BI Difficulty Settings

[Franconicus]

What is the best setting in BI? In Rome I used to play STRATEGY - VERY HARD, BATTELS - MEDIUM; however, my BI battles so far have been too easy. Has anybody testes hard or very hard? How realistic are these settings?

[Ciaran]

As far as I know, the difficulties were screwed up in vanilla Rome only in the custom battles. A short time ago we had a discussion here that indicated that the campaign difficulties were working as intended.
Note that on any other difficulty setting than medium one side gets stat boni (improved attack, defense, morale, etc.) it´s not the AI that acts smarter. So, on "very hard" you might see equites overrunning phalanxes head on

[CountMRVHS]

I play H/H.

Pre-BI, H/H was plenty of challenge for me in Rome -- especially when I try to turtle. Now, with BI, I find H/H to be a good setting as well. I don't see a lot of "unrealistic" results in battles (i.e. horses cutting through hoplites), and the strategy map is also "active" enough to keep things interesting. My Allemanni campaign is probably going to end in disaster as the WRE have been aggressive buggers from the get-go.

My first BI campaign was the Saxons on M/M. I quit after taking around a dozen provinces; no one was attacking me. The battles were alright, but I wanted the AI to be a bit more aggressive on the strategic level.

It must be said that there is a fair amount of randomness to the campaigns. See Frogbeastegg's recent testimony of her 2 Saxon campaigns, both VH/M: one was an absolute walkover; the other is much more challenging & fun.

I'd try H/H and see how that goes. Keep in mind that I don't pause in battles, and I haven't played RTW in months and months until BI came out. I manage to win most battles but the AI puts up a good fight and can turn the tables on me. Also, I use Large unit sizes.

CountMRVHS