But what about the world settings which change the difficulty, like the world size? It would be bad if someone wanted to have an easy game and selected easy difficulty, then chose a huge world size and gets bogged down or stuck in space stage.
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You meant industrial?
Also maybe have the regular/nonplanetary difficulty settings impact the difficulty of getting stuff out of the atmosphere of one’s planet, though that might also be a move towards the unwanted “harder = realisticer”…
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There are so many interdependent factors that have a seemingly unknown or complex impact on the difficulty that I am right now leaning towards the basic settings using presets for the easy/normal/hard difficulties and then only allowing complex world and universe customization options for custom difficulty in advanced settings. And it would not be recommended to use it unless you really know what you are doing.
Another example: land-sea ratio. Does having more land relative to water increase or decrease the difficulty? It seems that heavily depends on what the player ends up doing in game, if they are a completely land-based organism and society, then a higher land ratio is better. But if they get most of their food from the sea, then perhaps a larger water ratio is easier. And there are other interdependent effects like the climate will be affected by how much water there is, if the water ratio is low then while there might be a larger amount of land, much of it might be desert. Perhaps there would even be less of the usable land if there is too much land in the ratio.
And with correlated settings, how do you handle which one is exposed to the user? Like would rainfall amount be exposed to the player to change how wet/dry the world is? Even though that is more of an affect from other settings such as water/land ratio and placement, temperature values, etc.
It seems like the easiest way to deal with this is to have preset settings, such as 1:2 land to water, that we can use for balancing. If we can determine how each setting affects the difficulty throughout the game then we can factor that into difficulty calculations, but only if we can reliably predict the outcome of these settings.
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And we also need to keep the settings and their results realistic.
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I am glad to see that custom difficulty is still planned to be worked on. If these ideas do in fact get fully implemented in the game, I will be spending a lot of time tinkering with different play settings in the future.
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Simply having the settings in the game shouldn’t be difficult, as they would be implemented internally anyway. But having them locked behind an advanced menu option, or even experimental perhaps, would be best until we figured out how to organize them and have the player effectively utilize them while knowing what effects could happen in their later game. I am sure advanced players would have fun with the unknown of how a setting could change the flow of the game, but we don’t want that for typical players to accidentally blunder into.
If wonder if some kind of points system could be useful for choosing different settings and having a resulting difficulty. Like in Stellaris there are planet modifiers that give known effects.
This could even be like the Species Traits where there is a points cost for different traits, and they add different good and bad effects.
For Thrive, perhaps you would customize your world/universe and this would result in a difficulty score. You would be limited to certain combinations of changes if you are trying to get a difficulty of Hard or Easy.
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Would there be presets for the “base” difficulties (easy/normal/hard)?
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