Levels of difficulties and time and cost modifier

posted on February 4th, 2017, 7:54 pm

I would like to know the relationship between the difficulty levels with respect to the modifiers, e.g. which build time and build cost modifier do I have to choose for the difficulty level "normal" to match the difficulty level "hard" (set to default)? Is there any overview?

posted on February 5th, 2017, 12:45 am

well, you may have noticed that the AI is terrible at gathering resources. So the Medium AI tends to run out of res after a certain point, while the harder ones have pretty extreme multipliers.

The Hard AI gets an 0.2 modifier to its build costs, while the Merciless AI gets 0.1.

The thing that actually matters is build time: the Hard AI gets an 0.7 modifier while the Merciless AI gets 0.6. You can find all of these by going to the Data directory and opening RTS_CFG.h in notepad (I use Programmer's Notepad 2)

posted on February 5th, 2017, 2:44 pm

Well, that gives me an idea about how it works. But how do the build cost and build time modifier of the advanced settings menu influence the whole system? Become those factors applied to the factors mentioned in that file?

posted on February 6th, 2017, 1:01 am

No, they're multiplied. So if you give the AI a +65% build time handicap and set it to merciless, it will have the same build times as the player.

posted on February 6th, 2017, 4:23 pm

+65% = 165% = 1.65 ?
Resulting in: 0.6 * 1.65 = 0.99
Is this correct?

posted on February 7th, 2017, 1:27 pm

You got it!