I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks combat units are relatively inefficient compared to Champion armies armed with magic.

I've won each victory type on Normal, and enjoyed the games though they were simple victories (once I learned how to efficiently multitask in the early game).  There are definitely many ways to hamstring yourself that aren't readily apparent (at least not to me, though I might be a slow learner), and Normal difficulty seems balanced well to give you lots of wiggle room and still pull out the win.

Played a custom (caster-heavy) empire on Challenging that didn't seem any tougher than Normal, so I'm going to see if I can repeat that with mostly melee builds before trying Hard.  I like to do lots of exploring while I build up my city/unit strength, and I like bullying the AI through diplomacy (making them pay me for peace), so I'll probably get pulverized on the harder levels (which I'll try a time or two just to bring me down from my earlier successes).

In the future, I expect to find my fun/challenge balance at either Challenging or Hard levels.  (And no, Kongdej, challenging means you can win, but you have to work at it, while hard means you might not win even if you work at it, so the terms are in the correct order, in my opinion.)

Thanks Orion for the summary post!!  very interesting data set we have here

I totally agree with yuo that having the bell curve with a median sitting on challenging means the devs have got the difficulties about right

oh, Glazunov, how come you play mages on easy?  I find that magic based champs/sov make the harder difficulty levels easier due to being able to exploit spell synergies.  (I took out a city with my Sov, garrisoned to the hilt, by using contagion and range damage spells, and a lot of running away )

There are very rigid steps you have to follow to be "Viable" in the current game, which I think is sad.
turn 1: Cast inspiration on your first city,
turn 1: If you have earth magic, cast enchanted hammers on your first city
first few turns, build a pioneer, or 2, or 3, so you can resource grab from the AI.
First 50 turns its better to run on No taxes setting, as to maximimize production and research.
It helps alot to atleast research the 1st prestige boosting research as the first research ever, then aim for basic weaponry, and some grain boosting research. (My starting research is pretty rigid, sad to say).

If you do that it will give you a tremendous boost in the early game
Asking me, not informing players about this in the tutorial (or even keeping the mechanics as is, in full release) is a mistake.
Hope you can use it.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

started 3 player  medium map game on easy.

played a couple of 8 player large map games on normal.

moved up to 5 player large map game on challenging.

I agree that endgame is easier than early midgame.  Once an AI's cities begins to fall, it's like dominoes.

maybe it's because I'm playing on large maps with dense resources.  Having 9 water shard resources makes slow spell very (too?) powerful.  Large slow monsters become near statues once they're hit with a slow spell.  I look forward to large monsters, trolls, slags, ogres, they're easy with high level slow.

One suggestion is to limit the benefits of extra shards to the spell level of the caster, perhaps only 2 shards of bonus's per spellcaster level.  That way a fireball from an archmage would be much more powerful than one from a flame disciple.

Challenging and hard

I don't like when AI has to cheat...............

Ridiculous. But I won't play until next beta again since Stardock works on next Beta which will release in a few weeks and I am short of free time...
I am an optimizer (not only but in majority) in TBS and still like myself a challenge (also makes for good testing what stuff is easy to abuse and what stuff is completely and vastly over the top. So even while it is not a measure and test for good overall balance its a good way to test the limits and report on those findings...)

As for Question number 3: Might sound a bit odd but I for one hope that I will be able to turn the difficulty down some way further down in time thanks to Frogboy getting the AI up to par to give that experience on hard either... (that point may come when the AI starts to excessively use strategic spells to good effect and a few other things...) So long-term I'm looking forward to being able to turn down the difficulty a notch and still find the level of challenge I like. Which means there would still be a way to dial up the difficulty to even more insane heights (even without modding not being a good modder myself as well as feeling a game of TBS would lack without such a variety of difficulties in both directions) if I'm really up for a bonkers experience...
On that front the game is actually heading into a good direction...

I believe challenging is the best ai without cheating

Thanks, as always, for your input, StevenAus.  BTW, for the sake of the next time that I update the statistics on this Discussion thread (like I did in my Reply #27 above), I plan to count you as someone who plays on the Insane level (unless you tell me otherwise).  I am doing that on the basis of your own excellent Discussion thread (" I finished Insane Difficulty ... "), which (acknowledgement is due here!) was one of the reasons that I decided to start this thread.  Thanks! 

Synergy is a good thing ...

On difficulties up to hard you do NOT have to use inspiration from the start. Nor do you have to use enchanted hammers from the start.  I tend to use them more mid game to give  abit of a boost once I have some decent shard resources.

Getting your sov up a few levels gives a massive boost to city growth, so that precious 2 mana per turn can get used for helping the Sov.

Expert, I'd agree that it's almost a requirement to use inspiration.  But only because you actually need more than heroes running around on Expert.

Definately agree on the research path at the beginning though!!  There is absolutely no way it is worth doing anything other than the first 3 or 4 civics before anything else besides shard harvesting.

If I want to turn on the AI sees through FOW, where do I go? Would be interesting to change only that and see how much harder challenging becomes.

Go to ElementalDefs.xml and search for Difficulty. That section determines the difficulty of the vanilla choices. AI sees through FoW is a tag set to 0 or 1. 1 means it can and 0 means it can't. This is a huge bonus for the AI and I think the vanilla settings only allow it to do so on Ridiculous. 

I'd agree in general but there are definite exceptions. I'm forgetting names but either of the two factions that allow you to buy up loits of champiosn early (either free champions or heaps of cash - Kraxis) there can be a lot of merit in researching the Magic tree up to Heroes firs tup ot nab any nearby level 5 heroes.

I generally won't touch military at the beginning, but there are some scenarios where you want a couple of spearmen up early.