POLL: Alpha4e difficulty

[Astraeus]

Having finally gotten around to 4E after the last couple of iterations, I feel the difficulty at the start might be perhaps one notch too high, and then after day 50~, several notches too easy. After I've developed my walls, turrets, and have enough R4's and M24's to go around, the AI isn't sending anything big enough to really challenge me UNLESS it's a drop squad in the dead center of my base, and then the difficulty goes nutty.

I feel that if they drop directly in the base, maybe the attacking force should be 75% of what it would normally be. The difference in difficulty between having them unexpectedly drop behind your defenses versus having to come through the front door is going to be hard to balance. I'm sure you could build an "emergency bunker" within your walls, but you're still letting them run rampant through your base setting things on fire if you do that, so really you're going to have to engage in a gun fight with whatever cover you have on hand.

Edit: Keep in mind the difficulty you're aiming for has to consider whether or not the game is going to be "iron man" on release. Do you want people having the option to save/reload often if something goes slightly wrong, or do you want people to live with the small (or large) losses that occur due to poor management or some bad luck? If you're going to disable save/load scumming, then you really can't make the game TOO hard, unless you want this to be like DF where your 5, 10, or 100 hour colony falls apart due a string of bad luck.

[Dr. Z]

Turrets also don't increase raid difficulty (at least, not any more than walls, stockpiles, beds, or anything else that adds to your wealth).

This would imply that building a base inside a rock wall (i.e. using the cave walls instead of building walls) would artificially deflate your wealth?

That's true. Interesting point.

Perhaps rock walls could be considered very ugly by colonists to compensate.

Even barring that, there seem to be too many advantages in cave dwelling. Single entry point. No drop-in raiders. Raiders won't attack rock walls. You can even expand to the edges of the map through a cave. It's rather OP compared to dwelling out in the open.

Of course tunneling is better then building in the open because it's smarter than building in the open. There are just things in this world which are better then other things.

[Untrustedlife]

I haven't voted yet, outside that encounter everything was fine.
Got the game yesterday and tried two times on easy callie, which went fine.
This was the first proper game, so it's kinda normal to get your ass handed I think.

As for feedback on the centipedes, the worst offender seemed to be the inferno gun which kinda invalidates cover.
The inferno gun sets the ground ablaze, so the defenders have to find new cover, so my guys are more busy running for their lives compared to shooting back. Combine that with the huge range and reasonable reload of the inferno gun, it kinda means my guys never get the chance to open fire, because they spend all their time running away.

Right now the best idea I have is to fill a field with stone pillars spread out, and just place men behind them.

losing is fun

[Untrustedlife]

Having finally gotten around to 4E after the last couple of iterations, I feel the difficulty at the start might be perhaps one notch too high, and then after day 50~, several notches too easy. After I've developed my walls, turrets, and have enough R4's and M24's to go around, the AI isn't sending anything big enough to really challenge me UNLESS it's a drop squad in the dead center of my base, and then the difficulty goes nutty.

I feel that if they drop directly in the base, maybe the attacking force should be 75% of what it would normally be. The difference in difficulty between having them unexpectedly drop behind your defenses versus having to come through the front door is going to be hard to balance. I'm sure you could build an "emergency bunker" within your walls, but you're still letting them run rampant through your base setting things on fire if you do that, so really you're going to have to engage in a gun fight with whatever cover you have on hand.

Edit: Keep in mind the difficulty you're aiming for has to consider whether or not the game is going to be "iron man" on release. Do you want people having the option to save/reload often if something goes slightly wrong, or do you want people to live with the small (or large) losses that occur due to poor management or some bad luck? If you're going to disable save/load scumming, then you really can't make the game TOO hard, unless you want this to be like DF where your 5, 10, or 100 hour colony falls apart due a string of bad luck.

as an avid fan of dwarf fortress, i feel the game is just hard enough to be challenging/extremely entertaining right now, especially on randy random.

[Ruin]

I forced myself to play with no mods on A4e.  There were some touch an go moments in the first 40-60 days.  Then, it seemed to just ease up once I had weapons to go around and my walls up.  It seems a bit difficult up front and then far too easy in the later stages of the game.

[Garen]

Having finally gotten around to 4E after the last couple of iterations, I feel the difficulty at the start might be perhaps one notch too high, and then after day 50~, several notches too easy. After I've developed my walls, turrets, and have enough R4's and M24's to go around, the AI isn't sending anything big enough to really challenge me UNLESS it's a drop squad in the dead center of my base, and then the difficulty goes nutty.

I feel that if they drop directly in the base, maybe the attacking force should be 75% of what it would normally be. The difference in difficulty between having them unexpectedly drop behind your defenses versus having to come through the front door is going to be hard to balance. I'm sure you could build an "emergency bunker" within your walls, but you're still letting them run rampant through your base setting things on fire if you do that, so really you're going to have to engage in a gun fight with whatever cover you have on hand.

Edit: Keep in mind the difficulty you're aiming for has to consider whether or not the game is going to be "iron man" on release. Do you want people having the option to save/reload often if something goes slightly wrong, or do you want people to live with the small (or large) losses that occur due to poor management or some bad luck? If you're going to disable save/load scumming, then you really can't make the game TOO hard, unless you want this to be like DF where your 5, 10, or 100 hour colony falls apart due a string of bad luck.

I definately agree with what you've said.

ok i've voted really hard died at day 70 due to 7-8 raiders dropping into the colony. even with tribal groups helping, stone walls and a decent supply of weapons, i just coulden't make it. consdering that said raiders didnt have advanced weapons yet and i haven't encountered mechanoids yet. made me vote really hard.

This isnt unfair difficulty but merely unforgiving, and i am thinking in terms for new players as well...

[Garen]

what i will say is we definately need better turrets, and that there is very few research that focuses on defense.
occasionally had problems with the early to mid stages which made it challenging and fun. just in its current stage, there is little you can do for late game unless you get very lucky with traders

[CharlieC]

Now we have wood maybe Balista could be the first turret option? Tribals have Pila and Balistas are pila chuckers.

[Riithi]

After some more play I find that cassandra classic is too easy for sure.
Due to rng I only had one gun-toting enemy village, the tribals are piss easy.
After 180 days I just had the 7x Centipede attack again, and managed to take them apart in the open with 9 colonists, it took some reloads and I lost 2 colonists in the process, but it's doable.

I had pre-placed structures in the open made of  sandbag/stonewall mix, so my colonists fought a slow retreating battle mostly using guns that outrange the miniguns. Together with a few unlucky colonists in the centipede range to keep them occupied.

[Untrustedlife]

I definately agree with what you've said.

ok i've voted really hard died at day 70 due to 7-8 raiders dropping into the colony. even with tribal groups helping, stone walls and a decent supply of weapons, i just coulden't make it. consdering that said raiders didnt have advanced weapons yet and i haven't encountered mechanoids yet. made me vote really hard.

This isnt unfair difficulty but merely unforgiving, and i am thinking in terms for new players as well...

7-8 raiders with simple weapons were able to take you out?

Were your colonist equipped and did you have any turrets?

You just had bad luck, they dropped inside your base...

[Leffa]

Tynan

Another question, why now  the settlers dont take their maximum capacity (75)? Here to have to insist they take at least three times, and even then sometimes they do not take all.

[ManFriday]

It might be cool to be able to see what the ai is thinking in debug mode, perhaps even save it to a log which we could post in these types of threads. It might help you understand better whats happening during a game.

[Nasikabatrachus]

I just played a 175 day A4e game with Cassandra Classic. I found the difficulty level rather soporific until about day 50, when there was a sudden jump in raider strength. This has seemed to be the case for me throughout this sequence of alphas: low difficulty followed by a sudden jump near day 50. It's like there's an arbitrary spike around 50 days in. After day 50, raids got fairly challenging for another 60 days, although they were spaced rather long apart at times. A couple raids killed or incapacitated at least two colonists out of an average of seven, and a few more would have been worse if I hadn't called for help, although half the time the friendly fighters would just loiter on the wrong side of my base or be otherwise useless. One friendly group even tried to run straight through the enemy's ranks without fighting. They just got slaughtered by the gauntlet.

I got three mechanoid raids. The first one was a single centipede, which made me wonder why it even bothered showing up. The second raid on day 86 was not, to my surprise, as dangerous to me as a large pirate group: it only incapacitated a few people. The biggest challenge was fighting three centipedes in the open, because although one centipede with an inferno cannon is no big deal, two inferno cannons and one blaster can actually control a lot of space. When I realized I couldn't fight them all in the open, I had my colonists fall back and let the centipedes take on my outer four turrets. Centipedes don't seem to deal with turrets very well, so that took a while, allowing my colonists to recuperate a bit. By the time they encroached on my wood-walled base, they had been worn down a bit, and I found that my colonists were much more effective against them in close quarters, especially when the centipedes moved so that there were walls between them, cutting them off from each other's support. It was an interesting fight, being the longest and most damaging to my colony's structure, but in the end only two colonists were incapacitated while only a portion of my colony was threatened. The next one was a joke, even though two centipedes dropped right on top of the colony. For some reason, one of the centipedes was released from its drop pod into a different room than the other one, even though both drop pods landed in the same room. Despite the surprise, only one managed to do so much as break down a wooden door. I had a squad of six colonists dispatch them both fairly quickly at close range.

http://puu.sh/9iKfa/026014cb84.png
http://puu.sh/9iKdj/c9fed5cf3e.png

Around that time, the difficulty of raids started to no longer really matter; although I occasionally lost colonists, my colony as a whole seemed to surpass what the AI was willing to throw at it. I don't know why, but the AI doesn't seem to understand exactly how strong a colony is anymore. Overall, I feel it would have been more even and engaging if there had been more 3-5 person raids in the first 50 days, and if the most dangerous raids had been bracketed by smaller raids.

[Leffa]

Nasikabatrachus

Are you using any mod? I'm not using, and I am unable to meet my demand for timber as you did to have so much wood? In my map there is no more trees.

[Nasikabatrachus]

Nasikabatrachus

Are you using any mod? I'm not using, and I am unable to meet my demand for timber as you did to have so much wood? In my map there is no more trees.

I'm not using any mods. You can grow trees in growing zones. I think my lumber needs were met by just one crop of cultivated trees.