Note that this is one of most story-driven and lore-enhancing campaigns since Blue Planet. My view was that deliberately excluding novice or less-skilled players (not everyone can improve their skills by practice alone no matter how hard they try) from such world building wasn't fair. They disagreed. So now I’m throwing it out to the community at large to get their views.
I'm somewhat hesitant to comment on this. It feels like I'm having only one side of the story.
So instead I'm just gonna talk about FS2 difficulty in general.
By default, FS2 selects "Easy". Lots of people assume that "Medium" is the baseline difficulty setting. This is wrong:
Insane is the baseline.
On Insane, the player is on level footing with the AI. They fire as fast as you do. They turn as fast as you do. You take as much damage as they do. Your countermeasures last as long as theirs. There's only one exception to this: Even on Insane, the player has better weapon recharge then the others. Aside from that little caveat, everything and everyone on insane follows the rules of the game as put into the tables.
From hard downwards, everyone except you gets debuffs.
All of these can be found in AI profiles.tbl. But there's a few key things that change the overal balance of the game itself:
The enemy AI turns slower with lower difficulties.$AI Turn Time Scale:: 3, 2.2, 1.6, 1.3, 1
You can see what the problem here is no? Using default settings, on any setting other then insane, it's very likely that a ship that's designed to out-turn its opponent isn't able to do so when it is on the enemy team. The whole armor vs manouvrability paradigm shifts around quite a lot due to this. People who try FS2 on hard or insane for the first time will notice this with the Lokis in particular.
Ships are prevented from targeting another ship with too many turrets.$Max Turret Target Ownage: 3, 4, 7, 12, 19
Yup! That's gonna be a problem for balancing your capship battles...
Both friendly and enemy AI fire slower.$Friendly AI Fire Delay Scale: 2, 1.4, 1.25, 1.1, 1
$Hostile AI Fire Delay Scale: 4, 2.5, 1.75, 1.25, 1
$Friendly AI Secondary Fire Delay Scale: 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, 1.2
$Hostile AI Secondary Fire Delay Scale: 1.4, 1.2, 1.0, 0.8, 0.6
On very easy, the friendly AI fires 2x slower then you. The enemy AI fires 2x slower then the friendly AI. On insane, everyone's equal. This affects stuff like beam fire too. A capship battle that's neatly balanced to work on medium can become impossible on hard or insane if this isn't taken into account. This setting in particular also means that the player's wingman become more effective on higher difficulties. After all, they can fire a lot faster! The gameplay itself shifts, moving from an ego shooter to a tactical shooter.
But these are not set in stone.For example, BP's War In Heaven campaign changes this around quite a bit. Notably:
- The friendly AI always fires as fast as the player
- Hostile AI always fires as fast as the player from "Medium/Veteran" difficulty onwards
- Hostile AI turns as fast as tabled from "Medium/Veteran" onwards
- Any capship may target anything freely
To compensate for this, the player gets a few more buffs. A lot of the buffs that the player gets on difficulty levels other then insane are increased, so the player gets a little more energy, can take a bit more damage, etc. compared to the same FS2 vanilla settings.
By changing around the AI Profile settings like this, WiH missions play (almost) the same on any difficulty level. The player simply survives more easily on lower difficulty levels. This does make it significantly easier to balance the game across different difficulty settings without changing the overal feel or the story-as-told-through-gameplay.
And if you want to do something completely different from what WiH or FS2 vanilla are doing, that's also very possible through the AI_Profiles.tbl. You don't have to balance your campaign around a certain difficulty level. You can balance your difficulty levels around your campaign.