Game Difficulty

[walsh_cm]

After owning this game for several years, I finally spent enough time to learn it well enough to play. I have issues with games though were just the slightest annoyance and I will start over. Well this game is one I would prefer to do that at little as possible with the insane amount of clicking involved in organizing armies in locations and managing generals. The detail is amazing, and I love it, but in my current German game I am wondering if I need to tweak anything within the difficulty settings in order to provide a difficult yet reasonable experience. I have yet to invade France, but I can already tell I am going to roll right over them. Before I get any further is there anything you veterans do to increase difficulty that doesn't upset the game balance? I am willing to start over one more time to make sure I have it right. I have a ton of resources and I don't know if they will become a problem or not as the game progresses as they should. My current problem with changing the difficulty level is screwing up the game. The difficulty setting seem to cut my resources which is fine, but I don't like the flip side of giving the AI tons of resources. To me this could disrupt the balance of the way the game is designed. Also, I do not like any combat modifiers that hinder me or help the AI as this ruins the game for me. I don't want to sit here spending hours upgrading my Tiger tanks and rolling them into battle and have them get their butts kicked unrealistically just to try and handicap myself.

 

[sebas379]

Well, since adjusting the difficulty setting simply gives the AI some bonusses and you some maluses, which if I understand is not what you want, there's only really one option I think.

Houserules.
Make the game more difficult for yourself by coming up with creative restrictions or objectives. I'm not at this stage so I have no list to offer, but you could think about not building more than X number of Y units or fight A, B and C together. Or pick a smaller nation.

 

[21oliver]

Houserules would be the way to go then. For example if your playing Germany, no Sea Lion or Barbarossa before the actual dates. Set the AI on trade so you cant stockpile all the resources is another good one. Use the AI for combat also is a good one.

 

[gunstickuncle]

Or you try multiplayer. Most players (even those with relatively low experience) tend to play much more sophisticated than the AI.
I recently started playing MP, and my experience is that many groups are more than willing to accept new players regardless of experience.
Just pick one (or several^^) that match your time schedule and give it a try.

 

[Kovax]

I started playing minor countries almost exclusively. This run, I'm trying GER for the first time with this expansion, and even with a few "house rules" (such as not enacting the silly "Blitzkrieg" and "Destiny" buffs), it's going way too smoothly. Despite diverting IC to build up a "conventional navy", and not allowing myself to invade the British home islands until I had closed off both ends of the Mediterranean and could properly protect a landing zone against the RN, I still found myself in position to do so easily by mid 1940. GER landed in the Middle East to relieve pressure on the retreating Italians, and closed off the Suez, while Italy assaulted Gibraltar. After sinking 6 UK BBs with Bismarck, Tirpitz, the two historical pre-war BCs, plus the pair of obsolescent WWI battlewagons (not counting the BB which the Italians sunk), I was easily able to seal off both ends of the Channel against several attacks while my transports made trip after trip unhindered. With my troops in possession of London, NET and GRE both jumped into the Allies, and a week later the Soviets declared war. That left me stretched a bit thin in a whole lot of places at once, but GER is overpowered enough in this game to deal with it. NET is down to two provinces, GRE is occupied except for Crete, I'm on the Scottish border and advancing rapidly, and I'm now able to redeploy forces from those areas to reinforce the Soviet front.

I've currently got initial breakthroughs in three places on the Soviet front (despite being badly understrength until the reinforcements arrive), which should interlock to trap about 20-30 divisions in two separate pockets. Rinse and repeat, and then the game will most likely get too boring to continue across the wide expanses of Russia (as usual). At that point, I'll probably quit and restart with yet another minor country for the greater challenge.

 

[walsh_cm]

I just mopped the floor with France, which is not surprising as historically it wasn't too difficult either, but I feel like whenever I move my army to the east and invade the USSR even with a near historic time frame, I will march straight through to Moscow. In my game I brought Italy in a little to early and France pushed them all the way to Rome, so perhaps this diverted too much French strength south and made taking Paris even easier. Where is the file located for me to make difficulty changes? I was thinking that I would like to nerf my resource and IC without changing the combat or AI resources. Maybe this will even things out a little without completely blowing things up.

 

[gunstickuncle]

tfh > common > static_modifiers.txt

i advise you make a backup before you change sth

 

[walsh_cm]

Thanks. I see the modifiers for IC's and the other stuff, but I cannot seem to find the combat one. Do you know where that is? Doesn't it give like -40% in combat on very hard?


Edit: I found it. So all I am changing is giving myself -25% IC, and -25% resources. I am leaving AI and all other modifiers as "normal". Will start over and see how this plays out. My biggest issue was that I seemed to have tons of resources and tons of production. Combat does appear to be easy due to AI, but then again I have yet to fight the Soviets, so we shall see. I just don't like difficulty changes that result in gimping the stats to my men and equipment as that ruins the immersion for me when superior trained troops and tech get beaten just for the sake of giving me an artificial challenge.

 

[BattleMoose]

Thanks. I see the modifiers for IC's and the other stuff, but I cannot seem to find the combat one. Do you know where that is? Doesn't it give like -40% in combat on very hard?


Edit: I found it. So all I am changing is giving myself -25% IC, and -25% resources. I am leaving AI and all other modifiers as "normal". Will start over and see how this plays out. My biggest issue was that I seemed to have tons of resources and tons of production. Combat does appear to be easy due to AI, but then again I have yet to fight the Soviets, so we shall see. I just don't like difficulty changes that result in gimping the stats to my men and equipment as that ruins the immersion for me when superior trained troops and tech get beaten just for the sake of giving me an artificial challenge.

If you want a proper USSR experience, be sure to give yourself a hefty malus to supply throughput!

 

[walsh_cm]

I assume "malus" is a word for nerf? Sorry I have only seen that expression on these forums. So how much would be reasonable? I don't want to give the AI unrealistic advantages so maybe 0.1? If I am not mistaken the original VH difficulty said .5. So is that a 50% throughput penalty?

 

[BattleMoose]

I assume "malus" is a word for nerf? Sorry I have only seen that expression on these forums. So how much would be reasonable? I don't want to give the AI unrealistic advantages so maybe 0.1? If I am not mistaken the original VH difficulty said .5. So is that a 50% throughput penalty?

Malus, penalty.

I think VH is a 20% supply throughput penalty, I'd go with that for starters. It should still be easy to defeat the USSR though. On normal you can take the AA line with almost no supply issues.

 

[Ikarases]

Or you try multiplayer. Most players (even those with relatively low experience) tend to play much more sophisticated than the AI.

I started playing minor countries almost exclusively.

I do exactly these two things above. Either going against superior odds as a minor or playing against someone I simply cannot afford to underestimate. I had a multiplayer session this Sunday (see my singnature if you're interested!) and lost 3/4 of my navy, though not without a fight. I got more or less lured into a trap (fake invasion attempt), as I'm still quite a newbie in the MP world.

It'd be awesome if the AI would be as capable as the human player is!

 

[Kovax]

The throughput penalty is a killer. With the lighter penalty on "Hard", I occasionally had units going out of supply while sitting on the border BEFORE the War in the East started. Considering that the Soviets outnumbered me almost 2:1 on the border and had a higher percentage of armor, while moving supplies over worse infrastructure than my own, it amazes me that their entire army isn't stuck in place from "day one".

Penalizing the player's supply chain even more isn't the answer, because it's a game engine problem, and you can't deal with it by simply (and wastefully) throwing tons of supply at the local trouble spot, because you have NO control. When you have a 2xGAR sitting in place for 6 months, only 10-12 provinces from the capital, and it suddenly goes out of supply for a full month, something is wrong. This game, I had one division out of supply at the start of Danzig, despite sitting for weeks about 5-8 provinces from Berlin. The last thing I want to do is make it worse.

 

[Roytje]

Edit: I found it. So all I am changing is giving myself -25% IC, and -25% resources. I am leaving AI and all other modifiers as "normal".

What I did in HOI2, and later found out was very popular, was give the AI bonusses, without giving myself a penalty. It was called "Emu difficulty" (iirc), it was named after a poster on the forums. I actually want to start a custom HOI3 game with the similar settings. I hate it when I have to play with penalties.

Found a thread: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?363913-Blue-Emu-Difficulty-Level

I once played a HOI2 game and edited the files to give the AI 200% bonus to IC, MP and Resources. AI made a ridiculous amount of divisions, and it slowed my game to a crawl. Soviet Union had 1264 INF divisions and 63 ARM divisions in 1941! I was playing the US and wanted a challenge. :rofl:

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[Beagá]

By editing the ideologies.txt file you also can give specific bonuses for a faction. For example you can give Axis +50% Manpower and IC.

I for one prefer giving the player maluses, to avoid silly situations like the one above

 

[walsh_cm]

I ended up giving myself -30% IC and resources, and also -20% supply throughput. The AI I gave just a small bump of like 5 or 10% IC. My problem with giving the AI too much is I like to convey raid with Germany, and if AI has ridiculous amounts of resources it would ruin that aspect of the game. Although, I have not played long or far enough to know if the raiding part of the game functions properly or not. I won't really know until Barbarossa how all this will translate. I have not played the game that far yet. I have started over multiple times as I continue to learn, but I think I have it good enough for this game and I prefer to not just roll through Russia, as It may be awhile before I decide to play again as the organizational requirements of this game can be really taxing. So I would like this 1st play through to be a good one, and hopefully I don't run over Russia in 3 months.

I cant wait for the day AI programming improves to the point of giving a real challenge to players. I could play multiplayer I suppose, but I have no friends that would dare touch this game.

 

[Roytje]

The AI I gave just a small bump of like 5 or 10% IC.

Dont forget to also give them more resources and manpower, otherwise they might not fully utilize their IC, or they might run out of manpower.

 

[Opanashc]

Also, it might behoove you to increase AI's officer production, so as to not look at their abysmal officer ration.

 

[Kovax]

A good way to steamroll the SU is to give them a massive IC boost, without increased officers. They end up diluting their officer pool to the point where you can just brush stacks of 5-10 divisions aside without a problem. I played a game as a minor country on Hard in one of the early patches or unpatched expansions, and was able to simply wade through massive stacks of Soviet divisions more easily than if they had been partisans. Going head-on at 1:4 odds was a cakewalk. Sad. Easy was actually harder, because they built less divisions and their Officer Ratio was better.