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Please make sure you update to Alpha4d before voting! That's build 462. Balance has changed from earlier versions.

Please only respond to the poll if:

-You played a game on Cassandra Classic
-You played a long game (at least 50 days)

I'm looking for difficulty balancing feedback and I want to hear how it's been going for you guys. We're going to try to get metrics in for later versions so this can be balanced a lot more tightly but this is my temporary solution for now.

Which is D? I have 460, which was easy and now 461. This has been a challenge. At 35 days I have a wave of 13 pirates coming in. I already beat a wave of ~10, killing 6 and running off 4 by sacrificing most of the inside of my base and abusing the fact that the raiders would rather beat on things instead of kill people. This one has me a bit concerned.

I updated the first post with the actual build number (462).

Are you looking for feedback based off plays on unmodded stock versions?

Quote from: ctgill on June 03, 2014, 02:37:32 PM
Are you looking for feedback based off plays on unmodded stock versions?

i think unmodded.

Definitely unmodded.

I've only played one game so far, but it ended around 30 days in.

First conflict was one guy with a bow.
Second conflict was two guys with molotov cocktail cocktails.
Third conflict was over a dozen guys with machine guns, laser rifles and grenades.

My 4 person colony with 2 hand guns and a rifle were steam rolled. The difficulty seemed reasonable up until then.

Quote from: Piata on June 03, 2014, 03:02:05 PM
I've only played one game so far, but it ended around 30 days in.

First conflict was one guy with a bow.
Second conflict was two guys with molotov cocktail cocktails.
Third conflict was over a dozen guys with machine guns, laser rifles and grenades.

My 4 person colony with 2 hand guns and a rifle were steam rolled. The difficulty seemed reasonable up until then.

What build was this? 460, 461, or 462?

Edit: AAAAAAAAND I see that there was another update, 461 is too old. My bad.


As soon as A4 came out, I went pretty crazy with it, interweaving it in-between Wildstar leveling time.

When A4 first came out, I got to Day 75~ no problems really at all. Then you released the hotfix.....

As soon as I booted up my day 77 save on A4's hotfix (folder name 461), a super gigantic wave of pirates launch on Day 80, all armed with the best weaponry while I still only have pistols and lee's. Now, I keep track of these forums and I see that you hotfixed something to deal with a difficulty curve that wasn't existant, so I figure maybe this happened because none of the previous "attacks" included this weaponry so I don't have any myself.

I made a new game, and early on (day 20? I really don't know), another pirate attack shows up with shotguns and maybe an M24, while once again, I still only have pistols and lees. I managed to beat this through rigorous save-scumming but it really does seem way too hard. I got the 2 shotguns and the M24, and the next time I was attacked included three mechanoids. One had the inferno cannon, the other two had rapid fire weaponry (minigun and Charge gun probably). Again, with a handful of pistols, and 2 shotguns that required my guys to get super close, this was brutal. As they came down my entrance hallway where my turrets were located, they simply outranged them and took them out no problem. Again, I had to resort to save scumming and various tactics to overcome it, most notably letting them get between my buildings so I could rush out and zerg them at close range.. but it's just still too hard.

I've also dealt with tribal waves that are just too damn big, considering they just rush you and no amount of weaponry in the world helps.. only a super line of turrets to "distract" them as you pick away.

Honestly, I feel it's too hard right now but I can't say for sure I'm doing what I should be doing. I might take way too long to get turrets up, but I don't like to bother until my walls are built. The problem is that finally getting around to building walls and then turrets takes significantly longer now that I don't build my base from inside a natural cave. I have to actually build houses with wood (which I do very much like btw, but it does slow down my preparations for defenses), and then I have to research stone, and.. blah, it just takes longer to get everything set up. Normally your 3 introduction characters can handle the growing, mining, and constructing. Now there is a 4th role of crafting thrown in and they seem a little overwhelmed at first. Admittedly, you do seem to always give us a "crash pod survivor" early on, and that helps immensely.

I try to avoid super cheese strategies, so again I don't know if you're balancing for something I don't know about. I do not have people "practice shooting" at a wall all day, I do not have an entrance absolutely blanketed in sandbags to prevent movement as they come in. I have a typical wall around my base, a long hallway entrance with 2x1 stone walls for shooters to lean out of. I'll upload my save actually and you can see.

My save:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/2mpnne3fbrwj9p6/We%20Landed%20Hard.rim

Edit: AAAAAAAAND I see that there was another update, 461 is too old. My bad.

Astraeus, your feedback is still very valuable. Thank you for going into detail and giving specifics, and providing the save. I'll have a look at it now.

Raid 1 - came on day 10 - 1 pirate crash landing with roughly 60% HP and a handgun on top of my best shot.

Raid 2 - Day 19, three tribals with stones and two short bows arrive bringing a solar flare with them. (current colony strength 3, prisoners 4)

Raid 3 - Day 31, 11 Tribals armed with an assortment of the usual tribal weapons. (Current colony strength 6 + 3 turrets)

Raid 4 - Day 47, 18 Tribals armed with the usual kit. (Current colony strength 6 + 1 turret)

Ending my game at day 47 after fighting a war of attrition in the hills, having lost my home to fire and my colonists to arrows my last and best shot was still no match for the remaining 10+

My people were armed with
2x M16
1x M-24
1x Uzi
2x Pistol
all colonists had shooting over 5, the M16 users had shooting 7 and the sniper had shooting 9.

A note after all that is the arrows vs the assault rifles or higher granted there we're if I had to guess id say 10 arrows flying at me per m16 burst. They felt a little too accurate for being arrows fired at their max range. All in all the turret didn't do much and the fight was over within 3 minutes time.

This is the closest I've been able to get to 50+ days in recent games.

Thank you ctgill. Numbers like this are very useful. Confirming - this is on 462, yeah?

Yes it is.

I saved manually right as Raid #3 appeared - https://www.dropbox.com/s/ed36hqzaohm9u1k/Raid3.rim

However the last raid manual saving slipped my mind but there was an autosave a few in-game days prior. During those days a combat supply vessel that was used to arm my people and sell off bows / pistols had appeared as well as a few bouts with insanity and last minute construction so I'm not sure if replaying that will see it go exactly the same or even remotely close.

Here is that auto save anyways for what use it may be. - https://www.dropbox.com/s/wovu567pd9qff13/PreRaid4Autosave.rim

Quote from: Tynan on June 03, 2014, 04:16:51 PM
Astraeus, your feedback is still very valuable. Thank you for going into detail and giving specifics, and providing the save. I'll have a look at it now.

Thanks. Fear not! I will have another go at a fresh game tonight and post the results. I have been playing since A1 (which I spent hours on), and I have to say the introduction of wood and having to build homes instead of living in a cave has mixed things up tremendously, for the better. Now that my people are actually living in homes, and not cave dwellers, you've taken this game 30 steps away from Dwarf Fortress and Gnomoria and given the game it's own feel.

Tynan, why don't you put the alpha version in the game, too? In the main menu it only reports the version number and it's quite hard to remember which version was which alpha... In fact, why not drop the whole Alpha4x term altogether and just say 0.4.461 or so? Or start using simple, increasing build numbers as they do with prison architect.

Anyway, I played 0.4.461 a bit  (with Chill Cassie so I didn't vote) and while everything seemed to go just okay, suddenly at day 36 there was a raid with just two Centipedes but with 800 HP each, one equipped with minigun and other with Inferno gun. They completely obliterated my base - there was absolutely nothing I could do. Not so fun :P

One thing I have noticed on latest 462 is that the trees don't seem to be re-growing much if at all after 20+ days - I ran right out of wood and had not built that much. The map had a lot of desert though. This pretty much ended the game I started on classic C. Also only had 3 space vessels to hail and had built an early beacon/comms in that time.

4d is much better.

Slightly faster ramp up from alpha 3. 

Currently I've had only one pirate boss with a mini-gun.

I've been cruzing along having waves of 10-15 natives/pirates attack with long lull periods in-between.

Haven't switched over to 4d quite yet, so I didn't vote, but I thought you might still find my 4c experience helpful. I've only played to the 50-day point.

Anyway, after getting the research bench up ASAP, I built a small wooden plank hut around my colonist's sleeping spots, converted them into beds, built a nutrient paste dispenser, and finally a comms device. They were living on survival meals and muffalo through this period, and the first raid was a fairly typical one-man-attack. Easily squashed.

I started mining into the mountain in my backyard since it seemed like the most viable long-term option on the map. I bought a slave around this point and encountered a 3-4 man raid. The odds were fairly even and my people managed to drive them off. It was a little rough post-raid since my colonists were still sharing a room in a cramped environment, but it was doable. I carved out some separate bedrooms in the mountain and lined the area with metal walls for electricity. I was just getting to where (I think) you'd start concerning yourself with better defenses.

Enter a 6-8 man raid. Three of them had M-24's and one had an R-4 Charge rifle (held by a "tough" attribute enemy, no less). There was simply no way my colonists could match them, even with my best shooter (~11 pts.) armed with a pila. I tried restarting and luring a few of the enemies into close quarters, but they still proved to be far too much. I ended up having to bar my colonists inside the mountain on repair duty. The raiders burned down everything outside: my hut with all of its contents, my workbenches, my solar panels, everything. A prisoner that I had in there tried to escape when one of the walls burned down, but they killed her too.

It was a pretty huge loss, but I do think Cassandra did a good job of giving me time to recuperate. Since the raids seemed like they would be increasing in strength quickly, I built a large stone wall around the general area and a smaller one close to the cave entrance. I also had time to carve out a battery room and build new solar panels for power. I kept my colonists on a berry diet since defenses seemed to be a higher priority. That's roughly when I noticed the update and these threads. The raid numbers don't seem to increase too quickly, but their equipment does.

Oh, and it's not related to difficulty, but I'm still finding that my colonists are taking highly inefficient paths when stonecutting and such. Here's a couple screens I took:

(https://static.firedrive.com/dynamic/previews/97/698b75d0843173548ffea729d1845ba1.jpg)

The stonecutting table is in between the green stockpiles on the left. Despite a plethora of stones that are actually closer, Jon chose the "closest" stone to the table, which happened to be outside of the wall. He did this consistently. Since you recently incorporated the region system, I thought you might want to know.

Here's another example, except with mining:

(https://static.firedrive.com/dynamic/previews/17/c0d70c8aa15f8a12ec994732f70b370c.jpg)


There is also an odd floating constructed roof on the right of the map, but that's not quite as big of a bug. Anyway, feel free to take a peek at my savefile (https://www.firedrive.com/file/3D779643D936EFA5) if you want. I'll be updating to 4d now.

Yes, SSS, after a certain radius they will go back to global searching for closest-objects, which is what happened here, because all the stones were quite far away. Hmm.

Thank you for the info everyone! I think I'm going to do a bit more hotfixing on this build because it's clearly too aggressive.

I managed to last to day 114.

I noticed a jump in difficulty after building a hydroponics farm which added a considerable amount of wealth to my colony, putting it up to 11500 with 5.8 strength. On day 31(a few days after the farm was complete) I got raided by a group of 9 pirates including 2 mercs armed with a energy weapon and mini gun. The previous raid before this was 5 tribes men that occurred on day 18.

What eventually destroyed me was a raid from 4 mechanoids when I only had 4 colonists: they had two inferno cannons and two plasma cannons. The inferno cannons just sat outside of my range of and bombarded me while the plasma defended so that I could not get close to them at all without being shot to pieces. I feel that the range on the cannons is a bit too far but this could probably be countered with constructing some sort of arena to force them into close quarters combat with high cover for colonists. My colony wealth was at 23006 wealth with 6.0 strengh at this point.

Yep, it's a little aggressive at the moment. On Chill Callie, I was attacked on day 25 by nine pirates against my four colonists (one of whom couldn't do violence). They all had pistols (each had between 57 to 65 health), but it didn't make any difference. I had even managed to get a couple of turrets up. :P

Looking forward to the hotfix. :)

In light of the results here, I've hotfixed the game again with a new rebalancing update, Alpha 4e. This is a silent update (for now).

Oh yay. I haven't even started playing A4 yet and I've already downloaded 4b, 4d, and now 4e. Tynan, do you have some sort of cutoff point for A4?

The cutoff is when it's not broken :P

I hate having to hotfix stuff, not just because it's lame on my part to leave things in a poor state, but also because it costs money for all that download bandwidth. Blerg!

I've been playing 461 and wow the difficulty is ridiculous. Tried a Randy Random and got destroyed pretty quickly but figured maybe RR was just changed and was a lot harder now, so I switched to Cassandra Classic. Almost the same with CC, at least I got to set up my (very) initial base, but still got rocked by Raiders/Centipedes.

1st wave - 1 Raider
2nd wave - 2 Centipedes w/ Minigun and Blasting Rifle (I think was the name, basically a molotov gun)
3rd wave - 12 Raiders w/ high powered rifles, machine guns, and grenades/molotovs.

1st wave was easy obviously, but the 2nd wave took me a long time to get through. I had 5 colonists, although it was early on and I didn't even have enough guns to arm them all. Had 2 colonists get incapacitated and needing rescue. Centipedes stood outside of turret range but I eventually killed them with my only colonist who had a rifle (Lee Enfield) after a long battle.

Almost immediately (2 or 3 days) after the 2nd wave, came the 3rd wave of 12 raiders. I stood no chance after the centipede fight or without time to rebuild defenses.

Another thing I noticed on Randy Random is that mental breaks came about very quickly, I had spacious bedrooms (5x5), etc. Although I had not cleaned yet as I was still doing initial construction, but mental breaks happened very fast it seemed.

Difficulty was high enough where I sought out the forums here to voice my concern. Love the game, but with this build it's almost not worth playing if raiders are going to kill off everyone so quickly.

Also a random last thought before I post, why are frag grenades so damn powerful haha. On my RR play today raiders destroyed my initial 3 turrets with 1 grenade each turret.

Quote from: Tynan on June 03, 2014, 10:38:17 PM
The cutoff is when it's not broken :P

I hate having to hotfix stuff, not just because it's lame on my part to leave things in a poor state, but also because it costs money for all that download bandwidth. Blerg!

Same bandwidth issue on this side :) When you do finally upload a 'not broken' version, tell us in the site blog? I'll defer from downloading until then.

Cheers! And keep up the good work!

I wiped (4d, 462).  On day 34, 34 tribals armed with stones and arrows attacked (immediately) my 10 or 11 colonists.  The colonists had no turrets because of another raid which occurred just a few days prior.  That was a smaller raid, but with good weapons and they landed inside my turret ring.
Too hard?  I don't know.  Hard is good.  I played build 254 a lot and the only thing I knew for sure is that I'd eventually be toasted.
I think I'll play another and save my vote for that one :)

Played 462... Chilled Callie Classic... 1st raid, tribal with bow... 2nd raid 4 man raid team with pistols... some ok raid... Final raid, about day 47, 4 raiders, 3 with sniper rifles, 1 Molotov. Game over...

By the time of the last raid I only had 4 people with either shot guns or 1 Uzi and pistols.

I just played a 462 colony with Cassandra Classic for 56 days. I can't check any of the poll options: the difficulty was mostly too easy (several 1-2 person raids and a couple of lone mechanoid raids) up until day 48, when a well-armed raid of nine pirates dropped directly onto my colony, killing three and incapacitating two. While I enjoyed the sudden drama of the raid, I felt sort of let down that it came so late and that the other raids were so easy to deal with.

Also, I got a bug: I built three graves for my dead, but I couldn't haul anyone to them and I still got the "Need grave" tip on the right of the screen. Will look for this in 4e shortly.

Classic Cassandra, "death" raid hit day 34ish.

I didn't get a save before the raid so I won't upload, I'll just summarize:

With 4d (will download 4e tomorrow or later tonight) I'm still wiping consistently on the third raid but it's a lot better than 4c.  On 4c I'd wipe without being able to put up any kind of fight at all, with 4d I'm at least taking down half or more of them before I go down.  I actually managed to wipe out the third raid one time, however only one of my colonists wasn't incapped, and then two of them had mental breaks, right as a fourth raid came in with 3 sniper rifles and molotovs... all my people were half healed at best so that didn't go very well.  I've played both extremes with initial starts too, in that I've tried making 3 combat oriented settlers, 3 not-so-combat oriented settlers with high construction/mining/crafting/growing, and a balance.  The one I managed to live on was a balanced selection and I think that had a slave trader popped by earlier I might've been able to pull that one off... only had 4 colonists and a turret when the 3rd raid hit.

I like that the game now determines raid size based on colony wealth and haven't had the chance to try a mass turret strategy.  I'm not sure whether or not A3 tendencies would still prevail and I'd get completely overwhelmed, or whether or not the turrets causing massive amounts of hostiles has been addressed.  I'll try that before I patch to 4e.

Sorry if my english is not perfect. I tried to play a game twice, but both have been defeated! In the first three waves, I could defend myself very well, I was very glad to have captured five raiders because it was too complicated on A3. But in the fourth wave, i was defeated both times by mechanoid. It was very fast! Each wave of shot killed a settler, while the other mechanoid destroyed my turrets.

It was frustrating, but I believe a fix will coming ... The mechanoids have much life, for to come attack us in the fourth wave and at first our power makes us casualties easy.

Again I'm sorry for my english.

Im aware this isnt exactly relevant to this thread anymore, but im noticing that the game egts far too easy now in alpha4e. I just sit here with now 9 colonists, occassionally capturing a wanderer and fending off barely challenging raids of mostly pistol pirates. This is on cassandra classic, so im not sure what thats about.

Also i've not once been visited by a slaver ship. nooot once. Something seems off. im in a large map if that makes a difference. My colony wealth says its at 20000 right now, and strength is at 12.6. I havent payed attention to whether my wealth is increasing, it may not be as i do spend a lot of metal rebuilding turrets even on the easily defeated raids, as i use them as mines. Still feel that it should be ramping up anytime soon now, day 106 but still no challenge.

Quote from: Mattk50 on June 04, 2014, 07:20:00 AM
Im aware this isnt exactly relevant to this thread anymore, but im noticing that the game egts far too easy now in alpha4e. I just sit here with now 9 colonists, occassionally capturing a wanderer and fending off barely challenging raids of mostly pistol pirates. This is on cassandra classic, so im not sure what thats about.

Also i've not once been visited by a slaver ship. nooot once. Something seems off. im in a large map if that makes a difference. My colony wealth says its at 20000 right now, and strength is at 12.6. I havent payed attention to whether my wealth is increasing, it may not be as i do spend a lot of metal rebuilding turrets even on the easily defeated raids, as i use them as mines. Still feel that it should be ramping up anytime soon now, day 106 but still no challenge.

You you post your savegame for me?

I got to day 37 before I got wiped out by 2 raids within 2 days of each other (10 raiders or some sort and then 2 centipedes). Didn't get a chance to fix up my defenses or turrets. My injured where too weak to be of much use and died pretty quickly followed by my healthy people then the colony got fire bombed to hell.

the lead ups where 2 tribal raids first one was with a bow from memory and the other was 4 with rocks and a bow.

A solution I feel would be to have some weapons scattered around the map like the ration packs at the start. This would make defense against the 3rd/4th wave easier which is where it seems most are having issues. The issue we are having is 2 easy waves with few/no weapons to arm new people then followed by 2 rapid follow up raids that usually seem to be armed with higher tech weapons or be robots with crazy HP compared to weapons available to harm them and their DPS output.

It is fun but the 30-40 day brick wall is kind of disheartening.

Note: This is from the 462 update and not the one that was pushed outa very short time ago, so if they has be modified  in the new hotfix then cool, I just am not goign to download it right now due to download limits.

Sure. this is now 20 days afterwards though, the raids have started stepping up again, and im getting pirates groups that are half sniper and my first group of 2 mechanoids. So you may not have to adjust much
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16970274/Land%20Softly%202.zip

Though, i think i managed to cause that intentionally, i tried to make it happen by increasing my stocks and hording material, and i set up a mining operation into the mountain behind me that boosted my colony value by 4000 or so. Dunno i feel like raids should naturally increase in difficulty even if you arent trying to horde materials.

Voting locked since the game is now at Alpha4e. I'll make another poll.

Mattk50: I checked your savegame. It does look like you're getting about 750-point raids, which can mean multiple triplets of mercs and snipers. But I guess this isn't tough enough? Also, apparently you took some damage around day 80. Can you remember what that was?

I played the last alpha4d and got steamrolled by a sudden very large raid around day 40, so im not sure how difficult it's supposed to be now. the challenge did step up in that savegame since my first post, as i've started mining and trying to increase the wealth rating, but i could have just sat there surviving easily forever if i hadn't.

around day 80 i think was just another pirate raid that took out my forward exposed turrets. i dont remember taking any real damage from any raids so far. maybe it was a battery explosion? i had one or two of those. around day 110 one of the mostly sniper raids finally managed to knock one of my people unconscious and i had to rescue him.

edit: oh maybe it was the time my forward solar panel got taken out by my own guy's grenade. i have solar panels out in front of my defenses because they arent really at risk as long as you dont put them where you expect your enemies to find cover.

how to get the E version of alpha4? only have a Download link for the D version...

Quote from: Dutch2005 on June 04, 2014, 04:26:01 PM
how to get the E version of alpha4? only have a Download link for the D version...

Your link will give you E, unless your browser is caching something.

Info about my last savepoint:
Day: 145
Colonists: 8
Raids: 11
Version: 4D
Story: Cassandra Classic

So, my bits about the newest Version are:
It has gotten a lot harder. The last wave I had to defeat was with about 24 Raiders, all equipped with something from Uzi's, to R4's and so on. Mine had Pistols, 2 M4's and 2 Uzi's - I reloaded about 5 times from my last savepoint, hoping that a weaker wave would come, but I had no luck and had to upgrade all my colonists to Shooting 20 by manipulating the Save-File.

About the Gameplay: Has something changed with the way they attack? I usually dig my colony in the mountain, the only tunnel leading outside is one wide and goes into death-zone where my colonists wait in a halfcircle to kill all incoming raiders - it usually worked really well, but with this update most of the raiders seem to ignore the tunnel and go straight for my Generators that are extremly well protected by stone walls (from inside to outside: Metal, Empty, Stone, Stone, 3x Empty, Stone, Stone, Surrounded by 4 metal floors) - and they usually destroy more than half of the defense I built there before I can defeat them. They not only attack the doors, they even go through the walls now - something that has never happened to me before.

Humanoids: Came waaay to early. I had three colonists, two with pistols, one with a lee, and sending in that monster with this rocket-like thing that makes huge balls of fire was close to impossible to defeat, took me 4 or 5 reloads before it went down. And again, went through my Stone walls like they didn't even exist.

In my opinion, the things that would make it more fair are:
Strength of Stone walls set back to 1000 instead of the 400
Humanoids sent in later and not as second or third wave
If the way they attack has been changed, I prefered the old one - it offered a more defensive way to deal with the raiders, which has become impossible with the new update (even though I can understand if some people prefer the new one - I guess I am just more of a defensive player)

But anyway, thank you for countless hours of incredible fun, Tynan! The game is great and I love it so far!

Quote from: RandyIsAwesome on June 04, 2014, 05:13:17 PM
Strength of Stone walls set back to 1000 instead of the 400

I missed that. That explains why they seem much easier to get through. They are.