Recommended Difficulty?

[AstroCat]

Excited to check out EB2!

Quick question, What is the recommended Difficulty?

I usually went H/H with M2TW. Thanks!

[Ferdiad]

VH-M.

[AstroCat]

Battle - VH
Campaign - M ?

Is that the "official" recommendation? Because it depends on how they balanced the units for the BM.

Thanks.

[Ferdiad]

Opposite, you could make Battles H if you want to as well.

[Wulfburk]

Its M battles and H campaign, VH campaign works too.

[Mayer]

why M?

[TheRazaman]

why M?

The EB team, as well as most other mod teams, will optimize units for battling on Medium. Difficulties above that don't make the AI in any way more tactically clever--they simply add hardcoded bonuses to the troops i.e. +morale +rank +atk +def, which incrementally increase per level above Medium.

[Funeh]

I always play battles on VH because human battle tactics are always better then AI so the bonuses for the AI make for the lack of brains

[Mayer]

The EB team, as well as most other mod teams, will optimize units for battling on Medium. Difficulties above that don't make the AI in any way more tactically clever--they simply add hardcoded bonuses to the troops i.e. +morale +rank +atk +def, which incrementally increase per level above Medium.

But I heard before that there aren't any special bonuses in M2 (unlike Rome1), confirmed by CA and extensive testing. Instead morale and fatigue plays a bigger role.

"Some say the AI gets a higher moral and fatigue bonus. Perhaps this is true, but I do not see any of this. In previous titles this painfully obvious and this was why I never went onto Very Hard, but MTWII is different.

All it really does is RESTRICT Moral and Fatigue to very realistic levels for BOTH sides. So it`s much more stringent. So you can`t over push your men or they`ll tire quickly and rout sooner. That`s it.

The Dev Blog also mentions this ground-breaking change from RTW.

I have found Peasants are easy to rout, while tougher soldiers take longer, but nothing to tell me that the AI has any extra bonus, just longer battles of rout and counter rout."
- Peacemaker EAF92

[TheRazaman]

But I heard before that there aren't any special bonuses in M2 (unlike Rome1), confirmed by CA and extensive testing. Instead morale and fatigue plays a bigger role.

"Some say the AI gets a higher moral and fatigue bonus. Perhaps this is true, but I do not see any of this. In previous titles this painfully obvious and this was why I never went onto Very Hard, but MTWII is different.

All it really does is RESTRICT Moral and Fatigue to very realistic levels for BOTH sides. So it`s much more stringent. So you can`t over push your men or they`ll tire quickly and rout sooner. That`s it.

The Dev Blog also mentions this ground-breaking change from RTW.

I have found Peasants are easy to rout, while tougher soldiers take longer, but nothing to tell me that the AI has any extra bonus, just longer battles of rout and counter rout."
- Peacemaker EAF92

I've heard that as well but there's a lot of conflicting information. Some people say that on VH they AI gets a morale boost of +4, and that the stamina regimenting is much more severe. I haven't played Kingdoms in a long time though so I'm unsure--I've been on R2TW DeI for a while. Just played EB on RTW for a few days and am now installing it for Kingdoms.

Would love to hear from a dev about this though.

[Medkirtys]

Well, with Epeiros on VH Pella seems hard to assault because seems that for a phalanx to kill General's Bodyguards unit it takes 45 minutes, lol.

[masterofroflness]

Very Hard and take no prisoners

[PhilipSchall]

On the harder campaign difficulties, does the AI get insane cash bonuses like in EB1?

[whosurcaddie]

Ive been playing on VH/VH it seems a little easy right now. Needs a little balancing I think. Maybe its just early on but I have cleared the British isles relatively easily only lost one battle and that was an ambush.

[Walincas]

Playing on H/H as Rome and im also having a very easy game so far. My empire expands all over the italian peninsula, and I have taken most of the cities of Carthage as well @ turn 100. The only difficulty I encountered in the campaign so far, was mediolanum revolting, while my faction leader was unable to get there and restore order in time (he was leading the romani legions against Carthage).

I will restart my campaign and see if it gets a little harder on VH/VH and maybe give the AI a little more time to build up, before I start expanding.

The problem with enemy AI imo atm. is, that the AI cannot defend it's cities, not even their capital (took carthage, which had only a garrison of around 300). This could be fixed by implementing a garrison script, ala the one from Roma Surrectum - this would make the game much more realistic.

Lets face it, Carthage would never garrison it's capital with whimsical units during wartime. The garrison script from roma surrectum will "spawn" a full stack of decent quality units to defend AI capital/historical important city - and I think it's badly needed in EB II.

[Rad]

There are no direct bonuses for units on Hard or Very Hard battle difficulty in Med2... the AI is just supposed to be smarter... not happening LOL

[Trax]

Going by memory here, because I haven't played M2TW for a very long time.

Diplomacy doesn't really work properly above medium or maybe hard campaign difficulty.

Higher battle difficulty most certainly gives no attack of defence bonuses to anyone.
It may give some morale bonuses to AI but it also makes morale checks much more severe. It may be very hard to break AI frontally but it may actually be easier to get them to rout by using proper tactics. Sometimes just moving a unit behind the line or on the flank is enough to make them run. Siege battles can be be hell though, because frontal slugging matches are hard to avoid.

[z3n]

Incorrect in terms of mods. In vanilla yes diplomacy is off.

Correct about morale, though I found the code to potentially adjust this across the board thus allowing for (maybe) better tactics by ai though I honestly don't see much difference myself. (If any.)

[Trax]

Incorrect in terms of mods. In vanilla yes diplomacy is off.

Correct about morale, though I found the code to potentially adjust this across the board thus allowing for (maybe) better tactics by ai though I honestly don't see much difference myself. (If any.)

Do you test and balance your BAI on medium? I think higher difficulties might modify AI behaviour and throw it out of balance. I'm playing on VH and seeing some crazy things like frontal charge of hippakontistai against a phalanx.

[Josh Mahurin]

The official default for our mod is M/M. Medium should always be a baseline for everything. That's the definition of that word... If you want it harder then play on hard or very hard. Easier play easy. We are obviously still working on the balance and people like Quintus and Ibrahim (working on stats) and z3n and Granto (working on CAI/BAI) are bringing us immense progress in that direction. We are also working slowly on unit costs and economy and this should help too.