Scaling Difficulty

[Duder]

So I've heard nothing but bad things about this setting, I am wondering if anyone had a good experience using it. Does it help at all with the snowball effect? I like a difficult game but sometimes if you start on say Admiral on Ironman, you might get some nasty neighbors and wiped out.
But then even on GA late game you completely dominate most if not all of the civs

[Ryika]

Nothing "bad" about it, you just can't expect a challenge if you're even somewhat experienced with the game. Snowballing is everything, and when you put the AI down to baselevel at the most crucial part of the game, you will not have opponents who amount to anything.

You shouldn't ever be wiped out by your neighbors on Admiral though, unless you're allowing them to be advanced starts.

[Duder]

Originally posted by Ryika:

Nothing "bad" about it, you just can't expect a challenge if you're even somewhat experienced with the game. Snowballing is everything, and when you put the AI down to baselevel at the most crucial part of the game, you will not have opponents who amount to anything.

You shouldn't ever be wiped out by your neighbors on Admiral though, unless you're allowing them to be advanced starts.

Not wiped out per se, just strongly disavantaged, especially with my custom races I include in the game purifiers, assimilators and fanatic xenophone militants, get no friendly neighbors sometimes, at the start already their militaries are overwhelming compared to yours, even if you build nothing but ships it can be a struggle if you're unlucky
Like others say after the first 50 years things get better

I have advanced neighbors off but set the advanced starts to more than half of the total
Plus I always set their agressiveness to high
And going forward I only play on Ironman

Last play I made the mistake of cranking up the endgame crisis quite high, I was in for a surprise but survived

[HappySack]

Scaling makes the game way too easy if you're playing with vanilla AI as commodore is actually more difficult then with grand admiral turned with scaling turned on.

But with Starnet it's actually a much more smoother difficulty curve that both rewards early game aggression and allows the AI to keep up to make things interesting which acts as intended I suppose.

[Tiasmoon]

Originally posted by Ryika:

Nothing "bad" about it, you just can't expect a challenge if you're even somewhat experienced with the game. Snowballing is everything, and when you put the AI down to baselevel at the most crucial part of the game, you will not have opponents who amount to anything.

You shouldn't ever be wiped out by your neighbors on Admiral though, unless you're allowing them to be advanced starts.

Advanced Start custom designed Exterminator spawned as neighbour to me one time.

I always saw them get their ass kicked by a gang of empires on the other side of the galaxy so I figured I'd be fine if they ever spawned near me.

What? So I made a small mistake.

[Duder]

Originally posted by Tiasmoon:

Originally posted by Ryika:

Nothing "bad" about it, you just can't expect a challenge if you're even somewhat experienced with the game. Snowballing is everything, and when you put the AI down to baselevel at the most crucial part of the game, you will not have opponents who amount to anything.

You shouldn't ever be wiped out by your neighbors on Admiral though, unless you're allowing them to be advanced starts.

Advanced Start custom designed Exterminator spawned as neighbour to me one time.

I always saw them get their ass kicked by a gang of empires on the other side of the galaxy so I figured I'd be fine if they ever spawned near me.

What? :Mishy: So I made a small mistake. :cozycastondeath:

My purifiers are lithoid ones that looks like a huge spider or crab
Spiritual Purifiers
I have four "evil" empires because I want lots of fights
When I was surrounded I wanted to weather it out but then they invaded my only other colony so derp
And advanced neighbors off doesn't always mean they wont be right in your backyard. Especially in larger galaxies
I think it allows them to spawn within x hyperlanes so not a big difference especially if they had advanced start