of any potential gaming customer base.  It is not that you are not entitled to your opinion.  It just strikes me as unlikely your post and its arguments will convince or influence anyone at Stardock.  It certainly didn't work for me.

Can we just stop debating the difference of cheats an handicaps? The boundaries are fluent and their effect is the same.
So is the conclusion: The AIs decision making still is far inferior to human decisions.

And here I thought Frogboy being back on the team would write an AI which would make bitch about it :/

Well, I'm sorry I brought it up.

But yeah....no...you can't do that to people.  It would change the human body's angle in the water, which would further disadvantage the best athletes, and on top of that, it would likely cause injuries due to the changed mechanics for arms, shoulders, and elbows.  Furthermore, it would prevent new records from being established, killing the competition aspect of the sport.  Even the use of resistance training aids (drag suits, hand paddles, etc) must be done with care so as to avoid a potentially career-ending injury. And never in a competition, damn!

Just the thought of this makes my shoulders, elbows, and wrists hurt!   

Oh and it shouldn't be done to horses either.  Weights pulling down on legs during the pounding of running would exert forces far beyond the design limitations of mere cartilage, ligaments, and bone!  We learned this at least in the 80s when people were wearing ankle weights while running and doing aerobics.  So knowing that now, doing it again would be a form of abuse!   

Sorry to take the topic off track, but seriously, I had no idea I was, ahem, diving into a pool of controversy.  And over something that I don't really feel strongly about (handicapping of AIs in this game).  Handicap/cheating, call it whatever you want and I'll call it practical.  In a computer game, some of that must be employed so as to calibrate the AI to work for all skills, or else we can only play the game on one skill level, and that would be no fun at all.  As I see it, the only other alternative to handicaps is to write different levels of AI behavior.  This can be done of course; it's just going to cost more labor for designing and coding, with maybe not much to gain for all the effort.

I'm going to stop following this thread.  It no longer interests me, and quite frankly, I don't want to spend any more time arguing against the cruelty of restraints on the natural body movements of any mammal, human or other.  Unless they're giant subterranean worms on one of my colonies, that is.  But then those probably aren't mammals, and there's always a new thread for that.