Tie Geysers - Vents etc Output to Difficulty Settings

[Denisetwin]

<<Balance pass on geysers, bringing up the rates of some of the Gas Vents, and also reducing the rates of the Cool Slush Geyser. >>

I'd really like to see the output on the geysers, vents, volcanos etc tied into the difficulty settings on the game.  One of the reasons I loved the cool slush geyser was when I wanted to play a game where I was trying out huge builds, I could pick a seed with one and it helped make things a little easier.  By tying the output to the difficulty setting, a new player can have a slightly easier time while still having the same resources to play with, while a more veteran player can choose to play on normal or hard and get the challenge they may be wanting.  These seems a better choice than trying to choose between something that will work for a newbie and something that will challenge a veteran. 

[bobucles]

Geyser output has no direct connection to difficulty. A low output geyser can be useless, but a high yield geyser can also bury the base in lava. Either outcome is bad.

Basing difficulty on duplicant traits is far more definitive. A low maintenance dupe is definitely easy to take care of, while a high maintenance dupe is definitely harder.

[metallichydra]

i thought that geodormant and geoactive made the geysers output less or more - turned out it was just the number of geysers.

maybe they could make a world trait (2) that work like this?

[asdf11784]

I'm honestly not sure how to handle difficulty in this game. I'd say the biggest problem with increasing the difficulty in any form is that you can always make the game easier by just using fewer dupes, so in practice pretty much anything that increases the difficulty is actually just making the game more tedious by making it take longer to get stuff done (since you have fewer dupes). I think before there can be a proper "high difficulty" setting there needs to be more of a motivation to have large numbers of dupes, otherwise it's just going to slow things down without really changing anything.

[Coolthulhu]

Sounds good - low availability of water is one of the most limiting things possible. While it's not the same as difficulty, as @asdf11784 explained above, the only part of the game that is actually difficult is the early-to-mid-game. After that, it's design considerations more than difficulty.

Though raw geyser multiplier might not be the best here, what would work better is having asteroids where, say, oil is incredibly scarce (one well, no non-well oil) but light is at max power all cycle.

22 hours ago, bobucles said:

a high yield geyser can also bury the base in lava. Either outcome is bad.

This could surprise a noob so maybe naming it "difficulty" isn't the most correct thing, but higher geyser output is unambiguously good for non-new players. Sealing a geyser is trivial. Then there is the "volcano checking" exploit (volcano area is uncraftable, even when buried, which lets you see if it's a volcano, vent or geyser) and the partial unbury trick that prevents geyser from outputting.

[David Olshanski]

Quote

4 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Then there is the "volcano checking" exploit

The more egregious exploit for buried vents/geysers, is to set the priority to "Alert", and then hover over the yellow alert warning in the upper left to read exactly what type of geothermal feature is underneath.