Something similar was in Alpha Centauri, although it was pretty fair. The smaller civs would ally together against the biggest civ, player controlled or not. Unfortunately this meant it was hard to ally when your civ was big, unless another civ of similar size was around.

This whole thing reminds me of the time I became the only one ever to pass the Kobayashi Maru test. They said it couldn't be done, but all it needed was some thinking outside of the box.


Wait...I don't actually think that was me.

They didn't fix it in the official patches, the bug was discovered too late for that. There may be an AI mod that addresses it, but I'm out of the loop with regard to Civ4 mods. Your best bet is to ask at the Civ4 modding forum at CivFanatics. This is the largest community of Civ4 modders, and someone there will be able to answer the question better than I can.

Falken: "I never could get Joshua to learn the most important lesson."
David: "What's that?"
Falken: "Futility."

I have the same feeling. I do apprecieate games where you can switch difficulty during the game, but I don't like it when the game does that for me.

Then again, there are games where dying is actually a key component to proceed in the story. But I guess those are excepted from your statement.

My thoughts when reading the title was rather the opposite direction of the OP, and more in order of the Wargames quote - the games not understanding that throwing more stuff at me is quite futile (GTA and Saints Row games being guilty of this - I have unlimited rockets, your puny attack helis and tanks are nothing I can't handle and just annoy me by piling up in my way).

Why? It happened all the time in ancient / medieval diplomacy. They are your allies, but when they have an option:

a) be buttraped by your unified enemy
b) let them pass and buttrape you for exchange of non-aggression

I would choose B all the time.

It's actually pretty human behaviour. If i see a force gathering near my borders I simply can't defend against, I always let them through, especially in games like EU3 or CK2.

Being your ally does not mean willing to die for you. Not in politics. By the way, it should be you who declares war on your former ally because he betrayed you, not the other way around.

Good point. :) But yeah, I wasn't talking about these games. ;)

I recall some Wing Commander 4 mission which I replayed like a couple dozen times and I was ready to give up, but suddenly two or three enemy ships collide together and blow up in front of my eyes, helping me immensely to beat the mission. I guess pilots were The Three Stooges.

But that was just luck through repetition. Or maybe that's what WC4 wants me to think?!?

Then there's e.g. Spec Ops: The Line, which kept bugging me all the time "Come on, you have already died a couple hundred times on this level. Let me lower the difficulty for you, ok?".

Shut up soldier! You can't just run away like chicken shit, even if you die lots of times! You just have to press harder if you die, and not lower the difficulty! Now get up and stop that whining "Oh, I'm so dead..."!

The reason I'd want such a system (and I just jumped into this thread, I'm not the previous poster) is that predefined difficulty settings mean very little. Some experienced players consider the 'hard' level of some games to be too easy, some players consider the 'easy' level to be hard. It varies by player and by game, and there's no way to tell up front when coming to a game how easy or difficult a particular level will be for you.

The easiest solution is to allow the player to switch difficulty mid game, and provide a very wide range of difficulty settings, but using adaptive difficulty could provide a more seamless gaming experience.

If 'easy', 'normal' and 'hard' are interpreted as intentions (how much the player is willing to be frustrated and retry a challenge) and the game adapts to the player skill, then that would likely result in a smoother difficulty curve that's more fitting for the player than when the difficulty level are treated as fixed.

Wait a tic. Wing Commander 4, Settlers 4.
I've found the primer!

I'm against adaptive difficulty, at least if it can't be switched off. So what if I want to replay the level two hundred times in the hardest difficulty? That's my prerogative. The game shouldn't be a bouncer telling me "I think you've had enough of this level already, time to move on...".

I'd add to that that give several options how to change the difficulty. For example: in RTS games I want the enemy AI be as hard as nails, but I do not necessarily want e.g. tight time limits in all missions (where it doesn't make sense), or restricting how I many times I can save the game, or at what speed the game will run. Like in some newer Blizzard RTS games selecting a higher difficulty also meant you couldn't slow down the game speed anymore. That's just so wrong.

The first System Shock had the right idea, I think it gave you four different ways to change the difficulty, like puzzles, how hard the enemies are, whether there is a time limit to save the Citadel etc. More options is gooooood!

I think that it is more a matter of having played it countless times, you know know the map and the situation very well - and when you see an opportunity present itself you you are more able of taking advantage of it.

I would say that it is more a matter of learning the map and the game and you adjusting yourself to the situation, rather than the game adjusting itself to you. This happens subconsciously, off course, so it seems that the game is suddenly easier, while it in fact did not change.

99% of the time that's what I attribute it to but this was a little different. If I go too much into it becomes a thread about S4 which isn't even on GOG and besides takes away from what turned out to be a more interesting topic than I thought when I made the OP.

I will say this. I didn't learn the map. :P I couldn't! I kept getting my ass handed to me before I could expand enough to learn any of it. That's how sudden this turn around was.