What does difficulty effect?
 

In SH3 the AI was the same and you adjusted the realism to your play style. What about in SH4? DO the different difficulty levels effect AI as well?

nobody knows? :nope:

As far as I know it's the same as it was in SH3.

As far as I can tell it doesn't affect the AI, only the realism pre-sets. (which you can alter anyway)

Someone may have a more definitive answer but I have tried easy for a training patrol and done four on hard and not noticed any difference.

I don't know about AI but acording to the manual it affects renown. At 100% realism you recieve full renown for every ship, at 0% realism you get 25% renown for every ship and so on.

Any definitive word on this yet?

My first career I selected "normal." I realized that this had auto targeting etc enabled so I scraped that career. Then I heard about the books with the realism options.

Started new career and I believe that I just left the difficulty setting on it's default "easy" because I knew I would ramp up the realism in the ready room. So I flavored the realism to my taste (74%) and was on my way. I've encounted some really sorry escorts and I fear that the "easy" setting is having some effect aside from realism (maybe I'm just parinoid :o)

So the question remains: is the difficulty setting at the start of a career just a lazy way of selecting realism options, or does it have additional effects (frequency of contacts, AI etc.) ?

Thoughts?

I do not believe it affects the AI warships. It just seems to be a preset what you can do with the sub....unlimited fuel, outside view, etc.