hard difficulty - too hard?

[Pratapon51]

ORIGINAL: stryc

The presence of the Absorption trait on tanky wildlife adds another level of effective difficulty all on its own; essentially, you can't do a damn thing to them until you've got tanks with chunky howitzers. This trait makes a TL3 start triple-hard (with TL3 start being double-hard in itself). Personally, I think the Absorption trait is broken and needs to confer proportional damage resistance not a binary threshold.

While starting at TL5, I had a Medusa world with 30+ meter xeno monstrosities. Many of them had both Absorption and one of the Hardness traits, essentially requiring that I field heavy tanks with big HV guns before I could reliably kill them or drive them away.

[Don_Oda]

thanks all - good to know that it is possible to win on Hard ... and Extreme Hard!
Made some changes and started a new game: T4 hard, I am giving the AI extra time - and also disabled aggressive neighbors - this also made a big difference.
Agree on several comments (like from redrum68 and others) that the planned generator dictates how difficult a game can be.
For normal game I really enjoyed the following setup: small planet, at least 20 zones, 25 to 30% mountains - aggressive neighbors, ai extra time and T3. But for Hard this was ... how to say ... not good(fun) for me.

[CaptBeefheart]

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar

ORIGINAL: CaptBeefheart
I just won on Extreme with TL3. I had one scavenge hex with a ruin on it to start.

Oh, so you don't always start with your city on Ruins with scavenge points ? Or was the ruin on your city hex too ?

Ah, bad vocabulary. What I meant to say was I had a ruin next to the city which had a white pyramid thingy on it. The pyramid thingy shat up some interesting artifacts, including two 500-level energy generators.

Cheers,
CB