Difficulty and Character improvement.

[x4000]

I seem to recall you play on diff 8 in AI War.  Am I remembering wrong?

[KDR_11k]

I don't quite remember but so far I've been mostly at 7 I think. One problem I have is that I can't really tell how hard a game of AI War is. The difficulty varies drastically between different events so I'm never sure whether I picked a good one or should go higher.

[zebramatt]

I don't quite remember but so far I've been mostly at 7 I think. One problem I have is that I can't really tell how hard a game of AI War is. The difficulty varies drastically between different events so I'm never sure whether I picked a good one or should go higher.

Ah, that reminds me: we should have another look at implementing an 'illustrative difficulty' of any given combination of things switched on in AI War. I still think it's worth doing, since it should become generally more accurate over time.

[x4000]

We're getting seriously off topic now, but I think that an "illustrative difficulty" would always be inherently misleading.  You could take one set of settings, play 100 games of them, and 5 of them would be brutally harder than the rest.  And 10 would be surprisingly easier than the rest.  Change no other settings, just the map seed itself, and you'll get this.  That really destroys any utility of an illustrative difficulty display, to me.  The sorts of people who would most need that aren't likely to make it past the hurdle of the tutorials of AI War in the first place.

[Martyn van Buren]

Two things, one off topic and one back to the main point:

I do think it would be good to have estimates somewhere in the AIW Wiki of how various options interact with difficulty, maybe just descriptions rather than numbers. Starting a game is a big commitment, so as a cautious player I still haven't got around to playing with a lot of the content because I'm afraid I'll wander into something really nasty and get slaughtered, and that's after a year of semiregular play. I've just got to trying basic hybrids in the past few weeks, and I've never tried golems or spire hard (thoigh I guess that's a good next goal).

But back to the topic, it would be good to have more places in the game where you find something really tough mixed in with your normal difficulty and can get something cool for and otherwise unavailable for taking it on.  Rather like most RPGs have some sort of megaspell or supersword hidden behind a nasty optional boss.  It's fun for an average player to have some kind of fearsome thing waiting.for you to try your skill on when you feel unreasonably confident.

[Terraziel]

But back to the topic, it would be good to have more places in the game where you find something really tough mixed in with your normal difficulty and can get something cool for and otherwise unavailable for taking it on.  Rather like most RPGs have some sort of megaspell or supersword hidden behind a nasty optional boss.  It's fun for an average player to have some kind of fearsome thing waiting.for you to try your skill on when you feel unreasonably confident.

I had been trying to think of ways for this sort of system to work in AVWW, the best I came up with was hidden unlocks, so defeating the optional boss doesn't give it directly but unlocks something of benefit.

Otherwise you end up with people grinding bosses for what ever rares they can get. I sure would.

[Martyn van Buren]

Oh, I was assuming it would be rare missions or secret missions with a really disproportionate difficulty and a commensurate reward. I guess they'd want to expire like normal missions to prevent overleveling.  I could see a system that limits you to doing one or two per continent, so you could choose when to do it but you have to pick what you want.