The game is trivially easy

[Muu]

That is to say:
- The game advertises itself as a roguelite
- The game expects you to lose multiple runs to reach the end, implying that harder difficulties are not 'casual gameplay, but you have to think'
- For a player starting out, who is about to invest at least an entire day to playing one run of the game, the most difficult option the player has (Matus, Harder/200% difficulty), the game is trivially easy and there is no option to make the game harder.

But I hear you say, 'what about the other elders? What about challenge mode?' I don't have access to those from the beginning and even afterwards I have not unlocked any of the elders, and the mastery/challenge mode remains mostly locked demanding I beat runs over and over again to get it higher.

There's a lot to love about this game but this is absolutely ridiculous. I'm sure once upon a time the game was more of a roguelite but there's so much now that there's no way you could ever call it that. In fact, in every single 'roguelite' game I've ever played, if you do somehow beat the game on the first run (which is odd, but not necessarily indicative of not being a roguelite, dicey dungeons is like this for example) you at least have the option to play another character by the end of it.

Seriously, where do I go from here. I just keep playing Matus in challenge mode? But if I'm making the game harder, that means I can't just skip through turns and go at it at a high speed, so I'm stuck playing slowly. Or do I just pick an easy difficulty and spam end turns to farm points? That doesn't seem right. I get that there's some variation so future playthroughs will be different + extra options I've now unlocked but that alone is hard to justify such a long run time.

I don't know. help

[Gamer7956]

By the way, to help with the early restarts - this was a problem much earlier in the game's life, so the option was added to look at the tech tree before placing your town centre. Just click the tech button before you select a location.

This will reveal all your turn one research options. While obviously not everything, it does notably reveal your water building, your tech building (which becomes relevant as variants are unlocked), as well as a bit more depending on which Elder you are playing (Matus starts with the forager, which means he can see which basic crop types he has access to, for example).

[Muu]

Originally posted by Gamer7956:

By the way, to help with the early restarts - this was a problem much earlier in the game's life, so the option was added to look at the tech tree before placing your town centre. Just click the tech button before you select a location.

This will reveal all your turn one research options. While obviously not everything, it does notably reveal your water building, your tech building (which becomes relevant as variants are unlocked), as well as a bit more depending on which Elder you are playing (Matus starts with the forager, which means he can see which basic crop types he has access to, for example).

I looked all over for this button and couldn't find it anywhere last time I played. I would have assumed the button would exist so I checked the menu and all over the UI.
Now I'm checking again it's very obviously there, but that feels weird. I surely would've found it before. Maybe it's a bug? Maybe it's me. I'll just have to keep an eye out for if that button ever disappears.