EB 2.3 Campaign Recommended Difficulty Settings?

Hi guys

First campaign ever on EB, I'm not a noob to TW I've played tons of modded TW games. Just started as Rome only 3-4 turns in, hardly suffered any casualties against rebel army - i'm a bit worried as Rome are very strong militarily anyway, that i'm not gonna have the long battles that go down to the wire I've enjoyed on other mods, as I progress in the game even against better opponents. I'm on HARD/MED, I don't mind getting my ass kicked in the field sometimes I like a challenge. I've got no interest in expanding as fast as possible, so i'm happy to let other factions take rebel settlements and build up -any other tips?

I don't mind starting again with more challneging settings if people think that's a good idea, if so what settings would you suggest?

I play on hard/hard. Can get challenging on some battles, but its important to have a realistic army composition. With epeiros i use 2 phalangites and 1 hypaspistai. The rest are all mediocre units. Lots of mercenaries too.

With the romans my army composition was 2 hastati, 2 principe, 1 triarii, 3 skirmishers, and some 5 mercenaries or regional units, nothing fancy. With the family member and some 2 regional cavalry, fighting AI full stacks could be tough.

EB 2 is not a mod where you will have much challenge if you have the same in quality or bigger army as the enemy, while playing on medium. If you want that id suggest Very hard on battles ( though never tried it)


On campaigns, hard is doing just fine in my current epeiros campaign. They may betray you, but its not often, and doesnt feels like the world is against you.

After over 700 turns in a VH/H campaign, I can say it's very enjoyable. The only "downside" is that one should release prisoners after almost every battle in order to keep the game interesting - the AI routs easily.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SteelCurtain

Just started as Rome only 3-4 turns in, hardly suffered any casualties against rebel army

---

In my observations: this is a feature of the game: very low casualties. You can have one army and win many battles as you lose 20% troops in a very difficult battle.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SteelCurtain

i'm a bit worried as Rome are very strong militarily anyway, that i'm not gonna have the long battles that go down to the wire I've enjoyed on other mods, as I progress in the game even against better opponents. I'm on HARD/MED, I don't mind getting my ass kicked in the field sometimes I like a challenge. I've got no interest in expanding as fast as possible, so i'm happy to let other factions take rebel settlements and build up -any other tips?

---

I don't find the goal of EBII to be a challenge for the Romans for an experienced TW player. They're too strong on military and too safe in their peninsula (with Med2TW system). There're for role-playing, imo.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SteelCurtain

I don't mind starting again with more challneging settings if people think that's a good idea, if so what settings would you suggest?

---

I think VH/H is the best option.

Rome starts out in an extremely strong position and has access to powerful units early on, if you instead play Sweboz or Lugiones, you'll see the difference.

Thanks guys, some food for thought.

I think a combination of VH/H, a few house rules like not not chasing down routing armies, or quitting at the you won screen, and releasing prisoners, no sacking or ext pop, not wiping out factions etc might make it more fun.

I seem to remember a house rule on RTR where I would not retrain, only recruit. That might help too.

What settings are recoomded for Carthage, and factions which are classed as challenging and very challenging?

For Carthage, I have played in Very Hard/Hard and had much fun with it. You should also take into consideration your army composition, not having more than 2 FMs, only 1/2 elites max, and the rest Lybian infantry, Iberian units and other mercs.
You should let Numidia develop to give you a good challenge and Rome too, if you can, wait for the Polybian units.
One of the worst things about playing campaigns in Very Hard is the quick normalization of diplomatic relations, let's say you send a gift of 20 000 to an ally and your relation goes up to 8, next turn is already in 7 or 6... Anyway, for an experienced player, it is not a problem and it will change on 2.35.

Hard Medium. Except I roleplay a lot: no elites beyond a few, historical army compositions, often I don't use full stacks and I don't go blitzing on neutral territory. So far the AI seems very active, and I got DOW's from two AI factions already.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Marie Louise von Preussen

Hard Medium. Except I roleplay a lot: no elites beyond a few, historical army compositions, often I don't use full stacks and I don't go blitzing on neutral territory. So far the AI seems very active, and I got DOW's from two AI factions already.

---

I too roleplay a lot in my Roman campaign and have got attacked by two factions. Still I find the campaign almost too easy to be enjoyable. However, as my faction has grown, more and more factions have grown distrustful of us even though we have been fairly peaceful. So I am expecting things to get a lot tougher soon.

My question is can I see my campaign's difficulty level somewhere? I have forgotten what it is, although I suspect that I am playing H/M.

Perhaps I should be playing Very Hard for campaign difficulty as others have suggested, but I refuse to play any battle difficulty that makes equal enemy units perform better than mine in one-on-one combat with all other things being equal. It seems so unnatural and killing the immersion that some rebel Hastati unit would wipe the floor with my Hastati just to make things more challenging. Difficulty has to come from something else. Such as roleplaying, if nothing else works.

Guys, this is something I keep on failing to understand in the EBII design.
Everybody is talking that you have to roleplay, you have to have home rules (like "no more than X elities"), you don't this or you do that. In sum: plenty of player-imposed external rules. Why you need to make all those external constraints ? Why cannot it be by design of the mod - in cases where the M2 engine does allow it?
For instance: in the mod you can lower the availability of the elite units. You can differentiate between the player and the AI. Why not simply make the elites less available for the player?
Or fighting in the advantage: various mods provided various reasons so that you don't fight in such a situation. A mod can introduce heavy costs for the large armies while in the enemy land - and it can be exponential: low for 10 units, large for 15, very large for 17, and very very very large above. And only for the player - then you're more likely to meet equal or stronger AI armies. Or you may get some punishment - as in the BGR the "overconfidence" trait. I don't like "punishment" type incentives, so I prefer the SSHIP incentives: you get very valuable traits only if you fight a stronger enemy. In this sense fighting a battle is an investement - you fight stronger enemy to get those great generals who can then provide much for your faction (in the SSHIP: this is the main way to get high Chivalry or Dread, and only with high Chivalry you can make a city over a bar to higher settlement level, and with high Dread you can keep big cities with foreign cultures under control). It is possible for the player to choose- in the Warscape one you cannot split your forces, but in the M2 you can do it just before the battle and leave a few units behind.
So why not to introduce similar incentives by design to EBII - instead of advising new players to "role play" or follow "home rules" ?
JoC

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jurand of Cracow

Why cannot it be by design of the mod

---

I like your ideas of balancing the game although I am obviously not the right person to answer your fundamental question of why we cannot do things by design. However, I would like to point out that incentives are a really tricky business. Whenever one tries to suppress one incentive, it brings forth other incentives that may have very counter-intuitive outcomes that other players will dislike greatly. I would not like to play in a way that I am encouraged to put myself at a disadvantage against an enemy and deliberately risk the lives of my men and myself. No general would do that.

Of course we are contrained by the game mechanics and AI on one side and realism on the other. Home rules at least have the advantage of allowing players to apply their own restrictions on their own volition instead of making them to do things they are not comfortable doing.

Well, elite units mostly do have low availability. Its just that a player, if they want to, can wait the specific number of turns to have an army filled with them.

In my current campaign i get 3 hypaspistai units per 90 or so turns (due to the hellenistic campaigns, got 3 cities with dynastic administration that gives them), if i wanted surely i could make an army with 5 or so of them.

I very much prefer this recruitment type, than setting hard limits, and saying you can field 2 elite units at a time, and etc, like so often is done now with the new total war games.


But i agree, i would very much like to see some player only features involving historical challenges that came with fielding a large army in hostile territory. A baggage train feature like in Stainless Steel, etc.

The mod has to be accessible to new players as well as experienced ones. I'm also not a fan of writing player-only code, especially in recruitment. The added complexities are compounded if they are optional in any way, or only triggered with particular difficulty settings.

We already deal with complaints about how, recruitment is channeled in particular ways, such that you can't play any faction anywhere and get the same options. I can only imagine the griping if we added even more stringent controls on what can and can't be done.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

The added complexities are compounded if they are optional in any way, or only triggered with particular difficulty settings.

---

The latter can be easily done in EDCT (I don't know whether also in EDU) through, eg.,
Condition I_EventCounter DifficultyLevel > 3
while the DifficultyLevel is defined in the script.

This would be great if some modable aspects of the game would be (maybe they are, I don't know) dependent on the difficulty level. For instance, in my modding for the SSHIP I make the skills of the diplomats dependent on the difficulty, and also on the turn number (to make up for the developments of the players - he builds some building leveling up his diplomats, but the AI doesn't know it should do it, so just to keep the playing field level):

Code:

---

;-------- diplomat AI & difficulty bonuses ---
;---------------------------------------------
Trigger Diplomat_Starter_Player_LevelNormal
WhenToTest AgentCreated

Condition AgentType = diplomat
and FactionIsLocal
and I_EventCounter DifficultyLevel < 3
and I_TurnNumber < 200
   
Affects NaturalDiplomatSkill 1 Chance 50
Affects Multilingual 1 Chance 10
Affects SmoothTalker 1 Chance 10
Affects Secretive 1 Chance 20
Affects ReligiousTolerance 1 Chance 5
Affects BraveDiplomat 1 Chance 5
 
;---------------------------------------------
Trigger Diplomat_Starter_AI_LevelHard
WhenToTest AgentCreated

Condition AgentType = diplomat
and not FactionIsLocal
and I_EventCounter DifficultyLevel > 2
   
Affects NaturalDiplomatSkill 1 Chance 50
Affects Multilingual 1 Chance 10
Affects SmoothTalker 1 Chance 10
Affects Secretive 1 Chance 20
Affects ReligiousTolerance 1 Chance 5
Affects BraveDiplomat 1 Chance 5
 
;---------------------------------------------
Trigger Diplomat_Starter_AI_LevelVeryHard
WhenToTest AgentCreated

Condition AgentType = diplomat
and not FactionIsLocal
and I_EventCounter DifficultyLevel > 3
and I_TurnNumber > 100
   
Affects NaturalDiplomatSkill 1 Chance 50
Affects Multilingual 1 Chance 10
Affects SmoothTalker 1 Chance 10
Affects Secretive 1 Chance 20
Affects ReligiousTolerance 1 Chance 5
Affects BraveDiplomat 1 Chance 5
 
;---------------------------------------------
Trigger Diplomat_Starter_AI_LevelVeryHard_Later
WhenToTest AgentCreated

Condition AgentType = diplomat
and not FactionIsLocal
and I_EventCounter DifficultyLevel > 3
and I_TurnNumber > 300
   
Affects NaturalDiplomatSkill 1 Chance 50
Affects Multilingual 1 Chance 10
Affects SmoothTalker 1 Chance 10
Affects Secretive 1 Chance 20
Affects ReligiousTolerance 1 Chance 5
Affects BraveDiplomat 1 Chance 5

---

AIGeneral and AIGovernor are difficulty-affected. The AI is more likely to get the higher levels of both traits on higher difficulties.

Traits are the easiest thing to difficulty-link, if you go into recruitment that's a whole host of repetition and event_counter linkage.

Hard just gives loads and loads of money to the AI and it allows it to hire mercenaries, that's why they're more active and agressive in the map.

Playing as Hayastan in hard, I deleted my saves because the Seleukids are too damn strong and because It has become boring to destroy 4 armies in a row and then realize that they can still pull out another 4 armies in Ekbatana and other 2 in Anatolia because they can recruit mercenaries and city troops in mass while I can just afford 2 armies so it just became into a frustrating slog match where you acomplish almost nothing.

No thanks, I will return to medium, hard just adds artificial difficulty and it just becomes boring.

Hard doesn't give any additional money to the AI, that isn't in any of the scripts, and the hardcoded bonuses were an RTW thing.

They do hire mercs, where they didn't before.

Really?.

So why factions with 1 territory can field 2 and a half armies?.

Pergamon in my Makedonia campaign had 2 full armies in the field while just having the city of Pergamon and earlier, Epeiros could field 1 full army and they also had a numerous garrison in their last settlement, Ambrakia.

I would be in debt if I had those armies while having just 1 territory.

EDIT : Maybe they just spend their Initial treasury in Mercenaries and recruiting, maybe that's the reason.

All AI factions, on all difficulties, have a finance script that removes their debt. If they don't most factions go totally passive once they're in debt, and never come out of it.

There's another part of the script giving them some money in spring, and also taking back any excess in their treasury.

I remember asking this before, but I do not recall coming across a solution. Is there any way of telling which campaign difficulty level I have in my current campaign?

I think that it is hard, but I am not sure. I know that the AI is not ganging up on me. It is still fairly passive with the exception of certain factions sending everything they got at me.

Edit: specified that the question has to do with campaign difficulty.