Seriously Frog

what did I play for?

from Elemental Forums

If I knew how to attach my save file I would show it.  I completely wasted a night (without the kids) on this "ridiculous"-ness.  (that's a level of hardness, or difficulty, or in this case...)

It was ridiculous because:

(read it slow because it took 5 hours to play)

1000's of spiders that I cant hit and don't hit me.

Every starting race playing but the one I created.

Huge map.

After 250 years or so while Im walking through the woods with 2 of my baby girls I finally find the Umber.  Only the King of Umber was able to answer the door.  He had not found a faun as yet i guess.

Mr. Umber is sitting there with 1 city (total) and an unfinished farm (zero turns to complete bug?).  Well, Im evil this time so lets just kill the little turds!  Arggg!!!  I'm tired of just killing spiders!

King of Umber eat my wrath!  Pow!... Bang!

Ta da!!!

Game Won.

You get 26 tickets that you cant spend at Chucky-Cheese.

I get a pretty picture of the new world I just created though.  That's a plus!  Doesn't really matter that I was trying to be the Evil Empire.

I never use chat code words but...

WTF Mate?

Seriously.  You need to put a check in the code that will tell someone their game is not going to pan out like a real game because the other players are not producing anything (or were wiped out by the spider swarms), and have no armies, and that your just going to be playing a game of "run around the woods and kill spiders because we have nothing else to give you".  If the game told me that I would be cool.  I can kill spiders. Of that I am sure.

Thanks

If you tell me how Ill upload my saves, but making me feel cool only to find out I was cool only because I was the only one that was able to be cool is not cool!

Also, If by "ridiculous" difficulty you really mean that its going to be ridiculous please put that in the manual.

Fire Ze Missiles!

Somehow I still enjoyed the time without the kids!

 

elemental
6,639 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Sounds like a rehashing of the ridiculous world vs. ridiculous AI issue.  If you set the world difficulty to ridiculous, but don't change the difficulties on each individual opponent AI, it's not surprising that they're all getting wiped out.  Basically, you're amping up the wilderness so that it's filled with lots of evil creatures - including spiders - but you're not scaling the AI's competence (or, in this case, extra resources) to go with it.  Result: you, who can cut through the evil spiders easily are likely to meet weak opposition that has struggled to counter the same threats.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

You would think when you set difficulty level at the beginning of a game, it would mean difficulty level for the whole game. Roaming monsters and factions alike. After that you should be able to tweak it from the default, say when you are setting up your AI opponents. There is no indication that it works otherwise, and no intuitive reason to think so. In the short time I've been on these forums I've seen this same problem repeated a few times already.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Yes it used to work by applying the world difficulty to all AIs by default, unless you customized an AI player to be otherwise.  Changing that has caused a lot of avoidable angst and upset.

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I noticed as well that you need to set AI difficulty manually afterwards. This is the only game that I know that does this this way.

They need to fix things like this if they ever want this product to be polished and called a real game.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I think that Stardock needs to default all AI strengths to World Difficulty.  If you go in and change the AIs (which would all start on World Difficulty) *then* they would be different to world difficulty.  They had the right idea for a previous version of Elemental, so they just need to return to it to prevent future avoidable angst and upset. =)

Frogboy/Kael, can you do this?  That would be great! :D

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I disagree.  what I think is needed is for the computer opponent AI screen to just add the following

 

-default AI difficulty

-random AI opponents

 

I prefer to play at normal or challenging world difficulty and challenging AI.

 

 

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

StevenAus has the right idea, I think.  Have the AI default to the same level as the world difficulty, then you can tweak it from there by opponent if you wish...

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Just like GalCiv 2 i would like to be able to customize the AI. As long as it's marked clearly thats a much better way...people are so ADD these days and don't read everything

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

FYI: If you suspect that your AI is stuck, just check the kingdom report page. You have an uncanny ability to see how many cities they own, etc.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Shalkto, reply 8
Just like GalCiv 2 i would like to be able to customize the AI. As long as it's marked clearly thats a much better way...people are so ADD these days and don't read everything

 

It has nothing to do with ADD as the game does not indicate at all that there's any different between the two. Elemental/GalCiv is one of the few if only games that makes a distinction between these two things.