Difficulty level in Standoff

Farbourne

Rear Admiral
I'm curious what folks in general think about Standoff's difficulty levels. Not if the game is too hard or too easy (although that is probably a worthy thread topic as well, which I'm sure has been discussed a lot), but how the nature of the game causes the difficulty setting to have potentially unusual effects.

As I'm sure most Standoff veterans know, turning up the difficulty for the most part only affects the AI (i.e. I don't believe it raises or lowers gun or missile damage, collision detection thresholds, or enemy armor levels or anything like that). And it affects BOTH enemy and friendly AIs.

Combining that with the all-around awesomeness of the Rapier II, which many of your wingmen fly, what that seems to mean is that increasing the "difficulty" can actually make some missions easier, perhaps. But it likely depends on the mission.

So my question is: What difficulty level do you think makes Standoff the easiest? What makes it the hardest? How would you rank the difficulties? And what factors affect this?

To answer my own question: My own sense is that in the "larger" missions where you have lots of wingmen, especially in strike and fleet defense missions, the higher the "difficulty" the easier the game gets. Nightmare might actually be the easiest setting. On the other hand, "smaller" missions where it's you and few friends against the enemies, especially in "you just have to survive" missions like patrols, the game gets significantly easier if you turn the difficulty down.

If I had to pick just one difficulty level, I actually think it would be Nightmare. But I'm curious about other people's thoughts...
 
Yes, the difficulty levels affect both enemy as well as friendly AI to the same degree. Also, the difficulty levels affect nothing else beside that. So it really isn't that much of a "difficulty" setting as it's rather a "AI level" setting.

By recommendation of Dundradal I always use the "Hero" setting because he considered that the "most balanced" difficulty level. Yes, setting the difficulty "higher" can indeed make the missions easier, because on the lower levels, even on Ace, your wingmen are just too dumb to survive anything serious. On Hero it is much better; haven't tried Nightmare, though. Because Dundradal said, Hero is most balanced, I would expect on Hero the battle very much being decided by the AI pilots and the player not really getting into the action much... Maybe system performance will take a (slight) hit as well.

I have never tried the lowest level, but maybe that's kind-off a "superhero mode": The AI pilots just do some "alibi fighting" without really hurting each other too much, while you dart in between them and kill all the enemies easily. But again, that's just my imagination, haven't tried it. ;)
 
Ah HAH! So that's why my wingmen seemed to fly like they were outta the academy, and the difficulty mode seems to do nothing. <_<

Thing about the AI is that, even on easy difficulty, they RARELY MISS. They even know to lead you on afterburner, so my first attempts on the first few levels I'm guaranteed to lose ALL my front of side armor no matter my approach.
 
Nightmare cheats on the AI side by giving it more armor for example, so that one should definitely be hardest. Rookie also cheats, this time on the players side, so again that one should definitely be easiest. As for the rest, which are truely only affecting AI stuff I dunno. I usually play on the middle setting and that's it.
 
Nightmare cheats on the AI side by giving it more armor for example, so that one should definitely be hardest. Rookie also cheats, this time on the players side, so again that one should definitely be easiest.
As far as I know this only is true for Prophecy / SecretOps, not Standoff.
 
I don't believe they did anything with the difficulty levels in Standoff, so it should work the same way as Secret Ops.
 
I don't believe they did anything with the difficulty levels in Standoff, so it should work the same way as Secret Ops.
Well that's not what I've been told: Unlike in Secret Ops and Prophecy, in Standoff the difficulty level only affects the AI, not the ship or weapons stats, the numbers of enemies or so on.

Maybe one of the "insiders" could clear it up?
 
Well that's not what I've been told: Unlike in Secret Ops and Prophecy, in Standoff the difficulty level only affects the AI, not the ship or weapons stats, the numbers of enemies or so on.
We have not done anything with the difficulty levels, so they work exactly as they did in the original. I do not know who told you otherwise, but it could not have been one of us.

By the way, about difficulty settings affecting friendly ships. IIRC, I'm the one who originally made this claim - and it must be said, right until this day, I have no idea whether it's true or not. The official WCP guide actually describes the way difficulty levels affect AI stats, and it says no such thing - if anything, going by the guide, we'd have to assume that friendly ships are unaffected. At the same time, the guide only talks about stats changes - and I don't believe this is all there is to it. I feel pretty sure that the actual behaviour of the AI also varies from difficulty to difficulty. This, however, is not described anywhere. So, at the end of the day, while we can guess that friendly AI is weaker on easier difficulty levels, we should not state this as a proven fact. It may not actually be true at all - sometimes, merely hearing that something works in a particular way causes you to imagine that it really works that way :).
 
Very interesting.

But I would swear that the friendly AI has to get better too, because on missions where you have a lot of wingmen (especially wingmen flying Rapiers), Nightmare is decidedly easier than Ace.

I generally play on Hero. On "Storming the Rock", "Protect the Minelayers", "Defend the Verdun" and the Gothri furball, I was having a devil of a time, and turning the difficulty down to Ace only made it worse. On the other hand, in each case, when I turned the diffiuclty up to Nightmare, I beat the mission in one try. There just seemed to be far fewer enemies for me to worry about because my wingmen were shooting so many down (note: going to Nightmare did not make the Snakeir mission any easier...maybe the Broadsword is too clumsy to get much advantage from improved AI?)
 
I don't disagree, I know there's been quite a few people who claimed the same thing. So, it may well be true - I'm just pointing out that we don't actually know.
 
I believe it was Dunradal, but I may also have misunderstood him. As far as I recall, in Prophecy the difficulty changed things like the number of enemy fighters in the mission, and obviously Standoff doesn't do that. But then again, that may have been a change between Prophecy and Secret Ops and not something the Standoff team did, so that may be the source for my confusion.
 
I believe it was Dunradal, but I may also have misunderstood him. As far as I recall, in Prophecy the difficulty changed things like the number of enemy fighters in the mission, and obviously Standoff doesn't do that. But then again, that may have been a change between Prophecy and Secret Ops and not something the Standoff team did, so that may be the source for my confusion.

Yeah and I was taking my information from the boss man. So as we often try to do on the internal Standoff mailing list...when in doubt...blame Tempest! :D
 
Slightly related, how did the Standoff programmers get the AI code for the different fighters in, that couldn't have been easy... Or maybe it was, depending on how it was done in Secret Ops. If they would all try to fly the same regardless of their fighter we probably would have an AI that's much more stupid than what we see. Especially if they'd try to fly like with Prophecy fighters... Also they behave quite differently depending on the fighter. Ever noticed how the Hhriss spin right round, baby, right round, like a record...

The alternative would be the Secret Ops AI is just that flexible and automatically adapts to the fighter stats, but that sounds like Science Fiction to me ;)
 
Hmm, well I guess it might be possible that changes in difficulty result in the AI-ship multipliers being applied to all AI and not just the enemy's ships. This would mean that at higher difficulties your wingmen have the same improved stats as your enemy does, which might explain the observed thread.

IIRC, Ace has even stats all around while rookie and nightmare alter the AI's stats by a factor (only your own stats are altered, I think anyway). Not sure regarding Hard and Veteran, though the stats are probably altered for there to be a difference in difficulty.

WCP Gold Manual said:
Difficulty. There are five distinct levels of game difficulty in Wing Commander:
Prophecy. As the difficulty level goes up, the enemy becomes smarter and more
aggressive. Default difficulty level is Ace.

I guess aggressive could still simply mean more lethal and more difficult to kill, though it would seem to indicate AI changes. Enemy AI certainly does change in one aspect from one difficulty to the next: missile frequency

Hard to say regarding Friendly AI missile frequency though. They allows seem to shoot missiles whether I'm on rookie (IIRC) or nightmare.

Regarding AI adapting to the weaker shields and armor....yeah right. They still love to go head-on with their opponents (friendly AI's especially).

I may have to take a look at how the AI fights in WCSO depending on difficulty and see if there are any pattern changes. Dang, this has really got me curious, now.

Edit: Oh and I think a really good check for changes in friendly AI: Just set your ship to invincible in a really large battle, afterburn away, and sit. Check out the end results depending on the difficulty (Rookie or Nightmare probably) taking special note of friendly losses. The last battle in UE is probably the better mission for checking, though IMO.
 
In general I think the Nightmare friendly AI is somewhat better at dogfighting, but no better at strike missions (or alternatively capital ship gunners are much better on Nightmare). The only winning path mission I have never beaten on Nightmare in Standoff is "Lashing Out" (I think that's what it's called - E5M2, aka "destroy a Kilrathi carrier group"); a mission that is not particularly difficult on Hero.

Conversely, Episode 1 is probably harder on Hero than it is on Nightmare, and I've never beaten Storming the Rock on Ace (not tried it more than maybe 10 times mind).
 
In general I think the Nightmare friendly AI is somewhat better at dogfighting, but no better at strike missions

Also toughens up missions where you have to protect anything. In which case, IMHO, the Nightmare difficulty setting basically makes the game unwinnable unless you have unlimited time and infinite patience - take a simple mission like the Clydesdale escort run and it becomes frustratingly difficult, and missions such as 'Save the Sao Paolo' become impossible in Nightmare.

"Lashing Out" (I think that's what it's called - E5M2, aka "destroy a Kilrathi carrier group")

"Lashing Out" involves a rendevous with Condordia pilots, then a strike mission against a Ralatha and a Snakeir - it's in Ep3 I believe, and Bradshaw's first introduction to Stingray.
 
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