Any tips on how best to tweak difficulty?

[thirith 27]

We did a coop session yesterday with my small group (up to 8 players, mostly of mediocre skills) and found that pretty much every mission was a meat grinder. Partly that's the mission design, of course, but I'm also wondering if there'd be ways for me to tweak the server setup and mods to make the game more playable.

 

The current setup is as follows:

• We're playing on a dedicated server that also runs a Headless Client.
• The AI is at 1.00 skill and 0.30 accuracy.
• We're also running ASR AI and Pooter's Enhanced ASR AI.

 

My goal is to find a good balance between fair and challenging, and I want the AI to behave interestingly. I don't mind losing against AI that plays cleverly, flanking us and showing behaviour that is believable. I do mind losing against AI that wins through sheer aggression and accuracy.

 

Obviously I can tweak and test all of these, but we only play every two weeks, and you pretty much have to play an entire session to get a feel for what difference the settings make. So, my question is basically this: how would those of you with more experience of running coop games tweak this?

[JohnKalo 657]

Don't know much about servers but using ASR AI 3 mod should make the game playable. Judging from experience that is.

Maybe you guys would like to try our missions that use ASR AI 3 directly via adding such units through the editor. That causes dependacies but it made our missions way more joyable.

The link to our webiste is on the bottom of my post. We have also got BI forum and armaholic links that you can use if you would like.

 

[Perfect88 3]

On 9/24/2017 at 5:49 PM, thirith said:

The AI is at 1.00 skill and 0.30 accuracy.

I would suggest dropping the accuracy below 0.1 with those extra mods. I see it as out of 10 shots 1 will be a aim bot headshot. This might not be totally correct, but for new recruits i normally put it on 0.02. That way they take a bit of fire  before getting headshot. And slowly bump it up as they get more comfortable with there use of hard cover and substances. I would rather the enemy see them and react but miss then them not see them then suddenly 180 headshot everyone in a single mag. Also if your using vehicles a BMP firing you dont want them to be perfect shots. So drop it super low, and slowly bump it up till your unit finds it challenging

[das attorney 857]

On 9/24/2017 at 9:19 AM, thirith said:

Obviously I can tweak and test all of these, but we only play every two weeks, and you pretty much have to play an entire session to get a feel for what difference the settings make

 

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dial it in

 

So if you need to dial it in, then it a process of looking at works for you and what doesn't.

 

In your case, you only get the chance to do that every two weeks, so it is a slow process.  I would use rule of halves.  So next time I play, I would drop all skills by 50%  If still too hard/not fun, then halve it again.  When you reach the level where it is semi-playable/semi-fun, then start thinking about whether they were too stupid but excellent shots or vice versa and increase/decrease accordingly.

 

That's probably not the answer you want, but the reality is you only play every two weeks, so with the best will in the world, that is the timescale you are looking at.  Maybe host a server for a while and make it public if you want faster feedback.  I'm happy to tell you the values I like, but I feel that if you use them and don't like them, then it wastes another two weeks for you.

 

Anyway, here you go (note that this is fiddling with even more subskills, so more to dial in if wrong for you)

 

_unit setSkill 1;
_unit setSkill ["aimingAccuracy",0.25];
_unit setSkill ["aimingShake",0.25];
_unit setSkill ["aimingSpeed",0.25];
_unit setSkill ["spotDistance",0.25];
_unit setSkill ["spotTime",0.25];

 

 

I can't really comment about AI mods as I don't bother with them so you might be better off checking the respective threads for those scripts/mods.

[thirith 27]

Thanks for the additional tips.

 

das attorney: The lines of code you mentioned, those would come into play if I used my own missions, right? Or is it somehow possible to inject those server-side?

[das attorney 857]

Yes, you can do that in your own missions, or if not your own missions, then you can make a mod to enforce the values.