power level progression and recovering from near death?

[daveal]

Playing on normal difficulty (no permadeath) I have rage-quit a couple of times. This experience seems similar to a number of the negative steam reviews.  Because I make a copy of the save game directory every few hours, I only lost a couple of hours of progress on that captain instead of the full 10-15 hours I had invested.  In both of these cases my ship was not destroyed and none of my officers died, but I had almost total ship, crew and morale damage. Although I decided this would not be fun to do, it would perhaps have been possible to limp along for a while and eventually get back where I was. In other turn based games, a setback like this is unrecoverable; the enemies keep growing in power, and the setback means that for the rest of the game, I will be too far behind the power level and I will just keep getting beat up.

I have not been able to find a pattern to the enemy power level in encounters yet.  When my crew is in the mid 20 levels, enemy ship encounters seem to be in a wide range, between 2 levels less to 10 levels less.  Similarly in crew combat, the enemies will be lower level but sometimes more than 10 levels less.  I have guessed that when the mission is generated, there is some difficulty level assigned, so some missions may be easier and some harder.  But, this is not displayed, and it could be just a wide random range.  For encounters from red cards in patrol/blockade/spy, I suppose that the -1 card generates an easier encounter than the -4/-5 cards.

In this game, how does power level progress? If I get reduced to a tiny crew without enough skills to man all the weapons and no money to repair the ship all the way, will the enemies adapt to that? Or will I just keep getting killed? If the game knows that I can't handle a ship of any medium level due to crew conditions, will it pity me and either avoid encounters or reduce the enemy level?

[Cory Trese]

I am sorry you've had so many negative experiences with this game.

[fallen]

May 25, 2018 10:25:03 GMT -5 daveal said:

If I get reduced to a tiny crew without enough skills to man all the weapons and no money to repair the ship all the way, will the enemies adapt to that? Or will I just keep getting killed? If the game knows that I can't handle a ship of any medium level due to crew conditions, will it pity me and either avoid encounters or reduce the enemy level?

To quote the dialog, "the void has no mercy."

No, there is no pity scale in the game that dumbs down the challenge rating if you start to fail as a captain.

[daveal]

Thanks, but I am still having fun and still trying to improve. My question was about whether the power level of enemies will keep increasing over time, or if it will decrease while I am trying to recover from a disaster such as the above. In other games like XCOM or Total War, a disaster like this is unrecoverable, but perhaps it is different in your game?

(ninja edit)  OK, if the void has no mercy and a random event can cause such crippling damage, I will be sure to exit every couple of hours and copy the save game directory.  IMHO this is not fun, but obviously YMMV.  I hope all the players leaving the negative reviews on steam will at least try this exit and backup before giving up on the game, but I am not sure they will stick around to find that out.

[drspendlove]

While this likely alienates a number of potential players who have to do external work to get the game to be as forgiving as they'd like, it also keeps another set of players from having to do external work to keep the game as challenging as they'd like. I think it's 6s.

[daveal]

Interesting; if the game optionally supported multiple saves per captain, what external work would these ironman players have to do?

[fallen]

Sorry that you dislike the saved game system. Our stance has not changed.

[drspendlove]

May 25, 2018 13:14:05 GMT -5 daveal said:

Interesting; if the game optionally supported multiple saves per captain, what external work would these ironman players have to do?

Hmm, I have to half-retract my statement. It would be less external work to only use one save. The difference would be a subtle thing: playing the game "as intended" and having that force me into a mindset of danger and risk. Probably the way around even that would be to have the default be "ironman" mode and an alternate style for "softcore" or whatever. I see your point a little better having thought of it.

One case where developers did something in the direction of "too easy" where I had to do external work to make the game slightly challenging was in Puzzle Quest 1. In that game after a certain point in the game, you could walk back and forth and collect tribute from friendly castles without any danger or scarcity. So gold became infinite and things that granted gold pointless. Their response to this situation was "Just don't do that then." It was effectively catering to a crowd that wanted that level of difficulty. That's fine, but it did cause me to have to avoid certain portions of the world map or manually buy and sell at a loss to keep my gold count "honest". 

That story isn't a reflection of the situation here. But it is what I was originally thinking of when I made my response.

[athios]

May 25, 2018 11:28:27 GMT -5 daveal said:

 My question was about whether the power level of enemies will keep increasing over time

I don't know for sure, but (assuming STF follows the trend...) in the original STRPG, yes the difficulty kept increasing over time based on the number of game turns elapsed. At higher difficulties, you were on a constant struggle to stay ahead of the curve. At normal difficulty though, you probably won't notice any appreciable change over time, at least when compared to starting a new game at the next higher difficulty level. If this is wrong for STF, devs please comment.

Here are some tips for cutting down repair costs and repair time:

• Hire Engineers from Military Commanders (one of the starting Contact choices) or other Contacts and get them Port Maintenance. If you have 2-4 Engineers on board, you can easily fix up your ship for FREE by serial-landing on different settlements. Of course, you can still get attacked in between landings, so it's a serious risk that you have to weigh.
  
• If you have a heavily damaged ship, you may want to manually select all the easy-to-fix components (less than 1.5 weeks) to pay to fix at a Starport before making use of the PM Talents, so that the PM repairs get targeted to difficult repairs on expensive components.
• The caveat of this strategy is that Port Maintenance does not repair your hull. If your hull is severely damaged, it could still take many months to repair. Alternatively, you can get free hull repairs by using Expert Salvager. If you are ship-combat competent, you can target low level merchants/smugglers for this alt strategy. Keep in mind, you could get blown up if a lucky torpedo ruptures your hull.
  
• You can reduce repair time/cost by going to better-rated Starports, Factions that you have high military rank with (not 100% sure on this), and/or ones where you know influential Contacts who grant Discounted Repairs.
  

[athios]

May 25, 2018 10:25:03 GMT -5 daveal said:

I have not been able to find a pattern to the enemy power level in encounters yet.  When my crew is in the mid 20 levels, enemy ship encounters seem to be in a wide range, between 2 levels less to 10 levels less.  Similarly in crew combat, the enemies will be lower level but sometimes more than 10 levels less.  I have guessed that when the mission is generated, there is some difficulty level assigned, so some missions may be easier and some harder.  But, this is not displayed, and it could be just a wide random range.  For encounters from red cards in patrol/blockade/spy, I suppose that the -1 card generates an easier encounter than the -4/-5 cards.

I had to learn this the hard way (i.e. a few dead Captains) but get in the habit of checking the enemy Captain Level in ship encounters. It's listed in the middle tab at the top of the encounter screen. If the enemy is several levels above you, or they are on par but you are not ship-combat-oriented, you might be better off surrendering from the start.

Also note, just because you are on a Mission doesn't mean you have to fight. Depending on the circumstance, it may be a better choice to abandon the Mission and lose Rep & credit opportunity, rather than risk death/defeat in a difficult ship combat.

Encounter difficulty isn't displayed when picking Missions, but in general, I think the higher the pay, the harder it is. # of jumps also affects pay of course.

Yes, more negative cards give stronger enemies.

[athios]

May 25, 2018 11:28:27 GMT -5 daveal said:

OK, if the void has no mercy and a random event can cause such crippling damage, I will be sure to exit every couple of hours and copy the save game directory.  IMHO this is not fun, but obviously YMMV.

This was a contentious topic of discussion in the comments section of the Rock Paper Shotgun review. Is single-save-file is a good idea? Is it a better/worse experience to manually backup?

Below was my comment. Hope you find it interesting.

As to “What’s good about that?” I can only say that traumatic experiences are what gets lodged in our brains. While yes, the encounters and dice rolls are up to chance, but the strategies and decisions I made were not. I’ve had a few beloved STRPG captains get killed because I made dumb mistakes or didn’t plan well enough. The thing is, I remember their backstory, what they were doing, how they died. I also have captains on lower difficulties that I kept playing until I got bored of them, and don’t remember much about them. When the game was too easy, I already knew enough to manage to survive and there was no further pressure to improve. As I go up in difficulty level, I quickly learn (sometimes with deadly results) how to better manage money, fuel, crew mutinies, hostile enemies, etc.

I think the difference regarding whether this is “acceptable” is your mindset. One thing I learned (and had to relearn) while playing this series is that your crew and officers are disposable. Yes, they gain levels and skills and are very useful, but if they die, I can hire or promote someone to replace them. It took a while to get used to that. By extension, even the core character —the Captain— is disposable. Why? Because the one who is really gaining experience, becoming proficient, and developing useful strategies is YOU, the player. Learn your lessons, make a fresh start (at a higher difficulty if you’re feeling lucky) and challenge yourself to do better. Just try not to make the same mistake twice.

[fallen]

It's years old, but I wrote a blog post about this exact thing once athios, titled "Hardcore games -- You're going to die"
blog.tresebrothers.com/2011/03/hardcore-games-youre-going-to-die.html

[daveal]

Thanks for all the feedback. If I am trying something risky, and it goes badly, it may be memorable. The main experience that triggered this thread for me was a random xeno encounter. I was peacefully flying from one system to another, got a xeno encounter, and failed three escape rolls. The xeno disabled my engines and game over. (Of course it was not game over because I had my previous save.) This is a random death and I did not find it fun.

The second one may have been a bug and I want to see it happen again before I report it. I was peacefully landing at a planet with a relatively low level ship not rated for combat yet. I clicked the "land" button -- no, it did not say "run blockade" -- and I got a message that I had been intercepted by a pirate. I clicked escape, and escaped fine. Then, since the button did not say "run blockade" I assumed it was a glitch and landed again. No glitch, failed escape rolls => death.

The problem with restarting *from scratch* after a death is that by now, for me, the first 3-4 hours of a new start is pretty boring. Level up the crew, talk with Estelle/Faen, run all the same-system fetch missions for local contacts. It was fun while I was learning the game but now it isn't. If I get into a bad situation, I have a save game at the 3-4 hour mark to drop back to, so I don't go through it all again.

Again, I have 100+ hours in the game and still having fun. For me, the fun is maintained by manually keeping multiple save slots per captain. I understand YMMV and this is clearly not the way the devs intend the game to be played. I found it interesting to read a few dozen of the recent negative reviews on steam. Personally, I would like to tell these players about the easy manual workaround for multiple save slots, and have them try again.

[Cory Trese]

May 25, 2018 15:11:36 GMT -5 daveal said:

The second one may have been a bug and I want to see it happen again before I report it. I was peacefully landing at a planet with a relatively low level ship not rated for combat yet. I clicked the "land" button -- no, it did not say "run blockade" -- and I got a message that I had been intercepted by a pirate. I clicked escape, and escaped fine. Then, since the button did not say "run blockade" I assumed it was a glitch and landed again. No glitch, failed escape rolls => death.

That is not a bug or glitch.

You have to pass a Landing Test to land, otherwise the ship may run into Patrolling ships.

[Cory Trese]

May 25, 2018 15:11:36 GMT -5 daveal said:

Again, I have 100+ hours in the game and still having fun. For me, the fun is maintained by manually keeping multiple save slots per captain. I understand YMMV and this is clearly not the way the devs intend the game to be played. I found it interesting to read a few dozen of the recent negative reviews on steam. Personally, I would like to tell these players about the easy manual workaround for multiple save slots, and have them try again.

And that's fine -- less than 1% of our current player base is doing this. I really doubt any workaround will make those people on Steam happy.

We could take easy steps to block manual backups and make sure that it wasn't possible but we don't. Again, because of the number of impacted players.