If this mod adjust costs dynamically, would it be possible to add a 'difficulty setting' that defines the cost multiplier? I find the base game a bit too quick, but the marathon length a bit too much of a grind.

It's a fair amount of work to decide on what's well balanced for medium-hard. Do you have any ideas? For instance, iron plates are inflated by 2.5x and copper by 5x -- i could change this to 2x and 3x but not sure how much difference it would make.

Do you mainly have a complaint about the early burner game lasting too long? Science costs too high? Late game robots too hard to get to? Maybe you just want some way to cut trees faster?

Well, it's really not that much the 'inflation' of iron and copper that bothers me. It honestly changes very little, except that your copper smelting changes from a line of smelters to a line of 2xsmelter+wire factory in a line, which completely compresses it again.

I think it's the overall raised cost of everything, and the difficulty in keeping your factory 'fed'. I found it rather 'grindy' to have to conquer new resources constantly as old fields ran out. Perhaps I played with resource richness too low, and biter base density too high. But it seemed like all I did was desperately fight for new resource fields without much progress at home.
Simply put, I would like things to be a bit more expensive than in vanilla, but not as expensive as in marathon.

I play with a number of mods, including 'chainsaw', and 'bluebuild', so trees and the lack of robots didn't bother me too much.
And I think extending the burner age a bit is fine (it feels awfully short in vanilla). The hand crafting time for the parts of my first factory felt a bit long, though. But that is a one time thing, so not much of a problem.

Can you be more specific about the "overall raised cost of everything"? Like what resource in particular do you seem to need the most?

Discounting the "inflation", these are the recipes that have raised costs:

• 50% yield all oil products
• 5x increased science costs
• 2x wire costs, 3x circuit costs, 1.5x battery costs
• 6x assembling machine, lab, mining drill costs
• Boiler & steam engine changes
• 2x accumulator & solar panel costs
• 2x usage of iron gears & plates in all ammo
• 5x usage of iron gears & plates in all turrets
• 0.5x power per unit of all fuel
• 2.5x stone brick costs

If you are running low on resources fighting biters I would definitely first suggest turning down biters. Otherwise, I would suggest trying to be more efficient - research bullet damage, use piercing ammo, upgrade to infinite-ammo laser + solar setups, or even set up some impact damage train traps (like the factorio trailer).

I did some calculations, and I think the 'problem' is the compound interest that results from the price increases.

For example, multiplying all of wire cost, circuit costs and science costs results in a roughly x100 increase in resources needed for (blue) science.

Now this may very well be the desired effect you want to have (I have seen other mods that increase science cost by x100). I'm just saying that it's a bit much for me, personally, and that it would be cool if there could be a difficulty setting.

Compared to vanilla, the copper needs of your factory are roughly double compared to iron, so that changes what resources you have to go for first, but is feasible. Also, coal has a real danger of running out, but it's possible to aquire enough until you get solar running. Mostly, I would suggest setting map creation to very rich ore fields (which I didn't do in my first play), but that could be enough to reduce the resource troubles I had. (I played relatively vanilla. I suppose things would be very different in angel's mod where there is infinite ore).

Suggestion for automatic difficulty setting:
Obviously, it's not possible to do fractions in factorio, but perhaps you could do the changes in the recipes using a variable and then round mathematically to the nearest full number of ingredients at setup.

I will do the circuit as an example, but it could be applied to all, I think. And please forgive me if I make mistakes in the code. I can't really program lua, but it is just an example.

Wire cost at 100% difficulty is 9. So that could be changed to math.ceil(difficulty*9) (rounding up to avoid ever creating a '0' cost.)

With the difficulty variable set to 100% by default and easily accessible at one spot in your mod.

If I were to set that to 30%, then I would pay math.ceil(30%x9), or 3 Wires for my circuits. Along with math.ceil(30%x7)=3 Iron plates. The prices of other items could likewise be adjusted automatically.

Obviously, the rounding makes the difficulty setting a bit 'choppy', but it would do the trick, I think. Do you think that is possible to implement? (Again, forgive me for my ignorance in the actual programming process you have to do).

That... seems like a great idea!!

The only issue is that it'll be virtually impossible to playtest the intermediate ratios, and that it'll screw up a lot of optimal production ratios (5:7 wire:board production will annoy OCD peeps), so it'll be more of an "experimental" setting.

Yup, this is implemented now, and in particular the fluid ratios are all sorts of off. Good luck!

I started a new game, and so far my observations are:

1. Stack sizes for iron and copper plates are back to 100. Is this intended?
2. The difficulty setting does work and seems to modify recipe costs properly.
3. However, the 'compression/uncompression' of iron and copper smelting feels a bit off. Depending on the difficulty setting the productivity can make rather large jumps. Perhaps it would be best not to modify 'compression' by difficulty and just leave it at default?

1. Yes -- otherwise train throughput becomes too high if you have very efficient loading/unloading stations.

2. Great!

3. I feel like this is mainly due to some rounding error, but yeah I can hotfix it for now.