Dynamic Conquest Understanding Difficulty Settings

[UnicornPoacher]

Hi All, I have found that slight differences in difficulty can have a huge impact on difficulty and want to ask to make sure I have a full understanding. I am aware of this information which is very useful but I don't think it tells the whole picture:

https://gatesofhell.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty

I think these are the three elements that effect overall difficulty:

Difficulty - "Easy" not only does what's posted but I feel it may increases the number of AI attack vectors. For instance on "easy" attacks seem to come from roughly same direction such as roughly one map corner; on Harder difficulty it seems more common that enemy might come from more avenues of attack like two being spread between two adjacent map corners.
Economy - "Low" increases player rewards and decreases AI unit scaling ratio to player, "High" does the opposite.
Fog of War - Fog of war obviously affects player experience but AI performs exactly the same.

Also curious if the facts of how "risk level" affects the difficulty mission to mission.

Please let me know if I have got this right. Thanks!

[Saxhorn]

Low economy means the player gets less and the AI gets more. So lower is harder.

On low economy the payback system will not give a sufficient refund for the player to replace the units lost with just the payback amount.

Risk level is a multiplier that is applied to the result of a successful mission. A one star "risk factor" gives no bonus.

You can't see these things until the end of the battle and the summary is shown.
Here is an example.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3273398144

From playing I think the following apply :

Resources gained - based on the day of the campaign and the economy setting.
Map resource bonus - based on what location on the strategic map you chose (icon type).
Risk Factor Bonus - based on the stars on the strategic map ( 1, 2 or 3 stars under icon)
Payback - an amount of MP refunded to the player when a unit is destroyed.

[UnicornPoacher]

Thanks @Saxhorn I thought I might get some helpful input from you :) so the risk factor has absolutely no impact on difficulty?

[Saxhorn]

I don't code the game or mod the game so anything I "know" is simply from playing the game and looking at the game.log file which is basically the in game kill feed in a text file.

I "test things" on the first attack and first defence mission of a campaign - so day 1 and day 2. I rarely bother to play Conquest anymore but it was my favourite part of the game because it is the only game mode that rewards you for keeping your soldiers alive. It's easy to start a new campaign and rinse and repeat the first two missions multiple times to see how it all meshes together.

A developer did post about the differences in the various "difficulty" choices in a thread a while back. I'm not sure if that was before or after the economy and difficulty were separated (there use to be one setting only).

Difficulty changes the "stats" of individual soldiers, like health, accuracy with weapons and stamina. I don't think vehicle accuracy gets changed.

On heroic/hardcore the bot soldiers don't have exactly the same health as your soldiers but all the other stats are the same. This is as close to PvP as you can try against a bot.

I don't think the AI has different "behaviours" for different difficulty settings so the bot has no "personality" or "flavour" - personality as in "will camp and defend" whilst another bot is a "real aggressive attacker". This wouldn't really work in Conquest but Local Skirmish versus the AI would benefit from "personalities".

The only obvious difference I've ever noticed was the bot soldiers using smoke grenades. On hardcore the AI always used smoke grenades. Now I think all levels of bot will use smoke grenades but maybe less often? I'm not sure because I only ever play hardcore or heroic bots and they always dump smoke almost instantly.

The risk factor certainly changes the Defender AI soldiers but doesn't seem to change the AI bot "player". On one star "risk factor" missions I notice mostly tier 2 soldiers (for the AI defender) - so nothing special just your average soldier.

On three star "risk factor" map locations with the "star" icon you can see Recon Spec Ops/Brandenburger, paratroopers, Black Sea Fleet and other high level defender soldiers in the very first attack mission on day 1. I've also encountered snipers as defender AI soldiers on the first day. They can be particularly nasty if you aren't paying attention.

All other three star "risk factor" locations (like the flask, ammo, factory etc) seem to have slightly lower AI defender soldier levels. Lots of tier 3 and 4 but not many tier 5 if any at all.

I'm not sure what "risk factor" the AT rifleman, AT rifle grenade and flamethrower appear at but they are always spawned as tier 2 soldiers no matter the "risk factor" setting. It seems you encounter more of those soldiers on higher "risk factor" map locations.

On a one star location I only ever see a couple (one at each flag) of AI Defender AT rifles in the first attack mission.

[Saxhorn]

To get a three star risk factor location on the strategic map on day one you need to have a very large campaign size set.

Then you get to choose one of three locations to attack - each location has a different "risk factor" but the icons may be different. The icon appears to be randomly selected.

I've had three locations all flasks on day 1. Each location had a different "risk factor" but the same flask icon.

I "backed up" the save file and repeatedly replayed the mission form the saved file to see what the differences in "risk factor" were.
This doesn't seem to work anymore but maybe it's the Steam Cloud causing issues. I might have turned it off to stop it destroying the save file.