Idea: difficulty level

Unknown

The list of how the AI is crippled is found in many other topics, and we also discussed that much of it, along with other attacker's privileges are deliberate. As winning (and wining with smaller team) is more fun than losing.

But wining against crippled opponent is also less fun than against a proper one.

In other games we can set levels of difficulty, and it influences many aspects -- sometimes resulting in very different gamer experience.

It doesn't fit too well with MPQ but room can be found. It's can be done trivially for games you play locally (prologue).

In competitive arenas the points you get could have a multiplier based on the level played. What requires a deal of playtesting.

The normal difficulty maps to current state without boosts. Picking boosts pushes toward "easy". And toward hard you lose picking opponents, then eventually all the rest including one ability/turn limits.

Once the system in place it opens routes for much variation and further improvements, say based on current placement or points you start getting protected form easier difficulties increasingly.

Unknown

I'm not a big fan of setting an difficulty level because there will likely be one that is 'best' and that'd be the one people play by default. But I think the easiest way to incentivize doing harder stuff would be higher Iso rewards (and maybe a rare chance for HP), and that winning on a 'hard' setting reduces the chances the opponent can retaliate. For example, normally you attacking a 10 point guy is pretty dangerous because he'll almost certainly retaliate you for 35. If winning under the conditions of say, no skip and no boosts reduces the chance of retaliation to 40%, that might be more appealing.

Unknown

Sure, forcing retals to be played at least on the level of original attack would be a trivial and good improvement.

(Or without forcing it would gain just a fraction of points.)