Gamma campaign difficulty

[NachtRaveVL]

Seriously you guys made normal way too fucking hard. WAY TOO HARD. Like the amount of non-stop ass-fuckery that occurs on a regular basis is absolutely beyond reasonable. If the cheating AI wasn't enough, but missiles from outside the map? Guys... Seriously. Split the damned difficulty up better. Normal shouldn't be absolute torture.

[GiantEnemyCrabKing]

Here to let you know before my comment is deleted by Big Brother that the stand-in developers and admins don't actually care.

Edit: "off-topic" lmao

[past-due]

@NachtRaveVL Can you please provide some more details? Such as:

1. Which version of WZ are you running?
2. Are you playing the “Remastered” or “Classic” campaign balance?
3. Which level(s) in particular are you referring to? (I’m assuming within the Gamma campaign?)
4. Are you comparing this to prior experience with a different version of WZ (or on a different platform), and if so - when did you play the prior version that differed?

And if you have a savegame from around the time you experienced the “missiles from outside the map”, or your other peak frustrations, please zip up its folder and attach it to a reply so we can take a look.

(Historically, Gamma campaign has always been a noticeable step up in difficulty level. But obviously any additional feedback and details you can provide are useful.)

[NachtRaveVL]

1. Latest
2. Never was presented with a choice when starting a campaign.
3. Gamma campaign, yup
4. This is not about comparing a prior experience, it's about NORMAL DIFFICULTY being ORIGINAL HARD DIFFICULTY. When you have the AI making split-second decisions, constant time-on-target attacks from multiple angles, a total onslaught from an AI that seemingly has unlimited resources it feels more cheaty and less fun. Spending all your time repairing a few units just to survive onslaught after onslaught isn't particularly my idea of NORMAL DIFFICULTY.

What I think the disconnect is is that not everyone who plays this game is a 12 year old Korean kid with lightning fast reflexes. Why don't you guys actually try making a normal difficulty that is normal and not just completely overbearing?

This whole idea that it needs to be the hardest thing you can do, or that the AI needs to be the absolute best it can be - did you guys forget you're making a game? Seriously. Not everyone enjoys that insane level of difficulty, and the way that the Normal difficulty was scrapped and made the original hard AI to make room for even more insane levels of ungodly ability.... You guys forget that the only people playing this shit is old fucks like me who don't care to "rank" or "level up" or "get gud."

How about your make the normal level challenge a normal level challenge and not AI on steroids?

[GiantEnemyCrabKing]

This is a recurring complaint, and their solution is for you to play Super Easy or Easy while they work on making Insane mode harder.

[NachtRaveVL]

This is a recurring complaint, and their solution is for you to play Super Easy or Easy while they work on making Insane mode harder.

WOW I WONDER WHY THAT IS /s

Seriously tho... While that is great and all, can you guys make normal mode just normal again? Please? Not everything needs to be a freaking a challenge to see how hard and difficult you can do it. Some people just want to play a game they played a long time ago and not come out of it with less hair than they started with. Like, touch grass - I mean it!

[past-due]

1. Latest
2. Never was presented with a choice when starting a campaign.

What’s the exact version, listed on the right side of the main screen when you first launch the game?

(If you were never presented with a choice, I’m wondering if you are not actually running the latest version, which changed the screens for launching a new campaign run. And also made numerous improvements to balance.)

Additionally, on what platform did you originally play the game “a long time ago”? (If it was PS1, that port actually significantly reduced damage / made every difficulty level easier. But if you are running version 4.5.2+, you can enable the “PS1 Modifiers” tweak option when starting a new campaign to get that same difficulty / damage scaling you might have been used to in the original PS1 release.)

[NachtRaveVL]

Tilt your head sideways, I don't wanna.

[NachtRaveVL]

Original version as in, fully updated classic win32 version before we got the codebase released and this entire project as a result.

On PC, not PS1.

When you go into custom maps to make a game it's pretty apparent that normal difficulty got replaced with "original hard AI" which is made out to be stupid or something.

[past-due]

@NachtRaveVL Since you are running 4.5.x, please see the settings described here when starting a new campaign: https://wz2100.net/news/new-feature-campaign-selector/

Specifically, you may want to try changing the “Balance” to “Classic”.

From that same screen you can then elect to jump straight into Gamma campaign again with the Classic balance profile. (You’ll be granted some high-rank starting units.)

[NachtRaveVL]

How about you guys actually make the game playable on normal difficulty?

Seriously. That's it. You've made it way too hard. WAY TOO HARD. How many times can I spell it out?

Here. Try this save game file. Do it. Try to win this mission. It's absolutely impossible. You cannot do the Gamma campaign. It is absolutely insane without any sort of more advanced tech like large cannon. You do not have enough tech to even play even remotely at the same level as the opponent - you have hyper velocity cannons and assault cannons, not even the dualies, going against needle guns and lasers. In any multiplayer game you would be balancing between what techs you have and what strengths you've made for yourself - but with the Gamma missions it becomes literally impossible.

You're literally playing 2 tech levels back below the opponent as he just swarms you with VTOLS from off-map. Speaking of which -the CONSTANT SWARMING OF VTOLS IN PARTICULAR is absolutely insane. And the fact that your shitty AA guns just die alongside the repair dudes, I swear.

This is beyond atrocious. It is just bad design. There's not a challenge here - it's just a fucking onslaught of impossible.

Gamma 3 2.zip

[KJeff01]

This is the intended design with Gamma: a vastly superior enemy with a new class of weapons (rails/lasers/missiles), set with baseline damages so high, that they blow through the previous HP and armor upgrades you got in Alpha and Beta. The Project is constantly fighting something intentionally superior to them which is normal for how this game works: it's why they are able to collect new artifacts all the time. This power disparity has always been a thing, and won't matter if you choose the Remastered or Classic balance profiles. The damage output from the bot against your HP/Armor in Gamma are still more of less the same as Pumpkin's PC releases or any of the open-source releases. After all, you are fighting the entity that destroyed the world and is seeking total dominion by crushing The Project.

---

It seems to me you are having trouble against the Angel Missiles and VTOLs here and maybe in the past missions. For the Angel Missiles you can build CB-sensor towers (or units) and have your artillery destroy the few Angel Missile sites on this map. This can be achieved in a few seconds with a few Ripple Rockets or Ground Shakers somewhere in the upper regions of your base connected to a CB tower/unit. Hellstorms have less range and won't be as effective for this purpose though.

The VTOL timer on this mission, however, was always rather short, and for Remastered I can decrease their appearance frequency some more in a future release. In the mean time, you may have noticed that destroying one of the enemy HQs will stop VTOLs from spawning, so you could send some VTOLs to pop the one of the left side of the map near your NorthWestern Oil Derrick and stop any more VTOLs from appearing. Parking about 5-6 heavy body whirlwinds alongside your army will be enough to deal with the VTOLs if you do it the land route way.

---

We may be able to try some sort of buffs for the player in the first half of Gamma during the 4.6 releases some point in the future, but without adapting your tactics to the bot and the layout of the map, it can only do so much without making the Gamma campaign alien to what other players expect.

What is your play style? I mostly ask cause I see you have no base in Gamma 3, with no power, and no ranked units either for someone that has played the game before, which isn't something we see a lot of. While it may be possible to send units to the meat grinder in earlier campaigns, Gamma pretty much makes that very difficult to do without some mid-ranked units or base preparation. This game rewards players that do at least some light preparations with their base and keeping units alive. And that can go a long way.

[KJeff01]

At least one part of your posts mention "custom maps", which I interpret to be Skirmish. Here you'll want to use Nexus (the default AI) since that is designed to mimic the original skirmish AI. The others either have specific play styles or are competitive enough to train people for real multiplayer battles or for something above the default bot.

[NachtRaveVL]

How hard would it be to get the large cannon (or dual assault guns/cannons) at this point? Seriously? "make gun bigger" isn't exactly a complicated idea.

[KJeff01]

The Heavy Cannon from Alpha 11 got obsoleted by the Hyper Velocity Cannon in Beta campaign, and while you still have access to HC through the obsolete tech button, it will be roughly 50% worse and be much slower to move around. The Needle and Scourge Missile could appear around Gamma 4 though not sure when it will be experimented with.

As a general combat tip: Python and Mantis are usually better than the Tiger body when using Tracks for frontline combat units due to their speed advantage, unless said unit is very high ranked or attached to a high rank commander to reduce the damage it receives. Tiger Tracks often can be too slow to go back to repair if low ranked and can cause traffic jams if there are many in a narrow area, so it is better to relegate Tiger tanks to Artillery and Anti-Air weaponry in this case.

[NachtRaveVL]

Alright, I went back through to play campaign 3 Gamma reimagined on easy, and I walked through it like it was nothing. I think I may have an idea what's going on here.

When you play the game from the earlier campaigns, you don't get any of these special units. You are only pulling from the existing units that you built at the end of campaign 2.

As a result, when you start at campaign 3 (not playing through) you get a bunch of high ranked units you don't get if you are playing through from earlier campaigns.

Additionally, in easy, it's almost too easy. The units that were giving me hell earlier gave me no issues, it was like night and day. In fact, I wonder why the extreme ramp in difficulty was there. Are the damage modifiers and defense modifiers just whack, or?

Also, I spotted another thing when it came to oil - in the campaign options you have an option to give you your oil so you don't have to wait down the counter. However, at the end of a mission, you may not have all the oil derricks built. I think this was another issue I was having because in easy mode I had so much oil I didn't know what to do with it and I chalk it up to also building the derricks asap on campaign 3.

[Chewbakka-Wakka]

"PS1, that port actually significantly reduced damage / made every difficulty level easier." - Aha that explains it then.

Fair to say... this can be closed. The title header should be updated as well.