How does the difficulty alter the game?

[Ruinous]

You get far less xp, cash and loot drops. Enemies are tougher (more veterans & aces around) and seem to hit more often. It might be subjective, but I don't think the loot from caches is anywhere near as good as on normal vs hard setting either... I may have just got unlucky hehe.

[BuilderX]

I don't know about other difficulties as i directly went with "hard" mode.

Xp is really slow to get, but it's the pleasure of challenge i like.

Some missions were a pain in the ass at the very beginning.

About the money i already got a lot of money in some missions like 200.000 and more recently 750.000, but perhraps you got more in easy mode i don't know ?

Anyway Salvaging is a great way to earn money, i scout systems sometimes
after conflicts between 2 factions and i happen to find a lot of things i am reselling, as for the escape pods turning them into money and XP.

All i know is with what i get in "hard" mode with the challenges i had to overcome, i feel pretty good about the rewards in "hard" mode. I even feel powerful some times even if i am still in 3rd generation fighters

[Nanaki]

Going through the game files, here is what I found so far...

1: Cash rewards from missions are less
2: Shops give you less money for sold equipment, everythings more expensive
3: Enemies are tougher
4: You get less experiance from each kill

[ryuujin]

me i'm playing on easy mode because i want easy kill and finished the quest fast so that random bugs wont hit me as often as it is. I had a very bad experience in Star Wolves 2 where random bugs hit me quite often in every mission I did. its really frustrating keep doing the same mission evertime bugs hits not to mentioned restart the whole game.. omg.. that time Star Wolves 2 was my worst buggiest game ever played in my life.

[Nanaki]

As long as you avoid the Inoco mission line, Star Wolves 3 is quite bug free.

[tsavo]

Just cleared XB-19 after I changed mothership to Astarte
Only 3 pilots with me, It looks the AI is pretty much the same,
I was hoping with harder game, u have better AI

Is there any way to change that?

[Nanaki]

Is there any way to change that?

AI is pretty much the same though and though, although its pretty smart as is, they will work as teams if in the same squad. Becides, Star Wolves is an RPG, so in reality the AI does not have to do much, everythings handled by the pilot stats and the ship stats.