Difficulty Scaling UI Suggestion

[57CloudFire]

I had a thought about normal and hard difficulties. Based on my skill level, normal difficulty is very easy, but hard tends to ramp up too quick. However, once enough infrastructure is built you can survive droughts much longer than even the 30 day droughts of hard mode. I do understand that surviving long enough to build that infrastructure is a major part of the challenge. This is not a complaint, I'm simply throwing an idea out for the UI of the difficulty selection

What if the difficulty selection was also split into a few separate sliding scales rather than just presets of easy normal and hard? Essentially combining a few of the "custom" difficulty settings into the standard way difficulty is selected.

My initial thoughts would be:
first scale is duration of wet season
second scale is duration of dry season / bad tides (with a checkbox to turn these on or off)
Third scale is the handicap ramp up (how many cycles it takes for dry seasons and bad tides to reach full duration.

You could keep the "easy" "normal" and "hard" presets and simply have the scales go to the predetermined values when clicking on each preset, but the scales could also include options more extreme than the presets, plus everything in between. This would allow for a "challenge" mode that is the hardest combination of settings (shortest wet seasons, longest droughts, quick ramp up time - harder than current 'hard'), or a "ultra casual" version that is just endless wet season.


An example of how I would use this as a player, I would select either Normal mode and shorten the wet seasons to maybe a 10 day max and lengthen the dry seasons up to 40 days, but keep the ramp up scaling the same. Or, I could select hard and either lengthen the wet seasons by a day or two, or maybe instead increase the number of cycles it takes for droughts and bad tides to reach full length.


Everything I've described above is already possible in the game, I'm more presenting an idea for a UI change that brings a few of these "custom" difficulty options to the main window of difficulty selection in an intuitive and user friendly way.

What are your thoughts?

[EleventhStar]

sure it would be nice to have, but not exactly first on my list of QoL improvements.

the one big thing i'd say is actually a problem the handicap percentage kinda working opposite to what most peoples intuition is.