Curious Expedition is a highly fickle game which owes a lot of its difficulty to chance. It is very easy to instantly lose party members and receive crippling status effects. In some ways this is a good thing as it punishes mistakes and makes games more virulent. In other ways, this is a bad thing as parties which already had hard luck will continue to have poor luck. Curious Expedition also has a tendency to favour specific playstyles and party builds more than others. Certain units are better than others, whether due to their action dice, carrying capacity, skills or even the lack of stock of specific items.

The game is meant to have many different strategies (https://curious-expedition.fandom.com/wiki/Strategy), but some are clearly superior to others. What I like to call the ' grab and run' strategy dominates the game in particular, especially with combat-oriented parties. This involves meeting and using the natives, finding the golden pyramid and then taking all of the shrine loot on the way back. Since standing technically doesn't have a cost, the negative standing doesn't matter and doesn't transition from one expedition to the next. Monster loot, when combined with cooks, allows combat parties to sustain themselves better than any other and cash-in valuables for fame or funds.

Referring to the Curious Expedition wiki's strategy page, the strategies which dominate are the Hunter and Outlaw strategies (and the Completionist/Speed Runner strategies are almost always strong factors in any build). Unlike written on the wiki, Hunter + Outlaw builds don't often go through companions quickly with reasonable preparation (such as med kits) and as aforementioned, there's no penalty to negative standing on subsequent runs. Regardless of the segregated nature of standing, numerous elements of the game work together to promote the Hunter + Outlaw (take and run) build and make this build the most reliable and the highest-scorer of all strategies. Non-combat teams can't easily fight, yet the game is filled with enemies. Enemies during cut-scene events also cannot be evaded using horn flutes & totems, unlike on-map enemies. Buried treasure is pitifully weak and not worth the time or investment. Cooks are also far too overpowered and can easily sustain combat parties throughout an entire expedition by themselves. These are just some of the reasons why Hunter + Outlaw dominates.

There are at least three issues here:
- Too much of the game's difficulty is owed to chance instead of strategy
- Too many of the no sanity events or other features instantly result in a party member's death or worse
- Hunter + Outlaw (take & run) is far too powerful by comparison to other party builds and some things, whether items, units, enemies or perks, are better than others or better than they should be

One of the purposes of Discovery is to improve upon these flaws and incorporate new content where needed, thereby providing a superior Curious Expedition experience. Whilst some of the aforementioned flaws still exist in the mod, more playstyles have become increasingly viable and gameplay is reaching a more balanced state.

Considerably less chance is involved, thanks in part to the new examine mechanic and also thanks to multiple new events and event-chance modifications. This mechanic allows players to take calculated risks, whereas the event-chance modifications lessens the impact from bad luck but maintains the negative effects derived from poor planning, whether on the expedition map or otherwise.

Parts of the game were simply too ineffective or effective, too rare or common or were too dangerous or not dangerous enough. Many new events and event-chance modifications help to lessen the impact or the chance of instant-death events. Fire sprawls, such as those from volcanoes for example were also a huge problem for multiple reasons. They spread incredibly far, last an excessive amount of time and burn down villages which also gives you -3 standing. It wasn't uncommon to walk into a dead-end only to face a wall of flames behind you, and this ends many an expedition. This is the purpose of fire sprawls, but it was so effective that even waiting for the flames to dwindle cost players the game. That's not fair at all, hence the reason why fire durations were changed and why only unnatural fire sprawls effect standing.

Events like the yeti event and the corrupted cave portal event were so incredibly rare that in all the time I've played, I've still yet to come across them. Yeti caves were so rare that you would only come across one every 6 games of Curious Expedition if all those 6 games were spent entirely on arctic worlds! On average, you would need to play around 34 expeditions on arctic worlds and investigate at least 1 cave in each expedition. However, this was still not as rare as the secret corrupted portal world (without the use of Tome Pages of Portral Traversal). The corrupted shrine event is only accessible at expedition 4 and beyond, making it twice as rare as one would expect. Over the course of a game, you would expect to come across the event once per 2.59 expeditions, which then becomes 5.18 due to the restriction (half of the expeditions can't have the corrupted shrine event). Then, if each expedition has an average of 3 shrines, the average number of expeditions you would need to take to see this event would be 39 (that's 7 games), and in each of these you would need to raid at least 3 shrines. You get the picture, the chances of finding the corrupted spider den portal were astronomically low.

Events like spider lairs were intended to be negative but could wind up becoming highly abusable. With access to a nearby healing springs, spiders could be infinitely harvested by standing adjacent to the springs and healing all damage before fighting the next set of enemies. Given that the spiders infinitely spawned and remained the same strength, it was easily possible for the player to infinitely obtain meat and spider legs. This abusive loop is powerful enough that it can instantly win the game. In the current version of Discovery, only a single wave of spiders spawns. In future, this may change and instead the waves could become more and more powerful, thereby reaching a difficulty level high enough to prevent the infinite harvesting exploit, even for combat parties.

The introduction of weather zones and the ability to use horn flutes & totems before any combat event and at any location, promotes non-combat teams and demotes combat teams, which was sorely needed. Combat teams cannot fight around the weather, whereas non-combat teams cannot fight enemies. Improvements to buried treasure helps to offset the cost of the shovel & treasure map and the space used by the shovel. Since combat parties tend to need more space for hunting goods, they have less inclination to focus on buried treasure, so this change subtly helps non-combat parties, which tend to need more frequent access to villages and hence decent reputation. An increased amount and value of village goods aids non-combat teams and the Diplomat strategy, as losing access to villages matters more than it used to. These new mechanics and additions, among others, help to achieve parity amongst aggressive and pacifist parties.

New functions and changes were made to try and improve the balance of the game, promote new or underused strategies, create new on-theme elements of risk and mystery and also to help the game to reflect or incorporate the reality and incredible mythology derived from the age of discovery.

Thanks for reading! Curious Expedition is one of my favourite games and I've had a lot of fun making this expansion mod. I hope you enjoy playing Discovery as much as I enjoyed making it!