Let's Talk Difficulty

Angry Elements: All naturally occurring ‘living’ things are made of random inorganic materials. Stone goblins, diamond trees, magma-grass, it could be anything!

The reasons of titans attacks and other big destructive attacks are brought on by YOU! you push a little to far into unknown land, anger some goblins, then kill a little to many goblins, and you bring the wrath of titans upon yourself! Since you can’t win the game you shouldn’t have the choice of who attacks you, but you can lengthen the time it takes for it to happen.

Staffs, the only warrior monk weapon I can think of without too much focus on a single race.

I recently thougt about that matter when watching a lets play of Gnomoria - how about incorporating those switches to the biomes? When embarking from one of your existing cities to other places you could choose where to go - by some means you would see what perks the surrounding landscape has: A dirty swamp nearby casts the “plague”-switch on the spot youre standing on. Diseases would last twice as long. Also, one or more Monsterhideouts near or far could determine what kind of monsters you would face - just like with gnomoria (and DF, I think), total worth of your City could add to the difficulty of monster spawns.

That being said, the embarking from an existing city itself would serve as a nice meta-game. To reach interesting spots on the Worldmap you would have to take preparations and play your existing cities well, so you will be able to stock a trail of settlers with quality-grade equipment and goods to make it over there.

Maybe when starting the first time, you would get that peaceful land to zen out and settle away. Whenever you fail at the harsh front, you can always go back to this place and build up for a stronger Explorersparty or send some supplies for towns in need.

The better you are, the further you get - maybe even discovering new minerals and ores with unique properties or strange new plants. Trees as hard as iron - or someone said something about grass made of lava? :wink:

why not just a slider; sandbox, easy, medium, hard, extreme, nightmare, hellish, with sandbox having no enemies, and the amount of enemies gets higher from there, the difficulty could also affect resource gather rates, amount of items needed to craft stuff, HP/MP levels, and titan events :3 obviously, the higher the difficulty, the harder the game should be :3

wow, this thread has been resurrected not once, but twice! :smile: [quote=“Cannon0006, post:26, topic:457”]
why not just a slider
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while having varying levels of difficulty is always nice (and i like the slider concept as well), keep in mind that this will add quite a bit of balancing to the mix, making sure each stage, in fact, adheres to its name…

the only two that wouldnt require any real testing/balancing being sandbox and “oh good lord, we’re toast”…

but that could be the challenge :3 the harder difficulties could be hugely unbalanced against the player, adding additional difficulties :3

well, true… but unbalanced doesn’t necessarily make it challenging, and could simply be frustrating… :wink:

unbalancing a game on hardest difficulty is almost a given though :3 thats why its usually hardest :stuck_out_tongue:

oh, agreed definitely… thats what i was referring to as one of the two scenarios that didnt require much balance… the “oh good lord, we’re toast” slider setting… :smile:

but i believe, the harder the difficulty, the more unbalanced the game should become :3 to truly challenge the player

All I’m saying is, this is a survival game. I expect 1000’s of different ways to lose and die.

We really only need two settings “Normal, Casual”

I like the idea of a slider.

Personally I prefer this type of game to be very challenging. When you first play you die horribly, but learn from it. You repeat the death and learning process until you get a settlement up and running, and that is very satisfying because of past wipeouts.

yea, I want to die horribly first playthrough too.

I want to have to struggle for hours :3 cursing silently under my breathe over and over again, and I want to have to spend months of effort to get competent, sadly, I havent met a game like that yet, Sins of a Solar Empire came close though :3

It all depends on how much customization you want. A simple slider or two with an advanced screen could be a good balance. A set of basic presets for difficulties and a giant options screen where you can turn off pretty much any major thing like specific races, terrain types, forms of magic or any other major feature with checkboxes would be good, maybe numeric inputs for things like aggressiveness of enemies? Just throwing out ideas here.

All this talk makes me think of FTL’s
Easy (hard)
and
Normal (F U)

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You know in mincraft when you can change the difficulty from easy, to normal, to hard to peaceful? It would be neat if you could do soo in Stonhearth to! Let’s say you wan’t to build a beautyful town, nothing else… Just build… Then you set it to peaceful. If you wan’t a challange you set it to hard, and if you are like me you wan’t to build up, first you set the difficulty to peaceful build up a strong economy and army and then set it to hard.
Don’t tell me that “but it ruins the difficulty and no fun” because its a damm option! If you are playing multiplayer the admin decides what difficulty the world is set on(hahahahahahahahaha).

Bye :smiley:

I think a cool way to adjust difficulty would be to do it the “Don’t starve” way where every thing can be adjusted in quantity :slight_smile:

How horrible it would be if there were dozens of allergies and you could only find out if one of your villagers got it by, well, trying until you had some sort of… doctor?

Between the first meal and the end of the week, a good chunk of your boys could be either dead or seriously incapacitated.

Would make plenty of fun for scenarios too. Your king, which suffers from hay fever, demands the ban of everything that could even remotely have pollens. Your goal would be to cover the complete map in chromium.

Because that’s the future. Until you notice that most of your populace had a chrome allergy and we rinse and repeat…