Game is now...too hard??

[Isalon]

This may be a Dev question. I am a bit...confused. I didn't play for a few weeks and now I picked it back up. Normally I can steamroll a few AI (I regularly play against 4-6 AI and win most games). After this recent update, it seems they are a lot more challenging, which is great - but it seems overkill?

Scenario: My level 11 human goes against a level 9 frogboi. I have twice their army. They have the high ground with ranged defense because they stole one of my towns. I have better gear then them, too, and my army is 100% tier 2 (archers and footmen). Rasc wipes the floor with me. I'm talking end of round one, more than half my army is dead, and I kill two frogbois.

Defender advantage, I get that. But...to get stomped that hard, that quick, makes....no sense at all.

So I went and looked at the DEFAULT values for the AI. I have to ask: Were they ALWAYS like this? It seems they are getting advantages that, by default, give them a significant edge. I am 100% confident that I would have stomped Rasc in the field, and I'm going to go back and try that now.

tl;dr AI boost + defender advantage on a Tier 3 town (no wall) that is being converted, despite me having overwhelming troops and firepower, I get stomped. Something seems off.

EDIT: I let Rasc capture the town, he fought me in the open field, and it was close but I did win just by auto-resolving the battle. So, yeah, default AI difficulty and defenders advantage are a smidge overboard.

[Measuperbia]

I belive (normal) comp too weak atm in skirmish. They refuse to make walls etc...

The campaign normal comp though is completely stacked against you, almost takes a miracle and savescumming to beat it. Not to mention it clearly has maphack too.

[Holo]

Judging by all the other discussion threads up about this same issue and their responses it seems that AI was indeed buffed a lot. Really surprised me when I came back to buying this game (it's only my third time, alas no refunds anymore, not that I needed one) and got absolutely stomped by all the AI. So yeah just turn down the difficulty a bit, income or troop generation, whichever is best for you.

[valiant43e]

I am curious, are non-campaign scenarios much harder than campaigns? I have just finished all 3 campaigns on Normal and enjoyed it : it was reasonably challenging, but not too hard. I had to restart some missions though

[Slimebeast]

Why didn't we get all the tweaks for difficulty for the campaign? The tweaks that came with a patch recently. Because I only play campaign, I think single scenarios are pointless.

Only 3 options, "easy", "normal" and "hard" is too little!

What if I want a dificulty that is a bit harder than "hard"? Or let's say I want a difficulty level that sits between "normal" and "hard"?

Please developer, add these tweaks to the campaigns! (and please make an expansion pack for a new, superlong human campaign!)

[Anders]

Originally posted by Isalon:

This may be a Dev question. I am a bit...confused. I didn't play for a few weeks and now I picked it back up. Normally I can steamroll a few AI (I regularly play against 4-6 AI and win most games). After this recent update, it seems they are a lot more challenging, which is great - but it seems overkill?

Scenario: My level 11 human goes against a level 9 frogboi. I have twice their army. They have the high ground with ranged defense because they stole one of my towns. I have better gear then them, too, and my army is 100% tier 2 (archers and footmen). Rasc wipes the floor with me. I'm talking end of round one, more than half my army is dead, and I kill two frogbois.

Defender advantage, I get that. But...to get stomped that hard, that quick, makes....no sense at all.

So I went and looked at the DEFAULT values for the AI. I have to ask: Were they ALWAYS like this? It seems they are getting advantages that, by default, give them a significant edge. I am 100% confident that I would have stomped Rasc in the field, and I'm going to go back and try that now.

tl;dr AI boost + defender advantage on a Tier 3 town (no wall) that is being converted, despite me having overwhelming troops and firepower, I get stomped. Something seems off.

EDIT: I let Rasc capture the town, he fought me in the open field, and it was close but I did win just by auto-resolving the battle. So, yeah, default AI difficulty and defenders advantage are a smidge overboard.

Thanks for the input! Changing AI difficulty is absolutely something of a balancing act and we will be reading threads like this one and also look at statistics to see if we need to make some alterations! We want our game to be a challenge sure, but not an unsurpassable one!

Originally posted by Slimebeast:

Why didn't we get all the tweaks for difficulty for the campaign? The tweaks that came with a patch recently. Because I only play campaign, I think single scenarios are pointless.

Only 3 options, "easy", "normal" and "hard" is too little!

What if I want a dificulty that is a bit harder than "hard"? :dwarven: Or let's say I want a difficulty level that sits between "normal" and "hard"?

Please developer, add these tweaks to the campaigns! (and please make an expansion pack for a new, superlong human campaign!)

A super long human campaign sounds fun, I guess you are talking about Arleon here? And we will look into adding something to make additional changes to the difficulty in campaigns, just like we did in skirmish! Thanks for the input!

[Isalon]

Originally posted by anders.edgar:

Originally posted by Isalon:

This may be a Dev question. I am a bit...confused. I didn't play for a few weeks and now I picked it back up. Normally I can steamroll a few AI (I regularly play against 4-6 AI and win most games). After this recent update, it seems they are a lot more challenging, which is great - but it seems overkill?

Scenario: My level 11 human goes against a level 9 frogboi. I have twice their army. They have the high ground with ranged defense because they stole one of my towns. I have better gear then them, too, and my army is 100% tier 2 (archers and footmen). Rasc wipes the floor with me. I'm talking end of round one, more than half my army is dead, and I kill two frogbois.

Defender advantage, I get that. But...to get stomped that hard, that quick, makes....no sense at all.

So I went and looked at the DEFAULT values for the AI. I have to ask: Were they ALWAYS like this? It seems they are getting advantages that, by default, give them a significant edge. I am 100% confident that I would have stomped Rasc in the field, and I'm going to go back and try that now.

tl;dr AI boost + defender advantage on a Tier 3 town (no wall) that is being converted, despite me having overwhelming troops and firepower, I get stomped. Something seems off.

EDIT: I let Rasc capture the town, he fought me in the open field, and it was close but I did win just by auto-resolving the battle. So, yeah, default AI difficulty and defenders advantage are a smidge overboard.

Thanks for the input! Changing AI difficulty is absolutely something of a balancing act and we will be reading threads like this one and also look at statistics to see if we need to make some alterations! We want our game to be a challenge sure, but not an unsurpassable one!

Originally posted by Slimebeast:

Why didn't we get all the tweaks for difficulty for the campaign? The tweaks that came with a patch recently. Because I only play campaign, I think single scenarios are pointless.

Only 3 options, "easy", "normal" and "hard" is too little!

What if I want a dificulty that is a bit harder than "hard"? :dwarven: Or let's say I want a difficulty level that sits between "normal" and "hard"?

Please developer, add these tweaks to the campaigns! (and please make an expansion pack for a new, superlong human campaign!)

A super long human campaign sounds fun, I guess you are talking about Arleon here? And we will look into adding something to make additional changes to the difficulty in campaigns, just like we did in skirmish! Thanks for the input!

Hey Devs, welcome back! (I think welcome back, you had some time off right?) While you were gone, I took a deeper look into the customizations and a lot more compare/contrast to previous "expected" difficulty vs how it is now.

These are my suggestions:

- New AI is too hard by default. Whatever the old AI difficulty was, make THAT the standard (or maybe tweak it up just a smidge but not where it is now). Reason: It's too much "muchness" to go into each individual AI and tweak their difficulty. There should be a standard - which should be the old standard - and let players make it harder from there.

- For AI difficulty, each AI can be customized with several categories of sliding bars. I would suggest hiding those bars under a "Customize" button, and instead giving each AI several preset options to pick from. IE, gold income, "Very easy/Easy/Normal/Hard/Very Hard/Nightmare". Difficulty should be tiered. Maybe I want one AI to be easy, one AI to be nightmare, and several AI in between? It's a chore to move those slider bars for each AI.

- Do something about defender advantage in castles. The ONLY reason I was able to win against the new default AI was because I could have ranged advantage in castles. AI would often bypass me entirely and not try to pick a fight because of it, but even when they did pick a fight and had overwhelming odds against my defenders, my defenders often won if they were ranged. Melee is pretty much useless for castle defending. NOTE: This suggestion is meaningless unless overall AI difficulty and AI intelligence/learning is tweaked. If the AI can steamroll through defenders due to their current advantages, the game will break completely.

- While we're on the topic of defender advantage and castles, building more guard towers should also equal more ballista. If I have 6 guard towers in a city, I should have 6 ballista fielded. Also, upgrading guard towers should upgrade ballista as well. There is a trade off here - more defending troop cap from guard towers is not enough to sacrifice other buildings that could be present. Ballista shouldn't be a make-or-break for defender advantage, but they certainly don't feel very impactful right now.

- Keep campaign difficulty separate from skirmish difficulty. A lot of forum complaints I saw were people who were enjoying the campaign, then suddenly hit a wall.

- As always, MORE MAPS! :-) The map generator is fun, but very generic. I know the community can create maps but having more official maps to pick from (even if they're RNG maps, just different types of RNG) would really enhance replayability. I beat the campaign once, for each faction, and have spent the rest of my time in Skirmish maps having a blast.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for all you do!

[Slayer_Gauge]

Was going to make the same topic. Playing the campagin, and early on, where you fight the mercs at the fortress, I am FULLY LOADED with full slots, and maxed out guys, and I get blown away by the ai with their vet muskteers and pikeman. It was a slaughter, and I even sent two waves of max levels heroes into it.

Tempted to uninstall honestly with how utterly broken it is right now.

[Slayer_Gauge]

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥...considering this is near the beginning of the game, this is just way too hard, you shouldnt have to use waves of humans to take down a single guy.

[Isalon]

Originally posted by Slayer_Gauge:

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥...considering this is near the beginning of the game, this is just way too hard, you shouldnt have to use waves of humans to take down a single guy.

I agree. It would be a shame to abandon the game over something like that - and I totally understand your frustration, I have been there too. As much as I dont like to use them, there are "options" out there. I would suggest looking into WeMod. I dont think this suggestion breaks any TOS/EULA but I doubt the Devs would like discussion about such things, so I would encourage you Google responsibly and keep further discussion of it away from these forums. If you do use it, I hope it helps.

[valiant43e]

IMHO, game is reasonably difficult.
I bought it in July and finished it in several weeks (Normal difficulty).

Difficulty comes from these points :
- Some missions are literally unbeatable on the 1st try : you have to scout everything and uncover mines and recruitable units ahead of time. Otherwise, you might choose an inefficient path and lose.
- You must avoid casualties : you should win 90% of battles without losing a single unit. This is because the other 10% of battles are so hard that you will need everything you have.

Thus, to be good at Songs of Conquest you need to figure out the correct order of approaching things : which direction to go, which enemies to attack and which to avoid until later and so on...
Since I am not an expert in strategies, I ended up save-scumming quite a lot to minimize casualties as much as I could.

In conclusion, I believe that game is balanced and not too difficult, but it is balanced around finding a perfect approach which I could only find by save-scumming.

I believe that's how it has been in the whole HoMM franchise, but I am not sure if Lavapotion should focus on HoMM fans or more casual fans.

I have no issue with game becoming easier and less punishing, though.

[Anders]

Originally posted by Isalon:

Originally posted by anders.edgar:

Thanks for the input! Changing AI difficulty is absolutely something of a balancing act and we will be reading threads like this one and also look at statistics to see if we need to make some alterations! We want our game to be a challenge sure, but not an unsurpassable one!






A super long human campaign sounds fun, I guess you are talking about Arleon here? And we will look into adding something to make additional changes to the difficulty in campaigns, just like we did in skirmish! Thanks for the input!

Hey Devs, welcome back! (I think welcome back, you had some time off right?) While you were gone, I took a deeper look into the customizations and a lot more compare/contrast to previous "expected" difficulty vs how it is now.

These are my suggestions:

- New AI is too hard by default. Whatever the old AI difficulty was, make THAT the standard (or maybe tweak it up just a smidge but not where it is now). Reason: It's too much "muchness" to go into each individual AI and tweak their difficulty. There should be a standard - which should be the old standard - and let players make it harder from there.

- For AI difficulty, each AI can be customized with several categories of sliding bars. I would suggest hiding those bars under a "Customize" button, and instead giving each AI several preset options to pick from. IE, gold income, "Very easy/Easy/Normal/Hard/Very Hard/Nightmare". Difficulty should be tiered. Maybe I want one AI to be easy, one AI to be nightmare, and several AI in between? It's a chore to move those slider bars for each AI.

- Do something about defender advantage in castles. The ONLY reason I was able to win against the new default AI was because I could have ranged advantage in castles. AI would often bypass me entirely and not try to pick a fight because of it, but even when they did pick a fight and had overwhelming odds against my defenders, my defenders often won if they were ranged. Melee is pretty much useless for castle defending. NOTE: This suggestion is meaningless unless overall AI difficulty and AI intelligence/learning is tweaked. If the AI can steamroll through defenders due to their current advantages, the game will break completely.

- While we're on the topic of defender advantage and castles, building more guard towers should also equal more ballista. If I have 6 guard towers in a city, I should have 6 ballista fielded. Also, upgrading guard towers should upgrade ballista as well. There is a trade off here - more defending troop cap from guard towers is not enough to sacrifice other buildings that could be present. Ballista shouldn't be a make-or-break for defender advantage, but they certainly don't feel very impactful right now.

- Keep campaign difficulty separate from skirmish difficulty. A lot of forum complaints I saw were people who were enjoying the campaign, then suddenly hit a wall.

- As always, MORE MAPS! :-) The map generator is fun, but very generic. I know the community can create maps but having more official maps to pick from (even if they're RNG maps, just different types of RNG) would really enhance replayability. I beat the campaign once, for each faction, and have spent the rest of my time in Skirmish maps having a blast.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for all you do!

Thanks Isalon! We had a great vacation and are just happy to start working again, and some of the things we are working on are on your list too!

I love your suggestions and you've put them on the proverbial (and digital) paper in a very nice and easily understood way! I'v forwarded it to our devs so that they can read up on it. It's clear that we aren't done with the difficulty of our game just yet. It's always a balance that we keep saying like it's a mantra but it it's still true!

We aim to have a game that is just challenging enough but it shouldn't feel like "running into a wall" after all. Making sure difficulties are changeable is a way of fixing that sure but the base-line have to be on a fun level too.

Thank you for writing and we hope that you'll think the finished and polished version is just perfectly balanced!