Homeworld 2 had dynamic difficulty, and it sucked.
@Strato, I have bounced off the Railroad Tycoon series of games repeatedly over the years (Transport Tycoon was always more my speed), but your post has me desperately wanting to play the game you just described. Very cool!
It bears remembering that Railroad Tycoon 2 is a product of its time. It holds up ok but it can be a little infuriating. Also the difficulty options only apply to the scenarios. The campaign has its own difficulty, but I think that only applies to revenue for AI and player. All the share market and industrial models are available.
In a sense, Transport Tycoon (and Open TTD) is a superior game because they are about one thing, and doing that one thing right which is production chains. So much so that mods (eg: FIRS) for OpenTTD really open the gates with production chains encouraging a playstyle that has smaller branch lines and road transport merging into a singular drop off depot so that goods can be taken by larger vehicles across the map. In this case, the game’s difficulty is increased due to the industry model, pooling together primary resources to then feed into larger manufacturing industries and ensuring main line freight doesn’t get congested.
I could write a book about the problems KOTOR2 has with difficulty, as you’d expect from a game that’s released half-finished, but there’s one in particular that I want to point out.
If you turn up the difficulty setting, it gives a big bonus to enemies’ saving throws. That makes your force powers, grenades, and special abilities on your weapons useless. It robs you of most of the choices you might make during combat. All you can do is sit back and watch as your party make their standard attacks each turn until the battle is over. Besides being bad gameplay, it takes away the best parts of a Star Wars game. I don’t get to be a Jedi knocking a room full of guys on their asses with the force or a wily assassin droid picking just the right time to unleash some instrument of destruction.
In a fantasy setting like Star Wars, if you want to turn up the difficulty, don’t cripple my character. Make the enemies more deadly.