Recommended difficulty levels

[Lorska]

tl;dr:
I would recommend
Veteran > P1 for casual play
P4 if you want to progress fast without much risk of losing
P11 if you want more of a challenge
P15 if you can stomach randomness to experience some of the best difficulty increases
P20 if you're bored by everything else or just like to say that you're a hardcore gamer™


Settler
This is the easiest introductory difficulty and should be treated as such. The rewards are awful, the only challenge here is not knowing the base mechanics of the game and everything can work here. Very easy to form bad habits making it hard to move on. Past your first game I would never recommend this.

Pioneer
A fine base difficulty that shares some problems with the first one. I'd prefer this one to actually learn the base mechanics though but as before you should move on before bad habits are starting to form.


Veteran
I would recommend this for your early to mid game runs. The difficulty is decent, rewards are fair. It's a good baseline for casual players that understand the mechanics with a few unlocks offsetting the embark point reduction or for a good introduction for a more risky play style for people wanting to climb. You'll probably not lose games here unless you really mess up but it'll keep you on your toes regardless. It's also fantastic to try out some more dangerous modifiers on the map to feel out how they impact your run (e.g. no orders or no trader)


Viceroy
This is where hostility is maxed out and where you need to understand the consequences of your actions. Mistakes can be costly and if you didn't learn how to use the game's bounce back mechanics to recover then you'll pay dearly. I would probably recommend this more due to how well balanced it makes the game feel if there wasn't the next difficulty that is practically an unconditional improvement on this. As such I can really only recommend playing on this difficulty once and switch to…

P1
While it seems like such a small change, upping the orders is actually huge. You'll need to employ multiple win conditions now and figuring out what to do when and switching strategies now finally starts to be relevant. It does make games longer, but once you started you'll notice how much better the game flows around it. Hostility from years now adds up to dangerous levels and all the other benefits from before still apply. Whether you want to stay at this difficulty forever or climb further, this will be by far the biggest milestone in prestige. It also comes with a hefty reward and point bonus which makes it so good to unlock.

P2
Cyst generation isn't that interesting because you'll easily be able to deal with it but it does make investing into the mechanic (and rain punk) more relevant. In the end it just forces you to invest in something you should do anyway but also makes it so you can't really avoid it anymore which makes it a mixed bag.

P3
No rerolling for free in your very first blueprint sounds like bad design but it's largely harmless. It cements your first blueprints as a randomized direction or goal which forces you to adapt. Due to the negative impact on later rolls though I wouldn't call it great.

P4
Faster leave decay disables some cheesy resolve switching to prevent people leaving which is good. There's also another jump in rewards and this makes the third level in a row with little in terms of added difficulty and more on the side of inconvenience. This makes it a fantastic level to stay on in terms of reward vs. challenge.

P5
Higher building costs is simply not very interesting unfortunately. It just makes you wait around a bit longer or buy some materials but it doesn't change anything about a run. I'd continue towards more interesting things.

P6 & P7
Are not it though. It's actually even more boring because the prior level at least had some implications early game. This just means that you have to produce more which you're probably already doing running on max capacity.

P8
Lower glade event speed is a good difficulty increase but it doesn't actually change the common strategy of uncovering right at the start of drizzle. It makes certain events a lot more difficult, namely ones that spawn things or stack penalties. It also adds a small reward bonus which is the last time I'll mention it.
I wouldn't personally stay on this because in the end none of the modifiers since P4 are interesting or challenging enough.

P9
This is an actual game changer. Lower liquidity has some serious implications making perk and blueprint purchases as well as trading routes way more exciting and worthwhile. You can still absolutely wreck the economy with stacking resource specializations but the common cases are feeling the tax. I'd recommend this if you're looking for a fair challenge, unfortunately…

P10
Adds even more challenge that feels natural. It makes you stay on your toes and turns some inconvenient events into potentially devastating ones. It's a very good step up. Unfortunately again…

P11
Peaks out this cycle of progression. Harder orders means less chain order fulfilling using rewards from one to complete the next. it's a simple but effective increase in difficulty and the one I would recommend for a fair but challenging run. Even though it's mostly just because the next levels drag down everything after, this prestige level should definitely be something to consider. Unlocking it also unlocks a neat corner stone so there's even more incentives.

P12 & P13
Now this is where things start to go awry. Not because these modifiers make it overly difficult, in fact some runs will actually not be affected by them at all. But losing blueprint and cornerstone choices both reduces the fun of choosing and just makes things more random. The moments where you choose between two valid options will be fewer, the moments where you have the choice between two things that are completely useless will increase.
Unlike the increased reroll cost it also doesn't affect the start disproportionately much so you can't really argue that it does anything run-defining either. You simply turn every choice into a crapshoot.
It's unfortunate that every modifier after this is going to be dragged down by these two.

P14
A stricter time limit is a great modifier and it's quite unfortunate that it's not available earlier. It's not as impactful as you might think because amassing impatience is actually very beneficial. If this was earlier like around P5 this would have been a hard recommendation to stay on because it leads to very cool and tense situations. Well at least if the next level wasn't…

P15
Do I really need to talk about about the incredible amount of things this changes? The only reason this isn't part of the base difficulty is that new players would be completely overwhelmed but again this isn't a strict downside. Having more time in a year to do things is great, despite the harsh effects tied to it. If you can stomach the earlier modifiers, this is also a great place to stay.

P16
I'll say it here, anything from this point on, including this modifier is simply not worth the trouble. While things do get harder, there's nothing interesting locked behind these levels. So treat anything above P15 as something you are just doing to make things harder, there's nothing fun or interesting hidden there, so I'll mostly talk about the implications on difficulty from now on.
Same as with the blueprint reroll costs, having reduced starting choices is fine, because it makes your first picks that much more important. With the reduced choice however that's quite a bitter pill to swallow that can leave you in a really bad spot at the start, but it's a fine increase in difficulty that's not too mean-spirited.

P17
Your people are not supposed to starve. It's an extremely situational negative effect that's rarely gonna occur unless you messed up earlier so it's probably your fault. So in terms of difficulty increase this is practically nothing. Why this is locked away so high up where the supposedly hardest modifiers should be is beyond me.

P18
You're only gonna sacrifice when you have surplus anyway or in very niche situations so this is just gonna amount to nothing most of the time. Again I'm confused why this is locked so high up when just like starving, permanently sacrificing something isn't really a common occurrence.

P19
Probably the cheapest and unfair effect on the whole list. You generally only open a few glades unless you're going for a heavy tool strategy which is very luck-based anyway, so this'll amount to something between 15 and 25 amber in a normal game. The unfair part comes from requiring you to have amber to begin with, which either forces an expensive embark bonus on you or forces trading things away early (unless trading is disabled). also if you wanted another reason to never open small glades, here you go. This might as well just read as being forced to pick amber as an embark bonus and never opening small glades so it's way more annoying than it is difficult.

P20
The penultimate difficulty spike that will change everything by being so incredibly hard… that it basically does nothing. If you wanted another reason to not use the forsaken altar and to always bring amber with you at the start here you go.
This doesn't change anything about how you play and even when it does have any effect at all, you'll have bigger issues to deal with than some extra impatience. Play this if you get a kick out of jumping through one hoop to call it the highest difficulty despite it actually not being that much more difficult than before.

Considering the (mostly) amazing modifiers until P15 it feels kinda bad to have such a drop-off in quality.


What do others think? I know there's a crowd saying that the reduced choice levels aren't bad (which I actually agree with in terms of difficulty) but I'm of the firm opinion that a difficulty modifier should never take away what you gained from meta progression. (Yes I also don't think you should lose embark points as you increase difficulty, you should simply start at the viceroy amount)

[Earl Komrad]

I very much enjoyed the climb to prestige 6, but after having two games with the +50% construction cost I decided that anything past prestige 4 just wouldn't be fun for me, nor is there really any gameplay incentive to do so (exp stops being an incentive after a while and achievments don't affect the game).

The game does a good job ramping up the difficulty from Settler to Prestige 1. As you start to get the hang of the game and unlock citadel upgrades, you'll feel the game getting easier and see that each new difficulty level, while increasing the challenge, also increases the reward.

To me Prestige feels very much an afterthought. It is a linear scale of increasing negative modifiers that start out penalizing bad play and ends up constraining your options. Sure, having less options to choose from and having each option cost more to invest is a challenge, but it also exacerbates the difference in utility between the blueprints, cornerstones and embarkation options. Even with 4 options for blueprints/cornerstons I often times find myself presented with either four bad options or options that won't help me at all. Having less stuff to choose from just makes it worse.

[LotusBlade]

I still sit at difficulty 4 yet to dive into prestiges. I don't think there is any reason to do prestige runs before leveling up more in progression tree. Also need much more knowledge and experience about bioms to be able to plan my victory path from beggining.

Today got daily run with no boards at all, blocked building to make basic boards and super anoying queen requests which were absolutely non-combinable guano. The run was true pain to the knee. Traders were all trolling with bad resource choises and super useless artifacts. My trade route villages were only 2 with few choises. Just hell... This is why player should level up more first (i am at 12 lvl or so, but only unlocked 7 lvl stuff and below), to get more varietty, slots and embark points.

I do think 14 blue and 14 red bars is not good for difficulty 4, should be 18 blues. Often it feels like i could get more fun from a slighty longer run, but there is some hesitation to start doing prestige-1.

[Olleus]

A lot of these are from the perspective of someone who is comfortable on very high levels, and would not at all represent the feelings of the "average" player first coming across a that new modifier.

P5 is pretty significant when it comes to rare resources, like parts, hearthstones and (now) pipes. Specifically because you can't sell a bunch to the first trader for a huge influx of cash.

P6? (the increased food consumption) is a pretty big one IMO. It means that you have to make cooking food a higher priority, before you could live on what the caravan brought you for a couple of years. The small camp patch did make this less of a problem though I guess...

P8 might not be a significant jump if you're already playing very precisely with seasonal timings. But below this level you don't need to, so for some people it would be a substantial adjustment.

P12&13 agree entirely. Makes everything just feel sluggish. The game becomes about survival while stumbling towards victory, rather than shooting ahead with a planned strategy. I get some people enjoy that, but it's pretty much were the fun stopped for me.

[Crashtest]

I'm currently at P11 and starting to really feel the pain. It's not really that the game feels too hard at this level since all in all it all remains manageable, but rather that it feels much more unforgiving. I had a really bad start in my current game and by year 4 I'm starting to feel like I should just cut my losses and abandon to not lose too much time in the faction contest.

So far I completely agree with your assessment of the difficulty levels :

P5 initially felt like a big deal but was ultimately very manageable by making minor changes to my strategy. I now prioritize a bit more the resource-making building when i chose my blueprints and I'm a bit more careful with my pop count, but apart from that it's business as usual and I don't even notice it anymore.

P8, while definitely noticeable (especially for events that add a negative effect for every X seconds of working time), didn't make me change that strategy that much either. I now have to be a bit stricter regarding my glade opening time, but that's it.

P9 was probably more impactful than all the previous prestige maluses combined. Not only does it make trade-focused runs much harder, but it also hugely reduces my margin of error and increases the importance of a solid early game. No longer can I solve all my problems by selling a few dozen resources, nor buy every nice perk or blueprints the traders offer to complement my roster. All in all, that's probably a positive thing in a roguelite game since trading made it almost impossible to lose before, but it's also a lot more frustating to get smacked by bad RNG when the main way to recover has been nerfed to hell.

P10 is very good, nothing much to add. I almost never cared about blightrot before, and this makes it an actual, relevant new mechanic to deal with every game. Nothing that a good fuel economy can't solve though.

I'm still not sure of the exact effects of P11, but as I said my current game felt really unfair to me and that may be why. It probably enhances the effects of bad RNG by taking away the easiest orders I guess, so i feel like it may compound heavily with the effects of P9.


Overall, I think I'll try to get to P20 just to prove to myself that I mastered the game, but I'll probably go back to something like P7 or P8 for casual play after that.

EDIT : I'm cool with the current prestige system but I think I would have preferred something more like Hades, where you can pick and chose from a list of difficulty modifiers to create your own difficulty level. It could even look like the current embarkation system, where modifiers are weighted differently according to their challenge, and the addition of all the mods you bring along defines your prestige level.

[Alleria]

My personal thought about prestige is that it does not really make sense to analyze prestiges one by one. Individually, none of them makes the game substantially harder. It's the fact that they all aggregate together in the end that matters.
Besides, the way it works, the game makes a really good way at teaching you how to play by trickling its actual mechanics one by one.
Rare materials are a none issue? P5 teaches you to treat flame essences and parts as godsends.
Never had a famine? P6 is still going to teach you that you need to improve your food management.
Opening glades anytime, it just doesn't matter anyway? That's right, P8 is there to teach you when to open glades.
Kysts are a joke? P10, now we are talking.
And so on.
I actually really like this design decision, which helps tremendously improving the gameplay one part at a time

Originally posted by Lorska:

tl;dr:
P20
The penultimate difficulty spike that will change everything by being so incredibly hard… that it basically does nothing. If you wanted another reason to not use the forsaken altar and to always bring amber with you at the start here you go.
This doesn't change anything about how you play and even when it does have any effect at all, you'll have bigger issues to deal with than some extra impatience. Play this if you get a kick out of jumping through one hoop to call it the highest difficulty despite it actually not being that much more difficult than before.

Penultimate difficulty is actually P20 Daily Expeditions. No embark bonus and 2 negative modifiers. You get a small bonus in exchange which often time just doesn't matter (such as providing Religion slowing down impatience... if you are far enough in the game to have religion online, you are probably set for the win anyway).

P20 does matter a lot because you WILL lose villagers in the toughest Daily Expeditions, and while you have all the time in the world in P19 to make up for it, P20 makes sure the penalty is harsh (except if you get the Pillar that removes impatience on losing villagers ofc).

I personally never build the Forsaken Altar, it's just waaaaaay too powerful, basically doubles the amount of Pillars (and a better version at that) and for absolutely 0 cost once you have already all meta upgrades. Idk what was the thought process behind this building to be honnest.

[Crashtest]

Penultimate means second to last, so OP agrees that P20 isn't the ultimate difficulty

[Alleria]

Originally posted by Crashtest:

Penultimate means second to last, so OP agrees that P20 isn't the ultimate difficulty

English is not my mother tongue and I did not know that, thank you correcting me!

[löyly]

My TL;DR is play Settler, Pioneer and everything else for as long as you like. Idk what "bad habits" means in the OP but my guess would be a lot of the people now complaining about the Favoring nerf rushed up the difficulty ladder too quickly

[Lorska]

It's interesting to hear you guy's thoughts about it!

@Alleria
It's true that you have to look at the combination of prestige levels which I tried to incorporate as well, there are just jumps in quality of modifiers imo. Some are just so good or impactful that I would recommend them more (P4 is probably the standout for casual play). P14 and 15 are such well designed modifiers in particular that I regard them as special because they outweigh the mediocre stuff before.

I totally agree with the idea of a hades-like difficulty tbh. It also forces a little more thought into the modifiers (I just roll my eyes at the last two in particular, as if we needed another reason to never touch small glades).
Some of these modifiers are simply so good they could be part of the standard difficulty if they weren't too difficult for newer players.

@löxly
Bad habits from low difficulty is what I would call ways to play that will actively hinder you later. A simple example would be to spam out woodcutters and opening every glade because hostility is a complete non-factor.
Or completely ignoring the resolve system because you can just win freely by orders and cashes.
It is generally harder to unlearn things you thought are correct than learn things new.
That's why imo veteran is llthe best difficulty early on to familiarize yourself with the game because it's where you have to really start to interact with most systems and all the cheap ways out start to stop working. Then viceroy is just a test of what you learned and P1 would be the actual game (length).

Cheers everyone!

[löyly]

Eh Idk, do we have any actual reason to believe this is an issue for this game, other than, it makes sense to you in theory?
I still think it was the opposite for me at least. When I finally moved on to higher difficulties, it was because I was ready for something new rather than doing everything the same way again. I'm really not sure I would have lasted long in this game if I'd thought I had to familiarise myself with it in Veteran, I would have struggled a lot and I've got enough struggle irl lol. All you need to understand is that there's no one "correct" way to play.