Farce’s Normalized Player Difficulty

The purpose of these modifications are to ‘normalize’ the difficulty curve. At each level of difficulty certain under-the-hood difficulty modifiers are tweaked. In short, these seemingly arbitrary percent bonuses, hidden stats, handicaps etc are required for the AI to function and pose a threat at all.

But if you’re like me then you may feel these bonuses and handicaps go too far or are too extreme. The jump from Hard to Legendary is pretty steep occasionally, and this mod ‘normalizes’ this difficulty curve – the game still has difficulty increases at each level but they are reigned in.

Ultimately, this mod does make the game easier. If you’re uncomfortable with the changes in the more detailed summary below that’s completely fine, this mod isn’t for you.

I’ve kept these mods separate for greater choice, flexibility, and compatibility.

The ‘Player’ Difficulty Mod

This mod is targeted at the player experience, so mainly bonuses, handicaps, and penalties placed upon the player and not the AI. See the companion mod for those. It’s quite larger, by virtue most of the difficulty tweaking is AI-focused (naturally).
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Troop Morale Handicap/Bonus: Did you know your units had negative modifiers to their leadership on higher difficulties? Personally, I’m not a fan of uneven playing fields in regards to units on the battlefield. The player also received a bonus to morale on Easy, which I’ve removed.

• Easy – from +4 morale to 0.
• Normal – had none.
• Hard – had none.
• Very Hard – from -5 morale to 0.
• Legendary – from -5 morale to 0.

Public Order Penalty/Bonus: This is a well known penalty on the player. It felt harsh, so the handicap has been weakened overall. Legendary had a penalty of -8 Public Order (PO). That feels excessive to me, at least!

• Easy – Has a bonus of +1 PO, this has been kept.
• Normal – No bonus or handicap.
• Hard – Handicap of -2 PO, is now -1.
• Very Hard – Handicap of -4 PO, is now -2.
• Legendary – Handicap of -8(!) PO, is now -4.

Number of Armies Upkeep Handicap: The game does explain to you that each additional army increases the upkeep of all your armies, but each difficulty this value changes. Of note is that Very Hard and Legendary had the same upkeep increase of 15%. It’s now less punishing, and each difficulty has its own unique % value.

• Easy – Upkeep increase of 1%, kept the same.
• Normal – Upkeep increase of 2%, kept the same.
• Hard – Upkeep increase of 7%, now 5%.
• Very Hard – Upkeep increase of 15%, now 7.5%.
• Legendary – Upkeep increase of 15%, now 10%.

Player Imperium Diplomacy Handicap: The player gets slapped with some decent diplomacy penalties once they start taking a few territories. There are seven levels of Imperium, with each incurring a proportionate and corresponding diplomacy penalty. Across the board this effect has been halved.

• Imperium 1: No penalty.
• Imperium 2: Diplomacy penalty of -10, now -5.
• Imperium 3: Diplomacy penalty of -20, now -10.
• Imperium 4: Diplomacy penalty of -30, now -15.
• Imperium 5: Diplomacy penalty of -40, now -20.
• Imperium 6: Diplomacy penalty of -50, now -25.
• Imperium 7: Diplomacy penalty of -60, now -30.

Player Autoresolve Penalties: The player receives negative modifiers in AutoResolve (AR) based on difficulty. This makes sense, but I’m not a huge fan of having to AR trivial battles. The effectiveness of a unit in AR calculations was decreased by a % value based on difficulty. These effects have been tweaked.

• Easy – 1% penalty, effectively null and remains.
• Normal – 5% penalty, is now 2.5%.
• Hard – 7.5% penalty, is now 5.0%.
• Very Hard – 10% penalty, is now 7.5%.
• Legendary – 15% penalty, is now 10%.

In addition, across all difficulties there was a flat 15% penalty in AR when attacking any AI settlement. This is halved to 7.5%.

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This mod alters the following tables:

_kv_morale_tables
campaign_difficuty_handicap_effects
effect_bundles_to_effects_junctions_tables
autoresolver_modifier_group_to_modifier_table

This mod renames the tables so they should be compatible with mods that affect other entries within them so long as they don’t change the specific lines I have. A lot of your garden-variety large mods may be incompatible, but not in a sense they’ll crash your game. Rather, only one mod in the load order will take effect. Hopefully.

I don’t use SFO, so I have no idea and can’t help you there.

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Like all my mods this is really made for me, but feel free to make suggestions. I make these to learn, cut down on mod bloat, and implement what I want to see. If there are specific things you disagree with consider downloading pack file manager and changing it yourself! You’ll see it isn’t hard and soon you’ll be tweaking plenty of mods. Enjoy!