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Adaptive Difficulty [Beta]

This mod changes how difficulty bonuses in the campaign work.

In vanilla, all difficulty bonuses are flat throughout the game. Each AI faction always receives a -20% upkeep bonus on legendary, for example. This mod replaces these bonuses with adaptive bonuses that can change over time according to the game situation.

High difficulty bonuses are necessary for the game to feel challenging, especially for experienced players. However, setting the bonuses that the AI receives too high causes battles to feel insignificant and turns the campaign into a grind. Every time you defeat an enemy army, it is replaced almost instantly. Adaptive difficulty bonuses are a way to mitigate this issue. The bonuses start off higher, which creates a greater challenge initial defeating the AI. However, once they have been defeated, the reduction in their bonuses allows the player time to take advantage of their victory. I think this improves the balance between challenging the player and making victories feel significant.

Features:

• AI Bonuses start low but recover to their maximum value over time.
  
• Defeating AI factions in significant battles reduces their bonuses.
  
• AI Characters are given periodic experience bonuses if they are lower level than the Player's highest level lord.
  
• AI armies gain more experience for defeating humans.
  
• Upkeep bonuses are limited to factions with more than one region to avoid flashbacks to Rome 2 Rhodes.
  
• Keep in mind: bonuses are on a per faction basis. The faction you're finishing off probably has no bonuses left, but the faction about to declare war on you does.
  
• All flat bonuses to upkeep, recruitment cost and growth are removed and replaced.

This mod works with all difficulty levels and has different values for each. Overall difficulty will feel different, but will not be too far removed from what you would normally expect on each difficulty level.

The mod should be compatible with almost every other mod. Submodders or overhauls can override script/_lib/mod/AdaptiveDifficultyData.lua to change settings without modifying the actual scriptybits.

Thanks to Chatapp for his artistic vision.

This mod has full support for the Mod Configuration Tool. I will consider exposing more settings later, but for now you have access to change the default values, maximum values, and minimum values for all bonuses across all difficulty levels, as well as the ability to change how quickly the AI bonuses recover and toggle the character catch-up experience. Don't mind the visual bug, Vandy promises he'll fix it.

I'm hoping to get lots of feedback. Testing this kind of mod requires more campaigns than I'm able to play on my own.

If you enjoy the mod or are interested in modding yourself, join the Modding Den Discord. I have a channel there.[discord.gg]