SoC Ultra Difficulty Director v3.0.0

An ungodly madly vastly enhanced, fair, real-time difficulty director. Instead of one static lobby slider chosen before you know how the map plays out, the director watches your match every round — the game's own five score pillars, live army value, liquid treasury — and leans on twelve independent levers to hold the match at exactly the tension level you configure. 99 settings, four one-click presets, and a telemetry tab that shows you its mind.

Download StixsworldHD_SoCDifficultyDirector_v3_0_0.rar and open it with 7-Zip / WinRAR / NanaZip. Inside:

1. 1

   Copy the DLL into plugins

   With the game closed, drag StixsworldHD.SoCDifficultyDirector.dll from the archive into BepInEx\plugins⧉:

   SongsOfConquest\BepInEx\plugins\
   ├── StixsworldHD.SoCUltraGraphics.dll        ← from Part II (if installed)
   └── StixsworldHD.SoCDifficultyDirector.dll   ← new

   Click to view full size

   Upgrading from v1.x / v2.x?

   Just replace the DLL. Your existing config is kept and the plugin appends the new v3 settings with their defaults on first launch. Every setting hot-applies — the only exceptions are the two match-creation bakes noted below.

2. 2

   Launch the game config + state folder generate themselves

   Start Songs of Conquest. The director registers, logs itself in BepInEx\LogOutput.log⧉, and writes its fully documented config to:

   BepInEx\config\stixsworldhd.songsofconquest.difficultydirector.cfg⧉

   A small sidecar folder, BepInEx\config\StixsworldHD.DirectorState\, appears once you play: it holds the director's cross-save memory (a few hundred bytes per match, keyed to the match seed, newest 24 kept, auto-cleaned when a match ends). Your actual save files are never touched.

   Click to view full size

3. 3

   Press F9 meet the director

   Works in any scene — menus, adventure map, battles. You get a solid-background menu with 10 setting tabs, a search box (type “tax”, “revive”, “coalition” — matching settings from every tab render inline, fully editable), the preset row, and the Telemetry tab.

   Click to view full size

   Sensible from second one

   The Balanced preset — “the intended always-a-good-fight experience” — is active out of the box. Start a match and play; the HUD chip and action toasts will narrate every intervention as it happens.

Full mechanics live in the shipped README.md and inside the config file itself — every lever acts through the game's own synced commands and server-side hooks, never through client-side hacks.

Everything is smoothed, deadbanded, rate-limited, budget-capped and cooldown-guarded, so the director feels like pacing, not puppetry. New in v3.0.0, the whole system breathes through a three-act dramatic arc — configurable act boundaries with per-act intensity (default 60% / 100% / 130%): openings breathe, mid-game plays at designed strength, finales escalate.

Songs of Conquest runs a server-authoritative command pipeline: one simulation is authoritative (locally in single-player, the host in multiplayer); clients send requests, the server validates and broadcasts results. The director speaks only that language:

• It attaches via the game's own server installer, so it only exists on the authoritative side — guests' copies stay dormant automatically, and guests never need the mod at all.
• Every action is a vanilla, validated, synced command (AddResource, HostileGrowth, AiAlterGrudge, SetAiMode…). Absolute results go out over the wire like always — desync from this mod is impossible by construction.
• Host migration safe: if a new host is promoted and has the mod, the director re-attaches there; if not, the game simply continues vanilla.
• The Multiplayer + Safety tab adds policy on top: FullDirector, AiAndWorldOnly (the default when remote guests are connected — no human ever receives aid, competitive-integrity mode) or Disabled, plus per-team exclusions, a per-team bias ledger, a hard gold floor for taxes, and a global per-round action fuse.

“Dormant — waiting for a match” won't go away?

That badge is normal anywhere outside an actual running match. Also remember GraceRounds (default 3): the director deliberately takes zero actions before that round so early scouting plays exactly vanilla.

Two settings bake at match creation

AiProductionScalePercent and AiIncomeTierScalePercent apply when a match is created, exactly like lobby settings. Everything else hot-applies mid-match.

Want to watch before you trust it?

Turn on DryRun (General tab): the director logs every decision it would make without touching anything. The Telemetry tab shows per-AI pressure bars with 48-round sparklines (ember above the midline = boosted, steel below = reined in), the rolling action log, and the real cost of the last evaluation in milliseconds. A pause hotkey freezes the whole director mid-match.

Campaigns & scenarios

Fully supported — use GraceRounds, ExcludedTeamNames / PerTeamBias for scripted allies, the act intensities, or simply the Story preset for gentler narrative pacing.

Saves

Load and save freely. With PersistStateAcrossSaves ON (default), the director's full memory resumes exactly where it left off; with it OFF, pressure state rebuilds from live game state within one evaluation.

Performance

Zero per-frame work and zero polling — the director wakes on the round-change event, runs one pass, issues at most its action budget, and sleeps. The menu/HUD only cost anything while visible.

Uninstall

Delete StixsworldHD.SoCDifficultyDirector.dll from BepInEx\plugins⧉ (and, if you like, the BepInEx\config\StixsworldHD.DirectorState folder). Saves are untouched — everything the director did flowed through normal game commands.