Is Normal to Very Hard a big jump?

[LastMinit]

I'm in my first campaign, Sisters of Twilight on normal, and I'm rolling towards the long victory. It feels like I've got a handle on the game, more or less, and I'm feeling a lack of challenge.
Looking at Grom next.
If I go very hard, will I end up being knocked back down to hard?
If I go hard, will I end up lacking challenge again?

[Lady MacBeth]

Its just more ai bonuses really. I would just try it and see how you get along. Its my prefered difficulty setting since if you get a bad bug in a legendary campaign thats it your done. At least on VH you have backup saves to use.

[EvilJoshy]

From what I've gathered. Increasing the difficulty doesn't make the ai play smarter. It just cheats more. 1 city is able to support 3 entire armies despite only making 500 gold per turn.

[Zeek]

Originally posted by Ming:

Its just more ai bonuses really. I would just try it and see how you get along. Its my prefered difficulty setting since if you get a bad bug in a legendary campaign thats it your done. At least on VH you have backup saves to use.

This.

The biggest difference you will notice is the AI will create more armies more frequently.

[Lady MacBeth]

Originally posted by EvilJoshy:

From what I've gathered. Increasing the difficulty doesn't make the ai play smarter. It just cheats more. 1 city is able to support 3 entire armies despite only making 500 gold per turn.

Well everyone gets a passive 3000g income in IE before cities even come into account. But yes, the AI gets a bigger reduction in upkeep/recruitment costs making their gold go much further.

[VoiD]

Haven't played on lower difficulties in a long time, but, from my memories from WH2 they were very, very boring in the late game as every enemy would field very low tier small armies that you could auto-resolve without any losses, while legendary dif still made some elite doomstacks to fight yours.

The only thing I hated was the nerf that made all melee near-useless, and the supply lines that made any non-elite doomstack army a complete waste of space and money, but both of these have been removed in WH3.

[p30pl3h4t3m3]

go directly to very hard, even if you get some trouble or even loses at first in a bunch of tries, over time it's natural to play tw games on vh/legendary difficulty. normal & hard are both "easy mode" cause of less playermalus and you can ignore a lot of the mechanics that are more essentinal on campaign map.

battles on the other hand, i prefer still normal without bonus for player or ai. ai peasants that kill player elite units is ridiculous and only doable with a lot of cheese. on vh/legendary there are ai armys that can ruin your day and if you start doomstacks, ai does the same...

[valky]

Originally posted by HintrGlactic:

Looking at Grom next.

Good choice - very good choice!
Fat gobbo pulled by 4 wolves, that can solo a lot of garbage at breakfast -backed' up by near invincible goblins thanks to supreme cooking!

I really LOVED the trailer introducing him.

You will not be displeased....

[Sergalius]

Normal battle- VH campaing your choice.

[Ka'a]

not a big jump anymore. Pretty sure a lot of people playing on normal can play on Very hard without seeing any difference.

[kamikharzeeh]

up the _battle_ difficulty first.

because, if u play normal battle diff, the campaign difficulty matters zero, as the ai just send u basically more XP, gold and magic items fasters on higher difficulty levels of the campaign.
__
i personally gone back then from normal (HE) to legendary (Empire) and got destroyed, bc i wasnt used to things like not beeing able to slow-mo and did not understand how many mechanics work. i ended up trying to help the HE against naggaroth and lost reikland to chaos doomstacks during midgame - it was early ME, before chaos beelining with full chosen stacks towards any player settlement got reverted.

(despite my first normal/normal campaign was a total domination one with 492 turns)

___

okay and about WH3: i feel atm that there is not a huge difference in difficulty between normal and legendary even lol. i tried easy and normal bc people thought to see that the ai does different things, but i honestly notice nothing. it's nearly confusing how similar it acts. low diff ai is just a tad more ballsy.

[InfoManiac]

in my opinion.. higher difficulties turns the game into a struggle simulator. Youre going to be almost strictly defending and then advancing once you win. You will have to make more sacrifices in order to gain advantages.

[Gnarl]

I don't like the higher difficulties because AI factions that don't have anything to do with the Long Campaign Victory conditions will more likely attack the player just because they can take 1 or more border settlements easily.

For a strength 30 faction to go to war with a strength 1 faction (and my 27 vassals) just to take one or two settlements is bad design to me for a couple reasons:

1) The player is just going to squish that player.
2) The player's starting LL's campaign now no longer feels unique because it's war vs almost everyone, every game. The theme of the campaign is lost.
3) It creates difficulty that instigates the player to be more aggressive to non-campaign themed targets to counter this difficulty. (This is different from reason 2 because 'the solution' to a fast/non-stress game is to just kill anyone near you. Whereas in reason 2, it's more about the theme, feel, and uniqueness of a particular LL player selection.)

I think the solution to this is for Long-Term Campaign enemy factions to be more, (or grow more) hostile toward the player's faction. And those not long term to be less aggressive, and seek Trade, Non-aggression, and military access diplomacy options more often as a way to ensure their own survival. (And I put them in that order because even enemy nations irl will still trade with one another even though they are covertly killing each others troops or damaging eachothers economies. Like maybe raiding should be less of a negative penalty for weaker, non-LT Campaign factions.)

As for combat difficulty. I like it VH when I know and enjoy a faction. The bump from normal to VH is basically, tier 1 infantry of AI can fight your tier 3 infantry and be even. Leadership issues exist in many factions, and those tier 1 of yours or the ai's will break in many matchups tho. And I think the Lords of the AI are more slippery in VH. Less likely to just charge solo ahead into the player and just be surrounded and defeated. But some lords might still have bad AI that does this, like Morathi in last game played like she was Hellebron and would be swallowed, but I think they fixed her for game 3.

As for normal vs VH campaign, other than what I mentioned above, I like fighting the larger armies of VH. On lower difficulties many factions will just send 10 to 17 unit armies at me, and there's no contest.

But I started on Easy back in WH1, and still sometimes play Normal-Normal on LLs I don't know, so start where you want. Play and have fun.

[Lady MacBeth]

Originally posted by kamikharzeeh:

up the _battle_ difficulty first.

because, if u play normal battle diff, the campaign difficulty matters zero, as the ai just send u basically more XP, gold and magic items fasters on higher difficulty levels of the campaign.
__
i personally gone back then from normal (HE) to legendary (Empire) and got destroyed, bc i wasnt used to things like not beeing able to slow-mo and did not understand how many mechanics work. i ended up trying to help the HE against naggaroth and lost reikland to chaos doomstacks during midgame - it was early ME, before chaos beelining with full chosen stacks towards any player settlement got reverted.

(despite my first normal/normal campaign was a total domination one with 492 turns)

___

okay and about WH3: i feel atm that there is not a huge difference in difficulty between normal and legendary even lol. i tried easy and normal bc people thought to see that the ai does different things, but i honestly notice nothing. it's nearly confusing how similar it acts. low diff ai is just a tad more ballsy.

Cause there was a 2.0 bug that the battle difficulty overwrote the AI campaign difficulty. So if you played Legendary with normal battles you were really playing Normal AI and normal battles and had no clue.

https://forums.totalwar.com/discussion/321160/total-war-warhammer-iii-update-2-1-0/p3

[🆂🆈🅽🅿🅰🆃🅷🆈]

Very hard battle difficulty isn't that bad anymore, you should stuggle but be fine

Campaign wise...well that's different
-4 public order
-2500 base upkeep
Auto Resolve is significantly weaken
AI antiplayer aggression is up (you have to manual fight everything to prevent a loss of power)
AI makes way more armies than makes sense.

Those are the primary changes, there are others, but those really are the main ones.

[valky]

Originally posted by 🆂🆈🅽🅿🅰🆃🅷🆈:

Very hard battle difficulty isn't that bad anymore, you should stuggle but be fine

Campaign wise...well that's different
-4 public order
-2500 base upkeep
Auto Resolve is significantly weaken
AI antiplayer aggression is up (you have to manual fight everything to prevent a loss of power)
AI makes way more armies than makes sense.

Those are the primary changes, there are others, but those really are the main ones.

They use a scaling system now....so it's not fixed values, but battle.
Am not quite sure how it works, but it measures the strength-difference between player and that specific AI faction.
Battle uses still the same blatant modifiers - only the reload-boost is annoying. (it's like going from rank 1 to 9)

edit: PO and such are still hard-numbers.