Why are difficulty settings not sticky?

from Elemental Forums

I've read several posts here about what the difficulty settings do to try and better understand them.  My assumption was that difficulty worked in a similar way to civ4.  Namely if you set your difficulty to "beginner" and all the AIs to "normal" you'd have an easy game; and if you left them normal and set yours to "Rediculous" you'd have a hard time.   From some of the posts I've read here it may not be that simple or intuitive.  I'd prefer it if it were.

However, what I really don't understand was the change in a recent patch that made all of the AI difficulty settings default to the same as the player's.   In civ 4, they defaulted to "Normal" allowing you to set yours to easy or hard depending on how you want to play.   What is the sense in setting all the AI's "difficulty" settings to the same as whatever you choose for yourself?   I guess if I better understood that I'd have a better idea of what these difficulty settings actually do.

Bottom line, I have three requests or suggestions for the developers:

1) If you can't release something more intuitive or easier to use, then please at least release some better documentation describing functionality and usage.

2) If "difficulty" means what I assumed above from my civ4 experience, then please restore the default for all ai's to "normal".   Otherwise what does the term "normal" really mean in this context?

3) At the very least, please make the difficulty settings for the ai's persistent across new games -- like every other control in the game setup interface.  Having to manually reset every ai to the desired easier or harder difficulty that is different from that of the player is a pain.    If you want to have a common default that's easily set, then add a new "default ai difficulty" setting which gets used for the purpose ... and again is persistent across games.  Even adding such an option to the config file parameters until it can be eventually added to the interface screen would be a mercy.

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

elemental
7,841 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

There is no player difficulty setting. The one in the new game screen is the world difficulty setting, that determines the difficulty of monsters and such.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The closest equivalent in civ to the world difficulty setting would probably be the barbarians setting.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Netriak, reply 1
There is no player difficulty setting. The one in the new game screen is the world difficulty setting, that determines the difficulty of monsters and such.
End of Netriak's quote

 

Ok, I'll buy that.  Then what does setting the difficulty of an ai do relative to the player?  Does setting an ai to "hard" mean that the particular ai will have a harder game to play relative to the player (thus making it easier for the player to beat that ai)?  Or that the player will have a harder time beating that ai?

 

And again, what is the sense in setting all of the ai difficulty settings to that of the world?

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Maybe it needs to be more clear about what the world difficulty settings is, or maybe have the AIs default to whatever the world setting is and then the player can choose to change it if they wish.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

AI difficulty give the AI bonuses. Harder AI's are more difficult to defeat. The idea in setting the AI difficulty by default to world difficulty is to have an easy way to set general game difficulty for the player.

Easy: opponent ai: AI cannot use combat magic. AI plays at 50% intelligence. AI gets 10% income penalty.

Normal Opponent ai: same game rules, plays at 75 intelligence.

Challenging: double starting gold, full intelligence.

Hard: Triple starting gold, 25% income bonus, 50% sovereign hitpoint bonus, 50% more sovereign creation points

Extreme: Quintiple starting gold, 50% income bonus, double unit hitpoints, triple sovereign hitpoints, triple sovereign creation points

Ridiculous: 10 times starting gold, triple income, vision for the entire map with all units, triple hitpoints for all units, quadruple hitpoints for sovereign, quadruple sovereign creation points.

 

The player, unlike civ, always plays by the same rules.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

What on earth kind of games have you been playing :-P. I've never seen difficulty settings done any other way than this.

Setting the AI difficulty to hard means that the AI will be harder to beat. It gets economic bonuses and such. Same goes for the world difficulty.

 

Edit: Also, if the world difficulty were set much higher than the AI difficulty, then the AI would get trounced by wandering wolves. So it's probably a good starting point to have the two difficulty settings somewhat similar (or at least not setting world difficulty much higher than AI).

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

or maybe have the AIs default to whatever the world setting is and then the player can choose to change it if they wish.
End of quote

That exactly was done in the 1.06 update.

 

Does setting an ai to "hard" mean that the particular ai will have a harder game to play relative to the player (thus making it easier for the player to beat that ai)? Or that the player will have a harder time beating that ai?
End of quote

All of the difficulty settings are defined based on the difficulty (or lack of) that they're intended to present to the human player. Harder world difficulty should make the game harder for *you*, same as harder AI difficulty should.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Is there a reason that the easiest AI, novice, does not get an economic penalty, unlike the more difficult easy and beginner AI settings?

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

AI difficulty give the AI bonuses. Harder AI's are more difficult to defeat. The idea in setting the AI difficulty by default to world difficulty is to have an easy way to set general game difficulty for the player.
End of quote

Thanks Netriak.  That explains it very well. I appreciate  your helpful post.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

What on earth kind of games have you been playing . I've never seen difficulty settings done any other way than this.  Setting the AI difficulty to hard means that the AI will be harder to beat. It gets economic bonuses and such. Same goes for the world difficulty.
End of quote

Ah yes.  Well perhaps I'm clueless in taking Sid Meyer's Civilization series as an example.  It's not like it's ever been very popular, won any awards, played very often, nor had much impact on the gaming world.  No doubt the recent announcement of the fifth version in this franchise will be their opportunity to correct this, and having seen the error of their ways they will completely change the way they've made such games in the past and adhere to your ironclad conviction of the right and only true way to properly implement this.  If not, perhaps you can start a Jihad.

Ooops, someone appears to have turned off my sarcasm filter.   Let me fix that.