MisterPerson wrote:I think you need to define complexity. The one I use is "number of viable options the player must choose between at any given time". Thus false choices don't increase complexity and should be removed. This includes both no-brainer obviously good decisions (as an engineer, you always want to be wearing yellow gloves) and stupid choices you would never want to do (eating those jellies that have acid inside them). Having more complexity is good, but it also can't be increased very much for any given decision. If you were to keep adding more to one, you'll wind up with an optimal one, which means you actually reduced complexity. It's important that every choice is viable at least some of the time. That doesn't mean any given player should choose any option given some specific set of circumstances but instead that some player within the population should.
Contrary to what you might think, high complexity doesn't necessarily lead to player confusion or low usability or any of the other issues you commonly associate with complex games like DF or Aurora or SS13. Instead the real problems with a complex system is when the player makes a decision without knowing all their options or all the consequences of their actions. The general way players get confused is when they don't understand why something in the game happened the way it did, especially when it's something bad that happened to them.
Not knowing all your available options is always at least partially a failure of the game's UI. All options should be laid out clearly before the player at some point during the game. That doesn't mean the game should "play itself" or that new players should be flooded with unnecessary information, but it does mean the player should have all the information they need to solve any given problem. If the game literally can't lay that information out clearly, the system is too complex. A very common example with SS13 is pretty much anything in the "little things you learned that changed the game" thread. This kind of shit is very frustrating to players who lose and have no idea why or how they could have even won, but it can also simply lead to players missing out on fun they could have experienced if they only knew it was available.
Not knowing the consequences for a choice can be a failure of the game's UI, but it can also be a sign that the system is too confusing, interwoven with another system, or chaotic to get repeatable outcomes out of. An example would be if a closed-source game added an item with an unstated drawback. The player can't plan around it and may forget the item even has a drawback, which causes confusion when they notice they're experiencing it and can't figure out why. Another possibility would be if we made telescience require knowing how to do calculus. The inputs and results seem random to the player, making the whole system a waste.
EDIT: It also occurs to me a player could simply not care about the outcome of a decision they make, which basically has the same effect as not knowing those outcomes in the first place.
My definition of complexity would be the amount of pre-existing knowledge required to perform a job up to task. This is still extremely broad, of course, but at least from this I can form some bases for comparison.
For one, a job with RNG would probably require much more pre-existing knowledge than one that focuses on memorization. As you mention as well, a job with more viable options at a time requires the player to understand the results of each action.
Difficulty is probably an entirely different subject; Something can be hard without being complex
Something can be complex without being hard; As long as you have full knowledge of the processes you should be fine (i.e. genetics)
Keep in mind that I am specifically talking about the mundane station-based jobs we have, and SPECIFICALLY NOT DIFFICULTY OF ANTAGS (Which I believe is different)
A good question that summarizes what I think complexity is:
How much do I have to learn/know to understand this?
This is probably also entirely unable to be quantified, to my dismay.