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[Argonaut]

I remember the early game being hard. It can still be too hard for newbies, no doubt, but the jump from beginner in a wolf to armada overlord is too fast nonetheless. I happen to like the early-mid game the most. The game has all the mechanics to allow me to play a single ship trader with a few kites or a centurion for defense, but i soon become too rich for that. And to add insult to injury the Spacer option is hidden, despite being perfectly viable. It takes 10 minutes to fly to a random derelict in the generous starting range and scan for 30k, scoop some salvage and be on track to that armada, debt notwithstanding. Hardly a "very hard" option after a playthrough or two, but it gave 20 minutes of extra enjoyment before the spiral.

The game seems to want me to burn through ships every encounter, but it's very easy to pick your fights and not lose anything. The real difficulty is not overreaching your battle potential. Why should i bother being a small trader with my escorts if after a single mission i'm set to double my fleet? A guy with a truck making enough money to buy himself a second truck and starting his own trucking company from taking a 10 minute trip to examine some other vehicle is a bit excessive. I get that all gameplay should be accessible at the beginning, but there is no reason scaling up should be so fast. It's enough to give starting options for different "professions" while decreasing rewards to create hours of fresh gameplay. (Maybe a "hard" mode? Ironman doesn't cut it still). Otherwise it's trivial to end up bored and overpowered without a chance to experience half the content, even on early playthroughs.

I won't even mention colonization because i already did in another thread, but it's the same fare. Don't get me wrong, i love the game and the work done on it is fantastic, but it's not letting me play it. I want to care for my own ship like a lifeline like that beginner's wolf for longer. See each kite officer become a veteran on the ship. Relish every bullet dodged. Agonize over every trashed escort.

[Alex]

It's definitely too fast right now. I don't want it to be very slow, either; still finding the right balance. I think given the Galatian Stipend, it's probably ok to tone down some early/mid-game rewards, as those were mostly set up before that was a thing. Going to look at it at some point; it's safe to expect some possibly sweeping changes in this from release to release.

[megalon]

I think this question could be a bit tough to answer accurately for many players (perhaps as yourself) who've been playing this game for a long time. The game is certainly easy if you know all the mechanics in and out.

For a brand new player to the game could certainly see it being way harder, using your example re fleet encounters,  they don't know what you know as you describe in paragraph two.  

That being said, I think the difficulty, overall, is really good.  Being such an open ended sandbox game, you can sort of opt to make the game as easy as you like (through exploiting easy or low risk money making ventures) or as hard as you like (limiting yourself to one ship and trying to solo stuff or any other of the many ways).  

I think just bunch of small tweaks are needed, like toning down planet incomes and other balancing, but overall the difficulty feels really good to me, not too tough not too easy.

[Megas]

I took me about a week to get to endgame, and I do not have the time to play like I did decades ago.  I appreciate the semi-fast pace this game has.  I still have yet to invade core worlds for blueprints.  Now, I have explored about half the sector for the best planet, and I have not yet made it to the red planet that has taunted me from the very beginning, and I am slowly building a chain of waystations toward that red planet which no doubt has that planet shield item I read about.  Red planet in my game is at the very upper right corner of the whole sector.

[Schwartz]

I'm not finding it easy. I found the early game more manageable because you're not constantly scraping to break even money-wise, which is good. The combat side of the early game has lost none of its bite. But yes, every bit of money translates into getting out of the early game murk that much faster. I found the mid game to be weird, in that there was none for me. Bounties advanced from an easy 50k for a small fleet to 200k for one with capitals and 4x my fleet size. I never really arrived in mid game but sailed straight through to the end with money in the bank and my first colony therefore funded well right off the bat.

Overall I'd say the pacing is better in this version, but it can be improved. Levelling happens too fast compared to fleet power, and some variables scale with level(?)

Rewards for trade and exploration are okay. They're less generous than bounties, and you have to take fuel and time spent into account. I didn't do these much until I was well on the way, by which point 50k for a trade run was another drop in the bucket. I could imagine doing these early on to be an easy way to make bank.


What the game could use is a more noticeable mid game by way of a slower XP progression overall. A slight tightening of monetary rewards, including the starter stipend. More medium-strength bounties. An increase in makeshift pirate base strength as the player progresses. Luddic Path is plenty strong even early game, and I assume that's intended.

And since core worlds have such a hard time breaking even, I find it strange that the player can get filthy rich off colonies. I could see faction taxes being interesting, as both a way to keep their military at bay and reduce player income.

[Cik]

i saw the same thing re the bounties.

first round ~40k
next round 50-60k
round 3: 150+k

game pls

[Dexy]

The difficulty depends on how you decide to earn money and how easily you can escape from a superior fleet.

Selling drugs, organs, armaments to pirate stations is easy money with low risk using fast frigate haulers.

Exploration missions are similarly easy money with a little higher risk, if limiting yourself to fast ships.

Once you have any ships in the fleet that can't escape from fast frigates, the difficult suddenly jumps up.

So I would say that the rewards are poorly balanced, and there is too little incentive / too high risk in using slow ships if fast frigates can get the job done.

[Deshara]

And since core worlds have such a hard time breaking even, I find it strange that the player can get filthy rich off colonies. I could see faction taxes being interesting, as both a way to keep their military at bay and reduce player income.

isn't that what expeditions are?

[DaLagga]

i saw the same thing re the bounties.

first round ~40k
next round 50-60k
round 3: 150+k

game pls

Yeah, I second this.  I agree that the early-mid game needs to slow down a bit in terms of how quickly the player can build up, but in the current version pirate bounties tend to FAR out-scale the player no matter what you do.  In version .8 I had no trouble keeping up with the bounties and could subsist on them for pretty much the entirety of my income if I wanted.  But something is out of wack with the scaling in .9 where we go from 50k bounties consisting of a couple of destroyers and a few frigates with tons of D-mods to 150k battle fleets with several cruisers, half a dozen or more destroyers and a ton of frigates with maybe 1 D-mod each on average.  The giant leap came out of nowhere and only about an hour into the game (for me anyway) which meant that I basically had to ignore bounties until I had a fleet that was actually capable of handling them because the 50k bounties all but dried up when the game decided to load the next tier. 

[Schwartz]

And since core worlds have such a hard time breaking even, I find it strange that the player can get filthy rich off colonies. I could see faction taxes being interesting, as both a way to keep their military at bay and reduce player income.

isn't that what expeditions are?

Yes, I meant an outright demand for taxes as a percentage of your earnings, rather than the player having to do political maneuverings with costs that increase with every iteration (as it is with AI core fleets, anyway). A peaceful option with costs that keep increasing is something you do once or twice, it's not a long-term peaceful solution.

[Truthowl]

WOW, I must really really suck at this game. I don't find it easy at all. lol

But as to the issue of early-mid game bounties. I rarely, and I mean rarely, see bounties under 150k and those fleets are over 2 times stronger than me. They usually wipe me when I still haven't taken out even half of theirs. I wish I could find some 50-100k bounties.

As for colonies, how the hell are you all getting rich off of them? lol I mean, at one point I seen my expected income go up to about 60-70k. I got 1 month of that and used the money to build a tech mining structure. Then the Persean League came and jacked me up because of the tech miner and I was suddenly running in the red. Running several system bounties where you get 1400 per frigate allowed me to build a few more structures. But the upkeep was killing me. I noticed I could use cores in my buildings and that has helped, a lot actually. But I can't seem to find any more beta cores(for the 50% markdown of upkeep). Now I have pirates, the perseans, the ludic path and one other hitting my colony. ROFLMAO(<--hysteria)... Anyways, my colony is NOT making me any money. I'm sitting at about -10k per month right now. So how are you getting rich? I cannot fight off the fleets they at me. They appear to be about the same level as 170k bounties and I seem to be stuck with frigates. Otherwise I cant outrun the fleets out to get me.

I'm thinking I need to build another colony but avoid building the things these guys are hitting hard. Thats the refinery and tech miners as far as I can tell so far.

I do have a few ships better than frigates. But they're in storage at my colony, because I can't afford the fuel and supplies to use them all the time.

Anyway, @Dev please be gentle with the Balancing... lol

[Schwartz]

Skills, beta+ AI cores and a low enough hazard rating help a lot. My first colony is on 175% hazard and it always made a profit, but I invested heavily up-front. I wouldn't pick a hazard rating higher than that unless it was just loaded with goodies.

[Eji1700]

The game certainly has inconsistent pacing, some of it comes from inherent problems in any genre where you get powerful over time.

For example the early game is, almost by definition, the hardest part.  No matter how easy the start you pick, the game will almost always get easier from there as you acquire more resources and fleets, and if it doesn't, well it ends because you screwed up (or you just reload a save).  Worse as it is right now the early game feels like a very heavy knowledge test, where the first few times you play it's just insanely hard as there's a lot to learn, but once you get it it's not that hard to abuse something to basically skip it.

Even if the pacing is slowed down (so each phase of the game feels more meaningful, rather than going from scraping by to planetary warlord) mid and end game can still certainly be an issue. 

There's a few ways to add difficulty to a game like this:

1. Things like the spacer start (harder starting conditions).

Thoughts/issues- Mainly that it's only hard until you manage to get on even footing with another start (so a wolf + a Shepard + some pocket change).  If you can manage to do that, congrats, you're now where you would've been had you picked that start from the first place, and are clearly skilled enough to win from there , because you just got to that point from somewhere worse, and the difficulty spike is over.  The debt adds some longevity to it, but this is basically a challenge run that ends when you stablize.

2. Alternate playing conditions (like choosing a starting team in nex):

Thoughts/Issues- like the above, the conditions this starts you in only last until you get you way out of them, but I do think it's got the potential to help with replayability.  Suppose you start as an outlaw with a pirate fleet, but major rep penalties across the factions, or a wanted rebel who can work with smaller factions but has an open bounty on them from the main ones, or a totally unarmed smuggler fleet?  The upside here being that while you could just quickly do whatever is needed to pivot to "optimal" play, it also encourages trying something different.

3. Widening the power gap:

Thoughts/issues- right now I think it's still way too easy to get good ships. Ignoring blueprints, ships are decently cheap and salvage is huge.  I still think ships should be locked up tighter and harder to find if you aren't part of the military, meaning you'd have to salvage or buy the larger ones.  Salvage, since d mods are no longer such a huge downside, should be more rare unless you have skills and equipment to make it easier.  Right now I can wind up being offered 1/4th of an enemy fleet, so in a few won battles I've got what they've got with any decent luck, but there's no skill involved besides "win".   If salvage and restored hulls become harder to find, you can finally have a ship economy as well, rather than the current situation where even the rarest stuff sells for peanuts.

Oddly weapons are much harder to get reliably than ships, and are in a better place. I do think rare weapons should sell for and cost more though, thus making another reason to look into low vs high tech.

4. Escalating content:

The only real example of this right now is the redacted, and that's some of the issue. You go out exploring, find some hazards, kill what you can, and repeat until you know you're unbeatable.  There's nothing really wrong with this except for the lack of options.  There's one "boss" faction in the game, and then your other end game option is just going to war with everyone and fighting giant doom fleets. 

This can be fun, but more variety would be nice (the 3 types of stations added , each with 3 levels really help).  Maybe a few "elite" fleets that each faction can field which will only engage you when they REALLY hate you.  2+ for each faction, with each fleet showing off a different faction doctrine optimized to the extreme, maybe with a special ship/weapon (or maybe not, them playing fair is interesting too). 

All that said the game is still pretty good as is. If it were just numbers tweaks from here I think you could still accomplish a lot to even out the gameplay (i'm a big believe in non RNG scarcity doing wonders for game feel).

[DiM]

It's definitely too fast right now. I don't want it to be very slow, either; still finding the right balance. I think given the Galatian Stipend, it's probably ok to tone down some early/mid-game rewards, as those were mostly set up before that was a thing. Going to look at it at some point; it's safe to expect some possibly sweeping changes in this from release to release.

That's good to hear, however I think you should consider reworking the economy again.
Just kidding.
But seriously, importing stuff for free shouldn't be a thing, colonies that import stuff from out of faction should have those costs deducted from their income.
Or is it already that way and i just haven't noticed?

[torbes]

Just want to chime in on the bounty scale jump and add that Chalcedon is a gold mine. They have 2-3x deficits in almost everything and I was able to easily load up a handful of buffalos with heavy armaments/drugs/organs and sell for ~1-2mil.