Difficulty sliders

[taltamir]

I know people have been asking for it... but it has been there all along... in fact there are multiple difficulty sliders:
1. Agressiveness: the higher it is, the more hostile alien empires, especially to you. aka... this changes how "difficult" the enemy AI is.
2. Expansion: set the other races to old and yourself to starting... they all begin with sprawling empires while you begin with 1 planet. do you give yourself a handicap, or a leg up?
3. Home planet conditions: this is a huge one actually... a poor home system means you will have no economic base for the initial development. handicap yourself, or give yourself an advantage?

it would help if those are clarified somewhat.

[Erik Rutins]

This is very true, but I thought the in-game descriptions of these were already pretty clear? What we are looking at adding, probably for 1.0.5 rather than 1.0.4, is a slider that allows you to adjust some of the corruption/scaling effects for the economy as well.

[taltamir]

its clear what they do, just takes a little thinking to connect it to difficulty... only 2 of the sliders in the galaxy setup affect difficulty. Expansion and agression, the rest are more like "how you like things"...
I think the only thing that confused me at first was what aggression actually does. and I didn't immediately realize that expansion is for other empires while size is only for myself (but when I got thinking about it, it became obvious)

I am now trying a new game with expansion set to max (old), aggression to max (chaos), home system to worst (harsh), my size to worst (starting), and my tech to lowest (basic).
random location since there are benefits AND drawbacks to each position. pirates to none since they annoy me and are actually easily manipulated to benefit me more then the AI, creatures to low since I don't like them. Research to slowest, independent life to teeming.
human democracy..

mmm... odd... out of 4 tries, 2 of them resulted in the game being stuck in an infinite loop on generate galaxy under those settings. (1 CPU pegged at 100%, i let it run for minutes... it took mere seconds the other times)...
I THINK it might be related to me alt tabbing WHILE it was generating the galaxy... not sure...

as for difficulty. I started with 1 planet, a crappy one...
I am in contacts with 10 civilizations which have the following amount of planets:
13, 17, 16, 16, 6, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6

they are so gonna kick my ass

seeing as this is 1.0.4.4... harsh means I am losing 7k a year and my private sector is actually earing 1k a year... not as critical as it could have been... but I better improve it ASAP...
All other civs have oodles of tech which is higher level then me... I am going to need every possible advantage!

[taltamir]

interesting... it seems that the age of other empires does NOT take into account research rate... they have maxed out various fields and have lots of very high tech in the others...
i managed to trade a mining station for one tech and a colony i establish in another's system for another tech...

[jscott991]

We need the monster slider to go to none.

There are other ways to influence difficulty other than aggression and homeworld.

You can give the AI a better starting position than you. That will make the game harder.

[Fishman]

Increasing aggression actually makes the game easier, because the AI becomes more aggressive, and thus, more prone to getting into purposeless wars and wasting all of its resources in pointless fights that it has no plan for winning. Besides, the AI always hates me no matter what the aggression setting is.

[ASHBERY76]

ORIGINAL: Fishman

Increasing aggression actually makes the game easier, because the AI becomes more aggressive, and thus, more prone to getting into purposeless wars and wasting all of its resources in pointless fights that it has no plan for winning. Besides, the AI always hates me no matter what the aggression setting is.

Indeed only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts

[jscott991]

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

ORIGINAL: Fishman

Increasing aggression actually makes the game easier, because the AI becomes more aggressive, and thus, more prone to getting into purposeless wars and wasting all of its resources in pointless fights that it has no plan for winning. Besides, the AI always hates me no matter what the aggression setting is.

Indeed only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts

The AI loves 12 front wars.

It also loves being incredibly ticked off at very powerful nations. I think they have improved the AI's decision-making in terms of going to war with nations that are 10x more powerful, but they seem to be overdoing the "we are envious of your immense power" modifier.

[Rustyallan]

The AI loves 12 front wars.

It also loves being incredibly ticked off at very powerful nations. I think they have improved the AI's decision-making in terms of going to war with nations that are 10x more powerful, but they seem to be overdoing the "we are envious of your immense power" modifier.

Certain species do seem to have a problem getting along with others.

The last couple of games I've played, the Securans had empires twice my size and we had excellent relations, except for that heavy "we covet your systems" modifier which brought it back down to neutral.

Meanwhile the piddly little bugs are throwing a tantrum and picking wars left and right claiming they will cleanse the galaxy of me with their immense empire... which is about 1/50th my size... I want to say that's really not realistic, but I just have to read the news to see how true-to-life it is. I just ignore them when the start screaming.

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: jscott991
There are other ways to influence difficulty other than aggression and homeworld.

yes, like starting tech level, starting civilization size, starting size and tech for OTHER civilizations... as I said, i set them all against me... as I said, other empires started with MAXED OUT tech in some fields and 5 to 17 planets... I started with 1 planet, 1 escort, and no research at all. and my one starting planet was a desert... and started out losing money.
and I am winning...

but it was tough. I actually had to subjugate myself to another empire.

[martok]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

This is very true, but I thought the in-game descriptions of these were already pretty clear?

It isn't so much that the in-game descriptions aren't clear, but rather that -- as taltamir indicated -- players aren't always making the connection that these settings are what essentially determines the difficulty level. (Yes, they probably *should* be able to figure it out for themselves, but "should" and "do" are often two different things.)

If I might make a suggestion, adding a simple header ("Difficulty Settings" or some such) to the setup screen above these settings might go a ways towards making things a bit clearer and reducing confusion. Updating the game's PDF manual -- assuming that's possible/practical -- to specifically mention that you can "customize" your difficulty setting(s) would help as well.

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

What we are looking at adding, probably for 1.0.5 rather than 1.0.4, is a slider that allows you to adjust some of the corruption/scaling effects for the economy as well.

Interesting. I myself am not sure I would use such a slider, but more customization options are always welcome regardless.

Also: Perhaps Elliot could (should?) consider renaming "Corruption" to "Bureaucracy", or at least change it to "Corruption AND Bureaucracy". I know it's a small thing, obviously, but there might be some benefit in changing how that feature is perceived. Just a thought, anyway.

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

Indeed only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts

Heh. +1 for the Babylon 5 reference. [8D]

[taltamir]

corruption, bureaucracy, and tax resistance. (go tea party! say no to the VAT!)
yea... in a democracy its most likely elected officials promising to lower taxes. Although to be honest, we have been having tons of corruption as well... in many countries... remember recently the thing with British parliament stealing taxpayer money? getting "refunds" for non existing mortgages they took on their mansions.
Or cases in the USA, etc... those things happen.

[taltamir]

well, the game stalled out on me... uploaded as a reproducible crash here: tm.asp?m=2457638

its a real shame, I wanted to win that one. (well, I did win it, I wanted to absorb every other empire, which are now all weaker then me)

[lancer]

Goodaye,

Erik Rutins
This is very true, but I thought the in-game descriptions of these were already pretty clear? What we are looking at adding, probably for 1.0.5 rather than 1.0.4, is a slider that allows you to adjust some of the corruption/scaling effects for the economy as well.

No, not clear to me and I've had the game since day one. As has been mentioned before it's not obvious how the different sliders interact.

Given the responses to the recent 'Economy is too easy / too hard' thread I suspect it also isn't clear to a lot of other people.

I didn't realise until it was pointed out that the "Home Planet" slider acts as a very effective de-facto difficulty setting. Not all that intuitive.

A suggestion would be to rejig your options screen with the different sliders so that it's made obvious that you are adjusting different aspects of the games difficulty. This might go a long way to quell peoples confusion and all the arguments about too easy/too hard.

Most players would be happy with a reasonable default difficulty level provided they had the means to tweak it to their preference.

It's all there at present, it just isn't obvious.

Having an additional slider to adjust the economic scaling would be a good thing.

Cheers,
Lancer

[Rustyallan]

ORIGINAL: taltamir

corruption, bureaucracy, and tax resistance. (go tea party! say no to the VAT!)
yea... in a democracy its most likely elected officials promising to lower taxes. Although to be honest, we have been having tons of corruption as well... in many countries... remember recently the thing with British parliament stealing taxpayer money? getting "refunds" for non existing mortgages they took on their mansions.
Or cases in the USA, etc... those things happen.

Pork barrel spending FTW!

[DarkWraith]

Not all of these sliders exactly connect to difficulty anyways. The home system one, maybe, but that really only controls the size of the first hurdle you meet. For the others...from recent games I've played, I feel that expanding empires with normal or slightly higher than normal agression is actually harder than old empires with very high aggression settings. I'm not sure why it works out that way exactly, my best guess is that the AIs start blowing the crap out of each other before you're big enough for them to even take notice of, so they manage to keep their strength down that way. The sliders do what they say they do, but they don't correspond perfectly with difficulty.

[lostsm]

i ended up maxing out the aggression in races.txt to the max (150) for each, as i found the chaos setting not to do much. one AI went world destroyer beserk was pretty fun

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: DarkWraith

Not all of these sliders exactly connect to difficulty anyways. The home system one, maybe, but that really only controls the size of the first hurdle you meet. For the others...from recent games I've played, I feel that expanding empires with normal or slightly higher than normal agression is actually harder than old empires with very high aggression settings. I'm not sure why it works out that way exactly, my best guess is that the AIs start blowing the crap out of each other before you're big enough for them to even take notice of, so they manage to keep their strength down that way. The sliders do what they say they do, but they don't correspond perfectly with difficulty.

its a pretty big hurdle... the biggest hurdle of them all is setting the galactic civ to old and your to starting... you start with one planet, they start with 5 to 20 each and several maxed out techs...
prepare yourself for a butt whopping.

[lancer]

Goodaye,

With regards to the confusion over difficulty settings I have the following idea.

On the set-up screens where all the sliders are place a prominent yellow hyperlink saying something along the lines of "Learn about DIFFICULTY settings" (as per all the other in-game hyperlinks) and have it go straight to a page in the Galactopedia that
provides a comprehensive overview of all the different sliders and some guidance how they could work together to create different difficulty environments.

A fairly low impact, easily done way of providing a player with the information he needs.

This is an area generating a lot of confusion and, for whatever reason, the current in-game information presentation doesn't appear to be resolving it.

Cheers,
Lancer

[lostsm]

ORIGINAL: lancer

Goodaye,

With regards to the confusion over difficulty settings I have the following idea.

On the set-up screens where all the sliders are place a prominent yellow hyperlink saying something along the lines of "Learn about DIFFICULTY settings" (as per all the other in-game hyperlinks) and have it go straight to a page in the Galactopedia that
provides a comprehensive overview of all the different sliders and some guidance how they could work together to create different difficulty environments.

A fairly low impact, easily done way of providing a player with the information he needs.

This is an area generating a lot of confusion and, for whatever reason, the current in-game information presentation doesn't appear to be resolving it.

Cheers,
Lancer

i think it was very clear the first time I played that the sliders would represent how hard the game would be, at least once I saw the sum of all sliders. maybe it's because I've played games like this before though