[Suggestion] Map Difficulty Zones

from Elemental Forums

Judging by comments on the forums, there are still some significant issues with map randomness that can greatly affect the difficulty of the game for the player - if they luck out with lots of good resources nearby, they can start powering up fast - if expansion is blocked by lots of dangerous monsters, they're basically screwed (time for ctrl-N).

So here's my proposition - upon gamestart, before placing resources or monsters, divide the map into a series of "difficulty zones" - I shall call them Starter, Weak, Medium, Strong, Deadly, and Epic.  This should end up looking like a topographic map - Deadly zones surrounded by a band of Strong-zone, etc.  Wildlands can be placed in Deadly and Epic zones, then monsters and quests are placed in each zone corresponding to difficulty - Starter zones would only have Wildling Lurkers and the like, Weak zones would have assortments of bandits, mites, etc, going up to Epic zones with Dragons, armies of Drakes, and so forth.

Monsters would be much more aggressive - attacking nearby improvements and cities at first sight, but with a catch - they'd be restricted to zones within one increment of their base difficulty.  Namely, bandits could only move in Starter through Medium zones, a standard Ophidian army could only move in Medium through Deadly zones, etc.  Quests could also be placed in zones corresponding to their difficulty, to encourage being prepared to embark on them.

And of course resource distribution could be tied to zone difficulty - Starter and Weak zones would have a modest supply of resources, but the densest sources of Shards, Crystal, Gold, and more, would be found inside Epic zones where you would have to clear hosts of fearsome monsters to have any chance of keeping an outpost or settlement intact.  This would result in a different set of strategies depending on the map draw - with lots of weak zones nearby, you would launch an early expansion campaign to claim them all before pushing further, whereas a Sovereign looking at more dangerous nearby zones might focus on leveling up an elite force to get earlier access to dense resources.

Just a note - these zones wouldn't be directly visible to the player, but the combination of smooth zone boundaries and a look at the monsters within should make it readily apparent.

So, would this proposition help with the scaling issues this game has?  Any ideas how it might be improved?

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

i am a bit against making the world too much scripted to follow the player

 

also the problem can be solved in many other ways, i already did it by modding the lairs so that you dont get hard lairs at start, the few ones that have to spawn immediatly (like dragons) can be made so the dragons dont wander and arent released when your influence hit them

so basically once all this is balanced you cant really be destroyed cause you unluck in the starting spot, you get only the low level lairs and they evolve over time forcing the player to stay on guard(by default there is also  a min distance for each lair, even though this doesnt matter at all, the problem is not the capital since the game is balanced for now around building many cities you NEED the room for them, not for the capital)

 

other things that can improve the world are the new random events, i didnt really study them so much but its possible i think tie some monsters to  random event turns so you could balance the world even more

 

anyway most of your ideas are good, like linking the resources, aggressiveness, quests etc

but i suspect this would be too much work to do now, not only dividing the world in zones but create a new algorithm for random world able to adapt to other setting and the number of players, seems complicated but if devs love the idea why not