The Harder Difficulty Easier Win Anomaly

[Charles J Lee]

I find that playing official maps on higher difficulty settings results in a much harder starting game, but a much easier end game.

As we all know, game always starts hard on higher difficulty settings, since you face stronger enemy stacks, start with fewer resources, and need lots of time to rest between battles. But it gets easy at the end, since your computer opponents are always underdeveloped. (thanks to the same strong enemy stacks blocking their mines)

My most memorable example comes when I was playing Solmyr's Dragon Graveyard map in Emelia's h4 Order Campaign:

On Normal difficulty, my enemies always levelled up by the time I reached them. EG Bloch the Hatcher had 3 castles and was maxed at level 15. He had access to two dragon caves in addition to his own 2 asylums, so there was a lot of dragons waiting for me and my two castles' worth of titans.

On Expert, I faced a level 6 Bloch with 1 dragon and one castle. Almost all the mines around were untouched.

After struggling so painfully to flag mines and build my castles, I appreciate a more challenging final Grand Battle!

I also feel that higher difficulty settings reduce your options, making gameplay more boring. The number of ways you can win a scenario become restricted. You're often forced to go for grandmaster combat to keep your heroes alive. (e.g. try playing Solmyr without levelling any combat skills!)

In contrast, lower difficulty settings can be much harder when you deliberately pick and experiment with odd combos. I once played Emelia with said hero as an Archmage on Normal. In her first map, I picked up chaos magic at the usually-ignored magic institute in the Northern snowy area. I deliberately went for a broad range of magical powers. The result was pretty hellish. Because I had not one but four magical powers, I always had lots of mana. But sad to say, Beserk and Blind trump super magical versatility. My Emelia Archmage on Normal was far harder to play than my Emelia Battle Mage on Expert. I was forced to keep feeding the archmage immortality potions, whereas my battle mage on Expert never used a single potion. She singlehandedly wiped out scores of titans in the battle for the Mind Shield, and she singlehandedly destroyed Gavin Magnus and his army in a straightforward shootout. Without that all-important combo of hypnotize and grandmaster combat, Archmage couldn't do anything solo.

My conclusion? The difficulty settings don't make a difference. Your choices and decisions do. If the storyline suggests levelling your hero in a certain way, difficulty increases the further astray you go. Since I'm a writer myself, I like to explore alternate storylines. I've gone to the extent of trying to play Emelia as a necromancer on Novice. I couldn't do it!

[Darmani]

Is your entire post about Heroes IV? That'd be why; everyone knows the H4 AI sucks.

I don't know about Heroes III, but in HII, on higher difficulty levels the AI is given free resources, and it definitely doesn't get easier.

[Alamar]

The AI in H4 isn't great but the game design decisions that went into H4 made the AI appear even worse than it actually is. Facing those insane stack sizes was a chore ... for the AI it was virtually impossible.

While I normally wouldn't recommend that an AI cheat this much I think we'd see far better performance if only the humans had to face stacks that could move and grew [dramatically] as difficulty level increased. This is esp. true if the AI got the equivalent XP of killing numbers equivalent to the stack size that a human had to face.

IIRC someone did experiments that showed that the AI couldn't see the whole map [or at least acted differently when it could fairly see the map]. Allowing the AI full knowledge of the map would probably have helped it a lot also ....