Changing Difficulty and Achie Question

[telinio]

so i had a couple of older compaigns on easy before CA added the newer achievements about old world races.
I know that you can finish a campaign that you had already started and indeed get the achie but what i was wondering is if changing the difficulty on a campaign you had started on lower difficulty to very hard and then finishing the campaign a couple turns later will still give you the "finish as the X race a campaign on very hard or legendary difficulty" achie or if i'll have to start a new one yet again...

[Chrysalis]

I could be wrong, but isn't it impossible to change the difficulty in a running campaign?

I was under the impression, that if you start a campaign on hard, then it will stay on hard with no way to change it.

I'm not sure concerning the difficulty, but I know that, for example, you can't change the unit size in a running campaign and it would make sense to not be able to change the difficulty in a running campaign either.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Chrysalis:

I could be wrong, but isn't it impossible to change the difficulty in a running campaign?

I was under the impression, that if you start a campaign on hard, then it will stay on hard with no way to change it.

I'm not sure concerning the difficulty, but I know that, for example, you can't change the unit size in a running campaign and it would make sense to not be able to change the difficulty in a running campaign either.

I thought so too after I've read this question, so I decided to check it. You can actually change difficulty (both battle and campaign) from easy to very hard in campaign settings during the ongoing campaign. You can't change to or from legendary campaign difficulty. So yeah, I am not sure what the actual answer to the OP's question is but I expect that achievements that require finishing campaign on Very Hard should trigger if you play whole campaign on Easy and switch to Very Hard right before the end. But I didn't test it and don't know if this is true. It seems like a very cheesy way to get it but who cares about it in a single player game except for the person who is playing to get it.

[Chrysalis]

Originally posted by archmag:

Originally posted by Chrysalis:

I could be wrong, but isn't it impossible to change the difficulty in a running campaign?

I was under the impression, that if you start a campaign on hard, then it will stay on hard with no way to change it.

I'm not sure concerning the difficulty, but I know that, for example, you can't change the unit size in a running campaign and it would make sense to not be able to change the difficulty in a running campaign either.

I thought so too after I've read this question, so I decided to check it. You can actually change difficulty (both battle and campaign) from easy to very hard in campaign settings during the ongoing campaign. You can't change to or from legendary campaign difficulty. So yeah, I am not sure what the actual answer to the OP's question is but I expect that achievements that requires finishing campaign on Very Hard should trigger if you play whole campaign on easy and switch to Very Hard right before the end. But I didn't test it and don't know if this is true. It seems like a very cheesy way to get it but who cares about it in a single player game except for the person who is playing to get it.

That's interesting, I wonder why CA allows this kind of thing.

Anyway, thanks for testing it!

[telinio]

in ma VC campaign i can actuallly get the final long campaign victory conditions any time i want so i tried a couple of times by changing difficulty, ending the turn then fullfilling those conditions and i havent had any luck yet...got no idea if the fact that i have already gotten the short campaign victory is a factor or if its thanks to a mod that i get those last conditions or if a different way to do them can change that result

[Professor H. Farnsworth]

Originally posted by telinio:

in ma VC campaign i can actuallly get the final long campaign victory conditions any time i want so i tried a couple of times by changing difficulty, ending the turn then fullfilling those conditions and i havent had any luck yet...got no idea if the fact that i have already gotten the short campaign victory is a factor or if its thanks to a mod that i get those last conditions or if a different way to do them can change that result

I suspect that it is intended to not work. If I were to program such a thing, I would use a new field to define in-game campaign changes rather than the original field (in case you wanted to restore settings). If that's the case I'd expect the campaign difficulty require to read from the original campaign difficulty rather than the imposed one.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Professor H. Farnsworth:

I suspect that it is intended to not work. If I were to program such a thing, I would use a new field to define in-game campaign changes rather than the original field (in case you wanted to restore settings). If that's the case I'd expect the campaign difficulty require to read from the original campaign difficulty rather than the imposed one.

In which case it will still be easy to cheese this by starting on very hard and then switching to easy so what's the point of keeping two values instead of one. Better way would be to keep min difficulty for the whole campaign and current difficulty. And trigger achievement only based on min difficulty that you used during campaign. It's not that hard to implement but I doubt they really care to do it like this and complicate things just because of achievements. They seem to implement achievements as simple triggers that only look at the current state of the game, unless something is required for another thing they won't implement it just for achievements, so I really doubt min difficulty is being saved.

Originally posted by telinio:

in ma VC campaign i can actuallly get the final long campaign victory conditions any time i want so i tried a couple of times by changing difficulty, ending the turn then fullfilling those conditions and i havent had any luck yet...got no idea if the fact that i have already gotten the short campaign victory is a factor or if its thanks to a mod that i get those last conditions or if a different way to do them can change that result

Are you sure you changed campaign difficulty and not battle difficulty? Campaign difficulty is requred for an achievement and there are two difficulty sliders in settings so it is easy to confuse them. Does it display Very Hard difficulty on Load game screen when you save a game and then try to load it?

[telinio]

Originally posted by archmag:

Originally posted by Professor H. Farnsworth:

I suspect that it is intended to not work. If I were to program such a thing, I would use a new field to define in-game campaign changes rather than the original field (in case you wanted to restore settings). If that's the case I'd expect the campaign difficulty require to read from the original campaign difficulty rather than the imposed one.

In which case it will still be easy to cheese this by starting on very hard and then switching to easy so what's the point of keeping two values instead of one. Better way would be to keep min difficulty for the whole campaign and current difficulty. And trigger achievement only based on min difficulty that you used during campaign. It's not that hard to implement but I doubt they really care to do it like this and complicate things just because of achievements. They seem to implement achievements as simple triggers that only look at the current state of the game, unless something is required for another thing they won't implement it just for achievements, so I really doubt min difficulty is being saved.

Originally posted by telinio:

in ma VC campaign i can actuallly get the final long campaign victory conditions any time i want so i tried a couple of times by changing difficulty, ending the turn then fullfilling those conditions and i havent had any luck yet...got no idea if the fact that i have already gotten the short campaign victory is a factor or if its thanks to a mod that i get those last conditions or if a different way to do them can change that result

Are you sure you changed campaign difficulty and not battle difficulty? Campaign difficulty is requred for an achievement and there are two difficulty sliders in settings so it is easy to confuse them. Does it display Very Hard difficulty on Load game screen when you save a game and then try to load it?

i definitely changed campaign difficulty instead of battle (ever did both for safety), though i didnt see what difficulty the save game displayed so i gave it another go and the end turn auto save indeed shows very hard difficulty instead of easy that the rest of the saves show..
Despite that, when i got the final provinces and got the long campaign victory once i again there were no achie for it :(
dont know if CA intended it to be this way or not--maybe its based off the starting difficulty or maybe smth aint workin right or i could be missing smth