Talk:Difficulty Levels (Apocalypse)

On funding vs. score

Termination from very low score does actually happen if you just sit around and don't do anything. I'm guessing it's some sort of "X weeks with at least Y negative score", like in the first two games. Magic9mushroom (talk) 14:00, 19 August 2018 (CEST)

Yeah, it's definitely not an instant "below X points and terminate", and whatever the cutoff is it's well above -2400 on Superhuman. I did a "do nothing" test, got -1999 in week 3 and -1500-ish in week 4, and got terminated. If it were an instant thing then I should have either gotten terminated in week 3 or not terminated in week 4; it's definitely something that's accumulated. My assumption is either a very low total score, or some number (between 2 and 4) of weeks below some threshold. Magic9mushroom (talk) 15:34, 19 August 2018 (CEST)

Alien stats change with difficulty

I have confirmed (via mind-controlling a few aliens) that alien stats do in fact increase on higher difficulties. I'm not sure how it works, though, as I only have a few data points (I only have Novice and Superhuman saves, and mind-controlling anything except Anthropods and Skeletoids is highly non-trivial). I'm going to remove the mention of them not changing (since it's clearly wrong) but I won't be able to add a description of what it actually does to their stats. Magic9mushroom (talk) 07:48, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Difficulty Levels affect starting relations

From what I can tell, starting relations of Organisations towards X-COM are affected by difficulty level plus a random modifier. I'm fairly sure the modifier is up to +/-10.

The difficulty modifier is a bit more difficult to pin down, but my limited testing suggests that Organisations that have a default stance of 0 towards X-COM can start at anywhere from -10 to +10 on Novice, and from -20 to 0 on Superhuman. Darkpast (talk) 17:09, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't know the exact numbers either but I always thought it was obvious that it affects starting relations additionally to the random possible value you can get at the start. On top of that, Organizations get angry way faster on Superhuman. So a destroyed road / building part on the Cityscape or anything that gets destroyed during the Battlescape does deduct more from your relation level from that certain Organization. Another thing I'm not too sure on is if the damage you deal to the Organziations budget is also affected by the difficulty level or remains static regardless. Each object that gets destroyed during a Battlescape mission for example causes $50 or $100 damage to the Organization, not exactly sure on the number here though. So either that number is static and the total damage caused gets somehow converted to negative relation or additionally to that the actual $ damage is different for each difficulty setting, maybe making raids more harmful to the Organizations at easier settings. Bard (talk) 19:07, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Starting relations to X-COM (but nobody else) appear to be affected by:

Level	Adjustment
Novice	0%
Easy	+5%
Medium	0%
Hard	-5%
Superhuman	-10%

Don't ask me why Easy is friendlier than Novice. Magic9mushroom (talk) 07:19, 19 July 2020 (UTC)