What difficulty levels do players, and their empires, really prefer? The Spymaster's latest report reveals the truth about a large sample of the current Metaverse spanning 520 players in the 13 top empires.

Gerakken's toughness scale is not meant to measure maximum difficulty level played, but the current preferred levels of play based on recent games. The last 3 entries on a player's record are checked against a scale, averaged, and rounded back to the nearest category. Losses, anomolous scores, and scores from old version games that did not report difficulty are ignored. The preferred sample is 3 games, but if a player has only one or two valid scores, the record is still processed.

The scoring scale is based upon game difficulty:

1 Cakewalk
2 Easy
3 Simple
4 Beginner
5 Normal
6 Challenging
7 Tough
8 Painful
9 Crippling
10 Masochistic

To use a fictitious player record as an example, say the last three games were normal (rated 5), painful (rated 8), and crippling (rated 9). Those add up to 22 points. The average would be 22/3=7.33 rounded down to 7. The player rating is tough (7) on the scale.

422 player records out of 520 contained eligible scores. The scores are listed as a composite of all players combined and are also broken down by empires. Empires are rated on a similar toughness skill to players. The overall rating of each valid player record in the empire is averaged together. Empires with less than 10 usable player records are not listed in the empire breakdowns because the sample is too small to get a real empire toughness, but their players still appear in the composite.

Here are the empire breakdowns, in ascending order of empire toughness:

CDG Creations League
Cakewalk : 0
Easy : 0
Simple : 5
Beginner : 2
Normal : 2
Challenging: 1
Tough : 0
Painful : 0
Crippling : 0
Masochistic: 0
Toughness rating: 3.90

Canadian Star Federation
Cakewalk : 5
Easy : 3
Simple : 9
Beginner :12
Normal :15
Challenging: 7
Tough : 1
Painful : 3
Crippling : 0
Masochistic: 1
Toughness rating: 4.36

Jedi Republic
Cakewalk : 1
Easy : 1
Simple : 3
Beginner : 7
Normal : 3
Challenging: 0
Tough : 1
Painful : 4
Crippling : 0
Masochistic: 0
Toughness rating: 4.70

Apolyton
Cakewalk : 2
Easy : 4
Simple :10
Beginner :18
Normal :15
Challenging: 6
Tough : 4
Painful : 8
Crippling : 3
Masochistic: 2
Toughness rating: 5.03

ANZAC
Cakewalk : 4
Easy : 0
Simple : 2
Beginner : 5
Normal : 8
Challenging: 3
Tough : 1
Painful : 1
Crippling : 4
Masochistic: 1
Toughness rating: 5.14

European Alliance
Cakewalk : 3
Easy : 5
Simple : 8
Beginner :11
Normal :16
Challenging: 9
Tough : 5
Painful :10
Crippling : 4
Masochistic: 1
Toughness rating: 5.22

GROSS
Cakewalk : 2
Easy : 1
Simple : 6
Beginner : 2
Normal : 7
Challenging: 8
Tough : 4
Painful : 7
Crippling : 4
Masochistic: 1
Toughness rating: 5.79

Gamma Squad
Cakewalk : 0
Easy : 2
Simple : 1
Beginner : 3
Normal : 5
Challenging: 2
Tough : 0
Painful : 5
Crippling : 3
Masochistic: 0
Toughness rating: 5.86

MWC
Cakewalk : 0
Easy : 1
Simple : 4
Beginner : 3
Normal :14
Challenging: 6
Tough : 5
Painful : 6
Crippling : 6
Masochistic: 0
Toughness rating: 5.97

The Fellowship
Cakewalk : 0
Easy : 0
Simple : 1
Beginner : 3
Normal : 7
Challenging: 7
Tough : 4
Painful : 7
Crippling : 9
Masochistic: 0
Toughness rating: 6.76

The composite rating of all 422 eligible players in all 13 top empires:
Cakewalk :17
Easy :17
Simple :50
Beginner :70
Normal :92
Challenging:52
Tough :29
Painful :54
Crippling :35
Masochistic: 6
Toughness rating: 5.36

Anything less than 4.5 on the empire toughness scale represent empires whose players are laid back about difficulty level. A 4.5 to 5.5 represent empires who take a middle of the road approach to difficulty. Anything above 5.5 represents an empire that is leaning toward harder games.

In my research, I have found 4 general types of player records:
1. The traditional climb of starting low and levelling off at some point higher on the scale.
2. The peak and drop, where a player starts low, climbs to a certain height, and then drops back down to a comfortable difficulty level.
3. A straight line: the player starts at a certain difficulty and rarely deviates from it.
4. A lab rat/wild record scenario where difficulty changes very often.

I feel this is a fair scale no matter what the pattern of the record. It does not exclude newer players with few scores on the board, but the three game sample also does not discriminate against older players with long records.

I may make empire difficulty breakdown a standard feature in my Major Empires thread to better help players pin down whether any of those empires are right for them. For the moment, though, I just present my work here for evaluation and commentary. May these numbers prove useful.

Edit: Attempted chart formatting.
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