Thx - good to know; until now I've left your mod out of my testing setup because I've feared for incompatibility with Aric's mod - and balancing just gets harder if you have variables and values mixed and matched from different sources. I hope you don't mind looking into your files so I maybe can rip out some functions that could come in handy and aren't included in the base game. Unfortunately; right now I'm still just learning how to do this without generating error messages. :)

> Someone requested a money sink with an increasing target each week, so I put that in. I changed guidance as it allowed unlimited travel in the original form. I removed invigorate to put a limit on what could be done in a day. Etc.

Yeah, the first point is something that is always on my mind when starting balancing those kind of games. It's interesting how few games (and I include AAA titles here) make use of diminishing returns, taxes/expenses or similar - because the main problem I see in most tycoon games these days is the lack of 'time pressure' - what makes them mostly sandbox environments where every limitation basically can be circumvented by pressing 'next day'. I play with the idea of some 'simple' weekly taxation right now - something that basically factures in your number of slaves & maybe even your mansion's upgrades - but coding-wise I'm far away from achieving such thing yet. :)

Guidance & Invigoration are a good call as well - currently untouched in my test environment, but disabling them isn't that big of a deal and testing with/without them can be easily done by just ignoring them, so no adjustment to mod files necessary. If possible I would like a setup without deactivated vanilla features though - I don't like black or white approaches as long as slight tweaking can lead to success as well.


> In the long term, the financials are always going to explode in Strive as you have low overheads, low capitalcosts, and high income (jobs or adventuring).  You can buy a slave for 100 and she starts earning 100 per day. You can go into the swamp and everything you get from treasure chests is profit. That's not going to be easily balanced.

Fair point - but to be clear about my intentions and ideas; I've not even planned to go 'perfectly balanced' with this 'project' - I'm just looking for slight improvements that create a less progressive game experience - mostly just because I'm curious if it can easily be done for the game. Balancing never is easy - that much I know - I have done it for different games and concepts in the past - but there is always a way to improve. I personally aim mostly try to find a state where every decision has way more weight applied to it than most gamedesigner aim for - I'm all for 'abstraction' over 'simulation' - so basically a quality over quantity approach - if something can be achieved with 2-3 decisions with impactful consequences, why wasting your time playing by repeating a certain task dozens of times instead?

But right now I've only just flattened out some gamestyles - 50% bonus on slavetrades/gold rewards instead of 100% bonus for Slaver & Hunter profession - Alchemist only gets +50% instead of +100% on potion sales - traversing the zones raised from base 5 energy per action to 10 energy. Also; halve the drop chance on gear in combat. This should bring the other - less effective - options more in the same range of those I would consider OP in vanilla, from there on it's easier to adjust options. If some of these playstyles are still too effective, I start with some simple money-sink behind the scenes - everything else should be just finetuning then.

And then I have to playtest this environment long enough to see if it works - what might take the most time and effort... :D