Difficulty levels mod - change amount of pollution

[Peter34]

I'd still like to see a mod that allows a tweaking of the game's difficulty level, once that is muhc more precise and fluid, and more transparent to players, than just deciding the size of the starting area, and the exceedingly binary flag of peaceful_mode ON or OFF.

I think the simplest implementation is to look at the game files, and try to determine which frequently used machines make the most pollution, and then add a series of mods that increase or reduce the pollution made by these most problematic machines, all by the same percentage:
very_easy_diff.zip reduces the pollution from those machines by 60%.
easy_diff.zip by 30%
hard_diff.zip increases it by 40%
very_hard_diff.zip increases it by 100%
Four mods, and the player enables whichever one correspons to the difficulty level he desires, if he is unhappy with the vanilla difficulty level.

The idea isn't to change all machines, since that would be a lot of work and in some cases rather pointless (because some machines are only rarely used, or are used only early in the game, e.g. Burner Mining Drills) but rather to find the ones most critical to pollution creation, the ones that tend to pollute the most in the standard play style. That might be Boilers, or it might be Electric Mining Drills, or it might be tier 1/2/3 Assembler Machines, or Chemical Plants, or maybe Refineries, while rarely used en masse, are surprisingly big stinkers. Pick the 2 or 3 of the previous that have the biggest overall pollution impact. Find the most critical machines, and tweak those.

As little work as possible to achieve the desired result to a high level of quality and satisfaction.

Of course, if it is possible - and easily doable - it'd be better to tweak the alien's sensitivity to pollution, so that their mutate/reaction thresholds are increased (or lowered when making a mod that increases difficulty). I just don't know if that can be modded, whereas I know that the first idea can be implemented.

There's a potential problem, with my original suggestion, that some players might inadvertedly enable several of the difficulty level mods in the same game.

Checking for that, to work around problems, would add to the scripting burden, but a simpler solution could be to set a flag, on loading or starting a game only, set it to zero, then have each difficulty level mod increase this flag by 1 once, then 5 or 10 seconds after loading or starting a game, check the value of this flag. If it is >1 then give an error message explaining the problem, and end the game.

[Choumiko]

Of course, if it is possible - and easily doable - it'd be better to tweak the alien's sensitivity to pollution, so that their mutate/reaction thresholds are increased (or lowered when making a mod that increases difficulty). I just don't know if that can be modded, whereas I know that the first idea can be implemented.

base/prototypes/map-settings.lua should have pretty much all you need to change biter difficulty, a small part:

Code: Select all

pollution=
    {
      enabled=true,
      -- these are values for 60 ticks (1 simulated second)
      --
      -- amount that is diffused to neighboring chunk
      -- (possibly repeated for other directions as well)
      diffusion_ratio=0.02,
      -- this much PUs must be on the chunk to start diffusing
      min_to_diffuse=15,
      -- constant modifier a percentage of 1 - the pollution eaten by a chunks tiles
      ageing=1,
      -- anything bigger than this is visualised as this value
      expected_max_per_chunk=7000,
      -- anything lower than this (but > 0) is visualised as this value
      min_to_show_per_chunk=700,
      min_pollution_to_damage_trees = 3500,
      pollution_with_max_forest_damage = 10000,
      pollution_per_tree_damage = 2000,
      pollution_restored_per_tree_damage = 500,
      max_pollution_to_restore_trees = 1000
    },

    enemy_evolution=
    {
      enabled=true,
      -- percentual increase in the evolve factor for every second (60 ticks)
      time_factor = 0.000004,
      -- percentual increase in the evolve factor for every destroyed spawner
      destroy_factor = 0.002,
      -- percentual increase in the evolve factor for 1000 PU
      pollution_factor = 0.000015
    },

The whole file is pretty well commented. The really hard part would be to test the effects off the different settings and then decide what difficulty level has which settings.