Any ideas to further increase difficulty?

[xavra42]

This game is so easy especially if the turn number increases past 100. I use my own rule set to make it more difficult. I can't pause during battle, and I can't Last Save unless I lose all the starting lord and heirs. The scaling is just so bad in this game though. It is like impossible to lose if you just build up, train the production buildings and mass armies. I sometimes play with the rule that I must take all enemies capital by turn 100 but it is still feels anticlimactic. There should be a modification to the AI where it either gets more money or armies spawn for it. Just like a cave with mobs in it periodically spawns an army to attack you the other faiths should get armies to send at their rivals and shit. I am almost never on the defensive. Anyways what do you guys think? What do you do to increase the difficultly (other than turned it to hard)

[Boaster]

Mar 13, 2019 18:17:57 GMT -6 xavra42 said:

This game is so easy especially if the turn number increases past 100. I use my own rule set to make it more difficult. I can't pause during battle, and I can't Last Save unless I lose all the starting lord and heirs. The scaling is just so bad in this game though. It is like impossible to lose if you just build up, train the production buildings and mass armies. I sometimes play with the rule that I must take all enemies capital by turn 100 but it is still feels anticlimactic. There should be a modification to the AI where it either gets more money or armies spawn for it. Just like a cave with mobs in it periodically spawns an army to attack you the other faiths should get armies to send at their rivals and shit. I am almost never on the defensive. Anyways what do you guys think? What do you do to increase the difficultly (other than turned it to hard)

Modify the map you wish to play and remove the great temple and/or remove the capital building. You'll be operating from a region with no city. Start a custom Lord on level 1 with a potion of health and a single starting artifact and no backup army.

Play on a small custom map, hard mode, each region has only 3 encounters, or no encounters at all. Face off against all other faiths in close quarters.

[xavra42]

Yeah I've experimented with ways to make it harder, but it only increases the difficultly in the beginning of the game. The scaling is all fucked up. It's an old game when standards were different so I am fine. This game just has a lot of potential if it forced you to defend sometime

[yukimare]

Just two ideas that came to mind regarding difficulty, though it's more mechanics based and would likely demand a sequel (Blame my developing of a TRPG roleplay based off the game for some of these ideas as well as a little confusion that came up thanks to a issue with minor rust in a earlier patch, though the issue no longer exists it seems.)


1.) Introduce stamina to all of the champion characters, including your Lord 

Not really in-combat stamina (Unless you want to take a modern twist on things and have everyone use stamina for special abilities such as stealth.), but more a stamina system that is taken into account at every chance as a champion is running about with wild abandon.

At first, they will perform at peak performance, but as their stamina is taxed with every passing day without rest and instead resorting to potions or healing spells to recover lost health, fatigue starts to take it's toll, and the champion's stats are affected. As it gets lower, they will do less damage, defense drops, mana capacity starts to go down, they start gaining less movement points per turn and eventually stop benefiting from movement spells, and perhaps potentially at it's worse, the champion becomes so exhausted that max health is affected.

This likely won't work very well with Chaos due to the fact that they adore running about even on the brink of death (If the fact that most of them heal the fastest while still on the move is anything to go by), but for all of the other faiths, this could do a fairly good job at forcing a player who's on a rampage or over relying on a single champion to either slow down or take regular visits to a capitol's temple to heal, at the expense of a high amount of crystals to restore stamina.

To recover stamina more naturally, a champion must at minimum be allowed to still have a few movement points after a turn while NOT being subject to any spell that affects movement points and not having been in combat that turn. This will recover a tiny amount of stamina. To recover at the fastest, the champion should be allowed inside a building and not have to expend any movement points for a few turns while left alone by anyone who would try to fight them and thus disturb the recuperation process. As for Chaos, perhaps to go along with their chaotic nature and ability to heal at their best while on the move, they should be immune to the Stamina mechanic.



2.) (AI ONLY!!!) Have melee units belonging to murderers gain a weak ranged attack (Such as throwing rocks and bottles and sticks) vs flying ranged enemies trying to cheese with the terrain.

A occasional problem with the game that makes it too easy at times is that when using a ranged flying fighter (Most notably the Air Fairy Lord and Balkoth), if the arena has any areas where grounded units cannot pass and the enemy has no flying units of their own and no ranged units powerful enough to contest them, you can cheese a battle by flying over to the otherwise inaccessible area and letting them idle out of reach of everyone else while they take potshots, singling out any ranged units first before they can kill whoever is pulling the stunt. Obviously if it's multiplayer situation (Yet to be able to play online admittedly), this should not be the case, and vs normal grounded units a ranged attack on a melee fighter would seem odd and unbalanced, but at the same time, not only can it get rather unfair for the AI if you just let your puny lv 1 fairy lord murder a entire army of high level enemies while you make dinner because there was water at one spot and nobody in the dungeon thought to pack a bow and arrow, but it can also grow unfun.? and become a absurd way to grind for EXP. (I have done this admittedly on a max level bridge dungeon that contained nothing but trolls once on the original SE version of the game. The fairy lord leveled up 7 times in his first battle.) Giving enemies a exclusive attack that can only be used vs a flying enemy who's in a inaccessible area should help stop this from happening, even if this exclusive ranged attack is far weaker then a dedicated ranged attack and can be subverted by the flying unit simply having enough defense to put up with it all.


I would present more, but.? that'd require some significant rewriting of the mechanics, perhaps like in the remake or sequel. 

[lemminkainen]

Hi Xavra! If you still play the game these days, I challenge you to beat the game on hard difficulty without a single last save and as fast as possible. My current record is around 100 turns, but I think it's easily beatable with a strong mage start and good artifact drops. I do use pauses though.

[Frodo Baggins]

I am working on changes to GSZ to make flying units count as non flyers so they cant cheese terrain even though they won't be able to go over water I think the tradeoff is fine. Also, I am rebalancing to try to make all units for each faith the same as best of each currently(e.g. make all cav have heavy cav stats) so each are on even footing and AI will have easier time with dungeons etc. making them stronger. Also, modifying attack speed to counter the issue with no animation when no damage from armor being high. Also, going to test making thieves more noisy so cant cheese with thieves hopefully. Got a lot of ideas.

[Boaster]

Aug 3, 2020 20:24:21 GMT -6 Frodo Baggins said:

I am working on changes to GSZ to make flying units count as non flyers so they cant cheese terrain even though they won't be able to go over water I think the tradeoff is fine. Also, I am rebalancing to try to make all units for each faith the same as best of each currently(e.g. make all cav have heavy cav stats) so each are on even footing and AI will have easier time with dungeons etc. making them stronger. Also, modifying attack speed to counter the issue with no animation when no damage from armor being high. Also, going to test making thieves more noisy so cant cheese with thieves hopefully. Got a lot of ideas.

If you want to anti-cheese flying units, make their movement over terrain "above roads" as slower. This makes them slow in combat over impassable terrain.

[Frodo Baggins]

Thanks for the idea! Do you know where that might be located? Also, is there a way to give breath attacks to non breath using legendary creatures?

[Boaster]

Aug 4, 2020 19:54:50 GMT -6 Frodo Baggins said:

Thanks for the idea! Do you know where that might be located? Also, is there a way to give breath attacks to non breath using legendary creatures?

Termods.gs and easyunit.gs should have terrain mods. You may be able to better control these through easunit.gs though.

[Frodo Baggins]

Mar 13, 2019 18:17:57 GMT -6 xavra42 said:

This game is so easy especially if the turn number increases past 100. I use my own rule set to make it more difficult. I can't pause during battle, and I can't Last Save unless I lose all the starting lord and heirs. The scaling is just so bad in this game though. It is like impossible to lose if you just build up, train the production buildings and mass armies. I sometimes play with the rule that I must take all enemies capital by turn 100 but it is still feels anticlimactic. There should be a modification to the AI where it either gets more money or armies spawn for it. Just like a cave with mobs in it periodically spawns an army to attack you the other faiths should get armies to send at their rivals and shit. I am almost never on the defensive. Anyways what do you guys think? What do you do to increase the difficultly (other than turned it to hard)

If you mod it, you can change the xp the ai get for their troop generating buildings, make all lords mages and give the ai more starting resources, etc. You can also modify what you get when fealty is sworn to only acquire heir for instance.

[Boaster]

I found a way to add a new difficulty to the game. I called it "Insane" but, the game would not allow for the difficulty to be set outside of a range of 0, 1, 2 (easy, medium, hard respectively). So a value of 3 could not be set. The game throws errors to the effect that it's not a valid difficulty.

[Frodo Baggins]

Aug 19, 2020 7:05:42 GMT -6 Boaster said:

I found a way to add a new difficulty to the game. I called it "Insane" but, the game would not allow for the difficulty to be set outside of a range of 0, 1, 2 (easy, medium, hard respectively). So a value of 3 could not be set. The game throws errors to the effect that it's not a valid difficulty.

What modifications did you want to make? I would like to change hard to insane on one build.

[Boaster]

Aug 19, 2020 9:56:06 GMT -6 Frodo Baggins said:

Aug 19, 2020 7:05:42 GMT -6 Boaster said:

I found a way to add a new difficulty to the game. I called it "Insane" but, the game would not allow for the difficulty to be set outside of a range of 0, 1, 2 (easy, medium, hard respectively). So a value of 3 could not be set. The game throws errors to the effect that it's not a valid difficulty.

What modifications did you want to make? I would like to change hard to insane on one build.

Mods to dlg/pikfaith.gs and and dlg/difflvl.gs.

But, since the game throws errors when attempting to set a higher difficulty level, it never takes and cannot be implemented.

[myrddin]

Aug 19, 2020 10:14:50 GMT -6 Boaster said:

But, since the game throws errors when attempting to set a higher difficulty level, it never takes and cannot be implemented.

Couldn't you just bump each of the original difficulty levels up though? Have 1.Medium/Standard, 2.Hard, and 3.Insane, instead of 1.Easy, 2.Medium and 3.Hard? Who even plays on easy anyway?

The difficulty aspect is one that I've long considered as the greatest flaw of LOMSE. The game is great up to mid-game or so, until you have more followers than you know what to do with, experienced champions, and can just spam your way to victory.

One idea that I've had in my GSZ mod is to increase the stats of marauder-only units (wolves, witches, orcs and the like), so that even they present a greater challenge in late game. Another that I haven't implemented but that might be good is to increase the spawn rate of caves (like in the Earth quest, which spawns hordes of very powerful enemies), as well as to give enemy lords more powerful starting armies and city defenses.

[Frodo Baggins]

Those are good ideas but need to make sure we don't make low level mobs too difficult for early game. I have also bumped up the starting xp for the ai to make stronger trained forces earlier. I can make trading harder as well. I also made balkoth be death's leader always as that is harder than normal champions I think. Making starting relations worse between factions would also raise difficulty. Changing the levels for devotion etc can make it harder to improve relations as well.

[Boaster]

I am attempting work around measures.

What I have been trying for lately is using scenario options plus level modifiers that specifically target units owned by qualifying AI players.

One thing I have noticed, is this seems to cause the load times of games to increase significantly: going from dungeon to overland map, and reloading a saved game when the game is already loaded.

I haven't been able to find a way to correct for this slow loading mechanism, so I may have to scale back or re-organize data so that it won't.

[Frodo Baggins]

I am going to look for starting setup for ai to add to the ai starting army/garrison this evening.

[Frodo Baggins]

Aug 23, 2020 22:09:22 GMT -6 myrddin said:

Aug 19, 2020 10:14:50 GMT -6 Boaster said:

But, since the game throws errors when attempting to set a higher difficulty level, it never takes and cannot be implemented.

Couldn't you just bump each of the original difficulty levels up though? Have 1.Medium/Standard, 2.Hard, and 3.Insane, instead of 1.Easy, 2.Medium and 3.Hard? Who even plays on easy anyway?

The difficulty aspect is one that I've long considered as the greatest flaw of LOMSE. The game is great up to mid-game or so, until you have more followers than you know what to do with, experienced champions, and can just spam your way to victory.

One idea that I've had in my GSZ mod is to increase the stats of marauder-only units (wolves, witches, orcs and the like), so that even they present a greater challenge in late game. Another that I haven't implemented but that might be good is to increase the spawn rate of caves (like in the Earth quest, which spawns hordes of very powerful enemies), as well as to give enemy lords more powerful starting armies and city defenses.

Another thing that can be done is to make more active ai's for each difficulty.

[Boaster]

My preference is to keep the existing difficulties the way they are and find a way to toggle an increased difficulty option.

One issue I found when trying to configure a scenario option that is not pre-set in the files is that, after a reload of the game (from windows) is that scenario option would have to be set again, or it would provide the default option.

So if I set variable "extra_hard?" to true from inside the game, it will not automatically be recalled on a loaded game.

So, I'm trying to figure out a work around and also some new things to get things to work more the way I am thinking. But in the end, I may have to settle on what does work and MAYBE later work it more towards how I am wanting. I've made a lot of progress this way with other endeavors.

[Frodo Baggins]

Aug 26, 2020 6:05:43 GMT -6 Boaster said:

My preference is to keep the existing difficulties the way they are and find a way to toggle an increased difficulty option.

One issue I found when trying to configure a scenario option that is not pre-set in the files is that, after a reload of the game (from windows) is that scenario option would have to be set again, or it would provide the default option.

So if I set variable "extra_hard?" to true from inside the game, it will not automatically be recalled on a loaded game.

So, I'm trying to figure out a work around and also some new things to get things to work more the way I am thinking. But in the end, I may have to settle on what does work and MAYBE later work it more towards how I am wanting. I've made a lot of progress this way with other endeavors.

Where are the starting armies for the ai located? I found death's in scenario0.gs along with temple and city defense forces only.