Get rid of "dynamic difficulty"

There was a source code analysis few weeks ago of what PP is suppose to be doing in regards to the difficulty and it sounded quite simple. Last few missions that you did are looked into it and game compares your score to a maximum score you can get out of the mission. If you are doing well - your score is close to the maximum, then pandas get more deployment points for next battles. Or vise versa if you are doing bad. I’m not 100% sure if this code is actually used, as moder who looked into it wasn’t fully sure either. But it still sounds a bit simplistic and gimmicky. Like if your missions are becoming too hard, you could just abandon them or send 1 naked guy few times to reset the score. Overall, looking only into how well you did in missions doesn’t sound all that great as strategic layer becomes just a secondary thing of no concern. Neither this makes much sense from a lore point of view and clearly not what was advertised as “enemies adapt”.

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This comes with the base mechanic of solders becoming to powerful. I was never a fan of this and think is the reason why most of the remakes flopped. the latest Firaxis ones have hit a sweet spot but have indeed a very shallow progression and tech variety in exchange

This game already takes a different approach to tech but not sure if it is clearly decided if the player should have casualties or not. In the original, the enemies did not improve but new enemy types were introduced instead and in larger quantity which made perfect sense

Exactly: this type of enemy “progression” is a flat out bad idea for a game of this sort and caliber.

The player wants to feel if they are doing a good job and not that the enemy gets rubber-banded up to their level. Its gimmicky, destroys the sensation (and sense) of being ahead of the curve (the point of strategy games) and opens up the game to a host of exploits

The enemy should have a plan which it should be trying to achieve with the given tools and resources at its disposal (the higher the difficulty the more of these) and not have the invisible rubber-hand notching it up every time the player if lucky or doing a good job

Adapting to player tactics is also fine as long as it is not a flat-out superior change.

Part of the appeal of these games is also beating the game at a set difficulty - it is a benchmark that symbolizes an achievement.

The dynamic difficulty removes that. Maybe your legendary campaign was actually quite easy by gaming the dynamic difficulty at the correct time.

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According to player this code was applied to factions only and reinforcements, for me it’s clearly not covering all, there’s perhaps other code elsewhere and it could even be dead code not used.

That said such code could have the bug of escalating player strength as he wins missions even with some deaths, and at a point there’s a trigger and player is evaluated better because of more combats done. This could explain what I quoted through tests.

Dynamic difficulty is no way new:
Archon 's
First example quoted from wiki is since 1983.

Some examples of this wiki cover another case too, enemies scaling for RPG with characters levels, it’s not relevant to players skills.

I remind a game that did a com on it, but I don’t see it in wiki and don’t remind what game.

For sure, it throws troubles, references are lost, not just for bragging :slight_smile: but also for guides that become a lot less precises.

But I think that adaptive difficulty to setup the difficulty curve is totally new, that’s an idea, it looks like a great game option. For a forced feature, I understand some players don’t like and that it can causes negatives. Such system can also quickly degenerates into difficulty decrease and many players exploits that will even appear in guides.

That said, I think this system is just badly tuned for now, at least for first month. Before voting for it or not, a better tuned system would clarify the goal targeted by dev.

At least put in an option to remove it. I hate it. I want to sit and play without thinking too much. I didn’t set it to high difficulty. All it does is make the game petty, kamikaze to kill one guy on my squad…really stupid aspect of the game.

This DDA is not longer part of the game, since a pretty long time.

If you have so many problems even on the easiest difficulty I can only recommend to take a look into the tutorial on the wiki site: Getting Started - wiki.phoenixpoint.com

DDA is not part of the game? Or it takes now evolution into account?

From what I know it is pretty different now.
The amount of successful missions infulences the evolution process but not the difficulty of single missions, you don’t get more and more enemies but higher evolutions earlier.
AFAIK losing soldiers or get more injuries has no longer any influence … I think.

We never got explained this in detail, so this is only based on my experience.

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It is still one of my peeves about the game from when I first invested in it. The sell was more around enemies having adaptive tactics and using intentional counter-play. The end product has NPC’s that don’t even understand the tactical advantage of highground, and deploy at random based on the points pool available to them.

Addressing that initial sell point I think would be a game changer, and the real point of what dynamic difficulty was always meant to be; not about stats but unit tactics (both gear choices and on field tactics).

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