Can we have a chance of FFA increased for bronze? Just for fun. It seems like FFA happen mostly on silver +.
It's kept low because it's unclear whether it makes things easier or harder, so I've leaned towards keeping things simpler at the lower difficulties. I might crank the chance up across all the lower levels if people who play them prefer to see it more often.
I think that it MIGHT make things easier. Silver is pretty tough 1v2 bots. Otherwise if you have 1v2v1 it is a little bit easier to survive and transform it into a 1v1v1. However the game drags more into late stages.
FAQ and Known Issues have been updated in OP. Version 1.3.0 - 2019-10-11 Tried to improve the clarity of the difficulty tooltip for players for whom English is a second language The additional faction in a FFA has less Commanders Higher chance of a FFA at Casual, Bronze, Silver and Gold difficulties Lower chance of a FFA at Uber difficulty FFAs will sometimes be 4-way instead of 3-way Decreased the starting eco of Casual and Bronze
Nice. I am enjoying 3-4 FFA games on small maps (generally love playing this game easy). I like using custom systems with single small planets of ~350 radius (500 for metal planet) at silver difficulty and low resources (like 40 metal spots). I like that because there is little macro involved in these games on small maps but you want to use your little resources sparingly. Also it is MUCH easier to deal with the silver bots on small maps because they dont have time to snowball. The games are quite quick and conclusive within a short period of ~25 minutes. This is just some basic strategy fun where you can produce armies, build bases and defences and reclaim the wrecks for that extra metal boost. Just a few thoughts: The silver games seem to be more bot populated when compared to bronze games. I dont really know but maybe bronze could also have more bots for more fun for people which can not handle silver bots (more or less uber vanilla AI?). Generally i dont think that many casual gamers will overcome silver bots and especially if the maps are big and or multiplanet (50 apm here).
The primary scaling element at each difficulty level is the number of enemies. Each time a new enemy is added, that’s a reasonable jump in difficulty, thus the curve is shallower for Bronze than Silver. However, Bronze adds a second enemy Commander only one depth of system later than Silver. I don’t really want to make Bronze harder. If anything I’m concerned the low difficulties aren’t easy enough, hence a slight scaling back in this latest version. A long-term goal for me is adding the ability for the player to choose CUSTOM as a difficulty and then tweak all the values to provide precisely the experience they want.
Version 1.4.0 - 2019-10-21 Added a custom difficulty to allow you to configure all the difficulty settings Updated some personality names to prevent word wrapping with new fonts Galaxy size no longer has any effect on the chance of a FFA occuring Fixed the enemy system owner sometimes spawning with multiple Commanders Fixed a bug in the base game causing the General Commander's Sub Commanders to sometimes have an eco modifier applied
Well, the desire to add it predates that post, it simply made its way to the top of the pile as I sorted out everything else I will need to sort out the drop-down and multi-select list at some point, because they're ugly as sin right now.
Version 1.4.1 - 2019-10-24 Added support for the tutorial personality tag in custom difficulty mode Fixed some spelling errors
For me I've had a really hard time scaling up from Bronze to Silver. (haven't tried with latest versions though) Even Bronze can get really marginal for me especially when I get poor upgrade options from the first couple of battles & suddenly I'm fighting multiple strong AI but stuck with a low-efficiency economy & only T1 tech. Silver then ramps up so much quicker. In both cases once you get some key tech in place including a sub-commander it becomes much more bearable/easy but its been an insurmountable hump for me in most of my attempts to play Silver.
Many thanks for the feedback. Understanding what the real difficulty and curve of the lower levels is like is tricky for me, given the number of years I've been playing the game, so such feedback is very valuable. I will take another look at the scaling. I actually had an idea around how to handle this which I may implement in the next release. Is it the additional Commanders coming earlier that causes you difficulties?
Version 1.5.0 - 2019-10-31 Added Copper difficulty as a stepping stone between Bronze and Silver Added Easier Start option which adds more neutral systems with free tech
Version 1.5.1 - 2019-11-01 Fixed enemies having no eco if the difficulty level wasn't applied This has the side-effect of disabling enforcement of proper input into custom fields until I can fix the root cause
Version 2.0 - 2019-11-03 Clarified difficulty tooltip for custom difficulty Switched to a more recognisable ranking system for difficulty and smoothed the difficulty curve: Bronze has become Iron Copper has become Bronze Gold grow its additional Commander count slower and starts later Platinum has the additional Commander growth rate that Gold had previously Platinum grows its eco slightly slower Added Diamond difficulty which is identical to the old Platinum difficulty but with a higher starting eco Re-enabled custom difficulty as I have fixed the underlying bug Wait for player input to complete in a custom field before applying corrections
Version 2.0.1 - 2019-11-04 Added some more lore to ensure full system coverage when Easier Start is selected You will no longer be offered a Sub Commander if you don't have a factory they can open with (air/bot/vehicle)
I think the next area I will look into will be loadouts. I want to do the following: There's always an unlockable loadout available in every war Loadout is tied to some specific planet with some specific difficulty setup Add some additional loadouts
