Honest question on difficulty.

[cjww55]

Has anyone ever won a skirmish map? I get stomped as soon as, or right before I get tier 2 units. Also, the crusade garrisons are OP as hell.

[utilityguy]

Skirmish is pretty insane depending on your starting location, and what movement choices you and the A.I makes. because it's pretty easy to focus leveling your hero up for the first five turns through conquering cities and armies to your right, only for a Crusade a.i to come out of the fog from the left and start seiging your capital at turn 5 with a 7 unit army, well before you're able to heal up and reinforce your away unity army and be in fighting condition to realistically respond.

I've been blasting through quite a few skirmishes now, and priority one is absolutely doing anything you can to level up your starting hero as quickly as possible, and fill up their army to be able to doom stack other players quickly. Realm building requires a bit of perfection with you knowing which locations to prioritize building up in order to have access to cheap, but decent, units to spawn for the early game (though cheap doesn't really survive against a good Crusade turn 5).

I got done with a large Light & Dark world skirmish against the a.i, and that seemed okay so far, or at least I was (at worst) only being focused down by one a.i army for the majority of the 40 turns, so it was manageable after surviving the first attack.

[utilityguy]

Oh!

I never played with teams on, but I guess turning that option on would probably help you lower the difficulty down, as then you have at least one other friendly buddy helping you out

[wojciechwyskiel]

Yes, i won few matches, few lost. You should write which faction you play, whats your starting hero, whats your strategy.

[vulturius]

Just so you know, we're currently working on additional parameters to let everyone fine-tune the balancing in Skirmish to their preferences. It's challenging to find a setting that works equally well for everyone.

[easytarget]

It can obviously be done though. Drop a line to Soren, the dev who made Old World (and previously Civ IV) or just buy and play the game and see for yourself.

[Ail]

Originally posted by vulturius:

Just so you know, we're currently working on additional parameters to let everyone fine-tune the balancing in Skirmish to their preferences. It's challenging to find a setting that works equally well for everyone.

Most other games have difficulty-levels.
Something that could work well here could be a modifier to the AI's army-slots.
Like -2 army-slots on very easy, -1 on easy, +1 on hard and +2 on very hard.

[The Grand Mugwump]

I got the peerless strategist achievement on my first skirmish map. They don't seem too bad, though I didn't go up against the crusade. It felt a little unfair to bury my opponents under 8 units of royal guards.

[Aidanya]

The key in 1v1 is to scout.
Find your opponents army and attack it right after it fights.
Crush it and than you can keep snowballing though all the towns till you win.

The opposite can happen to you when they find you and its very easy to lose.
Play it slow. i have about 1/4 of the map when the opponent has at least half.
But they build no garrisons so still easy to win.

As for crusade... Hide your army in the tree's.
Wait for them to siege your capital and take over the undefended singularity... free win.

[Himelin]

I think a low difficulty level would allow beginners to better enjoy the game and practice to better understand higher difficulty levels.

[JDPUK]

Yeah, the difficulty in this game is crazy, I though I was doing well, in 15 turns I had two level five armies with six units each and the AI shows up with four armies, all stacked, got crushed, LOL.