Is it time for more difficulty options ?

[Bee1976]

Well, i know there are a lot of options to alter the ingame difficulty already. Buut the '"main" difficulty options touch prestige, but prestige is outside of SCW no real issue in the AO series. And even in SCW you can play around your prestige burning "allies".

So my idea is an option to grant the AI more prestige for additional units, additional reinforcements, OS AND/OR for useful (!) heros. Im not sure if its easy to implement, but that might cause some "surprises".
In a normal playthrough i know what is coming on each map. I know there is the option to grant the AI heros, but last time i tried that out, it was boring, because the AI got so many bad heros or bad assignments.

I.e. a bandwidth from 0% extra prestige to 200%+ extra prestige.

And in addition some love for the "heroic showdown" challenge, so the AI place heros to units where they are "good" or at least "useful".

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And i really hope its possible to alter the AI behavior in some ways. There are ways to "block" the AI and force them to do nothing if you form a good "wall of defense". Which means the AI moves next to you, decides not to attack and then it falls asleep waiting to get bombed into oblivion.
Im quite unsure how to handle this issue.

[DefiantXYX]

Did you try David vs Goliath? In 1941/1942 you start to run out of prestige, even if you once got 30/40k.
Another option is to deactivate heroes or limit heroes to one per unit. The game get unbalanced if you got 2-3 heroes for every unit, but still David vs Goliath can help.

You could also punish yourself by choosing some ugly traits. You can easily make it impossible to win

I dont think there is need for another option to make it harder. But still it would be very nice if enemey forces depend on your amount of heroes/prestige. All the scenarios should work for elite armies without frustrating players who might have started in 1943 with a green army.

[Bee1976]

You could also punish yourself by choosing some ugly traits. You can easily make it impossible to win

Hehe i have to call more playthroughs due to crazy challenge and trait combinations than i can finish. I try and error a lot with traits and challengesto find my personal "difficulty-level". I really enjoy Manstein challenge, but its way harder in SCW with inferior german equipment and without mass encirclements and caputring.
Later in the war i started to medalfarm with Manstein so i stopped playing with it. funfact david vs. goliath + uphill battle is kinda gamebreaking

The problem is there are a lot of options but some simply overtune the enemy. there is little space for mehelp a lot between "a little to easy" and impossible. So i think another option wont hurt anyone.
prestige as main factor for difficulty was fine in the basegame, but i dont think its working in AO.

a dynamic enemy force generation, like u mentioned, would help a lot, if that system just makes it harder for elite armies but not easiert than the base "map-setup" otherwise it would be hard to "lose".
But its a great idea, and it might help to increase difficulty from another perspective:

ofc battles will become harder but when the army composition of the AI differs from playthrough to playthrough i dont have the advantage of "knowing" what will happen to me. That would be most welcomed.

[David Hansen]

Try adding... no heroes...no scout planes...to your chosen difficulty criteria.

[Bee1976]

Nah Heros are the reason why i play PC2 and no longer pc1, or at least one of the big reasons.

It shouldnt be needed to get rid of 1 really funn part of the game, just to increase the difficulty. but yes i play with houserules. in most of my playthrough these are: no units with a capture hero combo, no mass encirclements no trophies.
sometimes i play with 2 heros sometimes with 3 sometimes with 4. and so on.

I could remove recon planes, well i did it before. after more than a dozen playthrougs i know the maps and the enemy army composition and there positions quite good. And thats one of the problems for me:
it reduces the replayability alot and lowers the difficulty lvl a lot. I.E. i know on the malaga map, that there will be a massivew tankrush in the northeast, i know there is a t-26 sleeping in a city, i know that there is massive aircraft on the rear bases. and thats stuff i can prepare for.
or in Warschau, i know the enemy has very limited aircraft and wont recive any reinforcements. So after my 2nd playthrough i stopped bringing a healthy army composition with a normal amount of anti air and reduce my anti air force to 1 1 fighter and 1-2 vierlings. That allows me to bring in more artillery and/or infantry units. and so on.

thats why i consider DEFIANTS idea so great, a dynamic army composition for the enemy, base on ones perosnal coreforce. ofc this should be optional, but i sounds great to me. Maybe a "AI gets aux forces aswell" neg trait might change a lot.

and ofc all my ideas are for pure optional features, no one should be forced into a harder game if this is not wanted.

[Edmon]

Put "Slow reactions" on. The game plays like a totally different game.

You'll learn all about punishing A.I. aggression when your units don't fight back.

[Bee1976]

Put "Slow reactions" on. The game plays like a totally different game.

You'll learn all about punishing A.I. aggression when your units don't fight back.

I know your "slow reaction" campaign, of course i know it

"even the pak dares to attack me" hehe. i once tried out slowreaction together with some challenges. it was a call early in scw, without enough 15cm artillery support it was impossible (for me).
but as soon as 2 of my prepared core forces have beaten ao43 (i count the hours....) i will give it a new try

oh and edmon to be honest, you are the reason why im asking for more difficulty options, i learend so much from you. so uhm basically its your fault hehe j/k

[DefiantXYX]

Well, yeah it doesnt feel right if you have to pick some traits, just to make the game harder.
But indeed map knowledge is a mighty feature. The game is completly different if you know whats coming.

[robman]

I totally agree that replayability would be much greater if there were some unpredictability to AI force composition, placement, and axes of attack. Even, say, three different scripts per scenario would remove the tedium of knowing what will happen next. The differences wouldn’t even need to be large. Maybe a thought for PC3?

[VirgilInTheSKY]

I totally agree that replayability would be much greater if there were some unpredictability to AI force composition, placement, and axes of attack. Even, say, three different scripts per scenario would remove the tedium of knowing what will happen next. The differences wouldn’t even need to be large. Maybe a thought for PC3?

From what I can remember, they do have "random scripts" there. Random patrol, for example. Units have several patrol routes and will go for one randomly.

[DefiantXYX]

I think i played the DLCs 3 or 4 times, I never realized some real changes. The weather sometimes is different, very annoying in operation sea lion when you want to save all your ships

In the map with reinforcements the units spawn differently. But tbh. I dont like this mechanism.