Separate difficulty settings

[svennnnnnnnnnnn]

In HOI3 the difficulty changed just about everything, from how units performed in combat to industrial capacity. Personally I would prefer if non-combat stuff was two settings, one for player nations and one for ai, and two for combat stuff, one for player nations and one for ai.

Since the easier difficulties have a very important role in bridging between tutorial and regular play, having a universal difficulty makes it much harder to identify good or bad behavior, since it teaches the player to overvalue his/her capacity in tactical situations. In the 1944 d-day bookmark, on very easy you just had to say "charge!" and you would win the western front as Germany.

It could also encourage playing on harder difficulties since the AI wouldn't get battle-winning discipline outta nowhere, while still giving them the extra factories to compensate for their sub-optimal allocation of resources on a strategic level. Or you could do the opposite. If nothing else it hopefully isn't that much work to implement, while giving more freedom, more control and more customization.

 

[YellowMoonshine]

It was already stated somewhere that the difference between difficulties would be maluses towards the player. I don't think difficulty has ever affected the AI performance in HOI. Designing a working AI for such a complex game is difficult and expensive enough, designing two would be madness.

EDIT: Actually I might have misunderstood what you were trying to say. Are you asking for some sort of customisable difficulty in terms of military and industrial bonuses?

 

[The Nothing]

It was already stated somewhere that the difference between difficulties would be maluses towards the player. I don't think difficulty has ever affected the AI performance in HOI. Designing a working AI for such a complex game is difficult and expensive enough, designing two would be madness.

With all due respect, in Hearts of Iron 3, if you played in hard or very hard difficulty, the AI got huge bonus. And it totally changed the game ! When you're playing USA on very hard since day one, it's giving +20 or +40 I don't remember % in IC to any other country. For Germany it doesn't change a thing since it is already overpowered. It can't field more troops in the small Benelux front. On the other hand, with that much bonus IC France can build a sizeable army, and so does UK. So it happened when I play like that, that France does not fall before 1941, once it fell in 1942.

 

[Nicolas I]

...I don't think difficulty has ever affected the AI performance in HOI...

It really did !

HOI3 Hard difficulty:

AI Industrial Capacity: +25%; AI Resources: +25%; AI Supply Throughput: +25%; AI Naval Base Efficiency: +25%

HOI3 Very Hard difficulty:

AI Industrial Capacity: +100%; AI Resources: +100%; AI Supply Throughput: +50%; AI Naval Base Efficiency: +50%

 

[Nicolas I]

I agree with the OP that more customization of the difficulty level setting would greatly enhance the game and replayability.

In Gary Grigsby's War in the East, you can customize 5 parameters for both the player and the AI, These are morale, fort build level (entrenchment speed), logistics level (supplies and replacements), transport level (rail capacity) and administration level (give more points for some actions).

We can imagine that in HOI4 we could have some of the following parameters : IC (military, civilian, dockyards), resources, manpower, supply capacity, morale, combat efficiency, political points, research speed, trade efficiency.

 

[potski]

In Gary Grigsby' War in the East, you can customize 5 parameters for both the player and the AI, These are morale, fort build level (entrenchment speed), logistics level (supplies and replacements), transport level (rail capacity) and administration level (give more points for some actions).

podcat said in response to something similar about having a feature from a Gary Grigsby game:

HOI4 is not a Gary Grigsby title. We are focusing on the strategic aspects of the war. The Grigsby ww2 games are in many ways the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish.

 

[Axe99]

As long as it wasn't too much of a pain, I'm a big fan of granularity in difficulty settings as well. Being able to decide which bonuses the AI gets allows players to tailor the game to how they'd like it. That said, if it creates unnecessary extra balancing work, it's understandable if it doesn't make the cut - I'm sure we could mod in custom difficulty settings if we wanted.

 

[Nicolas I]

podcat said in response to something similar about having a feature from a Gary Grigsby game:

Remember what was the context of this answer, it was about the level of details of the game (micro-management), not difficulty settings. On this I would agree that War in the East in rather a nano-management level game.

 

[Nicolas I]

As long as it wasn't too much of a pain, I'm a big fan of granularity in difficulty settings as well. Being able to decide which bonuses the AI gets allows players to tailor the game to how they'd like it. That said, if it creates unnecessary extra balancing work, it's understandable if it doesn't make the cut - I'm sure we could mod in custom difficulty settings if we wanted.

In War in the East there are fixed pre-set difficulty levels (Easy, Normal, Challenging, Hard, and Impossible) probably for balancing purposes.

Easy difficulty level has all values set to 120/80 [player/AI], Normal has all values set to 100/100, Challenging has all values set to 90/110, Hard has all values set to 80/125, and Impossible has all values set to 70/150. Players can generate a custom difficulty level by manually setting any of the factors for either side. The default setting is Normal.

But you can also try by yourself to play with the 5 parameters (the range is between 25% to 400%). It's clear that by doing that your are probably unbalancing the game, but you can tweak just a bit of one to five of the parameters to experiment and reach the kind of balance that you like or find challenging enough.

In HOI3, I found the step between hard and very hard settings quite steep (AI IC and resources going from +25% to +100%). If it was customizable, the players could set this more progressively.

And finally, you are right, we could "mod" that. I used do this very basically by editing my savegame at the beginning to tweak some values.

 

[Axe99]

In War in the East there are fixed pre-set difficulty levels (Easy, Normal, Challenging, Hard, and Impossible) probably for balancing purposes.

But you can also try by yourself to play with the 5 parameters (the range was between 25% to 400%). It's clear that by doing that your are probably unbalancing the game, but you can tweak just a bit of one to five of the parameters to experiment and reach the kind of balance that you like or find challenging enough.

In HOI3, I found the step between hard and very hard settings quite steep (AI IC and resources going from +25% to +100%). If it was customizable, the players could set this more progressively.

And finally, you are right, we could "mod" that. I used do this very basically by editing my savegame at the beginning to tweak some values.

Aye - if we had an 'extra options' area in the difficulty settings where we could play with things, but at the top of the UI it said "we haven't balanced for this - play at your own risk" that'd work well, good thinking .

 

[svennnnnnnnnnnn]

It was already stated somewhere that the difference between difficulties would be maluses towards the player. I don't think difficulty has ever affected the AI performance in HOI. Designing a working AI for such a complex game is difficult and expensive enough, designing two would be madness.

EDIT: Actually I might have misunderstood what you were trying to say. Are you asking for some sort of customisable difficulty in terms of military and industrial bonuses?

Ok, sorry if I was unclear, I don't want to change the AI, I want to change the system for the bonuses/penalties that non-player nations ("AI") receive and the bonuses/penalties that player nations receive.

In Gary Grigsby's War in the East, you can customize 5 parameters for both the player and the AI, These are morale, fort build level (entrenchment speed), logistics level (supplies and replacements), transport level (rail capacity) and administration level (give more points for some actions).

This is what I am looking for, doesn't have to be exactly those categories but something like that.

In response to using mods, that seems like a roundabout way to do it, especially for multiplayer (20 mods will spring up, they wont be updated for new patches etc etc). Using the console to alter saves then launch them in multiplayer is sketchy, especially if you don't know the people involved well enough to trust their honesty ("I must have accidentally given myself the falkland islands and 200 development in them"). Having it pre-built into the game would be a huge convenience.

 

[Nicolas I]

...This is what I am looking for, doesn't have to be exactly those categories but something like that.

That's why I suggested: We can imagine that in HOI4 we could have some of the following parameters : IC (military, civilian, dockyards), resources, manpower, supply capacity, morale, combat efficiency, political points, research speed, trade efficiency.

 

[FOARP]

It really did !

It really didn't. The AI didn't behave any more intelligently or aggressively depending on difficulty level, the only thing that changed were the production/morale/etc. bonuses the AI received and the maluses the player received (which in reality were just two sides of the same coin - a buff to the AI is a malus to the player and vice-versa).

By "AI performance" @YellowMoonshine is referring to the quality of the AI.

The counterpart to this was the AI "aggressiveness" setting in HOI2, where the devs quickly discovered that having more than one setting for AI aggressiveness was basically pointless and the entire game was balanced for "normal" aggressiveness.

 

[Nicolas I]

...By "AI performance" @YellowMoonshine is referring to the quality of the AI...

He began by saying that there would be no bonuses to AI, only maluses for the player. And then that difficulty level never affected the AI performance in HOI. I corrected that the was indeed major bonuses to the AI in HOI3. I never said that AI "performance" was enhanced.

It was already stated somewhere that the difference between difficulties would be maluses towards the player. I don't think difficulty has ever affected the AI performance in HOI...

 

[Nicolas I]

Hi folks, seems difficulty settings or more precisely play options made it's way in the minds of developers lately (last CKII DD)..

OK, it's regarding CKII, but still the idea is there with no less than 15 different options to chose from. So who knows they may eventually consider it for HOI4 someday.

Look here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/ck2-dev-diary-the-rules-of-the-game.923570/