Hi all,
Coming back to DF after a bit of a break i had an idea on difficulty levels.
Presently even with most of the mods, if you reach the point to can defeat attackers game gets easier rather than harder. I was wondering whether it was possible to make tweaks to get an 'ironman' mode, where the enemies keep getting more powerful.
Initial though on implimentation depend very much on exactly what you can edit in the raws after a world is generated and a fortress is up and running, the key one being:
A) Can you add new castes to races during a game (obviously while game not running) and have nothing break, and them show up in seiges
B) Failing that will modifying caste POP_RATIO during a game be respected when new seiges are generated
If either of these work, at the simpliest could save the game each spring and run the tool to bump the difficulty up (add/increse frequence of castes with better skills/stats/special abilities)
If you wanted to be more fancy could parse the gamelog when changing thing (e.g. if all the gobo are being killed by archers, gobo kings recruits many archers skilled in shield use to his army. If many trap deaths sabataur squads with expert dodge or trap avoid and building destroyer etc.)
For the really fancy possibility may be getting other info (fortress wealth?) from dfhack to tweak things further.
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As you can see however everything relies on being able to raw mod a running game if change difficuly without causing problem and i was wonder if anyone had already spent any time experimenting with this?
If not will spend some time this weekend seeing what happens.
Edit: I am aware that a number of mods use extra civs of different strenths and various population limits to escalate the difficulty. Wanted somthing a big more fine grained, could lower difficulty if needed and that could potentially would work moderatly easily with existing mods (e.g. civforge/genisis) as it could clone existing castes with bonues without having to know much if anything about exactly how a mod set up races, castes items etc. (cause i would suck as designing a large scale mod from scratch, coding a tool i can do)