Right now the chicken mode difficulty has really little influence compared to the amount of players playing. Here's the thing: If you play alone or as 2, you have more metal (per person), more buildfocus, less hatches, less chicken techprogress even without killing hatches (including diggers/static artillery), less chickens, weaker queen etc. compared to e.g. 8 players.
Even suicidal chickens is actually pretty easy if you play alone. If you kill 10 hatches in the beginning (with e.g. a group of 6 outlaws, before anything beyond basic chickens arrives), your agression rating will stay positive for the rest of the game. The queen strength is a joke in singleplayer.
Note: Custom chickens only partly make this better. You can't set queen strength, dragon count, aggression rating modifier...
If you try normal chickens with 6 players, it's already hard to raid for a few reasons.
1: You don't have that many ressources to build units with. Porc stays (if used correctly), units die, so too much metal invested in units means you have no chance later.
2: Waves contain more chickens, there's more hatches further back. Also chickens make tech progress faster. This means that you need a good unit composition when raiding as you'll sure as hell meet different chickens on your way.
3: Faster chicken tech. I get the idea that you can porc and deal with high tech chickens or raid to slow their tech, but raiding is (much) more difficult and with higher risk. So players usually choose to porc and "tech" temselves (as in "build better porc"). My usual approach to (at some point after ddm and anni) build a missile silo and eos the crap out of hatches works, like, a bit too well compared to the "supposed" raiding in the beginning.
And god forbid one of the porc lines doesn't hold up...
So what's my point? At the moment, my idea would be to give us an option to increase the player count without actually having more players, so you get more hatches, chickens, chicken tech, dragons, queen strength and a "more difficult" aggression rating. I don't wanna have NullAIs standing around my base (and i'm not even sure if that would work)...
If you have other ideas on how to adapt chicken strength to make it more interesting in singleplayer i'd be glad to hear!
TL;DR: Basically, chickens can be a fun gamemode, but atm it's either not a challenge or you have to rely on your team not failing. Which means you won't win a difficulty that the worst player can't handle...
