Difficulty Overhaul Idea

[Eterm]

I was thinking about difficulty levels and how currently they mostly affect the incoming challenges. You get more and worse bad events and fewer good events the higher difficulty you go.

However, I'd be interested in a mode where difficulty didn't affect those things, instead affecting everything else.

Some ideas of intrinsic values that difficulty could affect:

• Generated item quality (both traders and produced)
• Armor values
• Comfort / Beauty values
• Nutrition values
• Harvest amounts
• Power production

Instead of making the game harder by having more challening issues to deal with (which from what I've been told can still get to a point where you feel almost invincible), you are struggling against the same events, you're playing in the same world but you're less well equipped to deal with the events that come your way.

This in turn reduces the need to spawn huge tribal raids or dropping a centipede on a new colony and instead adds difficulty through a more subtle struggle where on the most difficult levels everything you produce seems to be garbage and you're tilling the fields for meagre scraps of food.

Looking at the code it looks like it would be relatively straightforward (I won't say easy, adding and testing code is never easy) to add a StoryTeller difficulty factor into the QualityUtility.