I found some new badge icons in the folder that came with the latest patch.
In the red circle I marked, you can clearly see five different difficulty levels — Easiest, Standard, Moderate, Hard, and Legendary — each with its own banner.
Pretty sure these are for the upcoming Three Kingdoms campaign, but not sure if they’ll be added to older campaigns too.
Also, I have a feeling this might be related to that bug where everyone’s campaign badges got downgraded by one level.
Your theories are more than welcome — feel free to share.
The gold medal was the “third” in ascending order, but now silver would take it’s place now, so that might explain why specifically medals turned to silver.
I agree. The legendary one (diamond) looks pretty awful.
Also, seems rather unnecessary to have additional difficulty levels. Standard/Moderate/Hard were just fine for campaigns.
it was communicated with the dlc announcement that these are for the new campaigns. That it messed with the current medals is another indicator for the fact that the 3 Kingdoms stuff was actually not supposed to be in the main game
Ah, I totally missed that. So the Easiest and Legendary difficulties were originally meant just for the Three Kingdoms campaign, but they ended up getting merged into multiplayer too.
Just because people wanted Romans in multiplayer doesn’t mean they wanted three different Chinese civs in there. Sadly, it’s been a slippery slope ever since the Return of Rome DLC.
The medals changed one tier back, so if you earned gold before, now it’s silver. That’s obviously because there is a new higher tier. This bug becomes clear once you start the game after the new patch, like immediately. There is no way this could be an oversight. So the explanation is, they moved the 3K to the main game relatively late while developing and didn’t have time to fix it.
It kind of make sense for someone who know programming. Programmers often use number for data storing, because it’s easier for comparing, checking, editing etc. So let’s assume:
0 = standard, 1 = moderate, 2 = hard
They your got a value of 2 in your data, for a golden medal. But now with Three Kingdoms difficulties:
0 = easy, 1 = standard, 2 = moderate …
Your ‘2’ medal is a sliver now.
That being said, this is pure speculation with zero proof of what really happened, but that’s kind of funny, and it just make sense for me, who learned a bit of programming.
If they do a legendary difficulty level, they should have to playtest them first to check no scenario has become impossible.
Looking at their incompetence to give a correct sword rating campaign to many campaigns, I do not trust that they have even playtest them correctly in the past.
Instead of adding another difficulty level, it would be better if they revised the campaigns and modify them to increase the difficulty on the current hard difficulty and make them more interesting. There’s lots of campaigns where the AI is pretty pasive and you are never really at risk. And even the last scenario is not always the most difficult of the campaign and you don’t really need to take advantages of the bonuses of your civ.
That is what the bug probably is. The biggest clue that the function that determines the medals is universal in the game code is that the medals in Return of Rome and in Chronicles are also bugged. The devs probably playing with the new difficulty level just used said function not realizing that it meesed up the other campaigns too.
I would like to see the following in higher difficulties:
• No pausing – Forces real-time decisions and better multitasking.
• No manual saving – Auto-saves only at key checkpoints (or not at all).
• Tougher AI – More aggressive, smarter enemy behaviour.
Yeah, I feel so let down over the medal bug that I’ve lost all hype for the new DLC. I mean why play the campaigns on any difficulty if they can be reset at any time…
