Difficulty Scaling

Official tier descriptions

Verbatim texts from the new-campaign screen (TEXTKEY_CreateCampaign_*). Combat and management difficulty are picked independently; the top tier is Devastation.

Combat difficulty scales the monsters

Combat difficulty is applied to every monster as a hidden affecter (AFFECTER_MonsterDifficulty*). Hard is the baseline. Easy and Normal make monsters far weaker; Very Hard and Devastation make them tankier and hit harder. On Devastation a monster has x1.5 the health and x1.5 the attack power of the same monster on Hard, and on top of that attack speed +20%, movement speed +15%, critical chance +10, critical damage bonus +50 and dodge chance +15.

Your units get a bonus too

High combat difficulty does not only buff monsters. Your own units get a bonus that does not exist at Hard or below (on Devastation: critical chance +10, critical damage bonus +50, dodge chance +10).

AFFECTER_PlayerDifficulty*

Two more combat-difficulty levers pile on top of that flat scaling:

Environment effects

Every expedition rolls a set of environment effects from the region's pool. Higher combat difficulty rolls fewer helpful and more harmful ones. Harmful effects weaken your units (e.g. a stat −30%, reduced hit chance, nausea) or strengthen the monsters - so they directly cut into your damage and survivability. Counts per tier:

Respawn interval & Magic Saturation

Monsters respawn faster on higher combat difficulty (every 1200 min on Easy, 900 on Normal, 600 from Hard up), so floors refill quicker. And when Magic Saturation is on - the default from Hard upward - monsters grow progressively stronger the longer a run lasts (AFFECTER_MagicSaturation), stacking on top of the flat tier scaling.

Management difficulty the economy

Management difficulty never touches combat. It scales what you pay to craft, build and research (and how demanding your settlers are). The material and workload numbers listed everywhere else on this wiki are the Hard baseline (factor x1.0, the game's design default); the game multiplies them by the factor below and rounds, never dropping below 1.

An ingredient listed as 3 costs 1 on Easy, 2 on Normal, 3 on Hard / Very Hard / Devastation.

Crafting and building labour, output counts, sell prices and unlock gates stay fixed.

Treatment expectation (mood) by unit level

The baseline mood a settler of each level expects from their treatment (housing/food standard). Higher management difficulty lowers the baseline - on Devastation a level-5 settler starts at -9 mood expectation vs -2 on Easy.

Dungeon-stay mood penalty

Mood penalty applied the longer a unit stays on an expedition, in four escalating stages.