I am looking for a mod that changes the review algorithm.
Not looking for a cheat here or easily reachable 10s, not at all actually.
All i want is for the algorithm to ignore my highest score and calculate against a fixed value that increases every year or so. It already uses a fixed value in the garage before having a high score, so this should be pretty easy to implement.
This is simply because i dislike having to hold back on innovations, just so i can top myself more often. This usually leads to a 4x10 game after an engine update and 7-9s untill the next update. Even if the games would be awesome in comparrison to “other” companies. If a company releases 5 games of equal quality in real life, all of those being WAY better then the average game out there… would the second get worse scores? The 5th?
Hope someone can make a mod like this OR point me to the right function in the JS file. I am able to write the code myself, just unable to find the right spots.
Just responded to a very similar comment on the steam forum.
My answer:
You can always sign up to get access to the complete/unobfuscated source. More info here:
The reason why we don’t have fixed difficulty progression is that this is impossible to balance. Some players progress faster than others and having fixed values would just mean that the game is either ridiculously easy (if you are ahead of the curve) or impossibly difficult (if you lack behind). If you are already behind it would be hard to catch up and if you are ahead it’s easy to get even more ahead. Not much fun.
I might also say that your summary of the review algorithm is very simplistic. There is a lot more going on in the background. I’ve addressed a similar comment on our forum:
The guy on the steam forum is actually me cough. Did not expect a fast reply at all, let alone one from the Dev-Team. That is why i asked in two places, increasing the odds of getting an answer at all. You know,… usually Dev’s don’t talk, let alone post helpful stuff. You guys trying to change the gaming world? haha.
No seriously, this is great and i will check out what i can do. Just gotta make some room in my calender and scrap some university stuff.
@PatrickKlug: there is 2 easy ways to solve/reduce that problem:
difficulty levels. most games have them. very good for long term motivation.
it is totally viable that my own games contribute to the market expectations. the problem in GDT is, that it is ONLY my games. set it to average of mine and a static value and it will be alot better.
one problem with your solution is, that it can be very frustrating especially for newbies. in my first game i developed some bad games, some good games and then i got a combination right and outstanding reviews. i was happy but now i know, this actually caused my bankrupt. because afterwards i tried to do something similar like the games that worked well before, but suddenly they got bad reviews, altough their stats were quite similar and i even had levelups and trainings inbetween. whatever i tried, i could not find out what i did wrong. very frustrating. of course the only thing i did wrong was, those games had not the perfect slider settings, and once you produced a game with perfect slider settings you can’t go back. very bad for newbies who have no idea about good slider settings. comparing to a static value on very easy difficulty would allow for that.
Rather than redesigning the review algorithm, it might be even better to tweak it a bit, by making calculations based both on your company’s previous scores AND some sort of “current market expectations”? This would allow both designs to work seamlesly together and give the game a little edge in terms of variable difficulty.
Some good ideas.
I like the difficulty setting one. And i second the “poor newbie!” lines. I had exactly the same thing happening to me.
Will think about this and other possible ideas for a bit and see where i want to start with modding.
Goal will be improving the algorithm, not changing the game. Making it a little more difficult is not a bad idea, but at the same time make it a little less needed to have an excel sheet nearby to calculate how many bugs you need to keep in and how many features to leave out.