Ericridge

Join Date 02/2012

+27

Finding your difficulty level home

I have discovered my sweet spot after several hundred hours of gameplay.

And that is at Expert Mode!

At this difficulty level, there is still plenty of monsters to kill, wildlands to explore and conquer.

Tech pace progress at reasonable pace to allow for interesting gameplay and armies.

I tried out Ridiculous mode several times and found it to be simply ridiculous indeed.

Wildlands is cleared out.

Monsters is wiped out.

AIs finish their tech tree and is training in those multipliers instantly.

And I found out how overpowered Tarth is with 60% accuraccy boost.

I could fight the AI armies off but with horrible causalities due to all cheats which is to be expected.

So I accepted that my level is in expert because its most satisfying progress in there but at same time I'm now sad because the game no longer offer any challenge to me nor any fun at all.

Ok to try make long story short.

I shall load up a screenshot to help you understand.

I was only at war against yithril for this game.

Red Circle is where my Capital cities is at, a town, fortress + Conclave.

Black Circle is where Yithril's capital cities is at.

Me is Zanber, Yithril is Yithril. We fought each other to a stalemate early on. To put it simply, we killed each other off but yithril had a slight advantage to Juggernaughts running around with 40% accuracy bonus, i don't even know how he did that so early in the game on expert. But he didn't have the balls to assault my cities unless he had a garbage army to remove the militia first. And he didn't' have any suicide armies in place so he just gave up and took his ball home because if he can't cheat by removing my militia he won't risk his army like I do when i assault his cities. fuck him.

This left me pretty angry. So after his cowardly armies left and we signed a neutral peace. Yithril entered world conquest mode. While I entered expansion and consolidation mode. There was alot of unclaimed lands and a couple of wildlands to my south. I was right next to curgen's grave which I expanded into first. Then the yellow circle was Imperia Wildlands. Which I found out was kind in middle of map which prompted me to start an all out attack due to it's excellent central location. After taking it over and constructing three fortresses plus a conclave so heroes stationed there can purchase blizzard/wellspring scrolls as necessary without abandoning defenses.

White circle is where Yithril expanded to. Took bit of badlands and took lands from Altar, pariden, and wiping out the dead. He was on the roll to win the game but yithril forgot one important thing....

The fact that his capital cities is right next to my capital cities.... Needless to say, after yithril overextended themselves i mounted an fast war on the yithril and took every single capital cities they had and burnt them to the ground in case he had an impressively large armies returning to take the cities back but never materialized.

After burning down all of his core cities yithril just surrendered to me, few armies i fought from him did manage to show up but got wiped out..

Then I just quit at this point because I already won. All other ais is too weak even when I razed yithril's cities.

I want to do stuff like bring 20 armies to have a good fight with AI's 20 armies. But it simply cannot happen and it makes me sad.

But it can happen if I suffer through ridiculous and live long enough somehow which is something I"m not willing to do because I want to have fun and frankly, ridiculous isn't fun And I'm not ready to see someone before I check insane setting

Its so friggin hard to find a Good Fight!

And the thing that makes me angry is that I never get to try out Guardian Idols. I want to play with it so badly but I have yet to play it cuz AIs is such wusses and weaklings that can't fight you unless you play on ridiculous and up. Unless they brought a garbage suicide army to remove ur militia first that is so that you never have to have that awesome epic siege battle because screw human players.

I think I have played with regular Guardians only three times.

And gotten the quest which unlock one of the guardian idols for you to play on field named bill once. x.x I wanna play with guardianssss!

despite this, I'm still playing FE:LH on expert hoping and hoping that I get lucky and find that super exclusive good fight.

Oops I rambled.

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davrovana

Join Date 05/2009

+61

Time to mod in buildable guardian units for your custom faction?

Ever tried making just ONE AI a ridiculous, while making the rest experts?

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It's difficult to hit that sweet spot in any 4X game. For example, a friend and I play Endless Space cooperatively on hard. I would say our games have panned out this way:

Too Easy 30%
Reasonable Challenge 30%
Challenging 30%
Too hard 10%

So, we are playing the right level for our skills, yet nearly 40 percent of the games are less than satisfying.

Since you consistently find one level too easy and the next too frustrating, I like davrovana's suggestion to put in just one AI at ridiculous. Just remember it's a thin line between "Challenging" and "Too Hard."

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If expert is getting too easy, try playing on ridiculous with a badass custom faction. I'm about ready to give up playing on insane because it's getting too easy. Basically you just have to work out things that are force multipliers that will make your stack of doom a Stack of DOOM.

I only make henchmen units in my cities. I use a beastlord mage for my Sov so by the time I am ready to make units at all in any city I have a full army of bears or spiders that are much better than the crappy spearmen or whatever you can make at the start of the game. Henchmen start out weak but if you get an army of them with +10% XP bonus, they level fast. Usually I'll have 2 or 3 on mage path, 1 or 2 on commander, maybe 1 warrior, sometimes an assassin or a defender (but they are rare). I'd rather have a great wolf and umberdroth in my main stack than a defender and assassin.

One of the tricks I use is to take several of those mage henchman, find Pariden and buy them a book of air magic. Once they level up a few times, you get to cast Titan's Breath with them with no delay. If you have two or three of these in an army, you can capture just about any city without a single loss. Also, if you play as empire and you take the racial trait for the "Cull the weak" spell, you can use these henchmen to summon 10 skeletons per battle and cull them for a gain of 200 mana per mage per battle. Granted, at first it only works out to like 150 at first because of the spell cost of Greater Necromancy, but with 3 of them it's still a net gain of 450 per battle. Using this trick, I only have less than 10,000 mana at the start of the game- usually I keep it above 20,000. (also, with the -1 spell casting time and 20k mana, you can kill almost anything in the game instantly with mana blast).

There are other things that I have discovered along the way, just from trying different things and playing around with custom factions. The AI does get huge bonuses to a lot of things on ridiculous and insane, but it doesn't learn tricks like those and use them.

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Problem is, i refuse to even move up onto ridiculous its utterly even more boring than expert difficulty.

The world is cleared out in a heart beat, wildlands gone fast so fuck that. Exploration phase is dead in ridiculous. And the map is fully colonized in 100 turns or so despite playing huge maps.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

I always feel like if I have to cheat/exploit to beat an AI, it's not playing the game, it's playing the AI.

Generally, super-resource bonuses force the player to start exploiting.

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davrovana

Join Date 05/2009

+61

Quoting Alstein,

reply 5

I always feel like if I have to cheat/exploit to beat an AI, it's not playing the game, it's playing the AI.

Generally, super-resource bonuses force the player to start exploiting.

Know exactly what you mean. I've been toying with creating factions that are meant for the AI-only, and purposelfully overpowering them. That way their sovereign unit itself or a unique faction ability can make them a heightened threat, instead of just ensuring they have more economy and troop count than you.

A new scenario mod would be a great place to try this out...

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