Difficulty over Time

[x4000]

Sorry for still being off-topic, but while we're at it, when era new spells or crests system are coming in game? I understand, that now you are mostly on bugfixing and tuning what already in place, but you can share approximate time?

No idea on the crest system, that really depends on Keith and what happens with his schedule in the macrogame stuff, etc.  I expect it will be within the next two months, but I don't know where in that progression it will fit. I think the Enchants will probably be first, but again that's somewhat dependent on player interest in the various parts of all that.

For new spells, I'd been planning on doing a couple today along with some new enemies, but that got derailed by this very thread.  Not that I'm upset about that -- this needed to happen first -- but that's what happened.  I'd been planning on doing new spells and enemies yesterday, but the stuff about the particle visuals derailed that day.  Presuming nothing pressing comes up over night, things are looking good for me to finally get to some new content tomorrow.

[BobTheJanitor]

Presuming nothing pressing comes up over night, things are looking good for me to finally get to some new content tomorrow.

Sounds like a challenge, folks. Quick, someone derail the game development again!

[x4000]

 

[eRe4s3r]

Oh i think i got that one down perfectly

[Armanant]

Looking at the respective 0.516 changes, wow, loving it. Looking forward to seeing it in action!

No more stat inflation means no more "wow, these ratsthat i'm trivially killing are 100x more powerful than I was a month ago! Powerful enough to wipe my entire scrap of civilization off the map! thank god I leveled lots few times since then and now it's just a rat!"

 

[Garthor]

You know, I feel there's a much simpler solution:

Adjust the maximum area level you can access to be civlevel * 2, instead of civlevel + 10.  Then, the equivalent at level 300 of raiding level 40 regions at level 30 would be raiding level 400 regions.

That is the worst sentence, but I like how bad it is so it's staying.  A better format would be "at level 30 you raid level 40 regions, and so at level 300 you raid level 400 regions".

Anyway, that keeps difficulty relatively static.  The solution for the display of numbers getting out of hand would be to just use the k, M, etc. suffixes for numbers, so you do 3M damage instead of 3,000,000.  People might be confused a bit when they're doing 185Z damage, but they'll figure out through context that it's 1000 times more than 185E.  Any rounding errors are also likely to be not particularly important.

Oh, and it occurs to me that the resources you find might have to have a nonlinear scale as well, so that you are getting approximately the same relative reward for +100 levels at level 300 as you got for +10 levels at level 30.

[zebramatt]

Egads, it's upside down!

[x4000]

Adjust the maximum area level you can access to be civlevel * 2, instead of civlevel + 10.  Then, the equivalent at level 300 of raiding level 40 regions at level 30 would be raiding level 400 regions.

The problem is that would make savegames grow exponentially, and you'll run out of RAM pretty fast.  In general our goal is to make world files grow as slowly as possible, but at a satisfying rate.

Egads, it's upside down!

For the enemy health: yes, yes it is.  Fix coming this morning!

[Sherlock]

I've got to say, I like this idea in general, but it does take away a couple things that i was looking forward to in the later-game.  The act of powering up your character doesn't seem as rewarding for its own sake.

Maybe you can blame this on my love of the Disgaea series, but...

"Rawr!  I have 1 million HP and my damage is over 9000!"
feels a little nicer than
"Rawr!  My awesome power has slid your difficulty slider leftwards considerably!"

Just a thought.

[x4000]

Yep, that does get lost -- but it's unavoidable, I decided.  That sort of progression of stats just simply is incompatible with the idea of playing infinitely.  And it's incompatible with having a wider range of enemy healths and such in general, too.  In general, it's just incompatible with this game -- which Keith had been trying to tell me prior to alpha, honestly, and was advocating a relative power levels thing, but I wanted to try it the linear way first.  And... well, that really was borked.

[Sherlock]

Could a combination of the two be possible?  Such as, if you did the current scaling, but added say... a 10% hp/damage boost to EVERYTHING per level (player and enemy and spells)  You'd be evenly matched on the sames.  The level +10s would have 2.59x everything you had, and your difficulty scaling would take care of the rest.

EDIT: I guess spells would need a 61% boost per spell level as their levels are character level / 5

[x4000]

I really have no desire to start getting the numbers scaling up again, honestly.  That always sort of misrepresented the sort of game this is, anyway -- this isn't an RPG, this is a Metroidvania game on steroids.

Don't worry, it's not like your character and world won't grow and change.  This game is all about growing and changing.  The numbers aspect of it really isn't the focus, though, and adding in scaling of the numbers causes problems that are not avoidable.

If you do the math on your suggestion, you'll see that it causes the exact same backwards difficulty curve that the game previously had, for instance: the early levels have extreme differences between them, whereas over time the differences fade to nothing.  That's the nature of a linear change, and the entire point of why we stopped doing that.  It's certainly non-obvious that it's an issue, though; I didn't see it myself until yesterday when I broke out the spreadsheets.

[zebramatt]

Although I think some of the problems this methodology overcomes might be alternatively solved just as elegantly, I actually think this approach is more in keeping with the atmosphere of the game.

Having a character with 1.9mil hp and 24bil damage makes sense when you've levelled your character to lvl1000... but actually having a tangible effect on the difficulty of the enemies in the universe, and efficacy of potions and spells, is far more in keeping with the idea that your civilisation has advanced - and the world has responded accordingly. Especially in a torn apart and put back together world such as this.

Would I be so bold as to suggest that this might go down as one of the standout defining features of the game? Is it to Valley what the asynchronous resourcing is to AI War? I'd say... it just may be!

[x4000]

That's been my thought, too -- it's really going in a novel direction that's a lot more fitting with the whole package.  Same as all the various AI Progress related stuff as in AI War.

[Sherlock]

Alright, I'll respect your decision.

Though, the geeky part of my brain wont let me drop this until i say a %age growth curve is non-linear, and the 2.59x scaling for level 10+ will stay static throughout all the levels.  It would be mathematically identical to scaling enemies by 1.1^(level gap). (10% is higher than you'd want though, cause you'd be bumping against the 64-bit integer cap for HP at about level 400.  maybe 1% would be better)