Main menu difficulty levels?

[Flalt]

What do they do? I asked this question in another thread but received no attention. I know what the AI difficulty levels do, but this is a mystery to me.

[crass]

the same thing for the campaign

[Flalt]

Ah OK. Thanks.

[aubergine]

There are two places where difficulty levels are set. One is on the Game Options Menu:



That relates to the difficulty of the campaign, basically giving the enemy players more units and stuff like that to make the campaign more challenging.

The other is on the game player set-up screens, and relate to the AI players in the game:



The Easy, Medium and Hard settings rely on the AI script itself to decide how to be less or more difficult. For example, NullBot will not attack in groups on Easy setting, and it will use research adaptation if it's on the Hard setting.

The Insane setting, however, makes a big difference to AI players:

1. It doubles their oil production - you can imagine how much of an advantage that is!
2. It removes fewer map-defined buildings for the AI player (detailed info here)

Hope that helps

[Flalt]

Thanks for the clarification, esp. on the campaign difficulty.

[NoQ]

No-no-no, it's all wrong (:

In campaign, high difficulty gives the enemy weapons +20% damage and decreases your damage by 20% (the total is 50%, and if we consider the armor, it's much greater), while easy difficulty does the opposite. In 2.3, there was a bug (feature? was fixed anyway) that caused this option to do the same to skirmish games (but not multiplayer, of course).

For Nexus AI, difficulty increase extra free power it receives regularly and research boost it has (easy (or minimal in 2.3) is non-cheating).
Semperfi disregards difficulty levels.
NullBot still regroups on easy, but it follows a stupid research path (not specialized) and uses a senseless build order.
Insane difficulty makes them all cheat as explained above.

[aubergine]

Thanks for info - I will add to wiki as that will be useful info to know.

[aubergine]

@NoQ: How does the setting affect Challenge maps? I assume there is a way to lock difficulty in the settings file, otherwise user can change it for each player and it will work just like Skirmish/MP?

EDIT: First draft of wiki page: https://warzone.atlassian.net/wiki/disp ... lty+Levels

[NoQ]

The AI difficulty is locked in the challenge .ini files, and the Campaign difficulty no longer affects challenges, which are sort of skirmish. I think.

[Cyp]

... In 2.3, there was a bug (feature? was fixed anyway) that caused this option to do the same to skirmish games (but not multiplayer, of course).

...

Actually, in 2.3, there was a bug that caused the difficulty level to affect how much power you get. In multiplayer. Only found that out because it was causing desynchs in master. Think the fix for that particular issue was backported. In 2.3, there were lots of insane bugs that made it very unfair in multiplayer (for example, some players could build 6 times faster than other players, and cover the map in ripples (without cheating) before it was possible for other players to research them in optimal time, and ridiculous stuff like that). Some of those bugs with backportable fixes were fixed. Some bugs were never discovered/reported (but fixed by accident in master/3.1 when redesigning insane code), and therefore not fixed in 2.3. Some were too hard to fix.

Don't expect a fair game in 2.3, even if you somehow manage to finish a game without it freezing or crashing.

[aubergine]

@NoQ - IIRC, if no difficulty is specified in the ini file the player can change difficulty setting on the players screen (can't remember if that's still accessible on the challenge game setup screen though). I noticed the other day when taking screenies for menus/etc that in challenge things like alliances, scavengers, base type, etc., can be pre-defined (and thus locked) or undefined (and thus user-selectable when starting game). I've not yet dug further in to challenge maps but it's on my to-do list.