FreeGameDev

So, I ran through the "Off the Beaten Track" Grand Prix on Expert difficulty through Story Mode (I have already beaten it, but I find that I run the preconfigured story-mode races more than set up my own races). Since Zen Garden does not like my graphics driver (already in another topic), I skipped that race and did not even finish the race, and earned zero points for the race. Yet, I still beat the computers by eleven points despite only participating in four of the five races.

These were the final results:
Konqi (me) - 44 pts.
Beastie - 33 pts.
Emule - 24 pts.
Wilbur - 23 pts.
Hexley - 15 pts.

Long story short, I think that Ironman difficulty should be ported into Story Mode, for people who want more of a challenge from the AI while doing Story Mode (even when I was legitimately going through these, most of them were a cakewalk) than Expert difficulty.

Also, if I'm thinking correctly, wasn't Ironman previously a rubber-band-less Expert? If this is still the case, then perhaps some AI tweaking could be done to make Ironman a little bigger of a step over Expert in the process.

I agree, and this might come in the future. Adding a new difficulty to story mode however involves a very large amount of playtesting and tweaking so it may take a little while before we tackle this, if we decide to

SilverNexus {l Wrote}:Also, if I'm thinking correctly, wasn't Ironman previously a rubber-band-less Expert? If this is still the case, then perhaps some AI tweaking could be done to make Ironman a little bigger of a step over Expert in the process.

Usually it is very difficult in fun racing games to implement an AI that poses a challenge to skilled players. In some games, this is compensated by unequal stat caps on the player's and the AI karts, but that may feel unfair. Personally, I think there are two nice challenges for advanced players: a) time-trial (see below) and b) races with custom settings in stk_config.cfg and as many AI karts as your CPU can handle

Don't worry guys, once we have online multiplayer with lag compensation you can challenge each other as much as you want.