What's your perfect campaign difficulty/settings?

[Satansblofish]

Everyone has a different idea of what makes a campaign settings just right for them. After 1000+ hours(ish) in DeI, i still have a hard time finding what makes a campaign just right for me. Those settings can vary and have changed over time. Recently, since around ED, I have been struggling to find a balance that works well for me. Between my campaigns being too easy where I could play less than 80 turns to create the full fledged makings of an empire vs battling to hold my one province as all of my neighbors bear down on me. Right now, I am in a Roma campaign at turn 90 with 3 provinces. I had 4 but I was forced to abandon my gains in Illyria and Makedonia as an onslaught of armies from various barbarian factions forced me back across to the peninsula. At the moment, I am weighing my decisions and it's fantastic that I have to do that. As for my battles, the power of balance bar used to mean nothing. Nothing. Battles existed in 2 outcomes: Decisive Victory and Heroic Victory. Now, and I find this very interesting, the power of balance bar is incredibly accurate. It has predicted my losses on auto-resolve to within 10% of my casualties multiple times in my recent battles. I have now done worse(a couple times it was pretty bad) than the auto-resolve results. Previously, this happened only due to a freak accident, like my extra ships not being able to land or my reinforcing army takes an absurd amount of time to come onto the field and are on the entire opposite end of the map. Plus, I haven't had a heroic victory yet. If I even beat this campaign, I don't think I'll ever achieve a heroic victory and I can't think of another time that's happened. The last thing I want to note, is that I used to play with house rules in order to create a more level playing field with the AI, but for my recent Roma campaign I have had to abandon all of those (except baiting enemy armies into ambushes because its just too easy and abusing that mechanic feels distinctly unroman).

My current settings/difficulty:

Hard/Hard. I have been playing with battles on both normal and hard. I prefer hard but some higher end units are incredibly difficult to break and require several rear charges. With quality 41 units+ on the battle field its simply too much microing.

41 Units Edit Savegame Tutorial: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...al-Here-is-how!

De AI "Arbitriis" http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...e-AI-Arbitriis

+50% Supply for 41 units: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...41-unit-armies

Hardcore/Softcore: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ftcore-Submods

Next on the docket:

Data Venia: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?743011-Overhaul-Submod-quot-Data-Venia-quot-(for-DeI-1-2-2f-Updated-1st-January)<--Started a 2nd simultaneous campaign and am using this paired w/ DAIA. Nothing else

Cultural Tensio: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ultural-Tensio (I plan to use this one my next playthrough as its recommended to be paired with DAIA)



Tell me about your perfect campaign settings/difficulty.

[Yarev]

Just a question how do you make 41 unit armies?

[Satansblofish]

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...41-unit-armies

[Iridium31]

Lately, nothing but DeI on H/N and routinely fighting battles at 1.5-2.5 to 1 odds in favor of the AI.

The problem I have with upping the battle difficulty is it doesn't necessarily translate to harder battles but instead makes weird stuff happen. A unit routs then 5 seconds later rejoins the battle, some units are ridiculously hard to take down even when executing perfect plans to take them down, archers eat cavalry to the face for 5 minutes, etc. The AI is still tactically challenged, it just means it can make poor choices and experience reduced punishment for it. In fact, the AI may even gain a tendency to make worse choices with higher battle difficulty because it ends up thinking it's uber buffed units can overcome units designed to counter them. It simply turns battles into more a matter of exploiting the AI instead of fighting them how you probably should be.

[Garbad]

I wish I knew. H/H is my most common, but the senseless AI aggro makes early game unfun a lot of the time, and the AI is still weak in a fite. N or H/VH ends up being a cakewalk because I have a massive economic advantage.

[Bandaro123]

Either hard or very hard campaign with normal battles. I hate seeing low tier units performing better or at the same pace as the higher ones. It's just makes me feel sad, not rewarded. I used to enjoy mod for Warhammer that introduced better more expansionist AI with even harder economical bonuses than on legendary, but the actual difficulty in menu still remained normal. Meaning i don't get diplomacy, no retarded penalties to public order or unfair battles.

I enjoy fighting outnumbered, but when those enemy stacks are better quality than mine i feel bad. Especially when they are not consisted of elite units but cheats.

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

Either hard or very hard campaign with normal battles. I hate seeing low tier units performing better or at the same pace as the higher ones. It's just makes me feel sad, not rewarded. I used to enjoy mod for Warhammer that introduced better more expansionist AI with even harder economical bonuses than on legendary, but the actual difficulty in menu still remained normal. Meaning i don't get diplomacy, no retarded penalties to public order or unfair battles.

I enjoy fighting outnumbered, but when those enemy stacks are better quality than mine i feel bad. Especially when they are not consisted of elite units but cheats.

That's why the suggested difficulty for battles was/is normal.

[Dardo21]

Usually anything between N-N to VH-N, I usually use the softcore submod for the first 50-60 turns then turn it off.

[mmm1234mm]

I used to play on H/H but recently decided to change to N/H after half of campaign as Athens where everyone declared war on me.
1. I never really played battles on Normal so I just got use to Hard. But things like

A unit routs then 5 seconds later rejoins the battle, some units are ridiculously hard to take down even when executing perfect plans to take them down, archers eat cavalry to the face for 5 minutes, etc.

sometimes are annoying.

2. About the campaign difficulty this is where I kind of swing between N and H. In my opinion the sweet spot is right in the middle. Pity there's no option like in Warhammer2 to change campaign difficulty in the middle of the game.

Either hard or very hard campaign with normal battles. I hate seeing low tier units performing better or at the same pace as the higher ones. It's just makes me feel sad, not rewarded. I used to enjoy mod for Warhammer that introduced better more expansionist AI with even harder economical bonuses than on legendary, but the actual difficulty in menu still remained normal. Meaning i don't get diplomacy, no retarded penalties to public order or unfair battles.

I enjoy fighting outnumbered, but when those enemy stacks are better quality than mine i feel bad. Especially when they are not consisted of elite units but cheats.

So if someone could clarify what really it to me?
The reason why I abandoned my Athens campaign on Hard is because my relations with everyone would just tick down every turn inevitably going red, even diplomatic missions wouldn't help. Aetolian League a 160+ relations wouldn't accept Defensive Alliance (only Non-aggression), Pergamon and 150+ relations for no reason declared war on me.
The only faction not at war is Rome, but it expanded so quick and has so many doom stacks, that I will never dear conquer it. And again at 100+ relations wouldn't even accept non-aggression pact.

New campaign on N/H as Pergamon. Only 15 turns in to it. Managed to conquer my whole starting province (Defeated Rhodes and at war with Selucids and all satrapies). Egypt loves me for that, but 450+ relations wouldn't even accept non-aggression pact. Knossos declared war been in good relations with me, but it always does when playing Athens. But then Spart sometimes too being at 100+ relations.

So what this is, I kind of feel is that the Campaign AI is way too stubborn even on normal difficulty. I do like the game to be challenging, but I feel like there are no political options to bend AI factions to my will. As I understand in DeI AI's aggression is turned up from vanilla? So playing on H or VH, wouldn't it just make politics useless because everyone will declare war on you anyway?
Are there certain thresholds of relations where AI is set to most likely accept pacts, confederations? Because it's ridiculous not accept when being at 200+ relations and I offer 70k for it )

[thesmoosh]

in my experience the AI will decide how to respond to your proposal based on a combination of its personality and your relations. It's possible that it also thinks about whether it wants your lands.

I haven't had much difficulty getting treaties with ai factions. The easiest way to get them to open up is a common enemy. Usually I have so much money that I pay one faction to break treaties with others then I declare way on the faction that betrayed everyone and others will join me.

[mmm1234mm]

in my experience the AI will decide how to respond to your proposal based on a combination of its personality and your relations. It's possible that it also thinks about whether it wants your lands.

I haven't had much difficulty getting treaties with ai factions. The easiest way to get them to open up is a common enemy. Usually I have so much money that I pay one faction to break treaties with others then I declare way on the faction that betrayed everyone and others will join me.

I literally never could pay my way in politics. How much did you have to pay to break treaties?

[Satansblofish]

Generally, the factions have their aggression turned up compared to vanilla as this is what makes the AI try to expand. At least, that is my understanding, I could be wrong. On normal, I think the AI is pretty readily manipulated. On hard, things can feel wonky or overwhelming early on when you are small or if you remain small. In my experience, if you're small and a handful of factions declare war on you, it feels like it starts to snowball. Once you get your economy rolling and have your settlements upgraded, everyone wants to be your friend/NAP. On very hard, if you can't keep your wars to a couple of factions at a time, expect the whole map to basically turn on you.

Personally, I think the diplomacy gets a bad wrap and is made out to be worse than it is. It's the most fun and meaningful early on in the campaign before your economy becomes the engine to your empire. For the most fun, you have to explore just about all of your options and kinda play around with diplomacy before you realize there are some interesting things that can be done in the current system. Also, I don't know the algorithm but I think certain actions are weighted more than others, regardless of what score it gives toward your relations. For example, I have routinely used the tactic of declaring war on my worrisome neighbors' enemies to prevent them from declaring war on me. I like to to join through diplomacy if I can and will even pay them if I have to but, failing that, I will just declare war on their enemy anyway. If I can, I actually attack their enemies and give battle support/raid their lands/sack their settlement. Plus I build good relations with w/e factions they have good relations with. Donating some money here and there helps. I do this until they allow me to pay for all of the various treaties, usually starting with trade or NAP. Basically, by ganging up on the enemies of whoever I'm trying to keep from attacking me and ingratiating myself with their allies, has made my scarier neighbors much more manageable. I do want to note though, this is never something I would do as a more powerful starting faction such as Roma, Carthage, Seleucids, etc as it's a different dynamic.

Anyway, this allowed me to play as Syracuse and get a military alliance with Rome, all while avoiding war with Carthage. I eventually paid Rome to break their treaties with Carthage and go to war against them with me. Another fun, off beat scenario is playing as Sparta and confederating on turn 1 or 2 with Epeiros and then try to manipulate Rome while you build yourself up as a threat to attack them. Or don't but generally they will always come for you unless you can somehow get a DA with them. One last one I liked, as Epeiros, to delay war with Rome, on turn 1 you can get a peace treaty by offering Rome to break your alliance with the Estrucans, joining the war effort against them, and paying ~12k. Don't want to pay money? Offer to break your TA or NAP or both with Syracuse. These were done on H/H with no submods and are some of the more difficult starting factions and if their scenario's can be manipulated like this, then there has to be a lot of others that can be similarly manipulated across the campaign map as well.

[thesmoosh]

I literally never could pay my way in politics. How much did you have to pay to break treaties?

I give gifts to turn them green then do other treaties.

If there are two factions you're trying to instigate against each other, the one that likes you more is more likely to accept your offer of breaking an agreement in exchange for coin.

The amount you have to pay depends on your treasury size, not the amount itself. I think when you're selecting how much money to give, each click is x% of your funds so it just goes off that.

For example, early on I'm able up make a difference with a few thousand coins while late game I was gifting 150k because that was the minimum I could select (I had 1.5M+ in the bank, earning 200k a round because trade is OP) and even that would do much sometimes.

...

You probably already know this but take care of your reliability rating. Without it, it doesn't matter how green you are with a faction, they will avoid any deals and might even break existing agreements.

...

Another trick you can use, though I consider this cheating, is that if the AI initiates diplomacy during their turn any action your take during that negotiation ends up counting as something the AI did.

So if you want to go to war with someone and don't feel like waiting 10+ turns for the penalties to wear off, you can use a situation where they initiate diplomacy to cancel the trade deal and other factions will blame the ai and not you.

...

Late game nothing really matters because you're usually too strong, not early on I pay a lot of attention to who's fighting who and how all the factions feel about each other.

If you can find a faction that everyone hates, find a way to join that war (joining is better than declaring for a number of reasons). If you get lucky it's against a faction like Rhodes or the Seleucids which tend to last forever and you can just stay in that war and milk it for good relations.

I had a game where I went to war with Knossos to curry favor work Sparta. Because I had a ton of trade agreements, when Knossos raided the seas it hurt their relations with everyone, which in turn meant that everyone loved me for being at war with Knossos including facing like Suebi and Iceni that are across the map, just because of the raiding penalty.

...

Anyways, there are tons of things you can do to manipulate diplomacy but I recommend just reading the FAQ thread and DEI's in-game guide (in the main menu, click the little arrows at the bottom). I found them both very helpful and they have me a lot of ideas.

Edit: fixed a few typos. Also, +1 to everything Satansblofish said.

[Vardano]

Since 2013 I played most of my DEI campaigns on legendary but now it is almost impossible with small factions and ultra aggressive AI on that difficulty. Interesting that recently I played Seleucid campaign on legendary, before new revolt system was introduced by team, and abandoned it because it was too easy. Battles on legendary are out of whack anyway.

Normal difficulty is just ridiculously easy for veterans of total war, no challenge and no fun. Hard is really well balanced difficulty but gets very easy once you get little bigger, so no point of continuing that campaigns, which feels wrong. My Syracuse campaign on VH was biggest act of masochism I have ever experienced, except of Egypt everyone declared war one me. Carthage with Rome were in love all the time in that campaign, and it was still real challenge and fun till the end, I wanted to play it non stop and enjoyed it.
Right now i'm torned about what difficulty to play on. Unfortunately I don't like many restrictions of hardcore submod, to me they are too artificial way to make things harder. I will probably still gonna choose challenge on VH.

Normal and Hard are good difficulties for battles. Overall balance is good now in the game but I still don't like speed of battles, everything happens way too fast. I still did not play a lot with latest update though but I don't think too much has changed.

[Pattonius]

I play on N/N, since that's what the mod was balanced for. I'm also a pathetic excuse for a TW veteran and can't handle more challenge. I've been playing the series since 2002 when I bought Medieval on a whim and found playing it became a priority over properly completing my senior year of high school, which I barely passed. Fun anecdote - I was curious about the history of the Almohad Caliphate after enjoying a campaign as them, so I decided to ask my grade 12 history teacher (who was highly-regarded and had won education awards in my city) what he could tell me about them. He said, "I think you mean the Umayyad Caliphate," then directed me to the library since Islamic caliphates weren't his area of study. I became confused and disappointed that the game developers had made such a mistake. Later, at home, I decided to check online and eventually discovered that the Almohad Caliphate had indeed existed and that the game was not in error. I found it amusing that a video game had just taught me something that an acclaimed teacher was unable to.

Back to difficulty in TW games. I'm a 15-year veteran of TW games, but I kind of suck at them. I actually don't think they're the right type of game for me, except that I can't stop playing them for some reason. What I mean by that is I am not competitive and have never wanted to challenge other players in multiplayer. I can beat the AI in a fair battle on normal or (vanilla) hard, although I still make mistakes even though I always pause to assess and issue orders. I simply don't want to deal with the AI having a ton of bonuses, because I don't find beating bonuses through careful play to be fun. No doubt if I played competitive multiplayer the AI would become a joke for me, as it is for many of the players here, but that has never been a goal I felt like achieving.

I also play the campaign map in a fairly passive, relaxed manner and generally prefer that portion of the game over the battles. I'm not very interested in steamrolling the map and owning 30 territories by turn 50, and would rather build up territories (and in Rome II I like to watch the dynamic cities develop). Most campaigns end with me getting ganged up on by blobbing AI powers to the point where I suddenly feel it would be a fantastic idea to start a new campaign as someone else on the other side of the map.

I'm one of those players who find normal too easy and hard too hard (except Medieval II, which I've put the most hours into and can play on hard campaign). Honestly, I play sub-optimally in almost all strategy games, whether they be 4X, Grand Strategy, RTS or TBS. I prefer roleplay and immersion over gameplay systems and improving my ability to win at them. Example: I had been a Civ II and III player for over a decade when one day on a forum I came across a discussion about Tall vs Wide play. It blew my mind. I had been completely unaware there was any sort of metagame (and wasn't really familiar with metagaming at all, yet) and had just played each game "organically" and in a casual manner, with only vague plans that changed to suit the moment. I'd never been able to play above Prince difficulty because I had no idea how anyone was supposed to compete with the AI (I had no idea they got bonuses on high difficulties).

It wasn't until I was in my 20s when I really clued in to the idea that people could get better at games by practicing them. I had always assumed people who were better than me just had some innate skill that I lacked. This is probably in part because gameplay mechanics have always taken a backseat to story (presented or self-made in sandboxes), but more because I had never practiced anything in my life. I didn't like sports or competitive activities and wasn't interested in art or music. I didn't study, either. "Practicing" things was a foreign concept. I later realized the "skill" other people had was actually one called discipline, which I've not really been successful at developing in the years since. These days I read strategies from metagamers and have improved my game a bit, but I'm still lazy and play with my feelings instead of my thoughts.

N/N is still the best for me.

[Speedy2511]

I started a new Empire Divided game on n/n difficulty. I play the Rome faction. It is my first DEI game. (before i played Attila with Radious Mod, on normal, because of the money bonuses the AI gets on harder levels; too much battles). Maybe i had to play on hard campaign. I think the AI is a little to passive on normal? I mean, i'm in multiple wars, but no one is attacking me. But i am not very far in the game right now.

[♔Greek Strategos♔]

I started a new Empire Divided game on n/n difficulty. I play the Rome faction. It is my first DEI game. (before i played Attila with Radious Mod, on normal, because of the money bonuses the AI gets on harder levels; too much battles). Maybe i had to play on hard campaign. I think the AI is a little to passive on normal? I mean, i'm in multiple wars, but no one is attacking me. But i am not very far in the game right now.

Yeah bump it. Try Hard with Normal battles.
Plus welcome to the family.

[Speedy2511]

Yeah bump it. Try Hard with Normal battles.
Plus welcome to the family.

Thanks for the welcome

I think i will go first with normal, and when its getting boring i start a new game on hard.

[AstroCat]

Historically I've played TW games on H/H, going back to the original Shogun which I picked up when it came out way back.

I like a challenge but not unrealistic mechanical gamey hardness. I generally play the TW series for immersion/roleplay and fun, I don't play to "game/beat" the system. Sure I could do all the gamey tricks and optimize every move but that is not fun for me and totally kills any historical immersion.

So for DEI it's N/N or maybe H/N, sure sometimes it's easy, and sometimes I don't always do the most perfect 100% turn because I want to roleplay out a different motivation. Same with games like EUIV and CKII, I don't game those systems either. Sure I play to "succeed in my goals" in general but on my own terms and I don't need silly gamey/make it hard to be hard gameplay for it to be enjoyable.

I try to learn the systems and then temper my exploitation of them when it feels cheesy and "off", let's just say I house rule it based on my goals for the current game. But of course each to their own, I got nothing to prove by playing TW games, and I don't have any real interest in competitive multiplayer for this series, so my competitive gaming bug is taken care of elsewhere.

[heidsiecker]

For me N/N is just fine!

I'm not playing to bet the AI, but to relax and build my empire.
For the challenge I use my house-rules.
For example I only recruit in winter and build in summer.

I think it is better to limit myself, than to give the AI just some unfair bonuses and than try to exploit the stupidity of the AI.
I want to play a game and I do not want to work on my free time.