Aside from AI perhaps playing better and getting some bonuses, what do the different difficulty levels do? I mean do you get bonuses/penalties according to the level?



So the reason I ask is, that I played a few games before today on the two lower difficulties to get my bearings, and I was rolling in dust. To the point where I really didn't pay attention to my dust income at all, aside from checking a few times that it was still positive, and I could even drop the tax rate to compensate for low approval, due to rapid expansion. Now after the launch I finally got to design my own faction, and I thought I'd put the difficulty on normal to compensate for the fact that the faction was tailored to my tastes (no I didn't take dust generation penalties, before you ask). I get an awesome start, with plenty of nice planets around, even got two Administrator heroes in the starting three, and I'm cheering silently inside. But somehow it seems I'm doing really crummy on dust. Still using the starting tax rate, I'm barely keeping it positive, with the occasional dip to negative production due to improvements. I don't feel like I'm doing anything different. So I check where all my crack...I mean dust is going and it seems that about half of it gets nixed from something called distance from empire. And I'm like "since when was there a modifier like that?"



So is it really the difficulty change, or a stealth nerf during launch? Or am I really just missing something?

Great question. I'm very curious as well. I just played a game on normal (my first game) and completely stomped the 4 computers I was playing against.

yeah



I played three games in beta - normal, hard and the difficulty above hard



I won them all - no troubles with dust shortages



so I create a custom faction and start playing on Hard today



am ruined for dust



my problem comes from the nerf to the ind→dust conversion - it used to be 50% and now it's 25% - so my fids strategy is now unsustainable



as a result I have to rethink my choice of Sophon Affinity and my entire early game



watch this space