How does campaign difficulty progression work with time passed & portals destroyed?

[David]

I looked on the wiki for an answer but couldn't find a definite answer, or an answer at all really, there wasn't a relevant section and retaliation waves are a one-off difficulty spike.

Does difficulty increase based on overall days or current day on island, or season?
Is it a mixture?
Does it reset when you lose the crown?

Asking because I went back to island 1, and it was winter and the greed waves seemed a lot stronger than when starting on island 1. Is that because it was winter, or was it because my current monarch has survived a long time, or is it based on the days of all of the monarchs added together?

Also asking because I don't know whether or not I should be destroying portals and in which order to destroy them? If I destroy a portal on island 1, does it bump up the difficulty on all of the other islands? or just island 1? Should I just destroy every portal I encounter anyway?

I just read up about lighthouses so I realised that I could be destroying the dockside portal before I leaving.

[EliTheRev]

I have never understood how the difficulty worked but I do know that destroying portals does change the difficulty on the islands. I never knew if this applied to dock portals though.

I used to complete island one so I could always come back to it if need be but I noticed doing that made island 2 much harder so I stopped destroying portals on any island until I had upgrades all islands completely tech wise and then I'd start going back and doing portals.

I tried a few different strategies in the older games and was never ever to pin down the correlation specifically or duplicate results with experiments.

All I know is that greed does get stronger as time goes on (breeders get armor etc) and destroying portals does increase the difficulty but how it scales or rate of scale I am not sure.

[David]

Edit: another thought, does unlocking/travelling to new islands raise the difficulty at all? or is it some combination of days passed.

Hopefully a dev can answer or someone that has somehow played a lot of days in Norse Lands / other versions has gathered a lot of insight on this.

Anyway from my experience:
Assuming creep waves aren't based on season, difficulty is not just "island" + "days since you arrived there" because my walls and knights are being destroyed on island 1 right after I just landed there.
So some incremental difficulty has happened somewhere and I don't know if its overall time or the time my monarch has been alive, or both. Or because I unlocked later islands.

[Malidictus]

I can't find a source for that, but from previous experience:

• For every day that passes since the start of the last reign, difficulty increases.
  
• For every portal destroyed, difficulty increases.
  
• Losing the crown resets "days" difficulty to 1, but not "portals" difficulty.
  
• Travelling to another island temporarily lowers difficulty (no longer seems to happen)

That last one is a big concern for me. I'm almost positive that travelling to a new island used to temporarily lower difficulty by a fair bit, so as to give the monarch time to build up defences or repair decay. There used to be a separate "time on island" timer, as well, which no longer exists. The days counter just counts total days since the start of the reign.

As per the developers, difficulty increases significantly more rapidly for time spent in a single reign, but less rapidly for destroying portals as of the last update. The latter seems to have a negligible effect relative to the former.

[EliTheRev]

So basically now you really have to RUSH or else it becomes impossible. I already felt that I was RUSHED in previous games. If I didn't get off of island 1 by day 8 I was pretty sure I was going to fail and I hated that feeling ... there is no time to really enjoy the game when you have to time everything like this.

[LukyMSant]

From what i have noticed, it seens to have 3 factors:
-> A soft increase with each day
-> A substatial increase with each portal destroyed
-> A "soft reset" with each new island visited

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Creep Soldier:

-> A "soft reset" with each new island visited

As I said above - that no longer seems to be the case. The day counter doesn't reset when you travel and the intensity of enemy waves doesn't seem to go down at all.

[Zeke]

personally, i try to avoid destroying any portals before i get to the iron stage where i can send the bomb to the cliff, and even then, i only break the portals between me and the cliff the bomb has to get passed
the only time i ever break any dockside portals is when they spawn right next to the basecamp
there is a noticeable difference (much less greed per wave) between doing that and breaking every portal i can (it ramps up so much faster)

[ALDC]

Originally posted by Malidictus:

• Travelling to another island temporarily lowers difficulty (no longer seems to happen)

That last one is a big concern for me. I'm almost positive that travelling to a new island used to temporarily lower difficulty by a fair bit, so as to give the monarch time to build up defences or repair decay. There used to be a separate "time on island" timer, as well, which no longer exists. The days counter just counts total days since the start of the reign.

Yes you're right. Travelling to a new island should lower the difficulty by quite a fair bit but it seems it doesn't work that well with the new DLC.

I think only the first night on the new island the Greed is less but after a few days the difficulty ramps up alot until it's almost indefensible and all your walls fall one by one.

[David]

Thank you, so my general feeling seems to be right. It's the amount of time you spend on a heir, with an unknown/negligible effect from portals, and travelling to islands doesn't reset it. Possibly the first night on a different island will be relatively peaceful, or it might be full force.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by .:

Thank you, so my general feeling seems to be right. It's the amount of time you spend on a heir, with an unknown/negligible effect from portals, and travelling to islands doesn't reset it. Possibly the first night on a different island will be relatively peaceful, or it might be full force.

The effect of destroying portals is not negligible AT ALL. It just takes a few portals before it ramps up fully. In my experience, though, it does seem to reset to some extent when starting a new reign.