Campaign Difficulty Level.

[Migey]

Hey.

For a challenge, i decided to play an early era Seljuk campaign, on very hard difficulty, with the AI set to the most aggressive (Graculs AI or Savage AI - can't remember which).

I have not, however, noticed any discernable difference as concerns how clever or smart the AI is - which is what i expected.

Does very hard difficulty only give the AI more money and troops, or does it do anything else, or make the AI smarter? Because i don't enjoy fighting a stupid AI with ridiculous bonuses to his money, and the amount of troops he has. I recently fought a battle at Ankara (defending) with a full stack of units. I lost to an equal amount of units, despite my units having about the same stats (at first glance) and a few blacksmith upgrades, and nevermind the fact that i had the wall (was only a palisade, but it should count for something? Hell, most of the time my walls seem to get in the way - they don't give me any advantage whatsoever...)

[kevindrosario]

Games rarely reserve the good AI for only the highest difficulty. A good AI is something you'd generally want to show off on most difficulties. So most games (including this one) just give the AI some sort of bonuses on higher difficulties.

Higher battle difficulty gives the AI troops more morale in battle, which is why you'd lose a battle with otherwise equal armies. Higher campaign difficulty gives the AI lots of bonuses. One big one is that other factions will automatically start to hate you more and more every turn, which makes diplomacy harder, and leads to you being at war with more factions.

[Migey]

The battle difficulty is medium, the campaign difficulty is very hard.

So do all the enemy troops just have more stats, and my enemy has more troops anyway?

Yay.

And i can't change the difficulty mid campaign, can i? (incidentally, can i change the overall unit size mid campaign?)

[kevindrosario]

Not sure what you were expecting out of the very hard difficulty. It's supposed to make the game harder.

No, enemy units will not have higher stats.

No, you can't change the campaign difficulty or unit scale in the middle of a campaign.

[Migey]

Meh. Thanks for helping though!

And for what i was expecting, i was expecting the AI to be simply more, unforgiving - not to let up, to pounce on weaknesses, to make greater use of agents, etc. Small things that can be simply programmed (well, my hands on knowledge of programming comes from a high school computing course, so i could be wrong) but make it harder.

I guess i should have thought about what i was expecting...

Thanks again

[Byg]

Meh. Thanks for helping though!

And for what i was expecting, i was expecting the AI to be simply more, unforgiving - not to let up, to pounce on weaknesses, to make greater use of agents, etc. Small things that can be simply programmed (well, my hands on knowledge of programming comes from a high school computing course, so i could be wrong) but make it harder.

I guess i should have thought about what i was expecting...

Thanks again

I believe Gracul's is less forgiving than Savage. The difference seems to be diplomatic and in the way enemy armies are assessed.

Very Hard difficulty is the way to go. Lower levels of difficulty seem to insert incompetence in AI actions from what I've seen. I some times see situations, when using low difficulty for testing, where the ai sends an army against you, only to turn it around again- and with less troops than high difficulty. Presumably because of some conflict where it knows it needs to attack, but lower difficulty forces the ai to let the human player have an easy time regardless of its own interests. That is just my theory based on watching the ai in the same situation on different difficulty levels.

[Ichon]

It depends alot on the faction you are playing. Since Turks almost always get into wars with all neighbors no matter the difficulty the only thing that changes is now those neighbors will have more armies.

Playing somewhere like Hungary or Lithuania it makes a bigger difference as you won't have long periods of peace and the AI ignore chances to fight neighbors to come after you. On VH the AI also tends to have better generals which might make a small difference in battles even without changing battle difficulty.

[Galain_Ironhide]

I remember back years ago someone had created a program called MedManager where you could go in and change campaign difficulties amongst a number of other things. This was for standard M2TW and also perhaps Lusted's mod.

Too bad there isn't anything that exists now to do similar though.

[Lazy]

Of course you can change unit size!
Go to export_descr_unit.txt and change it there.
The "old" units will stay as they are but all new trained ones will have the new unit size!

Make a backup!