Personally, I strongly dislike most implementations of difficulty levels and tend not to play those games. I like a very clear and distinct differentiation between AI level (or starting funds) and *opponent cheating*.
I'm 100% with ya there. I don't like "game AI's cheating" at all. The problem is usually the difficulty of programming AI. Most game software companies neglect research on AI and then resort to cheating to make the games more challenging.
Without going too far, just the fact of being outnumbered 15 to 1 is a form of game cheating. If the game AI were any good, in any game, you could not possibly be outnumbered 15 to 1 and survive, no matter how good you are.
In the case of Privateer (the original) I was very annoyed by how the enemies seem to know when you're turning close enough to get them back on screen, and at that moment they switch to flying the other way. It seemed to me it was just a cheap trick to have me go to the hospital with carpal syndrom from moving the mouse too much for too long; only to then fly away in a straight line, for them to be blown away. As if the whole purpose of the exercise was not to defeat me, but just to just make my arm fall off, in real life. Unfortunately, the remake follows the original here. I wish it did not.
But so, it seems to me we're getting good ideas from all this debating. If we agree that game cheating is no good, and that crippling enemy AI is no good either, then maybe the answer is to, for all difficulty levels, keep AI maxed out, keep cheating to a minimum, and change something else that changes the difficulty. And what could something else be? Number of enemies? Strength of their blasters?
This is a topic I've given some thought. I read somewhere that in the original Privateer, the strength of the enemies gradually goes up after you upgrade your guns. I hated it when I read that. That meant that all my attempts at making the game LESS difficult for myself by buying more powerful blasters was self-defeating, so next time I played the game I stayed with lasers till the end, but improved everything else. And it worked!
But I simpathize with the programmer's dilemma: How to make the game challenging. I just think they chose a bad solution. Because a game should not assume that every player
wants to be challenged. I did not. I wanted to upgrade the ship so that fighting enemies would be easier, and STAY easier.
Here's a possible solution that would a) do away with the need for difficulty settings, and b) do away with the assumption that every player wants the game to get progressively harder:
Have some systems far away from the fronteer with the kilrathi, say from Troy to New Detroit be fairly quiet and peaceful, but with not too much profit to be made. Make trade to fronteer systems very profitable. Then, a naturally challenged player like me can choose to stay away from trouble and make money slowly, and only venture into the hot zones after having upgraded the ship and equipment to make it overwhelmingly powerful. For the less challenged players, have a score system that is greater the shorter the time they take to finish the game, so that they can compare scores, like "I finished the game in 5 days"; "Oh yeah? I finished it in 4 days and 9 hours." I'd be happy to finish it in two months and let them brag about their scores.
Meanwhile, the enemy AI is the same for all players, and the level of challenge follows geographical location, instead. And to make things more interesting, other than the kilrathi fronteer, there'd be higher pirate concentrations to the south, and higher retro concentrations to the north, or something along the lines; and you could become a pirate or a retro, of course.
Anyways, I'm not proposing the above, merely suggesting that there can be better solutions, and worse solutions, to the problem; that the various tastes of different players can be accomodated without necessarily having "levels of difficulty".