Difficulty should also affect many other things besides damage taken...

[Wayleran]

New to the game with about 145 hours in with a buddy and we both love it and are addicted. We're extremely happy with our FIRST ever "early access" game purchase thanks to @ZiggyD making the recommendation.

 

One thing however I would love to see changed over time and nearer to release is that the game needs to be MUCH more challenging, not only in terms of AI DPS, but also in minor progression barriers so that you can't simply make a basic iron/titanium ship and skip right to the trinium stages. There's really no incentive to take your time in early game. I know this is a sandbox game but a little bit of progression mechanics would be wonderful in harder difficulties.

 

 

 

Ideas for challenges as difficulty is increased are:

 

 

 

Both resources AND crew should be vastly restricted and much more rare.

 

For instance, you should only be allowed to find basic crewman in the outer rings with maybe the occasional "lucky hit" of a professional. And you should definitely NOT be able to find any officers in early stages nor should you be able to use untrained crewman as sergeants or lieutenants. This alone would restrict your build sizes and ship capabilities so that you would need to search out professionals in every new sector and find that "lucky hit" with your first sergeant. It would be a great addition to the fun of exploration in the game. Make untrained crewman nearly limitless but greatly reduce professionals. With possibly one or two max professionals found in each sector.

 

Resources as difficulty is increased should also be less abundant making you have to actually stay in each stage of the game longer and find those valuable asteroids to increase your ship's capabilities to handle tougher areas.

 

 

 

Make hyperspace jumps much smaller with increased difficulty

 

I believe by default you should only be able to make a 1 sector jump. Then by adding upgrades and hyperspace core this should be very gradually increased making wormholes and gates much more useful then they are now.

 

Hyperspace upgrades should start at around .5 sectors for grey/white items and increase to perhaps 4 sectors max with a high tier upgrade. Also the diminishing return on hyperspace cores is a great idea and should be even slightly higher if you chose a harder difficulty. Being able to jump 10 sectors should be a rare and wonderful thing for only the largest and most expensive ships.

 

 

 

Combat is trivialized by simply and easily adding ridiculous shields

 

As the game is now, even on very hard difficulty, you can simply make a massive ship with tons of HP and ridiculous shields very easily and early trivializing all combat. I would like to see this curtailed by the previous two examples. Making professional crewman and officers MUCH MUCH harder to attain would naturally restrict the player's capability to make enormous monstrosities which steamroll through all content with ease. Also shield generator blocks should suffer from heavy diminishing returns like hyperspace core blocks currently do.

 

 

 

Make the cost of running a massive ship force the player into using "sector building"

 

One final note is that crew cost isn't at all an impediment. Making millions of credits is relatively easy. If you want to have an enormous ship with massive HP and Shields and upgrades and turrets, etc... Then you should pretty much be forced to have an equally enormous "revenue stream" coming in from the use of stations and the new economy updates. Pretty much making the player also be involved in what I'd consider "sector building" where you essentially create and grow your own empty sectors and faction just to maintain your massive "war effort".

 

I hope someone reads this and finds it useful and takes it as it's intended. As only a very friendly and positive suggestion to an already amazing game that's still in it's infancy.

 

Thanks!

[WSY]

I agree with the making hyper jumps smaller, which may make it more frustrating in some ways, they become near trivial by the time your naonite or trinium depending on size of ship and module farming.

 

Spreading them a little further apart to make them more like highways and jumps drives the local area jump mechanic in later difficulty would be a great idea.

 

I will have to say I partially agree and disagree on the crew part, mostly because it can be frustrating. On the other hand, being to hire without the Stonewall prevention of going above command requirement may make this easier, so you can run for a period of time without all the command crew until you find them.

 

However definitely keep the crew shuttle request mechanic. Maybe make it more expensive, but if you have that large of a ship and money, you have been playing the game to progress through it without rushing.

 

On shields, because they are "an absolute defense" I couldn't agree more. I am working on a suggestion post that will offer some balances possibly. Will have to let me know what you think when I post.

 

Lastly, agree with the necessity for large ship construction requiring some form of an infra-structure to have. Though I think it should be more than just a money thing.

[Treexter]

Agree that difficulty should matter something, however...

 

All being said is only my thoughts...

 

1) Both resources AND crew should be vastly restricted and much more rare.

This will only make a game more grindy.

Jumping around or login/logout for finding required crew? No fun in such chagnes. At all. Just more numbers to the played hours counter.

 

2) Make hyperspace jumps much smaller with increased difficulty

Again, will only increase the amount of bored played hours rather than having fun and exploring.

 

3) Combat is trivialized by simply and easily adding ridiculous shields

I can agree with that, however, i do wonder

how it's possible to improve combat for large (i mean, laaaaarge) ships? It's two big pieces of metal flying in the middle of nowhere shooting to each other.

 

4) Make the cost of running a massive ship force the player into using "sector building"

The game is a sandbox. Which means every player can play it how he want. Forcing one playstyle to be only one viable is not a good idea.

 

My main point is that DIFFICULTY is not connected to GRIND/Hours Spent. It's too different things.

[Wayleran]

Yeah thanks for the feedback and I hear some of those concerns and disagreements but I'd also definitely stress the fact that I'd want these things to be adjustable to the player's preferences. Even so far as adding 2 difficulty settings, one as it is for combat damage and another for "scarcity" or something.

 

If all these things were imposed upon the players then I'd totally be against that but it would be the best of both worlds if we could select how'd we'd like to build the galaxy to our preferred playstyle.

 

I also read the roadmap on the wiki just now and see some things such as shields and combat being addressed in the future.

[Treexter]

Yea, galaxy creation options will be lovely.

 

I'm also think more things should be exposed to lua so we can change some aspects as feel right

[WSY]

Wow re-reading my post I missed the word jump gates.

 

I meant to say make the jump gates farther apart so they act as highways, and jumps act more my like local area jumping. This would bring back a reason to use them.

[Uthael]

Increased difficulty shouldn't affect grinding but challange player's skills in building, planning and fighting.

 

This would require a lot of development time, but would also improve the game's quality.

 

Examples:

- AI realizes how profitable a location is and makes their own factory on the location. Would make players want to destroy that or deal with the competition.

- Enemies can realize they're being kited and can flee away to regenerate shields. Or take cover behind a full-shield ally or an asteroid. Or even someone friendly to both of you (if race traits allow that)

- Projectiles can be deflected. Laser beams reflected / diffused. And the AI ships are built for that

- Losing a lot of reputation in a short time period will "brick" it there for a long while, reducing all your reptation gains with that faction for a long time or a specific buffer amount.

- Too much thrust could make a thruster start crushing the ship if it's not integrity-reinforced enough

- If you make one of those nigh-unhittable needle-ships, you have to be careful with turning or you could snap

- Upgrade modules have a chance of losing quality when removed

- Enemies can search for you and follow you if you jump away (just cut and paste them into the sector if their allies are there, they're "communicating"). Especially head hunters who don't even need allies, just someone neutral or hostile to you.

 

etc etc

[Morbo513]

As the game is now, even on very hard difficulty, you can simply make a massive ship with tons of HP and ridiculous shields very easily and early

I'm disappointed that this is still the case. The extreme cost-effectiveness of shields, and how they're practically necessary instead of a choice with drawbacks, is my single biggest complaint with the game's mechanics.

I made a (very obnoxiously worded) series of posts addressing how the combat could be made more interesting by varying the weapons' properties, and how they interact with shields, with some being able to bust them down efficiently, some being able to penetrate depending on distance, that sort of stuff. Shields being a universal barrier against all damage except collision is simply a bad design choice in my opinion, and the degree to which you can inflate their stats, as OP says, makes combat trivial and uninteresting.

[Ravien]

The devs have said that the next major update is probably going to be focused on combat.

 

Once we get some better balance between the weapons and defenses, that will open the door to being able to make more difficult enemies.

 

I would like to see the option to have progression added to your galaxy to unlock building with different materials.

For example: there might be missions to unlock building basic Trinium hull/armor/etc blocks. Then more missions to unlock building generators/shields/propulsion/etc.

The missions wouldn't just be combat, but instead allow players to choose how they will unlock things either through combat, mining, trading, or exploration.

Combat missions could be attacking a pirate research facility or experimental alien ship. Mining missions would just require you to mine and turn in a certain amount of the resource. Trading would have you gathering a list of trade goods. And exploration could be randomly found in hidden mass sectors, giving you a multi-part mission to track down some ancient piece of knowledge.

 

This would give a sense of progression and stop people from just rushing to the core, while still keeping the sandbox gameplay. Since it would be an optional setting, those who wish to play without it may do so. It would give players a reason to stay in an area of the galaxy for a period of time before moving on.

 

I don't think the solution is making crew more expensive. I agree with making professionals harder to find so they'd be more valuable.

[Uthael]

I say: leave balancing for Beta! Don't waste too much time on it while there's still new features and mechanics to implement!

[SkyCore]

I would suggest incremental caps on maximum shields. Unlocking the next cap could be attained by picking up some new random drop from enemies or perhaps from some new special encounter.

But please, no time based spawn like the mobile equipment merchant (which is an absolutely terrible place to put a required item). The player should be able to actively pursue advancement, not have to wait around and hope to get lucky.