[HELP] Game Difficulty

[Someboddy]

Hello ppl .. as the game was crashing in the city of abandoned ships i loaded a previous save game , but the game was still crashing like every 10 minutes .. now i got the GoF mod & i tested it .. and there was no crash in 2h of gameplay ^^ nice ...

last game i had a class 2 ship , 3 milion gold , i was lvl 24 so i wanted to make the game a bit harder,but not too hard

so my question is if someone could tell me the detail of the difficulty levels ( i mean the sailor,skipper,captain and so on .. the ones that you can choose at the start of a new game )
the manual only says :"Di culty – Varies from “Sailor” to “Impossible”; ten levels in total, with
“Captain” as the median.  is affects the pace of your hero’s development,
enemy strength, pro t, and many other things."

but I wanted to know if you can give me sole details like sailor: "enemys have 65% HP and their damage is reduced by 10" , captain:"enemys have 80% health and their damage is reduced by 7" and so on ..

so im searching for some basic info about every difficulty ..

thank you ..

 

[buho]

Good question. I'll love to have an authoritative answer too.

The game changes in many ways based on 3 parameters: MOD_EXP_RATE, MOD_SKILL_ENEMY_RATE and MOD_Complexity_1_DMG (the last is a constant, the first two are variables). They are not flags used in "if" decisions but factors in equations.

The code using them is scattered all around in the source files: MOD_SKILL_ENEMY_RATE, as an example, is used near 100 times in two dozen different source files.

It is pretty difficult to get the whole image... at least for me, may be some other modders knows it better.

Luke? Jonathan? Are you there?

Cheers.
buho (A).

 

[Hyde911]

AFAIK difficulty level affects only level of your foes. There is no magic handicaps or advantages like "65% of HP". So the higher difficulty level you choose the better enemies you will meet. It is also important what experience increase rate you will choose at the beginning of game. Because it determines how long it will take you to reach level of your enemies. On impossible difficulty level and lowest experience increase rate you probably never reach it at all.
If you have some experience I recommend you playing on higher levels (admiral or hihger). At the beginning it will be somewhat hard, but it will be longer a challenge. However, you will be kicking everybody's asses eventually.
I currently play on Sea Master level with experience rate moved half to the left.

 

[buho]

AFAIK difficulty level affects only level of your foes. [...]

Not sure really. Apparently MOD_SKILL_ENEMY_RATE affects lotsa things, from Health (not HP) to boarding bonuses to deadlines for some quests to officers salaries.

Cheers.
buho (A).

 

[Someboddy]

AFAIK difficulty level affects only level of your foes. There is no magic handicaps or advantages like "65% of HP". So the higher difficulty level you choose the better enemies you will meet. It is also important what experience increase rate you will choose at the beginning of game. Because it determines how long it will take you to reach level of your enemies. On impossible difficulty level and lowest experience increase rate you probably never reach it at all.
If you have some experience I recommend you playing on higher levels (admiral or hihger). At the beginning it will be somewhat hard, but it will be longer a challenge. However, you will be kicking everybody's asses eventually.
I currently play on Sea Master level with experience rate moved half to the left.

haha... i play in captain with the exp bar at half ... im solid i'm lvl 6 with 400'000 gold .. but the problem is that i get my ass kicked in sword fights .. my main talents were talent,insight & reaction .. i leveled my light weapons .. but i seem to have way too low HP and i dish out low dmg .. only 10 dmg per hit :/ ...
what is the fastest way to develop your personal abilities ?

 

[Hologramm]

.. my main talents were talent,insight & reaction .. i leveled my light weapons .. but i seem to have way too low HP and i dish out low dmg .. only 10 dmg per hit :/ ...
what is the fastest way to develop your personal abilities ?

I always try to get 9 or 10 in power and endurance for nice boost in HP and energy (not to mention weight carry), rest is choice on base of your playing style (as lvl 30+ i have about 370HP). Light weapons are good for speed but little damage is problem. I got heavy weapons maxed and with mostly 1-3 hits enemy fall dead (crit is 1hit deal with heavy as far as i can see) although there are some really tough enemy's out there who needs little more hits. As i can tell personal goes really quickly if you are boarding ships a lot or doing dungeons killing skeletons.

 

[Someboddy]

.. my main talents were talent,insight & reaction .. i leveled my light weapons .. but i seem to have way too low HP and i dish out low dmg .. only 10 dmg per hit :/ ...
what is the fastest way to develop your personal abilities ?

I always try to get 9 or 10 in power and endurance for nice boost in HP and energy (not to mention weight carry), rest is choice on base of your playing style (as lvl 30+ i have about 370HP). Light weapons are good for speed but little damage is problem. I got heavy weapons maxed and with mostly 1-3 hits enemy fall dead (crit is 1hit deal with heavy as far as i can see) although there are some really tough enemy's out there who needs little more hits. As i can tell personal goes really quickly if you are boarding ships a lot or doing dungeons killing skeletons.

thank you for the answer,then i will be on my way to kill some skeletons

 

[buho]

Get lotsa antidotes if you are going to fight skellys.

Cheers.
buho (A).

 

[Spectre]

For the last 3 games i went up a notch for every new game.
British skipper, Spanish captain, French admiral (sacrebleu!).

The first things you notice ist, that it takes considerably longer to develope your skills (actually a good thing) and that it costs more at the end of the month (rather a bad thing, but not ruining).
Enemy ships tend to be quite a bit bigger than your pot, wich loses effect pretty soon, since you can still sink pretty much anything with a class 4 vessel.
The enemy squadrons are bigger and there are more of them. If you sail along, minding your own business, you can end up with a whole armada in your wake trying to catch you. This can be a bit annoying at times.... but can be fixed by repairing your ship, wich clears the map.
I found miself actually ramming my ship into the docks one time, because it wasn't damaged and therefore i couldn't let it be repaired.

The level seems to stretch out the game in every perspective, but not only for you i think.
While enemy ships sailed in circles like mad cows on "skipper", they didn't do that on higher levels. They also didn't damage my sails so much anymore (just a gut feeling). and didn't kill so many of my crewmembers with grapes. They don't mess around and try to sink you right away (wich is a good thing actually).
It took quite a long time on "captain" to piss off the Brits, let alone making them bother to set a price on my head. They did that in a heartbeat on "skipper" (not the Brits for that matter, since they were my own ppl during that campaign, but you get my drift...)
Everything seems slightly different. I would recommend to just try the admiral level.

PS: Valid for GoF 1.1

 

[Asquinol]

For the last 3 games i went up a notch for every new game.
British skipper, Spanish captain, French admiral (sacrebleu!).

The first things you notice ist, that it takes considerably longer to develope your skills (actually a good thing) and that it costs more at the end of the month (rather a bad thing, but not ruining).
Enemy ships tend to be quite a bit bigger than your pot, wich loses effect pretty soon, since you can still sink pretty much anything with a class 4 vessel.
The enemy squadrons are bigger and there are more of them. If you sail along, minding your own business, you can end up with a whole armada in your wake trying to catch you. This can be a bit annoying at times.... but can be fixed by repairing your ship, wich clears the map.
I found miself actually ramming my ship into the docks one time, because it wasn't damaged and therefore i couldn't let it be repaired.

The level seems to stretch out the game in every perspective, but not only for you i think.
While enemy ships sailed in circles like mad cows on "skipper", they didn't do that on higher levels. They also didn't damage my sails so much anymore (just a gut feeling). and didn't kill so many of my crewmembers with grapes. They don't mess around and try to sink you right away (wich is a good thing actually).
It took quite a long time on "captain" to piss off the Brits, let alone making them bother to set a price on my head. They did that in a heartbeat on "skipper" (not the Brits for that matter, since they were my own ppl during that campaign, but you get my drift...)
Everything seems slightly different. I would recommend to just try the admiral level.

PS: Valid for GoF 1.1

how do you repair your ship at sea? Besides having planks and sailcloth in your hold.

 

[Spectre]

This is something i've never truely managed to figre out.
Happens automatically, but i don't know how fast. Catch is - you need enormous ammounts of planks/sailcloth.

Btw: I didn't mean that you should repair at sea. Visit a drydock/shipjard, once you reach your destination and have your crates fixed. This will reset the global map.
On the other hand - if you want to snatch/sink what's comming: Don't repair first, or they are gone. It can be quite profitable to lure a fleet into the range of the local coastal battery.


@ Topic
The most enjoyable difficulty level imho is "Captain".
This level is hard, yet still balanced, without gaps (gameprogress to personal development)

 

[Luke159]

Good question. I'll love to have an authoritative answer too.

The game changes in many ways based on 3 parameters: MOD_EXP_RATE, MOD_SKILL_ENEMY_RATE and MOD_Complexity_1_DMG (the last is a constant, the first two are variables). They are not flags used in "if" decisions but factors in equations.

The code using them is scattered all around in the source files: MOD_SKILL_ENEMY_RATE, as an example, is used near 100 times in two dozen different source files.

It is pretty difficult to get the whole image... at least for me, may be some other modders knows it better.

Luke? Jonathan? Are you there?

Cheers.
buho (A).

Never looked into the code for this, but from gaming experience the game makes it so enemy crew is tougher ie has more energy and better weapons, also they will use health potions as will the enemy captains. The hardest level i play on is captain, if your looking at making the game play out harder so money isn't so easy to make, ships are more aggressive etc then i'm afraid none of that will happen. The only thing that changes apart from what i said above is ships must have a minimum crew before you can go into the world map again. If you want to make it harder in other way's then you will have to set yourself some person house rules like no selling ships you capture, no selling contraband, no slave trading etc etc.