I'm excited to be releasing further custom difficulty options with this update!

There are now two difficulty settings that can be altered both on starting a new game and at any time from the Options screen in-game:

Economic / Recruitment Difficulty

This affects income from battles and the quality of recruits that are offered every four weeks during the season. There are four modes ranging from 'Easy' to 'Nightmare'. Easy mode allows the player a more relaxed financial simulation with generally higher quality recruits on offer. Hard and Nightmare modes, on the other hand, give those bonuses to the AI, making for tougher campaigns.

Battle Difficulty

Battle Difficulty settings are, for now, quite simple. They operate by giving either the player or the AI global bonuses to attack, defence and damage, jumping on the back of the perk/advantage system.

Easy mode gives the player a 10% universal advantage in all battles, while Hard and Nightmare give 10% and 20% advantages to the AI instead.

'Normal' settings will make no difference to the current game - so if you are happy with the balance as it is, just leave the game on Normal!

Future Plans

Once I have some feedback on whether 'Easy' is really easy enough, and 'Nightmare' is really hard enough, I plan to create a semi-Ironman mode for Hard & Nightmare where those difficulty settings will only be changeable on starting a new game and will not be alterable thereafter.

I then intend to release a limited number of bonus achievements that will only be possible in Hard and Nightmare Ironman modes.

Other balancing, fixes and presentation changes in v.1.2

• Ever so slightly reduced energy loss for all fighters during battle.
• Fixed a bug with AI team selection vs the player when enemy had some healthy fighters but not enough for a complete team. This was creating duplicates and strange crashes. (FYI – sometimes the AI will desperately sign a new fighter just to make up numbers at the last minute, so they may not always appear on the selection screen – though surprise last minute signings will usually be poor, the AI having previously decided they weren’t good enough but being forced into signing them to make up the numbers).
• Fixed some minor issues with presentation of perk/class advantages in Detailed Battle Report.
• Fixed a minor colour presentation bug in Detailed Battle Report.