Geoff the Medio wrote:Anyway... is it worth having a "difficulty level" (or something similar) that's separate from the AI algorithm used and bonuses and penalties? If so, what should it be called?
No, I don't think so. I think it's better to set the game "difficulty" separately for each empire. I'll explain why with reference to the other parts of your original post.
The aforementioned thread noting AI difficulty levels caused me to realize that the effects stuff might not be a good way to go about making the difficulty levels different though. I assume that we'll vary the quality of AI opponents with difficulty level, but should the game mechanics also vary?
Yes... but the game mechanic variation should be attached to each player's (human or AI) separate difficulty setting.
Additionally, if there's no difference between the game content between difficulty levels, is it a good idea to have a single game difficulty level at all? If the only difference between difficulty levels is the quality of the AI opponents, then there's presumably no reason to require all these AIs to be of the same difficulty. Rather, the player could specify the difficulty level of each AI opponent, in the manner GalCiv allows.
This is better. It's much more useful for multiplayer games, as well.
We could also do both, by having a general or player-specific game difficulty setting, perhaps for player vs. environment stuff (eg. space monsters) or difficulty for the player in maintaining order within his/her own empire (eg. dealing with unrest, inefficiency, liklihood of getting good random results in any events, etc.).
Player-vs-environment can be determined on a per-player basis rather than in general.
These settings could actually work similar to any bonuses or penalties that AIs get at different difficulty levels (in addition to using better AI algorithms, assuming we even have them).
They should work the same way. Unified mechanics are better.
For example, an AI set to "easy" might get big penalties to production. A player set to "hard" might get those same penalties. The player's and the AIs' difficulty levels could be quite separate... or multiple players could have different difficulty levels in a multiplayer game as a form of handicapping.
This is the way to go, IMO. It makes actually having a single difficulty setting unnecessary.
If we *must* provide a single-click difficulty setting, we could provide easy/moderate/hard "levels" for single-player campaigns that set the human to increasingly lower Handicap levels while simultaneously increasing the AI Handicap levels.
For multiplayer, I don't see how a global difficulty setting would be useful. Anything that can be implemented as a "global difficulty modifier" can be implemented on a per-player basis anyway, which is more flexible, so why bother?