In the Civilization thread, GreasyJack says about Crusader Kings II:
This reminded me of Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl where a beginning player is better off on Medium difficulty than Easy. The reason why being that Easy lowers bullet damage globally so, while you can take more hits, so can your opponents. So fewer quick-kill headshots on them and more rounds spent by you each fire fight, longer fights potentially requiring more bandages, etc. The game mechanics penalize you in a sense for playing on Easy.
Can anyone think of other examples? I’m not talking about the recent “Play this game on regular so you learn faster” debate but rather actual mechanics issues making “Easy” a poor choice.
In Medieval 2: Total War, “Easy” was indeed easiest, but if you were trying to play economically rather than conquer-at-all-costs, I found that hard or very hard were easier than medium in one way: the AI was more likely to besiege a place long-term when the difficulty was Medium than when it was higher, but it wasn’t good enough to actually win those castle assaults. So you had to drag (and sometimes even raise) armies to the citiy to relieve it rather than wait for the AI to beat itself to death against your walls.
But the slower growth rate more than made up for that difficulty aspect, so overall Medium was a bit easier than Hard.
Well, with CK2, if you are playing the game just to get the highest score it is definitely easier to start as an “easy” character who already has a bunch of vassals and holdings. But the whole scoring mechanism is really just an afterthought. Most people ignore it and just play the game as an open-ended sandbox of medieval politics. It’s usually a lot more fun and rewarding to start out as some lowly character and scramble your way up to being a king or emperor than to start as one.
OpenRA, the high-resolution Red Alert mod, works exactly like this. On the “Easy” setting the AI will build a dozen troops or so and steamroll your base after a couple of minutes, while the higher difficulties will make it build up more troops and buildings and consequently allow you more time to build defences.
Not that it’s a very challenging game to begin with, but Heroes of Might and Magic IV is easier on higher difficulties. On Easy, the neutral creature stacks are small, so the AI players go out and kill them right away, expanding their territory. On the harder levels, the neutral stacks are big, and the AI players are afraid of them, and thus slower to expand (if they do at all). Other installments in the series don’t seem to have this problem.
I’m sure I remember some game where the monsters give you power-ups, but easy difficulty has less monsters, and so you end up underpowered by the time you reach the boss… But I can’t remember what it is.
And not quite the same thing, but in Ultima: Exodus, leveling up makes the game much harder. The random enemies you meet depend on your level, and the low-level monsters can be defeated instantly by one of two trivial spells, but higher-level monsters are much more powerful, and you don’t actually gain any abilities from leveling, just more HP. The rewards for beating more powerful monsters don’t even scale all that much with level (any encounter gives you 1-99 GP rolled randomly, and an encounter with dragons will give you approximately the same amount of worthless XP as an encounter with goblins).
In Guild Wars the temporary benefits from spell buffs in some class builds depended on the amount of damage your character received: the more damage you took, the longer the buff would last.
In harder dungeon difficulties it was possible to maintain the buffs permanently, allowing your character to be virtually impervious to damage. In lower difficulties or easier dungeons the amount of damage wasn’t enough to maintain the buffs indefinitely and your character had a bigger chance of dying.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is famous of this - enemies tend to gain power much faster than the player, especially if you are stupid enough to select skills you actually use for your class skills, potentially making the game impossible eventually.
Front Office Football 2k7 was harder on the medium setting than the hard one. The AI played by the same salary cap room as the players and was unable to manage it properly.
Teams would death spiral into cap hell , have to cut their stars and star players were a dime a dozen on the Free Agency Market and few AI teams could compete for them.
On the medium settings it’s easier to manage contracts and the computer doesn’t lose as many players as it does on hard so you have a smaller FA class to choose from making the game harder.
Remembered another one: The indie game Gratuitous Space Battles. There’s an enemy fleet deployment, and you have some budget to deploy a fleet of your own and give them orders, and then you hit start and watch the carnage. Every mission has an easy, medium, and hard version. All three have the same budget, the same alien race, and the same spatial anomalies, but different enemy deployments. The thing is, though, there’s no real correlation with difficulty. Like, maybe you’re not really good at dealing with a whole huge swarm of small fighters, in which case the enemy deployment that has that is going to be a problem for you… But maybe you’ve worked out which techniques work really well against fighters, and it’s just the heavy cruisers that cause you problems, in which case the swarm-of-fighters deployment is the easy one for you.
The AI of* Blood Bowl* is pretty crap at the game regardless of the setting, but on Hard it plays super conservatively and protects its ball at all cost. Including the cost of moving forward to score. If there’s even the slightest threat to the ball carrier it will bunker down and as long as you can score on your own drive, that’s the game.
On Easy, the AI will do completely stupid stuff and take insane risks. Sometimes it rolls a couple 6s or you turnover trying to punish a dumb move of its and the risk pays off.
Not quite what the OP is looking for, but they did a team-of-superheroes role-playing game where (spoilers? really?) one of the crimefighters secretly masterminded the whole thing to frame a supervillain – so if you miss a planted clue or fail to get the drop on the bad-guys-for-hire or whatever, he moves the plot along by brandishing stuff he prepared in the first place and so of course knew about all along.
So if you make the game hard by playing through with underpowered characters, he does this a lot and can more easily be discovered – but if you make it easy by playing through with folks built to ace checks left and right, he hangs back without ever doing anything incriminating or even suspicious, leaving you with no actual clues to analyze.
Who Watches The Watchmen, which Google tells me was an award-winning DC Comics role-playing game in the '80s (right around when, y’know, Watchmen came out).
(Here’s a link – which of course doesn’t reprint the adventure, but click on one of the pages and see what it helpfully spells out: “The advantage to having [the costumed hero] actually run by a Player instead of the GM is that the other Players will be less likely to suspect that [he] organized the kidnappings.”)
In Banished, starting on Hard is way easier than starting on an easier difficulty. Easier difficulties start you off with seeds and more people, this makes it tempting to farm, but agriculture just isn’t sustainable at that point in the game. Especially since you’ll probably only be able to manage one or two farms at best, so if you’re not massively overproducing food a single blight could send you into a starvation spiral.
It’s much better to just start with the smaller number of people and rely on the (frankly, somewhat overpowered) hunting and gathering until you grow a bit.
To be fair, if you know this already easy and medium can be viable “quick start” options and are indeed easier, but if you’re a complete newbie easy and medium lead you into doing things that will probably ruin you.
I see you qualified it as relevant to only newbies.
Gathering and hunting can appear to be better than agriculture if you use the default 15x15 fields with four workers each, but this is far from optimal. Some folks have crunched the numbers, and 11x11 (or 10x12) fields with one worker each give excellent yields. Way, way better than gatherer’s huts and hunting lodges. Maybe your first year will be rougher if you go without agriculture, but a hard start will definitely slow you down.
Although, in fairness, this is true only if you’re for some reason unwilling to use the difficulty slider. You can make pretty much everything die in a single hit by turning the difficulty down (which you can do at any time), which I think disqualifies it for this thread.