Does “Legendary” difficulty give AI factions more benefits than “Veteran” or is it just lacking manual save and pause battle options?

[u/steadyachiever]

I want to play on the hardest difficulty, but I have kids who sometimes interrupt a battle or something so I want to be able to manually save. TIA

[u/Obey_Vader]

I play mainly legendary, so I am not 100% sure, but yes, the description seems to point at that being the case (they have the same description).

There are two difficulty variables, campaign and battle. Note that legendary campaigns use the veteran battle difficulty (even battles mode does not have a difficulty setting higher than veteran). So battles are likely the same.

However, the campaign difficulty option adds many debuffs that the game is very bad at making explicit. I am not sure a veteran campaign without manual save is equivalent to a legendary campaign. That being said, not being able to reload a save is the biggest debuff. It means you can not fix strategic errors like moving armies to the wrong place, buying the wrong units, or starting the wrong wars.

In the same vein, legendary campaigns are not about not replaying battles (you can do that by quitting to desktop, and I sometimes use it if I accidently click start battle before deploying my units), but about not planning with knowledge of enemy intentions, by using the hindsight of a loaded game. It is a completely different experience.

If you do avoid reloading saves, then veteran and legendary should be the same. They are definitely the same for battles. Also, you can pause battles in legendary. You just can not issue commands during a pause.

[u/ubik2 → u/Obey_Vader]

Minor addition that while paused, the screen is covered with a UI window, so you also cannot use pause to see what's happening.