How does the distance to the citadel increase difficulty?

[POOTISMAN]

I see on the world map that distant tiles give higher food and XP rewards, but there is no explanation why. The modiers are identical to close tiles. I found only this description of this feature:

"The further away from the center of the map, the more demanding the game will become."

But how? Will caravans and traders need longer to arrive?

[alexshiro]

Is that new?

[Tam]

Originally posted by POOTISMAN:

I see on the world map that distant tiles give higher food and XP rewards, but there is no explanation why. The modiers are identical to close tiles. I found only this description of this feature:

"The further away from the center of the map, the more demanding the game will become."

But how? Will caravans and traders need longer to arrive?

In the past (before I even played the game so I only know from others) hostility seemed to scale with distance to the citadel. Maybe that is a left over from that time?

[Leisurely Luke]

Hey! The difficulty and rewards don't depend on the distance from the Citadel. Though, this indeed used to work like this in a very distant past, so perhaps some old or not updated online sources still include it.

You select the difficulty before embarking and the rewards depend on the selected and adjacent tiles (including modifiers).

[Kalisa]

shame this was removed, could have been a fun risk vs reward mechanic, push further away for higher difficulty but more rewards.
is there any advantage to pushing further away?

[Tam]

Originally posted by Kalisa:

shame this was removed, could have been a fun risk vs reward mechanic, push further away for higher difficulty but more rewards.
is there any advantage to pushing further away?

You will find more event sides and chests, but as far as I know that is all.

[Leisurely Luke]

Originally posted by Kalisa:

shame this was removed, could have been a fun risk vs reward mechanic, push further away for higher difficulty but more rewards.
is there any advantage to pushing further away?

The main reason why we changed this to selectable difficulty was the chore of having to start with low difficulty games at the beginning of each Cycle even if they were trivial and not challenging for you.

[Kalisa]

Originally posted by Leisurely Luke:

Originally posted by Kalisa:

shame this was removed, could have been a fun risk vs reward mechanic, push further away for higher difficulty but more rewards.
is there any advantage to pushing further away?

The main reason why we changed this to selectable difficulty was the chore of having to start with low difficulty games at the beginning of each Cycle even if they were trivial and not challenging for you.

Understandable, and this is just a suggestion but it would be nice if there was some incentive for pushing further away from the citadel for more risk vs reward gameplay, perhaps some kind of difficulty/hostility modifier ontop of normal difficulty even if its just minor.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Kalisa:

Originally posted by Leisurely Luke:

The main reason why we changed this to selectable difficulty was the chore of having to start with low difficulty games at the beginning of each Cycle even if they were trivial and not challenging for you.

Understandable, and this is just a suggestion but it would be nice if there was some incentive for pushing further away from the citadel for more risk vs reward gameplay, perhaps some kind of difficulty/hostility modifier ontop of normal difficulty even if its just minor.

There is: you need to push away from the citadel to push toward the map features which give you cool modifiers, extra rewards, or both.

[Kalisa]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Originally posted by Kalisa:

Understandable, and this is just a suggestion but it would be nice if there was some incentive for pushing further away from the citadel for more risk vs reward gameplay, perhaps some kind of difficulty/hostility modifier ontop of normal difficulty even if its just minor.

There is: you need to push away from the citadel to push toward the map features which give you cool modifiers, extra rewards, or both.

Those modiifers dont change tho the further you go out, there is no difficulty/hostility modifer that goes up, nothing gets more challanging the further out you go, its just randomly placed modifiers and biomes.
a watch tower near a excavation site biome right next to the citadel is exactly the same rewards/challange as one u would find very far out.

[Narandia]

Originally posted by Kalisa:

shame this was removed, could have been a fun risk vs reward mechanic, push further away for higher difficulty but more rewards.
is there any advantage to pushing further away?

There is in terms of the influence scoring system, you get extra points the further away you've gone with your settlements. Plus you can discover more modifiers and treasures to play with or claim. The risk is slightly there in terms of trade route partner selection and distance to said partners (although I think longer routes pay off better for the longer travel time and provision cost so that probably about evens out).

Originally posted by Kalisa:

Those modiifers dont change tho the further you go out, there is no difficulty/hostility modifer that goes up, nothing gets more challanging the further out you go, its just randomly placed modifiers and biomes.
a watch tower near a excavation site biome right next to the citadel is exactly the same rewards/challange as one u would find very far out.

Not generally, though in my experience some modifiers either just flat out dont spawn near the center or they are rare enough to be very unlikely to be there. Not that you need to go to extremes and explore to the ends of the map (in fact with the current mechanics the total map size seems to be a bit overkill anyway), but at least there is some point in pushing out a bit.

[Kalisa]

Originally posted by Narandia:

though in my experience some modifiers either just flat out dont spawn near the center or they are rare enough to be very unlikely to be there.

I'm curious what modifiers dont seem to spawn near the center? also i thought points for the score was just based on settlement score and had nothing to do with distance (im usually in first or 2nd every time without ever pushing very far out and didnt seem to notice any difference in distance for points)

[Narandia]

Originally posted by Kalisa:

Originally posted by Narandia:

though in my experience some modifiers either just flat out dont spawn near the center or they are rare enough to be very unlikely to be there.

I'm curious what modifiers dont seem to spawn near the center? also i thought points for the score was just based on settlement score and had nothing to do with distance (im usually in first or 2nd every time without ever pushing very far out and didnt seem to notice any difference in distance for points)

that temple that gives you a lot more timed orders comes to mind. And the influence ranking is mainly influenced by settlement score for sure but if it was only that, there wouldn't be those other categories. I suppose it's not like its a big factor, but its at least something.

[Kalisa]

more timed orders spawn for me allot near the center, though theres still some modifiers i have not seen. But in general there really is no real gameplay incentive to go further out in the current version beyond just exploration, they clearly had some incentives early on but moved away from that since that was the only way for difficulty i assume? (never played back then) but now that we do have difficulty options, would be nice to see a return of more incentives is all

[DG]

If you look at the end of year scoring for the four companies it shows the categories that you score points for (but it doesn't explain anything ).

I'm assuming that the whole company system is just a simple placeholder for something else that will come later in development.

[Narandia]

Originally posted by DG:

If you look at the end of year scoring for the four companies it shows the categories that you score points for (but it doesn't explain anything ).

I'm assuming that the whole company system is just a simple placeholder for something else that will come later in development.

it lacks details, for sure, but outside of the Modifiers score its self-explainatory enough. For that one its mainly that I have no idea how much each map modifier is worth. I assume the negative ones are worth more than the positive ones but that's about it.