Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013
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Age of Shadows is the more difficult start for planetary (normal) empires, while Classical Era is more difficult for pirate factions. Pirate factions are in general more difficult to play than planetary empires, though this can be somewhat variable.
If you're looking for a low-difficulty game, setting your home system quality to one of the higher settings is a good place to start, as is toning down the strength of the monsters and pirate factions. I would not, however, turn either of these off, as if you do you won't learn how to deal with them, and that could be a problem in the future. Pirates should probably be set to not respawn, and you'll probably want their proximity to be 'average' or 'distant' rather than 'nearby,' as the former two settings (especially 'distant') will result in less harassment by pirates in the early game.
The storylines are a mixed bag, as far as how they affect the game difficulty. This is because the storylines add a lot of really powerful abandoned ships to the game (many of these have to be repaired by a construction ship before they can be used, but some are your run-of-the-mill send-a-ship-to-claim-it abandoned warships), which tends to result in things like pirates who have a 700 firepower capital ship in your home system three years into the game or, very rarely, a planet killer. Things like this can greatly affect the game difficulty, as that kind of ship is very difficult to defeat with early-game tech (it'll happen even with none of the storylines enabled, but the storylines put more abandoned ships like that out there for you, and your enemies, to find). The Return of the Shakturi and Legends storylines additionally each eventually spawn a rather powerful faction (in RotS, it's a planetary empire, while in Legends it's a pirate faction), though the RotS faction is fairly easy to deal with when it first spawns if you decide to just crush it rather than letting the storyline continue to play out but grows more threatening if you let it be, while the Legends faction is rather difficult to deal with at first but the threat it poses tends to diminish with time. Both of these faction spawns tend to be rather rare; you're far from guaranteed to see either in any given game, so the larger concern with game difficulty is the abandoned ships scattered over the map. In player hands, abandoned ships can be an incredible boost to your technology or a great boon to a specific fleet's strength, depending on how you want to handle it (if you don't wan the abandoned ships that you recover to greatly impact game difficulty, order them scrapped immediately and all you'll get from them is a bit of money; 'retire at nearest shipyard' gives you a tech bonus, while keeping them in your fleet typically gives you a ship better than anything you'll be able to make for a bit). The computer typically seems to enlist any abandoned ships it finds into its navy, which makes any fleets which have one or more of these in them somewhat difficult to deal with, which can be a serious obstacle for early or mid-game wars, though on the other hand you'll tend to find you have an advantage in the wars anyways because you're probably better at using your assets efficiently than the computer players are. The storylines add a lot of interesting stuff, it's just stuff that can greatly affect the game difficulty depending on who finds it first.
Aggression settings should probably be kept to 'normal' or perhaps even 'peaceful,' as this will tend to keep wars from sprouting up, though note that this also tends to mean that the computer factions are somewhat stronger, as the computer tends to perform better with lower aggression settings because they're not constantly jumping into wars with all their neighbors and suffering from all the war-related penalties.
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