To be concise, I am designing a game based on resource/risk/conflict management. Units will be carrying around several piles of resources, which also power and boost actions like movement, attacking and mining.
I want the resource acquisition to be tactical/exciting as well. My current idea is going up to a resource node, setting its difficulty to a 2-6 number, and expending resources to roll as many dice as resources expended. Dice that come up greater than or equal to the difficulty yield difficulty resources each. As such, a roll of [6 5 2 2] against a node of diff 5 yields 2*5=10 resources, with 4 expended to roll. A net gain of 6.
My question: Does resetting a node's difficulty provide a genuine "steady stream vs risky motherlode" choice?
I've modelled this process, and the means vary less than expected while the maximums and deviations burst up as difficulty goes up. Does this mean there is genuine choice?