Can dynamic difficult work in ONI?

[ZombieDupe]

I have been a bit vocal about the idea of planetoids both in base game and the spaced out DLC to be set up in difficulty from easiest to hardest. Looking at the survival chance attribute for each type in the base game, that appears to have been the intention but didn't quite work out so well as difficulty was kind of all over the place and for one particular reason, which is the difficulty of heat management being ever present in way too many areas. Needless to say given the right geysers and biomes on planetoids, the difficulty can scale correctly, though it is static from where you start, meaning a Terra start could be made into teaching the basics and a chill experience if you ever wanted to revisit it as your start, while something more lethal like extreme temperatures on volcanic or oasis desert (and may be radiation in the DLC) right around the corner could prove an enjoyable challenge when you get to know the game better.

Some games are starting to employ dynamic difficulty however as setting strict settings at start can prove boring or unmanageable depending on how skilled you end up being. Instead of choosing what you will take for the entire playthrough, the game can scale events and AI reactions more dangerously. Because ONI is almost purely simulation based and requires at least some level of number estimation, random events could throw off a run completely. So I thought to bring up the question, could dynamic difficulty be implemented in ONI in some form and if so, should it? Personally I don't think it could really work, something like increased meteor showers for example due to high comfort of current colony could create all sorts of frustrating issues with no real solutions or high level exploits, and the difficulty through naturally exploring a planetoid further and trying out harder starts seems good enough for me, but may be some people have different perspectives to share.

[Sasza22]

It is possible to have multiple real difficulties imo but would require for geyser types to be curated like with the current dlc. That might be a lot of work in the end and cause us to have less start variants in the end. I`m not sure how will the dlc will end up looking and if we will have meteros eventually. Meteor storms could even get their own setting like hunger and morale.

Anyway if we want the diffculty to be really "dynamic" and change based on our colony status then it might cause problems due to unpredictability of certain things (like meteor storms or geyser periods which shouldn`t really change). People might also want to game the system and keep the colony on an artificial low development level to keep the diifculty low.

[babba]

Yes of course it can work on an really impacting scale ! Analyzing the current player "Strength, Power, Wealth,Capacity etc." and scaling opposing "Forces" towards the player via various event challenges like "Extreme Weather, Fire Emergency, Regolith-Meteor-Mayem, Aliens Visitors, Resource Shortage etc." is a common tool in various good games nowadays. Around 2000 I worked on games where the analyzing-player-strength/situation and delivering-counter-challenges tasks sometimes was still an abstract philosophy to design and deliver for some developers, nowadays it is much more common with great games - Its really great times, one top example evergreen title: Rimworld 

Its just important that the player does not feel overwhelmed and finds himself in unfair situations - If he/she/it has not selected the maximum level for "Scaled dynamic emergency events" in the world generation menu. Also it should be possible to deactivate dynamic threat scaling completely, for those which want to have their peace of mind. Made a small post note on this topic some time ago somewhere in the forum. IMHO great idea @ZombieDupe

Found the little note here ...There is a follow up post in the link, which IMHO reflects the current balanced approach by Klei. My suggestion is an additional layer of threat scaling, which can be switched off completely. Depends if Klei wants to have a bit more of Rimworld and harder challenges in the game for those who want to have them - As a player decided option, to make the game less static.

Also an Emergency DLC for ONI could be really exciting

Sadly not much forum activity with ONI nowadays, I hope you get more votes for your poll. Long live the Magma Engine !

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In my recent 2021 DLC ONI save I have 40kW load on my first power network line. One could assume,as example, that a player which has 100,200,500 or 1000kW total connected power load ( and/or actual current consumption ) is so powerful that he can deserve some appropriate threats, if he has activated "Dynamic Threat Scaling" in the world generation menu - The occuring interval of these special threat events, like a big meteor storm etc., could also be a game world setting. Klei could analyze so much about the current capacity of a player.