What is the effect of difficulty levels?

[peet]

Hey, there folks.

Quick question: How does the game handle Difficulty levels? When you go to a higher difficulty level in a campaign, does the machine get:

A. More gold / units?
B. 'Smarter' AI?
C. Better chance to hit and better chance for you to miss?

The reason I ask is I seem to be very unlucky and the computer player doesn't seem to have this problem. When I first started I figured I'd play on medium difficulty because I'm not a die-hard but I have played games like this before. I noticed that my hit averages were falling below what the terrain odds ought to be and the computers' averages were higher.

I ended up doing a hit/miss count and though my sample wasn't especially large (about 200 swings per % type) I found that my chances to hit were consistently about 5% less than the listed chance to hit while the computers' chances were about 5% higher at pretty much any odds level.

So I wanted to know if that was part of the difficulty level. Personally I would much rather the difficulty be handled by options A or B, since option C kind of seems like the computer is 'cheating.'

Peet

[zookeeper]

Hey, there folks.

Quick question: How does the game handle Difficulty levels? When you go to a higher difficulty level in a campaign, does the machine get:

A. More gold / units?
B. 'Smarter' AI?
C. Better chance to hit and better chance for you to miss?

A, and a little bit of B.

Basically, the campaign designer can make the difficulty levels affect pretty much anything, but influencing the luck on a wide scale is both almost impossible and something that isn't done (and also shouldn't). Campaigns typically just give the enemies more gold, have lower turn limits and tune the few AI parameters the scenario can define (like "aggressiveness" and "caution") a bit. I don't count the AI parameter tweaking as producing a "smarter AI" really, since the AI doesn't really become smarter in any way, since it can mostly just be made to ignore dangers or not to take much risks when attacking with them, or to try to protect a certain location or unit.

[Gus]

Generally, when people (me included) feel they're being more unlucky than the computer is, it's just biased perception.
But, of course, since it's all random, it's likely that you WILL get bad rolls at times. In order for you to check that, the devs have included an option (accessible using 'S' by default, i think) which shows statistics about the current game, including the expected value (EV) for both the damage dealt and received by you, and the actual values for those, so that you can compare how you fared, luck-wise.

[jg]

I noticed that my hit averages were falling below what the terrain odds ought to be and the computers' averages were higher.

Have you tried looking into the stats? Can be accessed by pressing 's' in-game. You can also find it in the menu.

There it tells you the 'real' damage inflicted, as well as the evaluated one (Damage inflicted (EV)). Same with Damage Taken.

jg