Alien infestation mod?

[poryg]

Hi,
I wondered about this for a longer time, whether it would be a good idea. It could be a setting at the create captain section, like these tick thingies at the beginning (double starting money, bonus starting officer, start from turn 1000). And it would influence the chances to meet aliens, maybe double or something like that.

[fallen]

May 14, 2016 9:27:54 GMT -5 poryg said:

Hi,
I wondered about this for a longer time, whether it would be a good idea. It could be a setting at the create captain section, like these tick thingies at the beginning (double starting money, bonus starting officer, start from turn 1000). And it would influence the chances to meet aliens, maybe double or something like that.

We'd love to have a custom difficulty in ST RPG, but the saved game format was built and shipped 6 years ago without it. There isn't anything we can for it now, except build it into ST2 (already did).

You can see that our very next game (CK RPG) had it built into the saved game format.

[Cory Trese]

Impossible in ST RPG but maybe something we could consider for ST2.

We will support, fully custom difficulty.

The question will be if we elect, for balance reasons, to make "Xeno Rate" a unique difficulty element, or if it is present inside of another customizable difficulty scalar.

[poryg]

I think that it would be good to put it as a custom scalar.

[Brutus Aurelius]

May 16, 2016 9:20:49 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Impossible in ST RPG but maybe something we could consider for ST2.

We will support, fully custom difficulty.

The question will be if we elect, for balance reasons, to make "Xeno Rate" a unique difficulty element, or if it is present inside of another customizable difficulty scalar.

Scalar. I will fight all the Xeno.

[Darth Cthoras]

Cadar supremacy. We're tired of torping weaklings. Bring on the Xenos. All of them.

[redartrats]

Yeah! I like the idea of a Xeno infestation mod. Start with low-level Knife Aliens, then bigger and badder ones, see how long your captain survives. To make things more dangerous, have a non-zero chance of an insanely-overpowered Alien popping up before the difficulty ramp reaches the point where it'd normally appear. Just to see how the captain would cope.

The difficulty ramp should be tuned such that Alien difficulty increases exponentially, and around, say, level 25 or level 50 it will be growing so fast that most captains won't survive for long past that point unless they're extremely, extremely good.

[poryg]

Jun 23, 2016 12:56:36 GMT -5 redartrats said:

Yeah! I like the idea of a Xeno infestation mod. Start with low-level Knife Aliens, then bigger and badder ones, see how long your captain survives. To make things more dangerous, have a non-zero chance of an insanely-overpowered Alien popping up before the difficulty ramp reaches the point where it'd normally appear. Just to see how the captain would cope.

The difficulty ramp should be tuned such that Alien difficulty increases exponentially, and around, say, level 25 or level 50 it will be growing so fast that most captains won't survive for long past that point unless they're extremely, extremely good.

I disagree with your last point. If you increase it exponentially, you are creating an indirect cap, since the speed of player's improvement is just not always fine tuned.

[redartrats]

OK, maybe not exponential then. But a steep ramp up so that Alien encounters will always remain challenging no matter how powerful you become.

[poryg]

Jun 25, 2016 11:16:43 GMT -5 redartrats said:

OK, maybe not exponential then. But a steep ramp up so that Alien encounters will always remain challenging no matter how powerful you become.

That is basically a system that ST works in right now

[redartrats]

Fair enough.