Change in Difficulty Rating

[cantdownloadit]

It appears with the .09 patch the difficulty percentage calculation changed a lot. here is the same game settings with .08 and .09.
I didnt see any mention of such a change, so is this intended ? or has the game suddenly been made that much easier ?

[Stylesjl]

I am not sure I can't see if there have been any settings changes. I did some testing where I checked if playing around with some of the new DLC would change the difficulty but that does not seem to be the case.

I am wondering now if there were any hidden difficulty tweaks in this patch version.

[cantdownloadit]

still same in .11

[David]

I just got the info from the dev team:

Now executive salary modifiers affect the difficulty rating.

The number of towns has a small impact on the difficulty rating.

--------------------

We would like to get your feedback:

In survival mode, should the number of AI competitors increase or decrease the difficulty rating, or have just no effect on it?

[Stylesjl]

In survival mode, should the number of AI competitors increase or decrease the difficulty rating, or have just no effect on it?

That's a good question actually.

Generally speaking I have always found Survivor Mode harder when there are fewer companies around. The reason largely has to do with investment capital, the more of it the city starts with the easier it is to get the economy going as the many companies will spend huge amounts of money providing jobs, city tax/land purchase revenue as well as semi-products/raw materials that other companies can buy for their own supply chains.

An example of what I mean (I have tried some experiments):

Start Survivor Mode with 5 companies.
Then with the same settings start with 20 companies.

With 20 companies the city can build itself up to nearly 1 million people within only a few decades with little human intervention (only providing public services as mayor).

With 5 the city still builds up reasonably quickly (but not as fast) to a few hundred thousand.

Start with 0 and it's a hard slog as it's only you alone, to build up the city.

So yes I think inverting the difficulty settings for competitors in Survivor Mode is a good idea (not sure to what extent). A similar rule I think should be introduced for AI Expansion Aggressiveness and AI Starting Capital as these also make it easier to expand the economy when set to higher levels.

Generally the strongest settings for economic growth are:
- Number of Competitors.
- Expansion Aggressiveness (set this too low and the companies don't build much at all and the city stagnates and goes bankrupt).
- Starting Capital (can still get decent growth when set to very low but it still slow things down).

The other settings such as Expertise, Local Competence, Tech Head Start and Price Aggression might also benefit city growth to some extent but are probably worse for the human player. It is therefore probably best to leave those settings alone.

--
On the other hand once the city has been built up more competitors do add to the difficulty as well as now you will be competing against AI players in an established and developed economy, just like in a normal game. However considering that the Survivor Mode goals are generally associated with either building up the city (which the AI will do the heavy lifting for you) or with launching products (which isn't that hard to do, as you only have to launch the product, not necessarily try to dominate the market) the extra competitors actually don't make it too much harder to do those goals.

--
So, yes more competitors (and starting capital + expansion aggression) on Survival should lower the difficulty level but only if Developed City = No.

[cantdownloadit]

I just got the info from the dev team:

Now executive salary modifiers affect the difficulty rating.

The number of towns has a small impact on the difficulty rating.

--------------------

We would like to get your feedback:

In survival mode, should the number of AI competitors increase or decrease the difficulty rating, or have just no effect on it?

Using a test script with 1 city gave 37% difficulty, if i change script to 15 cities it was still 37% difficulty.

with
CEO Salary Modifier=10
COO Salary Modifier=10
CTO Salary Modifier=10
CMO Salary Modifier=10

its 37%

with them set to 1000 its still only 89%

Not sure if that accounts for all the change but it appears to be a huge change, and a random one - and as i said in the game where my CEO was being paid 340 billion a year, that's crazy.

as i raised long ago, the option that lets you start with 10 billion cash doesn't affect difficulty at all