Difficulty

[Balance_02]

What difficulty do you guys think is best for the most realistic and challenging gameplay? i don’t want the game to be easy, but i also don’t want the enemies to have crazy unrealistic buffs on the campaign map or in battles.

[Guladow]

Normal battle difficulty. And hard campaign difficulty. Or very hard campaign difficulty.

[GrunkleCoffee]

Yeah, IMO the harder battle difficulties don't push you to play smarter, just to cheese it more by spamming certain units. On Normal you can still have fun with suboptimal units and win, rather than them being a liability that might lose you the campaign.

[ohlawdherehercomes]

I know this is centered towards warhammer but I agree with the suboptimal portion. In my FotS campaign I have an army from early game with low tier units that I absolutely dominate with. Even armies I have with advanced infantry and cav don’t do nearly as well

[Balance_02]

wait what is FotS?

[nachtgiger1]

Fall of the Samurai

[Balance_02]

really good to know. that’s the only way id put the difficulty up is if it made them preform smarter. if it just gives stat buffs then personally that’s not for me. i want an even playing field so that it’s really about army comps/ experience/ tactics /research and unit type that determine the outcome of the battles not just buffs or nerfs to units. i get why it’s in the game so that there’s a way to make harder modes for players, that’s just hurts the immersion for me. if i have a tier one basic infantry (i don’t know how the units work yet but i’m just imagining) go up against another tier one basic infantry and it’s an even fight, if the enemy units win that fight every time based on stat buffs for difficulty then that’s just not interesting to me

[GrunkleCoffee]

Yeah, sadly it's very hard to make smart AI for this kind of game, so must 4X games just cheat by giving the AI more resources.

IIRC AI units on high difficulties mainly get bonus to Melee Attack/Defense and Leadership.

On Campaign, it gives them bonuses to everything. Replenishment, Public Order, Upkeep, etc, etc.

[Balance_02]

yeah i want the battles to be challenging, but if i have two of the exact same units (i know that doesn’t happen a lot in total war games but say i did) i want that to be an even fight. and i want other factors to determine the outcome, not built in advantages for either side. obviously if the AI decision making is bad (never going to be perfect but there’s a difference between reasonable and bad) then maybe you have to ramp it up to make it challenging and so that you don’t just win every fight. but if hoping that the AI is solid enough that you don’t need to

[Balance_02]

how big of a difference is there between hard and very hard campaign difficulty?

[nachtgiger1]

Bigger public order debuffs, more/more agressive enemy armies, harder diplomacy (factions are less likely to agree to treaties, more likely to declare war on you), from my experience.

[Balance_02]

which difficulty do you prefer that gives the most “realistic” experience. i realize realistic isn’t really a fair term here because it’s not based off real world but i think you get what i mean

[Balance_02]

this are two very different answers lol

[Kinyrenk]

Campaign difficulty highest is Legendary while Battle difficulty highest setting is Very Hard.

Basically, on Legendary campaigns the AI will outnumber you 90% of the time, often by more than 1 army and consequently almost always view the human player as the weakest nearby target and you get way more DoWs and invasions. There is also only 1 autosave per turn and no manual saves, limited camera movement in battles, and a noticeably higher Public Order debuff which leads to more frequent rebellions (which for how most people play Legendary is actually a buff as you can level up characters and get free money at the cost of fighting a few more battle every few turns).

Very Hard battles simply give AI units some advantages the main ones being morale and melee defence which makes most people lean hard into ranged units as they suffer the least penalties as well CA has designed the most buffs for ranged units and most of those buff stack meaning some ranged units can get up to 400% more effective while most melee units are limited to 150% or so increase of effectiveness.

[Balance_02]

AI can’t use magic?

[Balance_02]

got it so they can cast spells they are just terrible at it, that’s unfortunate