This is more one of those slight mistakes that make it through playtesting because people always underestimate how good players are at finding the least fun way to play. By giving a 20% difficulty bonus for having a randomized tree you incentivize (for a certain kind of player) the style where you restart the game over and over until you get Martian Copyrights as your first social tech (+2000M$ for 1000 research, effectively holy moley money.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SurvivingMars/comments/8fnfk8/how_hard_is_985_difficulty_stupid_easy/
[Pictured: The proof is in the sols. And the link.]
Now you can argue that a player willing to do that deserves the reward of stupid amounts of money but it kinda breaks the scoring system as a means of determining skill when RNG can make it easier to just buy, launch, and salvage rockets than reuse them. I'd argue that it's also not a very fun way to play.
Changing the game rule so that it provides no difficulty bonus, negative difficulty, or simply adds a little coloured tick next to the difficulty when something like this can mean the difference between someone struggling to survive and cruising on through with hardly a care in the world. Random tech is too fun of a rule to get rid of but a slight tweak for the people crazy enough to play on 985% might make it easier to let us brag on the rare chance we survive.
Oh. And. Like. Some new gamerule for breakthroughs might be fun too. Like giving it it's own tech tree so you can avoid the completely overpowered stuff such as Extractor AI and Superconducting Computing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SurvivingMars/comments/8fnfk8/how_hard_is_985_difficulty_stupid_easy/
[Pictured: The proof is in the sols. And the link.]
Now you can argue that a player willing to do that deserves the reward of stupid amounts of money but it kinda breaks the scoring system as a means of determining skill when RNG can make it easier to just buy, launch, and salvage rockets than reuse them. I'd argue that it's also not a very fun way to play.
Changing the game rule so that it provides no difficulty bonus, negative difficulty, or simply adds a little coloured tick next to the difficulty when something like this can mean the difference between someone struggling to survive and cruising on through with hardly a care in the world. Random tech is too fun of a rule to get rid of but a slight tweak for the people crazy enough to play on 985% might make it easier to let us brag on the rare chance we survive.
Oh. And. Like. Some new gamerule for breakthroughs might be fun too. Like giving it it's own tech tree so you can avoid the completely overpowered stuff such as Extractor AI and Superconducting Computing.
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