[II] Feature Preview 5: Scalable Difficulty
Italia Invicta Feature Preview #5: Scalable Difficulty
In our fourth preview, I want to talk about something that's maybe a bit less exciting but appears to me to be very important to show the more casual gamers that we haven't forgotten them. In the last two previews I was talking about difficult decisions and how you're going to have very much restricted resources, which should definitely appeal to the power-gamers among the audience, but might overwhelm less experienced players who don't already know the game in-and-out and can't or don't want to spend the time working out all these little details you need to know to properly know the game.
To all of you who just want to enjoy a change of seasons, and don't spend ages getting to know our mod, we will make some of our features depend on the difficulty setting you choose at the start of the campaign. This means that players who want to get a difficult and interesting game will play on hard, where all features are implemented, and those who are really up to a challenge and like micro-managing the whole thing to an insane degree will play on very hard, with all features becoming that much more fleshed-out and restrictions neatly clicking into place.
The AI will also get a few cheats making it more competitive and actually able to win the game (as to how will be disclosed later, if I may hint at the glorious achievements again), which I will refer to as asymmetrical features.
Common asymmetries will be putting restrictions on the player that are for certain reasons not imposed on the AI. An example for this is the authority of your faction leader restricting the number of dependent cities you can have. The AI simply wouldn't be able to cope with this, so it will remain as a player-only feature, but it will only really kick in on the higher difficulty settings, becoming more and more restrictive the further you move up the ladder (being non-existent or practically non-existent on easy).
Such a progression feels quite natural and will make sure that new players aren't disencouraged by a too difficult game, and at the same time, powergamers are satisfied with a real challenge on very hard. You will see it with a lot of our features (where it makes sense anyways), and of course choosing a high difficulty setting will still result in less money and more difficult diplomacy. Ideally, we will have four difficulty settings that allow decent players to start at easy, to get a feel for the thing, and work their way up to medium or even hard, enjoying the difficulty setting they feel suits them best. Very hard, as has been hinted, will be nothing for the faint-hearted, and starting on that difficulty setting expecting to win will most likely spell disaster.
Some of you might think it's not worth the additional work and we should just implement all features as we intend them to be, but we want to give as many people as possible the opportunity to play the mod, and I feel that in general, mods are mainly meant for the hard core of players, sometimes leaving those who aren't so well-versed in the game's mechanics or simply not interested in them to a huge extent standing in the rain.
I hope this will further whet your appetite, alpaca out
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[II] Feature Preview 1: View City
[II] Feature Preview 2: Degrees of Independence
[II/AD] Feature Preview 3: Authority
[II] Feature Preview 4: The Levy Script
Re: [II] Feature Preview 5: Scalable Difficulty
I just read through all the previews after not watching you guys for a while.
You're nuts. Crazy. Insane.
Keep it up! :2thumbsup:
Re: [II] Feature Preview 5: Scalable Difficulty
well i have a stupid question... if people revolt, cause you are a cruel ruler or don't have enough power, will you be able to chop off their heads or something like that (something for the nerves) ?
o and keep up the good work :knight:
Re: [II] Feature Preview 5: Scalable Difficulty
Good work. I also would like to give credit for not forgetting the players who can't win a campaign in 50 turns. Keep it coming. :beam:
Re: [II] Feature Preview 5: Scalable Difficulty
Quote:
Originally Posted by crniMuc
well i have a stupid question... if people revolt, cause you are a cruel ruler or don't have enough power, will you be able to chop off their heads or something like that (something for the nerves) ?
o and keep up the good work :knight:
Well you will probably be able to fight against them in a battle because that's pretty much the only way we can represent revolts.
@Gurkhal: Yeah, we can't assume every player is a powergamer. We want to try to deliver a good balance for players of different skill levels and experience (and of course style of playing) and a very stiff balance is one of the main concerns a lot of people have with AD at the moment.
