What exactly do the difficulty levels do?

[bthizle1]

Well, what's the difference between em? both campaign and battle.

As far as I can tell/know as of now the hard campaign difficulty as apposed to medium simply means the AI will agree to your proposals less and are even more likely to attack you. As far as battles go just morale? Is that it? In RS isn't there some money script that comes into effect? I always play H/H just for reference.

[Nellup]

AI is more aggressive at harder levels and more tactical on the battlemap.
Also in campaign, the AI gets economic bonuses at higher levels (except VH, where the player gets it as well, making H the hardest difficulty for campaign).

On the battlemap, the AI gets morale bonuses, which is why their troops rarely run away at higher levels.

[ptg]

You're right about the campaign modifiers, but there's more to it on the battlemap - anything other than medium starts modding alot of the stats in EDU - I guess much like the 'bonuses' you receive from certain buildings etc; except they are applied more uniformly and to *all* the AIs units.

That is why you start seeing things like peasant units being charged from behind by heavy cavalry, turn round and massacre them. H and VH for the battles is a challenge, but will not be balanced in the way the modders intended. The values they took time to balance will be modded by the game engine. In doing this, you also start to effect the 'scissor, paper, stone' balance of ancient warfare in my view. Of course this is somewhat simplistic, but in vanilla and most mods, cav beats light/missile inf, which can beat most things at a distance, Spear inf beat cav, but can be beaten by heavy inf etc. etc. - that's off the top of my head but hopefully you get the idea.

[Visitor13]

So the recommended battle difficulty for RS is medium?

[traxx91]

I always thought the recommended settings were Hard campaign and Very hard battles.

And ptg, I never saw heavy cavalry beeing massacred by peasants beside in Medieval II Total War

[ptg]

traxx - an exaggeration to illustrate my point.... not tried M2TW yet -still going with Rome! I see it now comes bundled with 'Kingdoms' - exactly what I was waiting for. Will prob pick it up over the weekend...