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I'd appreciate your experiences with Empires in the Age of Shadows difficulty settings.

We all have different styles ... this is not intended to be a "who is right or wrong" thread. My particular style is that I enjoy games that are epic, eventful and challenging (but also victory needs to be achievable).

Most importantly I prefer to set a scenario rather than give the AI cheats e.g. so Normal Difficulty setting.

My current scenario is that my empire is the new kid on the block of an established 1400 star 10 x 10 galaxy. I start Pre-Warp while the 19 other empires are at least Tech Level 2 and Expanding. For late game the Insect Races are set to Tech Level 3, Mature and Distant. As a result there are no easy early conquests, the AI's will probably find the goodies first (e.g. Super Weapons, Way of the Ancients) and you can't technology trade for a while.

Very Expensive Research, making it hard to catch-up to the AI's.

To avoid colony spam and limit early growth options, Occasional Colonies and Scattered Independent Life.

Very Many Pirates. Killing Pirates should mean something so No Re-spawning ... I find Re-Spawning annoying late game.

Many Space Creatures, Unstable Aggression are also intended to keep the game eventful.

So I applied my usual Strategy and these settings only partly worked. I had no choice other than to Turtle for a while but no balls of doom ever arrived. With Intelligence Agents I was able to progressively catch-up on Technology and once I had a Technology lead, even though I still only had 3 colonies at the time, taking over the galaxy just became a matter of time, and in the end faster than an "all things equal" game. The Empire settings also pretty much cleaned out Space Creatures except Silvermist, although there were pretty huge clouds around.

So what settings to change for a more epic, eventful and challenging game?

Pirates Nearby rather than Average Distance. I'll also have a Harsh Homeworld while everyone else is Excellent. I can include those in the scenario ... now not only am I the new kid on the block but I'm in a nasty part of the galaxy. Should make life interesting.

Extreme Difficulty? Banning Technology Trading? Preferably no. But maybe there is no choice ... as I actually want to get slaughtered sometimes ...

There is just one real solution you can hope for... one day... maybe... in DW 2... multiplayer. [:'(] Shame most 4X dont include that. [:(]

Just a quick Hello. Ive played DW since Legends, and enjoy it immensely. I dont consider myself that great at the game, but here is my take on the shadows difficulty thus far.

Ive played about 3 games so far with Shadows, and with varying settings...tried different map types, control sector ranges, and colony/independent prevalence.

I play on very expensive research, hard difficulty, pre-warp start with normal pirates and no space monsters. I dont feel space monsters add much to the game, and I feel they hurt the AI more than they hurt me, so I try not to have them in there as I feel the monsters slow the AI down.

Also I like a LARGE amount of Empires. For a 10x10 sector map, I include at LEAST 20 Empires...oh and I use the DW:Extended Mod because it adds more races.


So, with that being said, the difficulty in shadows seems the same as in Legends. If I can make it past a certain threshhold, I just snowball to the win. Usually the early game and the early-middle game are the toughest, but then somewhere in there I just get too powerful to stop. I have tried turning the difficulty up, but that just makes it harder for me to reach that tipping point.

I think next Im going to try the 'difficulty scaling' option. See if that helps.

all 4x have the tipping point, its part of the nature of the game. DW has less of it because of the nature of its research.

at least there's the Shakturi

Icemania,

There really is no other way other than extreme difficulty. That, and make the other empires a little more powerful than you. Experiment until you find a good point for you. Pre-Shadow, I used to do a similar thing to what you are doing. Once you get over the initial challenge catching up to everyone, the game then loses the challenge. That was the main reason I stopped playing Legends previously...

Edit:
However, the fact that no one attacked you in your weakened state makes me think two things. You picked a race that others like and were less likely to attack and your neighbors all liked you. I thought maybe it was your aggression level but I see you set it to Unstable; so that can't be it.

Also, from my experience, by putting colonies and independents low, you are hampering the AI from what I have seen. The AI seems do not do too well with few colonies. Although with extreme difficulty, it seems to do better.

Also, I ban technology selling although not trading. The reason for banning selling is because the AI will give you far too much money for technology.

Edit:
You can do normal difficulty and put yourself to harsh homeworld and the others around you larger. However, you will run into the same problem I had. Either, you will get absolutely crushed if one of your neighbors decides to attack you or you will get by that stage and then have the same thing happen to you in your current game.

ORIGINAL: DeadlyShoe
all 4x have the tipping point, its part of the nature of the game. DW has less of it because of the nature of its research.

You mean DW has more of it because you can easily reach maximum research right from the start [;)]

Thanks for your responses, interesting reading.

I played my preferred race Ikkuro in my last game hand and had the Teekan, Zenox and Naxillian nearby (as always with as many other empires around as possible). Some tension early of course, but with some routine gifts and being a little careful about where I put my mining bases, the relationships were manageable, all evolving to Friendly. When I have the funds I also like to use the Pirates to get in touch with others early so the "we don't know you yet" penalty can wind down ASAP.

Next time I'll avoid placing the Bugs distant and leave them Random. That said, the Bugs didn't go to War either, just the usual Trade Sanction spam. So I'll also increase Aggression to Chaos and bump up all the empires up to Mature and Tech Level 3 (rather than the previous mix of Expanding/Mature, Tech 2/3). Since they are very well established, Chaos won't hinder their early expansion, but it will make my life more difficult.

In this case lowering the number of Colonies and Independents didn't seem to cause the AI trouble, since they all were either Expanding or Mature, they all had plenty of colonies from the start. However, it certainly hindered my game, as I had very few expansion options early on ... so I'll leave this as is.

Grudgingly I'll try Extreme Difficulty with Difficulty Scaling. Looking forward to seeing the Difficulty improvements from Legends.

I'm torn on going to Harsh Homeworld while the others stay Excellent but I'll stick with the status quo. Hopefully the above does the trick.

I'm still going to allow technology selling. It will be a long time before I can trade anyway at least until I can steal some Racial Technologies. Each to their own ... but philosophically I find find banning this artificial i.e. if it's in the game I'm going to use it.

I wonder what settings CodeForce use?

Small point to all your above suggestions, I created a custom race that pretty much does away with tech trading, trade agreements and anything regards being friendly with other races, took a few games to get the balance right but I used the biases file to make sure the race was not liked by anyone and the race did not like anyone either, ranges were set from 0 to -15. This makes a really different and difficult game, also have to edit the policy files / empire options regards trading, defense policies etc. Will say that it can be tricky as the AI will declare war fairly often, still trying to work that out as I have no idea what gives them the notion that they are in a good enough position to go to war with my race, is it population, military strength, reputation etc. I prefer to play on normal as well, IMHO it is a no-no to start juggling with cash, tech etc for raising the difficulty, would much prefer more advanced AI applied but I will have to wait, and hope, that DW2 can come through on that.

Darkspire

Sounds like a fun "against a nasty Galaxy" scenario Darkspire. That said I do enjoy the the Friendly part of Distant Worlds Diplomacy as well.

Icemania,

Well, part of your problem is you have no hostile races near you. Teeken and Zeenox are both very friendly. Naxillian can sometimes be aggressive. Put bugs all over the place, not just distant.

And you also use gifting, another element I find to be broken.

If you are going to use all elements at your disposal, you're going to find it difficult to make the game challenging. Do you also keep all those high tech cruisers and capital ships that are basically game breaking?

I still find it odd that you aren't seeing wars break out. I wonder if it's because of the lack of colonies and, thus, lack of close contact with other races. I always get one or two races which starts to covet my resources and that creates tension.

The Teekan and Zenox coveted my resources but the Naxillian were a bit further away. The Naxillian declared war at one stage and probably would have wiped the floor with me but a quick big payoff was enough for them to declare peace. The Teekan and Naxillian then had a war which softened the Naxillian up.

Gifting obviously helped. I don't agree Gifting is broken at least in this sort of game. A material effect doesn't come cheap when you can't technology trade early.

I used my early hyperspace fleets to focus on killing as many pirates as possible to improve reputation.

Derelict ships I always retire. A technology boost on very expensive research is a reasonable prize for the effort to fix them up. That said I tend to agree on your point about using them in fleets early although even that advantage is limited when everyone else is Mature and Tech Level 3.

If anything was broken it was probably the Intelligence Agents. With so many high technology empires around, you can shop around for the best chance of success, and my first Agent built up a great espionage skill.

Anyway, no doubt I got a bit lucky, I've started a new game with the updated settings ... which should be fun.

With new settings ...

First game had Gizurean next door and they invaded almost immediately. Second game the Attuko ... grr ... did the same. I like the idea of being able to make a start in every game, which was part of the idea in keeping the Bugs Distant but at a higher level for later in the game, but anyway. So made one small change in Settings for the third game and put the Securans nearby (with the appropriate Vulcan headcannon) but all others Random.

Just got to Hyperspace. Happy to see a few good guys nearby other than the Securans with some bad guys not far away at all i.e. while I might last more than 5 minutes there is challenge ahead. I have almost no territory in which I can mine as every Empire is Mature and most of the stars around are Barren with a Void as well so I'm still missing a few Strategic Resources. Just managed to convince one of my neighbours to give me mining rights to secure the last few Strategics. Sorry MartialDoctor there was gifting involved. Some of the good guys are coveting my territory already, looks manageable, but there might not be much Free Trade. Looking good for an interesting game ... what will happen next?

How are you guys doing in terms of playing as pirates? I find the most successful strategy as pirates is to find empire homeworlds as early as possible and knock down their starport with a big fleet. Afterwards you can just camp their system and get tons of cash from their homeworld.

This seems to be the easiest strategy, but how do you go about winning without doing this?

Play on smaller maps, with less stars. Playing with more stars with greater distance only helps you catch up.

Also leave the race distance settings on random, it makes the game harder.
You basically set your settings up in such a way, that you delude yourself into setting yourself up for a challenge, when you set half the setting to negate the other half.

Not sure by what you meant by turtle, but it sounds like you set the game up in such a manner that you wouldn't face any challenges early on, so you can catch up easily, and then act suprised that you could.

Plant, the intent in my original post, where I had the Bugs Distant but even more powerful than everyone else, was to help add mid/late game challenge beyond just the Shakturi. Everyone else was still Expanding and Tech Level 2 while I was Pre-Warp. The unintended consequence of this, at least with that particular galaxy spawn, along with a focus on doing everything possible to improve diplomacy, was that I could avoid forced early conflict and build up in a single solar system (i.e. turtle) and carefully selected mine locations, until I was ready to go on the offensive. So let's please park language like "delude" please.

My settings are now Extreme Difficulty with Scaling, all other empires are Mature and Tech Level 3 while I'm Pre-Warp, other Empire Locations are Random, with Chaos Aggression. After getting overrun a few times I felt it was prudent to set a single Nearby Friend (only) to reduce the chance of dying almost immediately with no realistic way of avoiding it ... while setting everything else up for epic challenge in the game years ahead.

My current game is looking much closer to the original objective of an epic, eventful and challenging game. But unfortunately there are again other unintended consequences. With Mature Empires all over the map it weakens the Pirate threat massively even though the setting was Very Many and Nearby. Space Creatures are almost non-existent even though they were set to be Many. Personally I want both to support an Eventful game. Also exploration becomes very limited. I could take the other Empire settings back a notch or two from Mature to say Young, but I don't really expect that to be as much of a challenge.

Note I have a very strong preference for larger maps with more empires but of course each to their own i.e. a key part of my definition of "epic".

As has been said, maybe we need to wait for DW2, but I'm still interested in exploring other ideas for this game.

An update on Extreme Difficulty with Scaling, all other empires are Mature and Tech Level 3 while I'm Pre-Warp, other Empire Locations are Random (except Securans nearby) with Chaos Aggression. Relics had to be immediately retired.

In Pre-Warp I spent a good fraction of my funds on gifting to keep nearby Empires happy enough to at least avoid declaring war. Playing as Ikkuro I beelined to S2F7 RepairBot and then Technology Traded for almost everything at Tech Level 3 across the other Empires. At that point the game was effectively over ... even though I only had 1 colony and was completely surrounded. Just waited for opportunities to attack when another empire weakened enough to attack, got another home system first up etc.

As was said on SpaceSector the new Difficulty Settings really don't seem to make the game materially harder, just a little slower to get from A to B.

As MartialDoctor said before at these settings you will either get crushed early or win. I want to get beaten mid-game once in a while.

Does anyone have any other ideas for this problem? i.e. beyond manual banning of core features, or waiting for DW2 or all 4X have the tipping point.

Maybe set some / most Empires to Old and Max Tech?

I can't see a smaller map, or colony prevalence, making a material difference with these settings because I couldn't expand anyway and everyone else had many colonies.

Otherwise looks like it's time to ban technology trading and gifting ... sigh! Or ban my custom ship and base designs ... cry!

I really like the Empire game but might be time to be a Pirate?

All that said, I've certainly enjoyed playing this game for many hours, and when I get an itch to take over the galaxy, will surely continue to do so.

But it would be great to see this issue as a focus in the next expansion rather than waiting for DW2 i.e. mid-game difficulty.

BTW, does anyone else have a review up beyond SpaceSector? Seriously?

ORIGINAL: Icemania
Otherwise looks like it's time to ban technology trading and gifting ... sigh!

Frankly, I'm impressed that it's possible for you to win at Extreme difficulty, along with all the other improvements to how the AI makes decisions and fights wars in Shadows. We're still mostly fixing bugs right now, but I think the above option may need to be added in an upcoming update based on this feedback.

Regards,

- Erik

Thanks for the consideration Erik. As a long-time lurker on the forum your participation with the community is appreciated.

In an ideal world I'd love to see a 4X game that has an AI Expert System based on modelling a couple of your top players. For example, playing against an AI that emulates a power hungry megalomaniac like Jeeves [&o] (whose guides and posts were required reading in getting started with this game) has much appeal ... and would be a path to a product even more unique than you already have. Not easy I'm sure!

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

ORIGINAL: Icemania
Otherwise looks like it's time to ban technology trading and gifting ... sigh!

Frankly, I'm impressed that it's possible for you to win at Extreme difficulty, along with all the other improvements to how the AI makes decisions and fights wars in Shadows. We're still mostly fixing bugs right now, but I think the above option may need to be added in an upcoming update based on this feedback.

Regards,

- Erik

Just to make my opinion known on this. Outright banning of tech trade...no. Optional for the player, yes.

One suggestion I might make is that the only way you can trade techs, bases, planets, etc is if you have an MDP with the empire you are wanting to trade with. This I think would curb a lot of the problems. Trading your technology should be something you do with only the most trusted of allies.

In fact, here is exactly how I would do it:

Tech trading criteria:

* must have MDP agreement
* for techs 2 levels or lower than current, relations at +75 or higher
* for techs 1 level less than current, relations at +90 or higher
* for equal level or advanced techs, relations at +100 or higher
* for special techs, relations at +125 or higher

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

ORIGINAL: Icemania
Otherwise looks like it's time to ban technology trading and gifting ... sigh!

I think the above option may need to be added in an upcoming update based on this feedback.

Regards,

- Erik

I would love such an option.