changing difficulty

[frumius]

Is there any way to determine what your difficulty setting is in the campaign you are playing? I have been playing for several hours and am getting slaughtered in every mission. I don't remember what difficulty I started with and probably should drop it to an easier one.

[anonymissimus]

That's not better on the lowest difficulty even I think.

Always stay in smoke from smoke grenades or otherwise well-covered. Cover civilians too, because if you aren't killed since you are in smoke, the civilians will be.
And be the one to shoot first. You mustn't let them have any chance to do damage. That's the best way to safe soldiers and civilians.

[Mattn]

oh, in fact the difficulty level has an impact there - the aliens are making more damage in higher difficulty levels.

[anonymissimus]

oh, in fact the difficulty level has an impact there - the aliens are making more damage in higher difficulty levels.

Does that mean there's some kind of factor making weapons more powerful silently ? Or just that aliens get more powerful weapons earlier ? The ladder point makes harder levels much easier, because it means cash.
It generally doesn't matter. If you are hit, you are dead no matter what the weapon is or what armor you are wearing or how experienced you are. So, you must arrange to not get hit.
When I switched from normal to easiest I got slaughtered just as well anyway. Until usage of smoke.

[ShipIt]

@frumius Sorry, it seems there is no way for you to see what difficulty level a savegame has. However, there might be a workaround. In the statistics, the game shows the max. allowed debts. This is different for each difficulty level. But I don´t know the numbers out of my head.

I made a feature request for this. So hopefully we will have this in the game in the future.

[DarkRain]

@frumius: You'd need to decompress your savegame to find the difficulty (or even change it, but geever would ban me from the forums if I post how to do that again )

Or as ShipIt said look at the max debt, here is the list from hardest to lowest difficulty:
50000
100000
130000 -- This would be normal difficulty
350000
500000

Does that mean there's some kind of factor making weapons more powerful silently ? Or just that aliens get more powerful weapons earlier ? The ladder point makes harder levels much easier, because it means cash.
It generally doesn't matter. If you are hit, you are dead no matter what the weapon is or what armor you are wearing or how experienced you are. So, you must arrange to not get hit.
When I switched from normal to easiest I got slaughtered just as well anyway. Until usage of smoke.

In fact the game tries to scale the damage according to difficulty from lowest at 'easiest' to higher at 'hardest' (and your soldiers damage in the opposite direction), yes it is completely silent — even debug messages print the 'total damage' *before* it is 'difficulty scaled'
BUT as I said the game *tries* to do so, in reality the g_difficulty cvar is never set and battlescape is *always* played in normal difficulty

[geever]

@frumius: You'd need to decompress your savegame to find the difficulty (or even change it, but geever would ban me from the forums if I post how to do that again )

Definitely!

...in reality the g_difficulty cvar is never set and battlescape is *always* played in normal difficulty

Oh, I can set the cvar in a sec (in the afternoon). It should be the [-4..+4] difficulty number, right?


-geever

[geever]

Added the cvar setting to the campaign (2.6), feedback is welcome.

-geever