Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General What do the different difficulties do?

Hi all,

I'm interested in how the difficulty setting influence the game. You know, with RTS or TBS games, higher difficulty typically just increase the AI's resource and/or building speed (i.e. cheating). I don't know if it's the same in Dragon Commander. I'm playing on Normal and have reached the end of Chapter 2. I must say the AI is very challenging and is one of the best in RTS, and a lot of the fights I couldn't win if I had not the legit cheat option - dragonform.

The biggest difference is that different difficulties increase how smart the AI plays. A playthrough on Hard, even in Chapter one, the AI will use spells and abilities that it normally doesn't, and it will research upgrades it normally wouldn't.

Also on Hard, there are additional enemy units on the map - at least in Chapter 1. I'm not sure about the other chapters.

Now THAT sounds interesting! Too bad it seems that my current save always crash on load if I change the difficulty to Hard .

After some fast comparison I've found difficulty to be directly influencing the dragon spawning time. On Hard it takes 180 seconds before the first spawning while on Casual that's 60 seconds. On Hard the AI has substantially more units on the world map as well.

RTS wise it seems both the AI and its resource don't have any obvious advantages, but the extra initial units they have can really ruin your day.

Trust me, after finishing the hard campaign and doing it again on normal for the other princesses, the biggest difference is the aggression of the PC on the RTS map.



I've seen it react to goldfish sized gaps in my naval blockade to still take rearguard bases away from the front. The damn transports managed to land too with like, 10 hp left.
Pace is relentless too. I can win 3 skirmishes against a Hard PC and still not take a breather as it throws a counter to my surviving forces right away. Against normal, its a done deal when I win the first clash.