Big Ambitions Difficulty: Easy vs Medium vs Hard Explained

Big Ambitions asks for a difficulty before it lets you build a character — the wiki calls the three Easy, Medium and Hard, while patch notes say Normal for the middle one — and the game does not restate the choice anywhere afterwards — a player asking how to check which difficulty their save uses was told by the developer to look at the tax rate on their last tax bill and work it back. This page lays out what the three settings change, so you can pick one deliberately.

What Difficulty Controls

The FAQ maintained by the BiggerAmbitions fan database lists the levers: starting cash, tax rate, employee salary, cost of goods, and loan interest rates. The developer’s own early roadmap described difficulty levels as “impacting competitiveness, tax rates, etc.” Patch notes since then have added two more:

What difficulty does not control: which buildings are available. A player once asked why a Hard-mode YouTuber could rent a 6,340 ft² house at day 100 when their Easy save could not; the developer’s reply was that property availability is mostly random, the map starts randomized, and businesses fail and get replaced over time regardless of setting.

The Exact Numbers Are on the Custom Game Screen

No public source lists the per-difficulty values, and we are not going to guess them. But the game does: on the forum, players point out that choosing Custom Game shows the default setting for every slider at Easy, Medium and Hard. If you want the precise tax percentage or starting balance for a difficulty before committing, open Custom Game, read the defaults, then back out and start Story Mode. Custom Game itself has no Uncle Fred objectives and no tutorial, and it lets you disable happiness, import limits and other systems outright.

A note on old forum threads: pre-1.0 the bank charged a weekly negative interest fee on your balance — 0.5%, or 5% on Hard — and Hard-mode players complained about it constantly. 1.0 removed negative interest entirely, so that difference no longer exists. See banking and loans.

Which Difficulty Is Best

First playthrough: Medium. The EA 0.9 update deliberately made the early game harder — “you’ll need to progress through a bit more struggles” — and balanced that by giving Easy a customer boost and Normal a small one. Medium is where the tutorial’s numbers roughly hold. The forum thread complaining that the tutorial “sets the player up to go bankrupt” is answered by other players reporting +$500 to +$4,000 a day from a first coffee shop or supermarket on the same builds; the difference is stocking, pricing and opening hours, not difficulty.

Easy is the right call if you want to play the interior design and empire-building side without sweating the first month. The traffic boost is free customers, and lower goods costs widen every margin.

Hard is for a second run. Higher wages and goods costs punish exactly the mistakes new players make — over-hiring, over-stocking, default pricing — and the urgent-order penalty means supply chain errors cost real money. Content creators who build long series around Hard Mode are playing it with hundreds of hours of experience.

Reading Guides Across Difficulties

Because wages, goods costs and taxes all move with difficulty, income figures from one difficulty do not transfer to another. A “$5,000 a day” claim without a difficulty attached is not comparable to yours. This site ranks businesses by structural demands — fixtures, staff, capacity — rather than by income numbers for exactly that reason; see business types and how to make money.

Can You Change Difficulty Mid-Game?

Nothing in the patch notes or forum replies describes changing a Story Mode save’s difficulty after creation, and the developer’s suggestion to infer it from the tax rate implies it is fixed. If a save has become unmanageable, the practical options are a Custom Game with the sliders you want, or a fresh Story Mode start. The beginner guide covers the first week either way.