Difficulty adjustments for recruiting

[Owlchemist]

After playing around with this mod for a week, I feel as though the difficulty could use some work. If there are some variables in the code that control a few aspects of the mod, I'd recommend linking them into a slider give some user control over this.

In particular, I find it's pretty easy to gain new pawns. In the early game, it's practically guaranteed I can get anyone to join with only 6 points of social. This is quite a contrast to vanilla gameplay where it is much more challenging and drawn out to get new recruits on your own terms.

I also find it's strangely easy to get a max 100 score when they leave. In the three colonies I've played so far, I've just had guests sleeping on the floor (sleeping spots) in some cramped room without anything in it. Seems all they need to be happy was a bit of charm from my social leader.

[OrionFive]

I do get complaints both ways. People who find it too hard to please guests and people who find it too easy.
I'm not sure what should be configurable, though. It can easily get overwhelming, and if people can change things, they will - and then forget about it - and then complain that this or that is not right.
And yes, this happened a few times already.

What do you think should be tweakable?

[Owlchemist]

Hmm, yes I make a few mods myself and know well enough what you're concerned about. One approach that may help would be preset difficulty levels. Could just start out with two - Normal (no changes) and Hardcore, which would make recruitment more of a rarity than a semi-guaranteed event.

Without knowing the variables in play it'd be hard for me to give a technical answer though.
It seems to me like I can get a max score of 100 by entertainment alone (my best social person has a high priority for social work, so they spend more of their time chatting with guests). Perhaps weight and cap just how much influence charming can do. Maybe you do this already, I couldn't say.

If I were wanting to play a more hardcore experience though, I might expect that only an exceptionally talented social pawn could have much luck persuading someone to leave their group to join some colony. I might also expect them to heavily weigh decision making on the colony's progression, which would probably just be looking at the total wealth value and/or how far down the tech tree they are. Sometimes I get new recruitments with high tech armor and weapons joining my tribal colony and that seems a bit hard to believe, lol!

[OrionFive]

Presets sounds like a good idea - the preset could also be selected by the difficulty the player has chosen for the storyteller.

What makes tweaking it so hard is that so many variables come into play. How difficulty scales right now is that the amount of colonists you already have increases the amount of "friends" the guest needs to be recruited. And the market value of the guest determines how well he has to like people that they count as friends.

So these could be tweaked a bit to make specific cases harder. For example the tech level could increase the required friends by 1 per level.

[OrionFive]

Also, the guests get a sort of base satisfaction if colony wealth is low (just like colonists)... This makes satisfying them easier at the start.

Their expectations slowly increase over the years played.

It is also much easier to increase relationship if their faction doesn't like yours than if it does. And the amount of relationship change is limited by the amount of guests. Since in the beginning there are fewer guests, the player can build/ruin relationship much slower than later.