(August 16th, 2016, 12:34)Tiltowait Wrote:(August 16th, 2016, 11:59)rgp151 Wrote: Just because it's called impossible doesn't mean that it should be impossible
I disagree. It's exactly what it says, why is anyone surprised?
The computer players get 4x advantage and at the time the game was made the designers didn't think anyone could beat it. Today, players regularly beat v1.31 on Impossible. Amazing.
At the time, "Impossible" mode was added to give the game additional life for expert players. And that it did. If MoM didn't have Impossible, the game would have long ago been discarded like so many other forgotten strategy games. But, with the extra challenge, it lasted long enough to attract Seravy's attention and he modded it and fixed a ton of bugs and greatly improved the computer players. So, Impossible has been reset to be even further out of reach. Outstanding! Nobody will ever get bored, there will always be another challenge.
So, I have to ask, if you haven't even mastered Hard yet and gotten bored with it, why are you playing on Impossible? Heck, one of the great joys of v1.5 for me was ratcheting down my level to Normal. Wow, playing the game fairly for once! No CP advantages of any kind! Just a straight fight! I heartily enjoyed these games. Now, I'm playing on Hard and it is indeed hard.
As you say, I think I just got used to always playing 1.31 on Impossible, but then when moving on to 1.4 and 1.5 those settings become truly impossible. In 1.31 I could regularly beat Impossible. In 1.41 I could beat Extreme, but never beat Impossible. IN 1.5 even Extreme is insane and Hard is in many ways harder than Impossible in 1.31.
I kind of agree with your point, but not entirely. I think that before Impossible was obviously not impossible, but I think now it is.
Having said that, I do now feel better about playing on "only" Hard, but it seems silly to me to have levels that are unplayable.
And I never really liked the old Impossible that much, and think the game still suffers from basically the same problem, which is that the way the difficulty settings work it puts the entire challenge at the start of the game. Playing on the harder levels has basically become a startup challenge, not a whole game challenge. The challenge is, can you survive the first 50 turns. Once you've gotten on your feet it's a whole different game, and much less challenging (though I will say that with 1.5 it *IS* more consistently challenging throughout the game).
But yeah, in the old version it was just all about getting on your feet, and then once that was done the game was essentially over, you just had to play for another hour to actually end it if you wanted to. I quit many games once it became clear I was in a dominant position. It is defiantly less like that now, and that's good.
I think my main point is that I prefer that the difficulty level create a challenge that is less about just making it past the first 50 turns and more about on-going difficulty throughout the game. I think that in 1.5 now, with the old difficulty advantages still in place, the game is basically unplayable on Impossible and even Extreme unless you happen to get some ideal start (which I have never gotten). The starting advantage is so strong that there really no way to possibly deal with it. (Maybe you could do it with an 11 book Death start...maybe...).
So if those levels are indeed unplayable (except maybe restarting like 20 times until you get an ideal setup) then there is really no point to them and they should be toned down a little.