Difficulty scaling mod question

[Lichen]

So, given the time I have on my have lately with with my work suspended for the coronovirus I wanted to try my hand at making some mods for one of my favorite games, but I have run in to a bit of trouble. I also wanted to use this opportunity to gauge interest to see if I should bother making a public release so I have both the mod ideas and the issues I'm having outlined below.


So, I like to play on hard difficulties. I use mods to make it ever harder. I like the idea of just scraping by, but with the way difficulty scales over time the vanilla game forces you to either progress/improve our fall hopelessly behind. Additionally, I enjoy immersion in my games, and when the whole world is scaling itself to your party it breaks that immersion.

The idea of this "mod to be" is that I want to replace the vanilla difficulty scaling with something immersive and sustainable.

From what I have gathered, the vanilla game scales difficulty over time in a linear relationship, and does difficulty over party strength in a similar manner.

I want to replace difficulty over time with a sin function, and reduce (or possibly entirely eliminate) the effect of party strength on scaling.

The core gameplay loop I want to create is a cycle between periods of easier difficult where you can expand, train new recruits, and build up a reserve of crowns, and periods of crisis where the company is tested and even veteran brothers are in danger on the battlefield. Surviving the crisis period in tact gives you an opening to push out further from the cities and complete the end game quests, but even in a disaster situation where most of your party is wiped you can recover during the downswing.

Additionally this allows the player to actually feel like they are progressing and dominate some battles instead of always struggling the same amount because any progress they make is scaled into the enemy strength. On the other side it lets even end game companies find challenges during the peaks instead of the game becoming a flat grind as the scaling drops off at 11 levels and 200 something days.

Last of all, it scratches my itch for immersion, as the world becomes less a reflection of the player and more of it's own living thing that the player must learn to survive and thrive in.
[/spoiler]


I have already familiarised myself with using the mod kit to decrypt and decompile the script files, which seems to be the harder part. My main problem is finding where the heck anything is.

There are about a million script files and I need to find very specific things.

I have already checked the obvious places to look. World.cnut playerparty, world_ai, ect.. either they are named unintuitively or they are not there.

Things I still need to find:
Difficulty/time scaling
Difficulty/party scaling
Player sight distances
Controls for event popups (like campfires)
Camp spawning parameters

Edit: spoilers don't work how I thought they did. lol

[Abel]

I suggest looking there: https://steamcommunity.com/app/365360/discussions/0/1752400953966681860/.
Towards the end of the discussion, there's a file where you'll find all functions with difficulty scaling. You can modify the game files containing these functions directly.

Regarding the other variables, you'll have to browse the files, using a text editor like Notepad++. You can add the scripts folder as a workspace folder to make folder wide searches which will help with modding.

Give a look at the mods on Nexus that do similar things if you want some more guidance.

[Lichen]

That is incredibly helpful. Thank you.