[Suggestion] Add difficulty modes to the game

[Wehrwolf_10]

Add difficulty modes to the game
For example:
1. The HQ mission gives the player an M-frigate, which is not fair at all in the early stages of the game.

Easy: M-frigate is still there
Normal: S-fighter
Hard: Nothing

2. The cost of the ship at the shipyard

Easy: 500,000 credits
Normal: 800,000 credits
Hard: 1,200,000 credits

3. Cash reward for completed repair mission

Easy: 20,000 credits
Normal: 16,000 credits
Hard: 9000 credits

4. After the destruction of the police ship by the player, the enemy sends a punitive squadron

Easy: 2 S-ships
Normal: 1 M-ship + 1 S-ship
Hard: 1 M-ship + 2 S-ships

[adeine]

Problem with anything like this is it would make it even harder to balance the game and economy as you'd have to literally triple any testing done.

I don't think that is feasible for Egosoft. Better to simply balance things on the hard side of things and provide 'easy' options through more generous game starts.

[Tomonor]

Nah, we are at a point where implementing difficulty modes are most likely impossible (=too expensive) to implement.

What they should do instead is fine-tune the balance so that the early stages are relatively easily, but the stronger/richer the player becomes, the harder/stronger hostiles the AI reacts to his/her actions.

[Fazmaster]

There are many "give slider option" requests lately and while some sound reasonable at first glance the consequences usually do more harm than good.

Apart from what adeine already said about testing and balancing all of these options and combinations, let me comment on yours in particular:

1) So you get no frigate with the HQ with "hard"? Just several hours in you can buy frigates everytime you want. So this options has little impact in early game and like no impact over time, adding an option for nothing.

2) Increase the costs of ships will heavily impact early and mid until you get your own shipyard, from which on your shipyard will be even more a cashcow than it is now. And this need to be balanced out again for this particular option.

3) Repair mission are meant for the start to get you going and are barely worth the effort some hours in when you established trade route, auto mine ressources, being capable to take fights whatever. So you delay early game a little without any impact later on. And delaying the early game sucks because you want to do some more interesting things quicker.

4) Sending fixed "punitive squadrons"? The game is already far more sophisticated and got even better in the current 3.0 Beta. Ships and stations send distress calls and get help from nearby ships (even from other factions they're good with). So the respond scales depending on how complex your universe is. Example: I started boarding an ANT freighter in ARG space and got half a dozen M-Ships and even more fighters turning against me. Thats how it should be and it feels much more alive and dynamic.

IMO the best way to handle this is with different game start which adeine also already mentioned. You start with a small fleet and good relations (-> easy) you start with a crappy fighter and half of the factions hate you (-> hard). This seem to be the way Egosoft is going and the most reaonable.

[Perahoky]

Hello,

I support this request and would extend it:

The difficulty mode sets up a value table in background, which defines things like Damages modifiers (for combat difficulty) or price modifiers (for economy difficulty) or profit margin.

Value table examples:

Mode - Modifier

Economy (price and profit)
Easy *= +-0.8
Normal *= +-1.0
Hard *= +-1.2

Combat (damage and A.I. targeting)
Easy *= +-0.8
Normal *= +-1.0
Hard *= +-1.2

Games gets balanced for normal mode.
Damage modifiers count for player owned stuff.
And starting money an stuff....

Sincerely,

Pera

Nah, we are at a point where implementing difficulty modes are most likely impossible (=too expensive) to implement.

I don't see this point.
Old savegames would be set to normal and done. At least implementing diffculty modes by start equipments stuff should be not more than the tutorials.

At least, nobody knows the code, so we cannot say how difficult something is.

Problem with anything like this is it would make it even harder to balance the game and economy as you'd have to literally triple any testing done.

usually, games are designed and tested for difficulty "normal". Mostly its just a decimal value modifier which changes thing like damages, amounts, time and so on.

For example, the game Homeworlds adapts the difficulty to the force of the player. The more stuff the player got, the more enemys the games spawns.
In C&C, the difficulty adds economy modifiers to the AI.
In AOE, the difficulty changes the priorities of the AI scripts by modifiers.
https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questi ... -and-skirm

[Fazmaster]

At least, nobody knows the code, so we cannot say how difficult something is.

You don't have to see the code to understand the difficulty.

You need to permute all options and all possible combinations should bring a different but prosper universe (unlike your RTS examples where the goal is destruction in countable minutes).

In your case with just two modifiers with three options that already means 9 different outcomes (easy/easy, easy/mid, easy/hard, mid/easy, mid/mid, mid/hard, hard/easy, hard/mid, hard/hard).

Now lets take one of them:

I set economy on hard and combat on easy, thus ships getting easier destroyed. This leads to more demand the rough economy might not be able to deal with, as it can't gather all the needed ressources quickly enough. Battles cease as ships won't be replaced and if there are barely any freighter to catch up, the game is broken beyond repair.

X4 is to my knowledge the first game of this kind with such a truly dynamic economy. That's an archivement! But it's hard to keep this balanced without going back to spawn things when something went out of control.

[Perahoky]

At least, nobody knows the code, so we cannot say how difficult something is.

You don't have to see the code to understand the difficulty.

You need to permute all options and all possible combinations should bring a different but prosper universe.

In your case with just two modifiers with three options that already means 9 different outcomes (easy/easy, easy/mid, easy/hard, mid/easy, mid/mid, mid/hard, hard/easy, hard/mid, hard/hard).

Now lets take one of them:

I set economy on hard and combat on easy, thus ships getting easier destroyed. This leads to more demand the rough economy might not be able to deal with, as it can't gather all the needed ressources quickly enough. Battles cease as ships won't be replaced and if there are barely any freighter to catch up, the game is broken beyond repair.

X4 is to my knowledge the first game of this kind with such a truly dynamic economy. That's an archivement! But it's hard to keep this balanced without going back to spawn things when something goes out of control.

Interesting position in "you dont need the code to understand something".
I think every architecture leader would instantly refuse this position. Its everything about architecture, and so its about the code and expandability.
We already made and refactored multiple projects from scratch, its nothing new.
Bad architecture leads to problems leads to bad software. thats the reason to rebuild software sometimes as Egosoft did.
Game design is somewhat limited by performance, but you should always keep the responsibility of every part of code - thats called single responsibility.
So, the conclusion is: its about the architecture whether and how difficult to implement a feature.
if our company would create a X economy, we would run somewhat georgous automatic tests who simulate the economy abstracted with no graphics - thats something "Factorio" did (click).

I think you ignored that its the difficulty relative to the player, not to the universe, and i doubt that the game does anything with money except the player, because thats not neccessary but adds millions of possible economy problems, theres no reason to make finite AI money depots but don't show them.
One of these economy problems was X3 energy cells plus energy crystalls: if you make crystalls to primary resources (change mechanic), the whole economy crashes instantly. Same with finite AI money.
That's not the case as described above.

The players gets damage and money penalties, right in almost every other game. Made a million and a one times and non special business.

Code: Select all

ITradingController ~ GeTradingController(IStation source) {
// or somewhere else
// this.Owner.GetTradingController(source)
var controller = new PlayerTradingController(source);
}

PlayerTradingController : ITradingController {
float MoneyPenalty = Instance.Difficulty.MoneyPenalty;

PlayerTradingController(...){}

ITradingOffer[] GetTradingOffers()
=> { new TradeOffer(source.Wares[0]) { Price *= MoneyPenalty } };
}

... in something more smart. TradeOffers shouldn't be created new, but adapt.

To multiply all the these options is just wrong, By logic, by mathematics and by software principles.
By logic, you can only multiply options of different mechanics and kinds, not of values (except null ) in same mechanic.

If you architecture reacts differently to different values, than its an error by design and therefore must be eliminated.
thats called "hidden logic" and is a anti pattern.

Edit: made the text a bit more friendly, sorry about that
Edit2: added part about factorio and tests

[CBJ]

Well, I do know the code, and I can tell you that adeine, Fazmaster and others are right.

[Crux_72]

Well, I do know the code, and I can tell you that adeine, Fazmaster and others are right.

Means, no chance of difficulty settings - for ever?

[CBJ]

No, it means there is no chance of difficulty levels that do things like change prices and profits in the economy. We did experiment with difficulty levels that change player damage (received and applied) in XR, but this too caused problems with things like testing and balancing missions, so we didn't repeat that experiment in X4. We currently have no plans to re-introduce difficulty levels, other that potentially by creating gamestarts that are inherently easier or more difficulty because of the starting scenario in which you find yourself. This is how we did things in X3 (and indeed X2) and it fitted the style of game better.

[Perahoky]

Well, I do know the code, and I can tell you that adeine, Fazmaster and others are right.

Can i ask some questions about your code, kiendly?
Do you use money values between AI interactions?
Do you have automated tests about the basic economic features?
Is the player interaction and AI interaction and gui interaction seperated from each other? (economic and combat?)

Interesting position in "you dont need the code to understand something".
I think every architecture leader would instantly refuse this position. Its everything about architecture, and so its about the code and expandability.
Bad architecture leads to problems leads to bad software. thats the reason to rebuild software sometimes as Egosoft did.

So, you are telling me, changes to player related stuff is changing the economy overall? Without even knowing about these changes ("single responsibility")?

Then i should quit all my exams, previous projects, burn books and go to cities garbage collection.

No offense but...
When i give the player a value which shall not affect other entities by design, and these "other entities" are the economy itself, then there should be even no physically connection between the two values.

A short story behind a old 2000s software: As we got scared about changing things (the design was really scaring), because these changes could cause other problems way behind (broken responsibilities), we concluded to redo the whole thing. I dont mean this as an insinuation (no offense).

X4 is a good game with a great concept (gratz!) but lacks of time and fine tune

Edit: i'm not telling it would be easy.

Sincerely,

pera

[CBJ]

Do you use money values between AI interactions?

Yes and no. Money does change hands, but the AI factions are effectively so rich that it doesn't make any real difference.

Do you draw the Gui as 3D oder overlay? I think as 3d, because sometimes we can see the gui out of players view angle, and i think that causes the third-person-targeting-bug i previously reported.

It's drawn in 3D space. This is actually necessary for various reasons.

Do you have automated tests about the basic economic features?

Yes. We have simulations that we run for extended periods, which give us large amounts of data about transactions, numbers of wares available, and so on.

Is the player interaction and AI interaction and gui interaction seperated from each other?

Of course. Some of them aren't even written in the same language! Our code is highly structured, with strict interaction rules between different areas.

Bad architecture leads to problems leads to bad software. thats the reason to rebuild software sometimes as Egosoft did.

So you're quite happy to make disparaging statements about the software without seeing the code, while at the same time dismissing people who disagree with you because they haven't. I'll let you think about whether that's really a good way of getting the developers of that software to answer your questions in future.

[adeine]

I think you ignored that its the difficulty relative to the player, not to the universe, and i doubt that the game does anything with money except the player, because thats not neccessary but adds millions of possible economy problems, theres no reason to make finite AI money depots but don't show them.
One of these economy problems was X3 energy cells plus energy crystalls: if you make crystalls to primary resources (change mechanic), the whole economy crashes instantly. Same with finite AI money.
That's not the case as described above.

The players gets damage and money penalties, right in almost every other game. Made a million and a one times and non special business.

X4 isn't almost every other game though. See, something like this might be more feasible if going by a "you own and fly one ship" paradigm, but "only affects the player" quickly turns into "breaks the entire game" when players can essentially control entire factions and supply chains. Unless "damage and money penalties" only apply to the ship you're personally flying in at the moment, in which case you'd be incentivised to exploit the system by just teleporting to another ship to do the trades/fights.

IS/OOS balance is already a huge problem in the game without more complexity layered on top.

[CBJ]

Is the player interaction and AI interaction and gui interaction seperated from each other?

Of course. Some of them aren't even written in the same language! Our code is highly structured, with strict interaction rules between different areas.

Actually I'd like to expand on this, just in case you weren't talking about code structure. If you're talking about the way the objects in the game interact with one another, then we essentially only have two cases in most situations: the player case where the player is actively doing something personally, and the non-player case where it's an NPC doing it (whether that NPC belong's to the player or not is usually neither here nor there). Wherever possible we make both cases the same, so that the player really feels like they are part of the universe in which they are participating. Where that's not possible, or not practical, we still try to make the behaviour of the two cases share as much of their underlying functionality (and code) as possible, to try to avoid there being glaring mismatches in the way things behave. There will always be some cases where even this isn't possible, but we limit them as much as we can.

[Fazmaster]

Then i should quit all my exams, previous projects, burn books and go to cities garbage collection.

You don't need to have an insight of the internals (be it super-smart or glue) but just observe the outcome from a player perspective. Production modules need a certain amount of time to be build and then repeately a certain amount of time to produce wares, cargo ships have limited storage capabilities and travel speed to deliver these wares etc. and these rules apply to the player and the AI visibly in the same way. Unless you want to mess with these parameters aswell (which you as a clever system architect won't) changing prices and/or damage output for instance will effect stability and balancing of the universe more than it already does considering different playstyles.

Comparing X with RTS games (C&C!?) where you solely build something up to crush everything else in a relatively short period of time is a bit awkward. I don't know for Factorio, but can you spend hundreds if thousands of hours in a single game? Is it the goal to give you a believeable and immersive simulation throughout? No? Guess we've spotted a difference..

[Crux_72]

No, it means there is no chance of difficulty levels that do things like change prices and profits in the economy. We did experiment with difficulty levels that change player damage (received and applied) in XR, but this too caused problems with things like testing and balancing missions, so we didn't repeat that experiment in X4. We currently have no plans to re-introduce difficulty levels, other that potentially by creating gamestarts that are inherently easier or more difficulty because of the starting scenario in which you find yourself. This is how we did things in X3 (and indeed X2) and it fitted the style of game better.

I know, and I loved the 'X-Tream' gamestart in the previous games. Didn't made the game more difficult in the long run but made you thinking more how to get started. So, with implementing the ability to land on stations within the space suit… how about a game start with only a barren space suit (no laser, no what ever) under your ass and nothing more than the wreckage of your former ship on the right and a space station on the left, with 0 Credits and a bad rep with almost everyone? Isn't that very easy to implement or are I missing something?

[Wehrwolf_10]

Well, I do know the code, and I can tell you that adeine, Fazmaster and others are right.

If it’s not possible to see difficulty levels, can we expect a small “Survival DLC” in the future? In X4, it is difficult to play only for a new player, but for an experienced player, the game is too simple. Those who don't like hardcore mode may not install "Survival DLC".

[Perahoky]

X4 isn't almost every other game though. See, something like this might be more feasible if going by a "you own and fly one ship" paradigm, but "only affects the player" quickly turns into "breaks the entire game" when players can essentially control entire factions and supply chains. Unless "damage and money penalties" only apply to the ship you're personally flying in at the moment, in which case you'd be incentivised to exploit the system by just teleporting to another ship to do the trades/fights.

IS/OOS balance is already a huge problem in the game without more complexity layered on top.

OOS/IS: yes, but whats the problem on add * 0.9-1.2 add the end of any mathematic operation like trade or combat, when it affects only player values (the cause why i said know the code, know to code).
One should know the single point of truth where damage or trade is calculated, something like egosoft.x4.simulation.trade/combat.player. If there are plenty locations, the design is just wrong (or tell me the reason). Sorry, no offense.


I think you can imgaine that base damage or price should not care about the pilot of a ship, but about the owner and the difficulty, like the diplomacy.
But, a different mechanic would be to send more police to bad players on higher difficulty.
In X, player owned ships are under the same difficulty and AI is under their own difficulty (money?!).

Some of the things said are basic game or software principles, as we can read in almost every book about software design.
https://www.amazon.de/Clean-Architectur ... 814&sr=8-4

Split your entities, split your responsibilities, tell dont ask, inversion of control, single responsibility, "there should be only one reason to change a class"
https://refactoring.guru/didp/principle ... ciples/srp
https://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns

Thats all related to the code, and thats the reason you need to know the code and the test engine to know the difficulty to implement something. Thats logic. (Test -->) Design --> Code --> Implementation --> Feature --> Test --> User

The difficulty of the game is one of the top topics since X4 released.
- For some people its too easy
- For some people its to hard
- For some people its ok
- All groups differentiate in combat and economy

Comparing X with RTS games (C&C!?) where you solely build something up to crush everything else in a relatively short period of time is a bit awkward. I don't know for Factorio, but can you spend hundreds if thousands of hours in a single game? Is it the goal to give you a believeable and immersive simulation throughout? No? Guess we've spotted a difference..

sure
https://i.postimg.cc/wBZq2qXJ/2019-11-1 ... -Steam.png
(dont forget that not all games always count in steam play time like X3R)

Funfact: factorio implements almost every feature with modifier mechanics.

thats not the point.
"immersion" and so on is no argument for the topic we discussing: difficulty levels.
Its a technical discussion about default game features, regardless of any immersion.

Not only i compare with RTS, at least egosoft did.
And i don't know why thats an argument for not implementing things correct or accept the difference between different mechanics of a game - for example build time, storage amount, travel speeds and - as mentioned in the difficulty-levels request above, the money and the damage taken/made.

You don't need to affect speeds or storages if you say:
Default price of energy cells for players are 12 * 0.9 in easy, 12 * 1.0 in normal and 12 * 1.1 in hard. The relative price of this stay the same. It's not the first time it's implemented this way.
Default damage made/taken for player is *0.9 easy *1.0 normal *1.1 hard.
If this is hard to implement in a design, the design is wrong, not the reason.

There are plenty other games except RTS and many games like X which contain difficulty levels, here's a list:

• Homeworld 1 + 2 + Remastered (with a enemy count modifier)
• Star Wolves 1-3 (with a difficulty modifier)
• Freelancer (with a difficulty modifier)
• Freespace
• https://www.egosoft.com/support/faq/faq ... version=10 (the same mechanic we discussing)
• No Man's Sky (immersion?) https://guides.gamepressure.com/nomanss ... p?ID=45833
• X3R Mods X2 Mods X3TC mods X3AP mods
• and so on

As a conclusion: it's sad to see that different mechanics got mixed and causality broken in such a discussion (software patterns, game features, test, "immersion", travel speed, build time, money and damage)

i didn't intend trouble, so i'm out.

Sincerely,
Pera
edit: removed first sentence, "one day operation" is probably a bit huge said, sorry for that.

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

Add difficulty modes to the game
For example:
1. The HQ mission gives the player an M-frigate, which is not fair at all in the early stages of the game.

Easy: M-frigate is still there
Normal: S-fighter
Hard: Nothing

2. The cost of the ship at the shipyard

Easy: 500,000 credits
Normal: 800,000 credits
Hard: 1,200,000 credits

3. Cash reward for completed repair mission

Easy: 20,000 credits
Normal: 16,000 credits
Hard: 9000 credits

4. After the destruction of the police ship by the player, the enemy sends a punitive squadron

Easy: 2 S-ships
Normal: 1 M-ship + 1 S-ship
Hard: 1 M-ship + 2 S-ships

5. Add a different state of the universe

Easy: A lot of ship and station with a self sustained economy.
Normal: Poor station with economy to recover and Xenon to fight.
Hard: A dead universe with few ship and station, no economy, a lot of miner around and some "huge and power" defence station with a lot of Xenon.

[SirNukes]

If you want basic difficulty modes, take an afternoon and mod them in. Simple polling scripts can watch for deltas and apply adjustments (for credits/shields/etc.), or you can hook into the event system for a cleaner implementation. Slap on a menu for player choice, and you are already in alpha.