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[Morrokain]

It could potentially be helpful for new players to have visible in-game difficulty toggle options when starting a first play through. These options could also be expanded to effect more campaign difficulty spikes.

1) An option to reduce supply and maintenance costs or alternatively reduce the credit cost of supplies and fuel.

2) An option to reduce the penalty of inspections/or number of raids generated against their colonies.

(Thoughts of any more?)

Having a visible in-game toggle menu might encourage players to customize their difficulty the first time they play based upon their gaming experience or genre background. For instance, a player may want to reduce supply or fuel costs but not, say, reduce the combat damage their piloted ship takes, or, increase the damage it deals, etc.

A concern: How could this also accommodate mod additions to difficulty mode config? Is it possible to implement a scrolling list in the UI that could read entries from the settings file and populate toggles during in-game campaign starts? (Thereby allowing additions to the list of config options that can be enabled/disabled when starting a new campaign in-game).

TLDR: The main goal is to make difficulty customization more visible to new players and to increase the number of customization options for more elements of the campaign.

[Timtumm]

I am a huge fan of customization.  I agree with these, and also other nit-picky adjustments.

I have already adjusted the supply/maintenance cost as well as fuel spent in the ShipHulls.xls file to my liking.

The pirate/faction raids/inspections are driving me batting however.  I wish this could be adjusted either in settings or in a json/xml/xls file. There is a non-stop stream of folks running at my planets, getting killed by my battlestations, and getting mad at me for it.  Frankly I don't care about how realistic it is to go to war for economic reasons.  It is taking agency away from my game, and periodically making everyone hate me for succeeding in the game. It is a single-player game, and this is making it less fun. I want to explore, not run appeasement missions for factions that like to run their fleet into my buzz-saw.

[bobucles]

Managing your finances is a huge portion of difficulty, so anything along those lines would be great.

- Mission reward scaling
- Generic salvage scaling (supplies/fuel/etc)
- Fleet Upkeep (crew cost/supplies/etc.) scaling

I dunno how well an "expedition timer" will work in terms of difficulty. A lot of expeditions can be trivial if they're all tiny, while a small number of expeditions can be brutal if they're monolithic attacks. Generally players get more annoyed if attacks happen too frequently, since that takes time away from other tasks they may enjoy. It'd probably make more sense to adjust the enemy fleet difficulty rather than the frequency of events.

Fuel is something that is generally very well displayed to the player and doesn't really require a difficulty setting. If anything, adjusting fuel expenses would only screw players up by giving a rock solid impression that ends up completely obsolete when the difficulty changes. It'd probably be better to adjust fuel recovery from generic salvage, so that easy mode is easier to sustain in deep space. Maybe there could be more forgiveness on distress calls as well, since that's the player's safety net if they run out.

Should difficulty interact with trade settings in any way? A sector in shambles may suffer with resources, but beat down planets offer superb trade opportunities. Similarly a very rock solid stable sector will struggle to offer big money trades. It doesn't seem like a direct 1:1 with difficulty, but is more about setting the theme of your sector.

Don't forget that a very small change in many areas can add up and multiply together into a vast swing of overall difficulty. While a lot of tiny dials are enticing for an experienced modding community, new players should not be expected to understand any details on the difficulty system. If they want easy, selecting easy should be easy.

[Morrokain]

My thoughts on those players who wouldn't want to tinker with the difficulty options or are not sure what they would do is that there would also be global settings that would "auto toggle" the appropriate sliders. So selecting "Easy", or even further separating that into "Easy and "Very Easy", etc, would have pre-selected toggles that could then be further customized. That might be borderline too complex on the technical side, but well it's an idea at least.

I don't particularly think customization is only attractive to modders though, or even just experienced players.

When I first encountered the easy setting, I did not select it even though I was having difficulty in the campaign at the time. Why? Because it operates on changes that are too broad in its sweep for me personally. More salvage might have somewhat alleviated my supply and fuel difficulties, but I didn't have a problem with combat and so didn't want my ship to have even more power creep than officers/skills would already provide. That's a pretty intuitive concept even when first playing the game. Consider too, that increased salvage only generally makes exploration outside of the core worlds easier - not exploration of the core worlds themselves (my initial goal at the time). As another example, salvage includes more than just fuel and supplies. I didn't particularly want to accelerate my play through by finding weapons and fighters more easily either.

I think we can mostly trust that players generally have at least some idea of what they either don't want to deal with in the campaign or what will likely be difficult for them in a game like this.

[outdated]

My thoughts on those players who wouldn't want to tinker with the difficulty options or are not sure what they would do is that there would also be global settings that would "auto toggle" the appropriate sliders. So selecting "Easy", or even further separating that into "Easy and "Very Easy", etc, would have pre-selected toggles that could then be further customized. That might be borderline too complex on the technical side, but well it's an idea at least.

Easy, Normal, Hard, Custom. And a permadeath/ironman toggle.