Star Traders RPG 4.0 Combat

[Cory Trese]

• Will be slightly harder.
  
• Will include smarter enemy Captains.
  
• Boarding is easier / better described.
  
• Slightly Harder for "Counter Stealth" Characters
  
• Slightly Harder for "Counter Warrior" Characters
  
• Enhances Boarding Weapons
  
• Increases Crew Morale Value in Combat
  
• Fixes Math, Bugs, Rules and Is Better
  
• Not 100% finished, more changes to come.
  

[Slide87]

Is It yet active?? 'cause it's harder yes xD i sent to Ade 4 of my captains in a hour xD(demanding or challenging xD)

EDIT: some advices for new mechanics ¿¿¿¿¿

[Fenikso]

Oct 14, 2011 11:02:28 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

• Will be slightly harder.
  
• Will include smarter enemy Captains.
  ...
  
• Slightly Harder for "Counter Stealth" Characters
  

Oh. New challenge. Cool .

[slawyer]

Wow, "will be slightly harder" seems an understatement to me. "will be almost completely impossible if you're playing Impossible, have a very high character level, and very high turn count" is my experience.

Harder = good, but this update seems to have really made level "Impossible" live up to its name.

"boarding is easier" -- I am not seeing that at all. My experience has been: boarding is TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE now (i.e., suicide, every time, unless I totally outclass my opponent, like my level is way higher than theirs).

Before the update to v4, Severian Payne was a champion boarder. That was his primary combat tactic, boarding and dueling the enemy to submission. He was feared throughout the galaxy -- the Billy the Kid of ST-RPG, fearless and almost impossible to damage, let alone kill. I was able to board an enemy ship and kick their ass ~90% of the time and take no wounds at all, even opponents 200-300 levels higher than me (I'm at level 448 now and my Warrior is 493). I could regularly take on level ~600-700 captains and win, and maybe get wounded a few times if the enemy is military officer and has high warrior (~5% of the time). The only ones I had real trouble with were the REALLY high level enemies, >800 or so (another ~5% or so). I have tons of screen caps of my high level victories accumulated from his long and illustrious career (each time he gets in a difficult fight, I do a screen cap of he results), and it seems there will be no more such victories forthcoming with v4.

Now I just get rocked, EVERY SINGLE TIME, and have to run away, run away, RUN AWAY!!!! All my strategies suck now, and nothing I do seems to work. I have tried many combats against various enemies and levels, and the one constant is getting my ass handed to me.

Other changes I have noted in combat:

• Before, when facing a difficult opponent, I would use the "invite them aboard to get slaughtered" tactic, and let them attempt a boarding action against me, with my 100+ crew, Mercenaries, Leviathan System, and 180+ Weapons aboard, instead of taking the hit myself when attempting to board them. Frequently, the boarding party would get rocked and lose lots of crew & take damage on the initial boarding action, and then Leviathan System would kick in and grant me an enormous bonus. Now, it seems like Leviathan System doesn't help much, and I get rocked in the duel.
  
• Before, then you got hit & damaged in the duel, and took significant crew casualties, it seems to affect the chances of getting hit again later, as if having reduced crew made it harder to hit you again. Now, I keep getting rocked until I retreat, and the chances of getting hit do not appear to be dropping after losing a significant number of crew like before.
  
• Before, then getting rocked by an opponent and attempting retreat, the odds seemed to favor the retreating party more and attacking actions (like duel) would heavily favor the retreating party. For example, I am in a duel and got hit and have 5 health remaining, and decide to bug out and retreat -- frequently the enemy would continue to attempt dueling with me, and they would get rocked and lose their engines (or some other big damage). Now I just continue to get rocked while retreating (pretty much every time), until I successfully get away.
  

At first I thought, maybe I am just getting really unlucky and running into some really hard enemies or something. But after fighting in several combats against various levels of enemies, it is apparent that "enemy level X" now means "enemy level X[+Y]" where the [+Y] is due to these changes! I will try to explain below what I mean...

I think your recent changes, while they might be well balanced for new games, have made combat unworkable for very high-level/late-game/Impossible players like me. It seems the difficulty of combat has increased, and the increase is greatly amplified when you have an existing game and your character level is already very high, the game turn count is already very high, and you're playing on Impossible. In that case, you will find that combat with the update is very significantly harder, and enemies you used to be able to fight successfully will just kill you, and fast.

Personally, I think the old combat calculations were good, and what needed enhanced was the feedback to the user (those changes in v4 are great!), and maybe a tweak on the odds of encountering a high level enemy on the harder difficulty levels (it did seem like many combats were rather boring and there were not enough very high level enemies encountered). I would not mind running into those high level enemies that can kick my ass more frequently, but I disagree with how your changes have altered the difficulty of encounters versus enemies at higher levels than you.

Explained another way: The combat changes seem to have drastically affected how bad an enemy at a certain level can hurt you, on average. Now that enemy seems to hurt you as if he is many levels higher than shown. A level 600 enemy now seems like a level 800 enemy used to be, and kicks ass like a level 800 enemy used to, but he's level 600.

If you are going to change the difficulty of combat, I suggest doing it with changes that affect the level of the enemy, rather than changes that affect the quality of the enemy level -- in other words, make the enemies encountered higher level, or make the encounters with high level enemies more frequent, rather than make the lower level enemies stronger and harder to fight.

That just makes us have to start over again and relearn which enemies we can fight and which ones we can't, and when I've already got a game going for months now, and I don't want to do that. I want to be able to apply my knowledge and experience from all these combats leading up to my character level to future combats, and your changes have made it like my character level suddenly just dropped like a stone, or the enemy level difficulty catapulted up suddenly.

Anybody else noticing combat difficulty increased too drastically in very late game/high level/Impossible difficulty like me? Maybe I'm the only one?

I have rolled back the update and restored 3.9.29 -- I think I'll wait until the combat system upgrade shakes out a little more before trying again. If the changes are here to stay and not going to get tweaked any more, I guess I'll wait until Severian dies before I update to v4, and try the new combat with a new character (which requires starting over with beginning stats and thus sucking at combat again anyway).

BTW, I noticed with v4 that I am able to generate records from Surveillance when I have a full cargo hold, even if I don't have databank. Did you make a change to record generation? I think it's being too liberal and allowing records to generate in too many cases. It's weird though -- I am able to generate 12 or 13 records from Surveillance with a full cargo hold, and then it stops generating new records. When I sell them (and my cargo hold says 112/100 or 113/100 when I do), I am able to repeat that and generate 12 or 13 more records.

[Fenikso]

Man, now I am scared to try Alia II. Shawarazan on 4.0 ;D. Ok, I will and let you know, but she is only level 83 or so.

Nevertheless, cannot argue if the difficulty system gets tweaked to get to real impossible around level 50. Impossible should not be constant cakewalk .

[slayernz]

I've taken my latest impossible pilot out for a spin ... he's only level 79 and it's only turn 17000, but so far things aren't really different ... ie, not crazily nuts hard compared to before.

Okay you forced me to have to play this captain for another 20,000 turns or so ... see how much I suffer to be helpful <grin>.


BTW, I still get the situation where I am very successful for the first few rounds, taking an enemy ship down from 20 engines to 1 or 2, but from that point on, no matter what I do, I can't seem to hit or even board him. I've gone from round 10 (with successful hits in almost every round) to a drawn match 992 turns later.

Enemy captains should get weaker as their ship gets more damage.

[Cory Trese]

Oct 18, 2011 14:56:41 GMT -5 slayernz said:

I've taken my latest impossible pilot out for a spin ... he's only level 79 and it's only turn 17000, but so far things aren't really different ... ie, not crazily nuts hard compared to before.

Okay you forced me to have to play this captain for another 20,000 turns or so ... see how much I suffer to be helpful <grin>.


BTW, I still get the situation where I am very successful for the first few rounds, taking an enemy ship down from 20 engines to 1 or 2, but from that point on, no matter what I do, I can't seem to hit or even board him. I've gone from round 10 (with successful hits in almost every round) to a drawn match 992 turns later.

Enemy captains should get weaker as their ship gets more damage.

I agree. I will look into this. It is a strange report but I will investigate as best I can because it is not intentional.

[Fenikso]

slayernz - tried on level 83 for a short while and I have not seen any real difference. It got a bit harder, but nothing which could not be handled.

[Cory Trese]

I have kept working on balance, testing and collecting e-mail feedback. It has been a great experience and I think choosing Combat Overhaul for "4.0" got people to think about responding to the changes.

[Cory Trese]

I have been testing the newest round of updates to the math, curves, ships and XP allotment schemes.

One big improvement is we finally have FULL output of all damages being done during the ship to ship combat.

This includes debris, secondary and splash damage for all operations at close range.

See attached screenshot for an example of some various types of damage all being displayed individually with no mysteries!

[sgtcookie]

Perhaps you could show us captain health, that may be useful in planning out attacks.

[Cory Trese]

On the list, expect to see HP and Morale in an upcoming release.

[slayernz]

The enemy captain was wounded in a duel ... and KILLED! ... Yeah I gotta love that message!

Some additional potential types of damage:
* An Alien captain's tentacle attempted to probe you. You stopped it but took 1 point of damage.
* Your crew were hit by an exploding box of Rychart hats. 4 crew perished and one fedora was wrecked.

[Slide87]

Oh oh,related to st combat...but Templar Assault? oO i can't sleep now,ahahaha,i must see what is this pre-pre-santa gift xDxDXD

[Cory Trese]

Huh? where can you see Templar Assault I thought I had it all hidden