Increase difficulty via power changes?

[yoakenashi]

Some players have requested a more difficult playing mode. Some suggestion have been more deadly diseases, more deadly critters, etc. I was just thinking, perhaps another way to increase difficulty would be to decrease power generated from sources. Meaning, instead of a natural gas generator generating 800W in normal, it would generate 400W in hard and 100W in insane mode. This would also apply to manual generators (400/200/50). I was thinking about this after reading several posts where experienced players say power is not an issue and often have an abundance of power. Power management is a major aspect of the game (similar to food, morale, etc) and could be used to add another form of difficulty.

[pether]

not sure if this would be more challenging or more annoying to be honest...

[Baer]

All "Difficulties" do only in earlygame play a role. A Hutchfarm negate food shortage on the hungriest dupe. Petrolium boilers negate all energie/water problems you maybe have. Short on Plastic? make a Farm and earn Tons of Plastic. You need Steel? Make another farm for lime. Iron falls from the Sky and coal? Hey! You have another farm for that. Your industrie burns your dupes? Make a cooling loop, you have plenty's ways to do that.

My last achievement was Super Sustainable and easy to achieve. My Base runs only with hamster wheels a long Time. No Problemo.  

[yoakenashi]

7 hours ago, pether said:

not sure if this would be more challenging or more annoying to be honest...

Some players consider Ravenous (maximum hunger difficult) game play annoying and do not enable it. I personally find the huge demand on food generation an interesting dynamic. Same would apply to greater power demands. Some may find managing power, like farming/ranching, a less than enjoyable aspect of the game and wouldn’t enable this difficulty mode.

Conversely, this could also allow for easier game play. Not unlike the Dev Generator, one could set this power game mode to super easy and power their entire base with one Manual Generator (maybe not that overpowered, but you get the idea) - nearly eliminating the power management aspect of the game.

[Sasza22]

I think it might be ok as a difficulty setting but what about the wires overloading? Shouldn`t they overload at lower powers as well?

There could also be a setting to increase dupe oxygen demand, critter food requirements and plant fertilisation/irrigation needs.

[Meltdown]

I think that the idea to change some numbers in the power generation to affect difficulty is interesting. However, I don't think that power generation is a good parameter for that. While decreasing efficiency of the generaitors would complicate the early game, it's unlikely that it would affect scalability of lategame builds. You would have to place more generators, and I doubt that the builds at question wouldn't allow that. Furthermore, additional generators mean additional byproducts, which could be used to gain power (like getting more heat production would allow to use additional steam turbines). 

It seems to me that the more efficient way to make power management harder is to make producing sufficient fuel harder. This could be affected by three values: generator fuel consuption, geyser resource production and, specifically, Oil Well efficiency.

Upscaling resource consumption of the generators may have direct effects simmilar to their efficiency reduction, but it additionally worsens power to byproduct ratio. The only generators that does not consume anything are solar panels and manual generators, but, in my opinion, they already have issues related to stabiliy and scalabiliy, so them not being affected by such changes wouldn't ruin the effect.

Reducing the productivity of geysers, on the other hand, affects more than just power management aspect of the game and makes it overall harder. Oil Well is essencially a geyser that yields two resources without a dormancy, for a price of small amount of water. Thus, in my opinion, affecting it's output should pair with manipulating the geyser efficiency. Both making water more scarce and less efficient in convertion to oil + gas should have at least some effect.

[yoakenashi]

6 hours ago, Meltdown said:

Furthermore, additional generators mean additional byproducts, which could be used to gain power (like getting more heat production would allow to use additional steam turbines). 

This would not be the case. If this were true we would currently see exploits of people running hundreds of fridges just to drain more power to run their generators more. I haven’t seen anyone waste power generation just to convert resources.

I did have a similar idea to vary heat production of machines, but that could definitely be exploited to make steam generators power positive.

[Meltdown]

5 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

This would not be the case. If this were true we would currently see exploits of people running hundreds of fridges just to drain more power to run their generators more. I haven’t seen anyone waste power generation just to convert resources.

Very strange claim in the context of what I was talking about. It isn't about wasting power to get more power. It is about creating the need to build and run more generators (due to thier decreased efficiency) would naturally create more buprodycts that may be useful. Like increased heat generation in my example.

The entire point of my post is that limiting the amount of generators you can support is more effective than increasing the number of generators you have to build.

5 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

I did have a similar idea to vary heat production of machines, but that could definitely be exploited to make steam generators power positive.

Unless those chages are paired with some changes in steam generators heat to power conventions. It may also be a good idea for a difficulty setting.