Memory as Game Difficulty
This is an updated and expanded cohost post in response to an ask, in discussing difficulty and the thoughts I had while designing and examining the response to The Banished Vault.
Difficulty as memory has been a funny one to stumble into, and not exactly something I set out create at the start of development. Certainly the biggest factor for TBV specifically is the way resources work, in that every resource/item exists somewhere and has to be accounted for by you. This became such a strong factor in the difficulty, almost everything else about the game is designed to offload or attenuate other mental work the player does. Most importantly is what the manual and building reference are designed to help with, containing and immediately presenting the player with much of the static information in the game.
Static in this sense meaning something fixed, so like building costs or artifact values. In contrast, dynamic information is something that can change, like the game saying these planets have these resources; or the player organizing their ships on the map or items in a cargo hold. There are patterns to the game's dynamic information, i.e. you generally have more resources/actions on regions closer to the sun, but it's not fixed in that every region adjacent to the sun gets a set number of actions. Typically, dynamic information is a collection of static information like a group of resources, in The Banished Vault it certainly is but that's not true of every game. This is a pretty loose framework that I haven't thought too deeply on yet, forgive me for (or get in touch if you have more thoughts on) any gaps.
Anyway, simply put The Banished Vault has a lot of dynamic information. This leads to the difficulty of memory, which is just holding it all in your head or organizing all that information into a strategy to complete the solar system. I think that's why a lot of people have characterized it as more of a puzzle game than strategy game. One element to this is the cost of failure can be as high as restarting the entire system or run, as opposed to attritional penalties that typical strategy games use.
But I think generally for strategy games, regardless of whether it has a lot of random or deterministic outcomes, the types of information are mostly static or small groups of static info that is applied and combined in various ways for an outcome. For example, when you're playing Into The Breach what every unit or element on the map does stays the same, it's just about figuring out the order to do things in.
These games get harder and more interesting when more elements of static information are added in, leading to the combination of outcomes growing larger. As the player grows to internalize the new elements, the relative difficulty lowers a bit as the player knows the game better. Ideally the possibility space is always beyond the average player's ability to internalize, or a game might feel solved or procedural. Generally the amount of dynamic information remains relatively low.
In The Banished Vault, the player is given basically all of the static information in the manual from the start. Then the game operates almost entirely on dynamic information. The amount of dynamic information starts pretty high, with the procedural generation requiring the player to actively sort through many possible combinations of the tools and resources they have. As they continue, the player is given even more dynamic information to deal with, as they build more ships, go to new solar systems, and stockpile resources and gain abilities. There's very few moments of contraction, and typically those are tied to losing resources/ships/exiles.
In addition to the volume, the specificity is important. Three iron and two water is very different from two iron and three water. The tenth resource created fills up a new inventory slot. A thrust of one or two can be the difference between a botched run or a success. This weighs on the player in the way myself and the game want it to, which I think is important for the overall experience.
The Banished Vault is a hard game for even me to play because of this reason. It's not enough to learn how the game works, you are given so much information and so many ways to combine it, it just stays hard.