Difficulty curve - game balance

[impaktor]

I thought a thread on pioneer's game difficulty / player progression through the game would be apt. It's a topic that interests me, (the reputation level and tech level implementations were my stab at this).

I found this article very interesting:

"The idea of a difficulty curve is all wrong"
https://www.davetech.co.uk/difficultycurves

Some points from the article:

- "Don’t punish someone for doing bad and make future attempts harder" Perhaps we have a tendency to do this, e.g. lowering reputation if missing the deadline. Though there is a path to redemption (take more missions and finish them in time, or donate money).

- "Achievements that reward people playing with a disadvantage" - flying without autopilot would be an obvious pioneer thing I suppose. Not sure what the reward would be? More space for cargo when no autopilot is fitted?

- "Don’t display things the player doesn’t need to know right now (don’t overwhelm them with descriptions of skills that are not on their path)". I suspect we're overwhelming the player at the start with stuff. But a tutorial for flight control at start would hopefully fix that.

- "Don’t just make the game harder; Show the player they are getting better. Something that works well is to show people how far they have come, you see games having nods back to previous puzzles, often they add something fresh or obfuscate it but it’s nice for the player to see how much better they are now." (perhaps cash, rank, ship equipment would be how it applies to pioneer)

The article also goes into collecting palyer stats. Fluffyfreak implemented something to this effect, but it was never finished as lwho felt monitoring players was unacceptable, and having opt in rather than opt out would mean no one would want to opt in. I think having opt-in would be nice, maybe if they opt-in they get to see their own player stats.

[FicksDinkum]

One issue that bothers me is that there isn't a normal progression in the Easy, Medium, and Hard starting scenarios.

For one thing, I think that all three beginner ships should be generalists. I know that the desire is to make ships more specialised, so you can't use a ship designated as a "fighter" in a trading role, and vice-versa. But I think the argument can be made that the starting ships should all be generalist ships, so that a new player can try out all the different roles right from the start, and use their starting ship in the way that they want until they can afford a suitable ship for the role they've decided to specialise in.

The most obvious discontinuity is in the cargo space. I would expect that the cargo space stats would go Hard < Medium < Easy, but actually the Hard start ship (Xylophis) has 8 cu space and the Medium start ship (Pumpkinseed) has 4 cu. This means that if your preferred play style is "trader" the Medium start ship is actually going to be more of a grind than the Hard start ship. Such a player is better off taking the Hard start. Or taking the Medium start, and immediately selling the ship and buying the Hard start ship instead.

You might say "Ah, this kind of gaming of the system is exactly the kind of clever strategy that we want to encourage!" And sure, in the long term I agree. Stripping out a ship and repurposing it for something that it supposedly wasn't designed for makes the player feel smart and is pretty cool too, but it shouldn't be the default best way of using the starting ships.

There are different ways we could address this:

1. Reduce the Xylophis's cargo stat from 8 to 4, and increase the Pumpkinseed's cargo stat from 4 to 12. The reason I say 12 and not 8 is that there is already the Kanara with cargo stat 8, so this would give a smoother upgrade path for traders.
2. Change the Hard start ship to Varada and the medium start ship to Kanara. This would then have the logical progression of 4 -> 8 -> 16 in starting ship cargo stats, and wouldn't require changing any ship definitions.
3. Some kind of mix of the above.

Whichever we choose, I would also lobby for a similar progression in cabin capacity in the starting ships. Or at least make it monotonic. 1 -> 1 -> 2 would be fine. But currently it is 1 -> 1 -> 0 which is just annoying.