Does it matter how long you stay in a map?

[joshua.selvan]

Greetings.

If you play on challenging difficulty, does the global map difficulty increase based on the number of maps you've been to or is it tied to how many cycles have passed in your game?

Trying to figure out if one is penalised for staying as long as one can on a single map to extract as many resources as possible or if you should leave a map as soon as the more valuable resources have been depleted.

[Skilliard]

It depends what difficulty setting you're playing on. There is a "survival mode" setting", if it is set to off, global infestation doesn't increase on its own. This setting is off in the "Relaxed" and "Take Your Time" presets. With any other preset, global map difficulty increases over time.

[joshua.selvan]

Thanks for the response. I saw those settings but I found the wording too vague to tell what it actually meant.

It states that in relaxed mode the world difficulty does not increase unless you fly to a higher difficulty zone. It doesn't confirm the behaviour above relaxed mode however. There are two different approaches which could determine when global infestation level increases and I can't see any words or comments which indicate which one is being used.

In challenge mode, the global infestation level could increase after a certain number of maps or it could increase after a certain number of cycles have passed. I can't find any indication in game into which is used.

There is a huge difference in one's approach to playing if difficulty increases every 200 cycles or if difficulty increases every 2 maps :p

I assume its based on cycles but it would really help to know for certain.

[Suncrash]

Global infestation, unless playing in relaxed mode, increases over time. Flying will not cause it to increase faster, so flying to a new map is definitely a positive thing if your current location is no longer efficiently providing you with resources.

I apologize if the wording is not clear enough. There are explanations when hovering the "survival mode" difficulty setting and also when hovering the global infestation display in the destination selection window, but they just say "over time" without being more specific than that.

[joshua.selvan]

Thanks for the clarification.

Great game by the way, really enjoying it :p