I've been a CiV player for five years and I always play on the 'normal'  difficulty.   Obviously after almost a thousand hours of playing I'm pretty good and usually win at that level.   But not always.   Sometimes it's a bad start, or being  caught up in early wars, the occasional bad decision that causes me to not win.   So 'normal difficulty' is 'if you're a very experienced player you usually win, but it's not guaranteed'. 

EL used to have a 'normal' difficulty that was like that.    You could usually win, but it wasn't guaranteed. 

Well, not any more.   Now on 'normal' 80 turns in the AI starts to take off like crazy and all of a sudden you're the lowest rated faction.    Or shortly after that they show up with these huge armies of VERY high stat units that just go through your units like crap through a goose. 

What happened?   Did you listen to the 'grognards grumpling about the AI' and decide to ramp up what was a perfect 'normal' difficulty for the vast majority of players?   

'Easy' is not an option, that is a 100% guaranteed win.    But now on 'normal' it's like you're not playing the game - it's playing you.   You have to do EXACTLY the right thing all the time or you'll get steamrolled.    It is nowhere near as fun a game as it used to be. 

What I find really frustrating is that there are FOUR LEVELS of difficulty above 'normal' for the 'I want the AI to pound me into oblivion' players.   FOUR.  LEVELS.    Why can't you make the first of those what you now call 'normal' and GIVE US BACK THE 'NORMAL' difficulty we had before the last two dlc's?  

This was my second favorite game after CiV, but now it's just not that fun to play anymore.  

I really hope you'll put 'normal' back to what 'normal' should be.

KnsCtyShufl wrote:

You might want to watch a few YouTube players, there are many really good ones out there.  There are also many guides on these forums that will probably help you a lot too.  With 1,000 hours logged there are probably some things you're missing in your game play and strategy if you can't easily beat normal 100% of the time.

I play impossible usually (I can beat endless, but I just find impossible more fun) and I win probably 80-90% of my games with less than 400 hours.  Over the last few expansions and patches, they have made the AI a lot better and Impossible now is a little more challenging than what is was, but I still feel like I have room to make a few mistakes and still not get steamrolled.

Aside from just not having enough / good enough military are there any specific aspects of the empire building that you think you're struggling with?

I would honestly like to know how you beat endless difficulty.
The two times I tried most enemies got to era 3 while I was at my 5th research in era 1, which also means it is impossible to get ANY legendary deed. So the only way i can see some1 beat the difficulty fidsi multiplier (x5 i think in endless, may be x4?) is to disable all non military victory and jus thope they destroy each other while you SLOWLY catch up.. Is this what you do?
In any case, difficulty multipliers aren't fun, nor fair. It's honestly the only turn down this game has (may be along with battle ai). So what do you think/do?

I suspect the underlying issue here is AI quality, which has to be compensated with tons of crutches. I would like it if Amp invested some more in making their AI smarter, not beefier.

Yes, Kns, but my personal impression is that AI in EL is dumber than other games. Normally multiplayer would compensate for this, but faction balance is pretty shaky. On any given day, there will be 1000 people playing single player, and 2 playing multiplayer, which seems to lend support to this notion.

In Endless Legend you can create your own difficulties very easily, the file with the AI bonuses is fully accessible and you can modify it.

Is found in:

Endless Legend\Public\Simulation\SimulationDescriptors [GameDifficultyBonus].xml

You do not need modding skills, simply modify slightly the numbers of the normal difficulty to your liking.

I recommend notepad++ for the edit

I usually play on Endless difficulty and it can be really challenging at times. What I don't like about that difficulty is that you are kinda forced to turtle and only take fights under fortification bonuses from Stronghold Architecture. Ai is superior at getting and growing its first colonies (good ol' cheats), and even on huge pangea you sometimes struggle to go wide. And the fact they have so much land early, really pushes you towards the necessity of making decisions, that AI treats as agressive: collecting pearls in their areas (because there is no neutral land already or its unreachable) or killing their colonists that try to snatch the last land pieces. And there is a problem with the level of vindictiveness AI puts on you for those actions. Any agressive actions towards AI leads to them declaring war on you. And do you know what war means when you are turtling in EL? It means no truce FOREVER, FOREVER CARL.

Below here is a screenshot of my last vaulters game where I was at war with 4 enemies at once during the ENTIRE GAME. Even Allayi from another continent (teal) declared war for whatever reason? I killed 1 skyfin turn 10 and now I am at eternal war with them and they are constantly bringing their troops to my flank, like wtf? they don't accept truce for any amount of resources either.




This is a point where I ended my last session. I got lucky that Necrophage and Drakken had a bit of a brawl between each other. That might be the only thing that can still keep me in this game. I just don't have enough time to make an army of 6 in every city, I constantly suffer casualties from fighting 3 superior players. With that amount of cities, without Vaulter's teleportation I would have lost 30 turns ago. So from my experience Endless Difficulty is managable but can be super tough when playing with little land and especially when starting near necrophage and Allayi. Btw Kapaku and Clans were dead by turn 80 lol.

So basically I would like some AIs to have slightly reduced levels of agressiveness at higher difficulties. At least do it for factions that PRETEND to "like" diplomatic approach. It is embarassing when all AIs have this same warmonger personality no matter the faction. I like the feeling of struggle of that difficulty but I don't like the feeling of ETERNAL struggle.

ninakoru

Forum Achievement Unlocked: Bane of Tamriel

- Necro a thread more than 2 years old and allow it to spark a continued conversation