Alpha4d difficulty

[CharlieC]

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.

[Ford_Prefect]

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.

[SSS]

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:



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:




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 if you want. I'll be updating to 4d now.

[Tynan]

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.

[Mozter]

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.

[Notho]

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.

Looking forward to the hotfix.

[Tynan]

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).

[StorymasterQ]

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?

[Tynan]

The cutoff is when it's not broken

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!

[K.LINE]

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.

[StorymasterQ]

The cutoff is when it's not broken

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!

[fluxfaraday]

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

[laston]

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.

[Nasikabatrachus]

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.

[Asdelbr]

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.