Difference Between Difficulty Levels

[artaxerxes]

Hi, I couldn't find a thread about this directly. I obviously get that Very Hard is harder than Hard that is harder than Medium, but just for the sake of clarity, I was hoping for some detailed info as to what really changes between these settings. if this is already covered in another thread, then I'm sorry. anyways, how does the AI behave differently, do the AI's treat each other differently - ie. more/less aggressively etc., I'm very interested, but I got a Next Turn-time of 5 minutes, so playing a campaign with each 3 difficulty levels would take me until Spring, so I'd rather ask here and then decide from your advice which of the difficulty levels that appeal to me

[Mediolanicus]

Campaign :
Medium : good for very slow players that like periods of peace now and then.
Hard : reasonable AI aggression, everyone'll want to wage war against you, but still quite fun.
Very Hard : Kamikaze AI. They just throw everything at you.

Factions will expand a little bit faster at higher difficulty AFAIK, but killing you if you border them is their priority.

Battle:
Medium : recommended, good balance. Requires the human player not to use full stacks, not to retrain, and to use no more than 1/4 elites per army.
Hard: +4 Morale, +4Attack and/or Defence, can't remember exactly. Ruins the balance work of the EB team. But you can use fullstacks, elites,... a bit unrealistic, but many people like it.
Very Hard: +7 bonusses! Prepare to see your elites slaughtered by Akontistai in melee. You need to constantly take advantage of AI's stupidity and blitz before faction start to throw elites at you.


I prefer M/M or H/M (I'm a slow expander).
VH/M or H/H for a challange.
VH/H or VH/VH if you want to blitz.


Disclaimer : AI is't any less braindead on VH than it is on E. So don't expect any improvement there.

[iamphet]

Also I believe on Hard campaign AI can recruit mercenaries and rebels can besiege your cities.

[Atraphoenix]

the advised difficulty setting for EB by the Dev team is VH for campaign medium for battle difficulty.
the difference is :

for campaign: in Hard difficulty AI factions get 4000 mnai bonus and more agressive than medium, rebels can besiege your towns eg.
in very hard difficulty for campaign AI factions get 10000 mnai bonus plus it is nearly impossible to make
a trade agreement, nearly , plus if you are in a war with a neighbour faction the AI is very agressive.

for battle: hard difficulty gives +4 morale bonus
very hard difficulty gives +7 morale bonus
that means levy troops can annihilate your elites

in medium no bonuses.

P.S. : difficulty setting does not make AI better, be aware of it
In addition; you may have different results between game engines, namely RTW.exe, BI.exe or alex.exe.
my favourite exe is alex cos in battles it gives more reasonable realism.

I hope I could help, and please if I am mistaken in some of the info, sorry for that; I am not a member of the Dev team.

Atra

[Mediolanicus]

The mnai bonussen are neglectable. The EB script gives AI faction all the money they need regardless of the difficulty.

And I'm sure morale bonusses aren't the only thing AI units get on H or VH.

[Atraphoenix]

although the advised difficulty VH/M sometimes I find it very ridiculous especially when I am in debt with 10 provinces, carthage had more than 500.000 mnai

[artaxerxes]

Ok thx a lot. I think H/M is what I'm gonna try for my next campaign :D

[desert]

On higher difficulties autoresolve is skewed towards the AI, isn't it?

[Lysimachos]

On higher difficulties autoresolve is skewed towards the AI, isn't it?

Yes, autoresolve depends on campaign difficulty, not battle difficulty. That's the reason why I often play m/m, because I autoresolve much.

[Sûlherokhh]

Good to know. I've been always wondering about the effects. Where did you find the AI boni spelled out in the game files?

[Mediolanicus]

EBBS_script in Eb\Data\scripts.

[Sûlherokhh]

Yes, that part i already found. :) What about the morale/unit strength bonus? I couldn't find that anywhere so i assumed that it was hardcoded and therefore also not possible to check the current difficulty with a script routine or as a trigger.

[Mediolanicus]

Yes, those are hard coded. I don't know where you can "see" them.

Only EB money boni are in the EBBS of course.