I support making the lower difficulty levels easier, but titan difficulty instead needs a tune up in challenge and design. any future changes to this difficulty level should focus more on making it more intuitive with the instructions and the triggers while upping the challenge rather than simply making it easier to clear.
several missions need to be harder and with more ai opponents or bases. other times the instructions are
a trap, the triggers punish you for success or the rewards are so bad your better of deleting them, such as colossus island.
please increase the challenge while also making it play better.
Colossus island is indeed a trap. But I’m not sure how to fo it better, other than simply not having attacks there. That level is otherwise quite easy.
31 front shore is also a trap.
However, i think such traps are generally ok in some levels, because it forces you to think outside the box. But not colossus island, that’s just bad.
if you send your initial batch of villagers back to the island to mine before your found out, and build a fort and a tower on the shoreline the ai can never challenge you there. forts deal so much damage to ships it makes water more pointless than in aoe3. the siege ships the ai sends are not good enough and the fort deals with any early landing party that manages to reach it.
the problem is that the gifted colossus every few minutes is not worth the effort to transport them at all with how many priests the ai army has. they either need a massive stat buff just for this mission, be gifted in a batch or replaced entirely with siege weapons. because currently its more effective to just delete the colossus and make more regular units that aren’t erased by priests. I’ve actually tested this and an elephant lasts longer in this mission than the colossus.
most of the Egyptian campaign isn’t fun because of how easily mass priests shred your myth units and how outclassed your barrack units are. you just auto pilot to stronghold units and hope you get Thoth to effectively double your economy.
you are right in that the mission currently is too easy though. i wish it was harder, but also more fun and rewarding to engage with its mechanics.
i don’t mind traps if its more funny and played for laughs rather than frustrating and a huge waste of time. spending 30 minutes to do something only to realize it was all pointless is not something i want.
It depends: having a mission “difficulty” by being clear the AI or the mission parameters are bugged is not fun, like Mission 18, where if you open the AI script it’s clear a dev ###### ### because the AI script header start as:
" fott18_p2.xs
Red Greek player owning the base in the north (Troy). Sends attacks of Hoplite, Hippeis, Prodromos, Petroboli."
Meaning they copy pasted the AI script from mission 5, changed things but forgot to finish the script and left a lot of values unfinished from mission 5 that did not made sense for mission 18.
In these kind of cases they should make Titan difficulty easier, because it’s not working in the intended way.
But in general, yeah, Titan difficulty can be difficulty, and sometimes they should even buff some missions on Titan to give an extra challenge.
When i did 19 the ai would land with a leviathan, which is practically impossible to kill with fortress fire. The leviathan would land 3+ scarabs, 6+ camels, 3 priests and a pharoth. This kind of army requires an army of your own, no fortress spam can hold that.
So i just decided to stomp over the enemy by spamming elephants and priests. No need for colossi.
i just tried it again with no mods activated, and it seems that the leviathan is bugged if the fort is on the shoreline. maybe that is why my experience is different from yours.
There is one thing you need to take in mind, in Retold, you can build villager centres.
If your start resource is allowed, you should being your campaign with building a villager centre to double the speed of villager training for later on.
