Game Difficulty

Grim Tides has four primary **Game Difficulties**: casual, grim, hardcore and nightmare, as well as additional modifiers such as **permadeath**. Generally, a newer player will want to start the game on **Grim** or **Casual**, but you have total freedom to customize your experience as you wish.

Difficulty Effects

## **Permadeath**

**Permadeath** is a special toggleable condition set upon character creation. If this setting is on, dying will result in a **permanent** game over and delete the save file.

This option is intended for players wanting a challenge, forcing them to play more carefully and strategically to prevent death at all costs. Most fan challenges in the official Discord server require permadeath to be active and cannot be cheated through exiting mid-dungeon or mid-battle. If you die, the following death message pops up instead of the usual:

*The Isles claim yet another hapless soul...
Perhaps another will succeed where you have failed?*

The following cases will not delete the save file and instead simply trigger the gold penalty as usual:

* Losing in The Arena (which triggers a -1 Morale penalty instead of taking away gold)
* Fleeing the Isles from losing all Morale
* Losing a naval encounter (except when fighting enemies after boarding)

## **Advanced Settings**

Further customisation can be done on character creation under the **advanced settings** drop-down, where you have three modifiers:

* **Dungeon Size**, determining how large an average dungeon can be, with small, normal, larger and XXL sizes.
* **Event Frequency**, determining the frequency of city and dungeon events. Ranges from none to more, with no events disabling all events in-game.
* **Level Progression**, determining the amount of experience to level up, ranging from faster to epic, the slowest rate of progression.

## **Combat Modifiers**

If in character creation you allow the **customisable settings** option, you can access a set of modifiers in the World Map menu next to the door icon. There are four values and two toggleable settings for you to mess around with.

*Adjusting these modifiers can dramatically impact your gameplay experience and should not be done if you want to play the game as it was designed. These settings are also hard to verify and thus are not allowed in most fan challenges.*

* Enemy DMG modifier, enemy HP modifier and boss HP modifier can be changed from 0.5x to 5x, affecting the damage and health of all enemies, as well as applying an additional multiplier on minibosses and bosses.
* Sanity reduction chance on CRIT can be adjusted from 10 to 100%.
* The ability to retreat and use consumables can be toggled.

## **Advanced Combat**

Introduced in Version 0.15, **Advanced Combat** is a difficulty modifier only available upon the creation of a save file. This setting allows the player to use 2 actions in their turn in exchange for doubling the health of all enemies. It expands the level of depth in combat and aims to give a new experience to Grim Tides.

There are multiple differences in battle mechanics compared to basic combat:

* Retreating consumes 2 actions and cannot be done with one action remaining.
* Defending consumes all actions remaining, but can be done with one action remaining.
* Poison damage on the player character triggers per action instead of per turn.
* Spell and skill cooldowns are based off actions.
* Enemy abilities that disable spells and skills wear off after one action instead of one turn.