How to know what difficulty to pick?

[Red Spot]

Disable LotS and Neinzul

I've seen this being adviced a couple of times now, but cant really find a good reason for doing so.
It somewhat goes against my logic to buy an addon to than disable it ...

Edit: Forgot the actual question ... Could you explain that advice in a bit more detail?

ps: just watched your videos, very interesting style you have

[Suzera]

For a starting player.

The Neinzul ships are a little weird to use due to the attrition for both the player and the AI, and the Spire bonus ships are/were a bit out there balancewise still, until maybe the last couple of patches.

My method has seen some refinement lately too, in the little bits of time I have put into the game. After all the turrets and starships are gone through, it might change more.

[Wingsofdomain]

Yeah well to the original post, I am not a newbie in that way. I love all he cool stuff that comes with the expansions and all ship types whatever they are unbalanced or not. The thing is that I have restarted the game too many times cuase of the diff-lvl xD. So I hoped to get a good piece of advice even though I don't see myself as a noob (or newbie or whatever). And I also had problem with disiding if it was the AIP that made it too hard or if it was the difficulty lvl. However me and my bro have just started a campaing with lvl 7.3 AI. I think that is too hard for us. Easy AI types though.

[Suzera]

If you're using warheads, stop that.

If you're taking every planet, you should probably stop that too.

If you're not both attacking and defending together 100% of the time with all your ships always together, either start doing that or the difficultly levels I mentioned will need to be bumped down. Multiplayer difficulties are only balanced against single player difficulties if you actually always have your entire fleets and turrets together at all times. If you aren't acting roughly as one united player, you'll need to take the difficulty down some notches compared to single player.

[x4000]

If you're using warheads, stop that.

If you're taking every planet, you should probably stop that too.

If you're not both attacking and defending together 100% of the time with all your ships always together, either start doing that or the difficultly levels I mentioned will need to be bumped down. Multiplayer difficulties are only balanced against single player difficulties if you actually always have your entire fleets and turrets together at all times. If you aren't acting roughly as one united player, you'll need to take the difficulty down some notches compared to single player.

This advice is good... to a certain extent.  In tennis, it reminds me of the advice to basically always use topspin.  It's what the pros do!  And if you want to compete on the pro circuit, you do in fact probably need to give up most of your backspin.

That said, at any of the amateur levels of tennis, backspin is actually an awesome and sometimes quite fearsome technique.  I suck at topspin forehands (my arm gets twitchy for some reason), so I rely on backspin when I'm at the baseline.  Does it put me at a disadvantage?  Sure, against someone who's much better than I am, anyway.  At the 3.5 and 4.0 levels of tennis rankings I can do quite well for myself, though.

Wow, that was a long analogy.  My point, however, is that the same strategy and tactics don't always scale up and down the skill chain in any game or sport, strategic or otherwise.  There are very valid strategies that appear and disappear if the participants are more or less skilled.

In this case, speaking less generally:

1. Warheads are there for a reason, just as backspin is in tennis, and just because you won't find them used at the highest eschalons of play doesn't mean they can't be mighty handy otherwise.

2. If you're trying to take every planet, you'll have to play below what your normal difficulty level would be (maybe 1-2 full points), but it sure can be done.  You can play without ever going to the net, or without having an excellent serve, right?  But that's going to handicap the rest of your game, so you have to either play on a lower skill level or else be damn good at the other parts of the game in order to compensate.

There again, those strike me as valid things to do.  Sure, not if you want to win Wimbledon, but let's face it, there's only about 100 people in the world for whom that's a concern at all.  For the rest of us plebs... well, I think there's a lot of room for people to play the way they want.

[Suzera]

If people want to just play how they feel like, then advice on how to play the game better or which difficulty level to pick is pretty meaningless unless the way they want to play is "better".

You could play tennis without moving your feet at all too. You're just probably not going to be asking other people how good you are, what you're doing wrong or how to get better at tennis.

If people have fun playing non-moving tennis that's cool with me though, but if they ask how to get better at tennis I'm going to tell them to move their feet, and if they ask how good they are I'm probably not going to say good.

[x4000]

I don't want to get pedantic, and I don't mean to start an argument, but I've actually known some people who played doubles tennis without moving their feet.  Usually because of injury or age (I know a woman over 80 years old who played, and played well, but could not dare run).

Those sorts of players can still focus on getting better, and on playing extremely well, they just won't ever play at the very highest levels.  But they can play in the upper-middle range, I guess is my point.

And my point is also more than that, from before: some of the things you recommend against, like warheads, actually are something that upper-middle players use a ton, and which constitutes semi-advanced play.  That just disappears when you go to very advanced play, is what I was trying to say.

I guess you might best think of what I'm saying as a simplified graph of valid tactics at various skill levels:

Skill              Tactic A       Tactic B       Tactic C       Tactic D       Tactic E       Tactic F
Very High                                           Y                Y                 Y               
High             Y                 Y                Y                 Y                                  Y
Medium         Y                 Y                Y
Low              Y                 Y

What I'm saying is that you specifically play in the Very High skill bracket, and thus only recommend tactics as such.  That's like having advice from Tiger Woods on how to play par-3 golf courses.  Granted, there's a point to that, but some of the tactics are out of reach of people just starting out, and there's a whole other range of possible tactics, some of which become valid only at a high level of play, and which then again become invalid at a very high level.  Like warheads.

The purpose of my post was simply to hopefully explain why there are many different valid levels of advice about even something like warheads.

[Suzera]

I'm fine with pedantry and argument as long as it is constructive. This is at least serving the purpose of the thread since you're bringing up more "artificial" impairments that people may have and need to adjust their difficulty likewise, and I am sticking to a pure efficiency per rules standpoint.

The difference between AIW and Tiger Woods's golfing is that everyone is capable of knocking the game speed to +10 and waiting to have a full ship cap of everything before attacking anything to overall save time in the game and so they don't need warheads, and not taking things to drag their mobile power down unnecessarily like fortresses or military base upgrades. Issues like the latter are going away with the rebalancing, but not quite there yet and some newer players could still get trapped into over-economizing or spreading their defense and such which is not hard at all to not do. You just click a different button or two instead, and it can make an enormous difference. For multiplayer, everyone can, at worst, click the team control of ships check box and round robin blowing up planets with everyone's entire fleets all at once one post at a time (aside from the obvious AI Eye exemption). Simple easy to do things that make warheads unnecessary and almost always a hindrance if used and is overall much much much better than piecemealing things that I see a lot of people doing. Again, enormous effectiveness difference.

Not everyone is physically like Tiger Woods, nor possesses the potential to be anywhere near. FPS games are more in that territory. AIW doesn't really have the same reaction component to it and is more involved in preplanning. It's more like a sliding puzzle.

Now, I suppose it is possible I have magical clicking or something that I just don't think about or realize nowadays, but for the large majority of effectiveness I think anyone that plays AIW should be able to do what I do with relatively low effort compared to something like being really good at Warcraft 3(which requires a lot of time compressed clicking and hotkeys and edges more into Tiger Woods), unless they hang themselves up on something sub-optimal they do instead for fun (which is fine but if you ask me how to get better at AIW generally I'm going to point it out). If anyone really cared hard enough and took the time, they could probably do so much more of the stuff even I just can't bring myself to care enough to do often to pop it up more.

[x4000]

All fair enough.  I think that in this case, while there's not a mystical non-mental component as with Tiger Woods, there's still a large cache of knowledge and behaviors that one must posses to play at the highest levels.  It's not just a few things done differently, it's a whole different approach to strategy games in general, from the bits I've seen of what you do.  In other words, giving a tip or two isn't going to make someone else play like you unless they also have as large a background in RTS, or otherwise have come to a similarly efficient natural playstyle.  That's really all I was saying.

[superking]

just popping in to note, I think AI war 4.0 'player ships move 2x speed of AI ships' is really conductive to moving all your ships in a blob.. there is no need to wait up for the slow ships as such, because group moved even the slower player units outstrip the AI. maunuvering in seperate smaller speed-grouped blobs like I did in 3.157 is pretty needless when my doom blob can entirely relocate faster than enemies can pursue, and frigates can outrun fighters.

[Vinraith]

Full vision/no fog

Any new player would be doing themselves a huge disservice by doing this. Removing the scouting component from the game removes the need to make decisions with less that complete information, removes the challenge of deep scouting, and removes the fun of exploring the map.

[Suzera]

For what it's worth, there's still another level above what I am playing, but that is far more micro with the current interface than I care to do repeatedly. It's also something non-trivial to do something about from a feature standpoint. It's there though and I could certainly do it all the time if I wanted to play probably another easy 30-50% better on offense (and maybe some rarer defensive breaks or counterposts), but it's far more busywork effort than I want to put in. Just doing it a couple times to know that I can and knowing that it is there suffices for me, and every once in a while I'll do it in a pinch to some extent.  The idea is pretty much the ideal triangles conflict taken to the very extreme to include every ship type currently in the game, with controls for time lost from movement vs eating the loss and rebuilding. It's very time consuming and clickfesty. The autokiting features helps that some, but it's not perfect. There's some other minor stuff I don't care enough to do like perfect power plant management (aside from the first 15 minutes), but those are overall not much of a swing in effectiveness.

One of the big things I actually do that makes a huge difference that I can imagine most people not doing is shift-queueing direct attack orders against every munitions booster while paused for every fight. Really huge difference, probably more than casual people want to do despite the fact that it means a longer and harder game for them.

This is why one of the criteria in my difficulty suggestions was the level of micro you were willing to do in addition to how strong of an RTS player you are. However, that still doesn't mean you can't suddenly be dozens of times more effective by just follow a few simple rules in AIW if you aren't already doing so. I remember I used to suffer from severe turtling block and "least amount of units to win possible" block when I was little. One day I stopped those abruptly for one game to try it since I had read that that wasn't very good and suddenly I was utterly stomping everything was challenging just one game ago. Never been the same RTS player since that day. I wasn't super godly or anything, in fact I still sucked pretty bad, but I was tons better than I was the day before from a very simple change.

Any new player would be doing themselves a huge disservice by doing this. Removing the scouting component from the game removes the need to make decisions with less that complete information, removes the challenge of deep scouting, and removes the fun of exploring the map.

I usually find the map relatively trivial to scout out. It just takes some time and mindless clicking after you spend 3k knowledge. If you know roughly how the map generates, you can probably narrow down to 3 or 4 places where the AI HWs are as well without scouting. Newbies already have plenty of other stuff to figure out the first few games that they don't need a relatively trivial and mindless puzzle they have to guess the correct answer to to win. We can disagree on how hard it is to send a ship cap of mk 3 scouts around in a bundle for half an hour, but I think that is rather boring right now and only serves to needlessly pad time against the more interesting parts of the game that is determining which planets to take when and why.

[Wingflier]

I remember I used to suffer from severe turtling block and "least amount of units to win possible" block when I was little. One day I stopped those abruptly for one game to try it since I had read that that wasn't very good and suddenly I was utterly stomping everything was challenging just one game ago.

To me, that's the day you became a gamer.

I remember a long time ago when I was younger, playing DotA I found the concept of "last-hitting" way too time-consuming, and requiring too much effort for me; as in it was taking the enjoyment of the game away.  However, part of me realized I would never get better without working on my last-hitting, and so I sacrificed my enjoyment of the game to improve, that's when I became a gamer.

Anybody can play games.  In fact, nowadays it seems like companies intentionally design games for the casual, instant-gratification loving masses.  Most of these people have no concept of improving or becoming skillful at the game, they just want to have fun and that's all.

When somebody asks you, "What difficulty should I play?"  You are answering their question from a gamer's perspective.  Even if your answer completely takes all the enjoyment of the game, if it is the best tactic within a reasonable degree, you will suggest it.  You have to realize that not everybody is like you, some people don't want to sacrifice enjoyment to improve, in fact some people don't even care about improving.  They just want a difficulty that makes the game reasonably challenging for them, without taxing their skills too much.

[x4000]

All fair enough.  I think people are taking my comments in the wrong light, though.  Let me try and sum it up as briefly as possible, again via analogy:

If you are playing against a pro tennis player, and you slice the ball at them, they will annihilate you.  Don't ever do it if you want any hope of winning!  However, if you are playing in your local highly-competitive tennis league at 3.5 or 4.0, where people are trying their hardest and playing excellent -- but not on-TV pro-level -- tennis, then slicing is totally valid and you NEED to have that in your back pocket.  When you have someone on their back foot at the baseline, by all means slice them because that's the winning move.

That's all I meant: that depending on your level of play, and that of your opponents, the best strategies vary.

Or another example, that chase scene at the start of Casino Royale.  The bomb maker guy is way faster than Bond, and has almost a superhuman agility.  He's going to get away if Bond doesn't play to his own strengths, because there's no way he can run as fast. 

I couldn't use Suzera's strategy any more than Bond could "just run faster," because her strategy is based on a totally different way of playing from how I play.  I could probably learn to do it, but not without watching her play and studying her doing so.  And that would still leave me feeling uncomfortable with her method, for me personally, since it just doesn't match how I think or who I am.  So I look for alternate ways to do things, playing to my own strengths.  Granted, I've lost a ton of AI War games lately, but they were all tactical mistakes that could have been avoided, not overall grand strategic errors.

For the record, I don't use warheads either.  But I simply recall that there were a ton of people using them to great effect and playing quite advanced AI War doing so.  To me, it's just different people using their own strengths and playstyles to create all sorts of victories.  Advice is great, and varies, and I'm all for that. 

I'm also just quite uncomfortable ever saying "never do x in the game," because that's the sort of thinking that leads new players to miss stuff that they might come up with a clever use for.  "Never use twine in the battle room, Bean."  Yeah, right.

Dang, my posts always get huge.  I'll leave it there.

[Wingflier]

I hope I didn't come off as condescending, because I just meant different people have different ways of doing things, and none of them are 'right' or 'wrong'. I simply meant that the OP was simply asking what difficulty to play, not how to improve at the game. Those are 2 very different questions ;p