All Planets Threat level 1 now?

That could be interesting and would leave options open for different game play. That sounds like it would work out pretty well.

 

nah armor pen and enemy armor was bad idea , they could just give more HP like +1HP*level of the mob , so they wont need to fix much on the weapons

 

Bolded are two quickly supplied, perfectly good reasons to go search other planets.

I assume you would want to raid villages and prisons on surface areas specifically because they were harder than the surrounding area, without requiring you to dig?

This leveling change has made exploration more for exploration's sake. It's not a "find the biggest level number for the best stuff" anymore. It's a "find the place that has the specific stuff I want" thing now. Don't really have to worry about that dungeon being on a high level planet you're not ready for, or on a low level planet where the gear value will drop in the next few minutes.
Unnecessary extremes have been trimmed, and things more normalized.

The "woefully underpowered" and "silly overpowered" nature of the prior leveling system within sectors has been trimmed down. If you want actually harder stuff? Start digging or go to the next sector.
If you want to find neat things? Fire up that starship and fly away.

The fact that the planets are now normalized a bit in no way actually inhibits you from exploring. If anything, it empowers it further. No longer are you gated by "Ugh, I'll die on the spot there" or "Pointless, I outleveled that one 5 minutes ago". It's mostly just "Eh, not really feeling that biome?" which seems much closer to the proper nature of exploration.

Explore for the sake of exploring, if that's what you really want.

Goals?
"This planet has crappy iron supply, better go find another one."
"These mobs' fire breath is irritating, let's go find a place with less bothersome monsters."
There are still goals. Now they're just more varied than the level numbers.

 

Maybe I am just unlucky, but for crying out loud. My first game after my first character from last night got wiped I get a really decent level one planet with really powerful enemies!

 

I find that this actually becomes more exciting to explore new worlds. You don't exactly know what's gonna happen there but whatever it is it's gonna be worth it either way. If you want level progression the simple level 1 to 10 works enough for me.

I tend to notice that with the older system people simply slingshot themselves 10 levels higher so they can mine and get the best items. So it discourages you from exploring and focusing too much on the numbers.

In the end no system is perfect but I find the ambiguity of this new system actually encourages me to explore alpha system more before jumping towards beta or even gamma.

 

If all planets in the first sector have the same difficulty it seems that there is little worth in exploring beyond the homeworld. My starter sword did 5 damage per hit, and the enemies had about 20 health on the surface. It was a hard start though as I had to be careful not to avoid damage. I would die in 3-4 hits making it hard to explore enough to get vines for bandages, much less iron ore. After getting good enough at identifying aggressive monsters and their attack styles to start venturing far beyond the spawn point I found a decent sized dungeon with lots of melee humanoid enemies with about 15 health each. The first one I killed dropped a decent weapon that dealt over 20 damage and by the time I cleared it I had a 44 damage hammer and 10 iron bars that I found in the lone chest, as well as some stimpacks. Those 10 iron bars allowed me to craft copper armour, although I barely noticed any upgrade in defence I was well armed enough to start exploring and mining. I ended up making an iron axe that did around 80 damage per swing, and hit faster than my hammer. As I went deeper I think the strongest monster I found had 24 health.

In the old system, when I was still learning how things worked, my friend and I explored a level 8 planet since we knew our iron weapons weren't going to cut it in the beta sector and didn't know how powerful steel would be. We found generic crappyweapons in chests that were stronger than our iron weapons, thanks to their 8 armour penetration, and even got an awesome hammer from a miniboss that could 2 shot us in our leather/silver armour (he tanked with a shield that an enemy dropped on that planet while I crouched behind him and attacked with an armour pen 8 spear that I had found) The UFO took forever to kill with iron weapons so it encouraged exploring high level planets in the alpha sector to find chests and dungeons to find better weapons and other goodies.

Since threat levels are no more, how am I supposed to know where to look if I want to take my newly crafted weapons for a spin, and maybe find some better ones? Is there some kind of invisible difficulty rating in the alpha sector where I could possibly find a dungeon with enemies that could provide a challenge for my iron weapons and possibly reward my efforts with something stronger? Is it even still possible to get such things any more without advancing to the next sector? If not then I see little reason for visiting more than one planet per sector unless you want to find specific decorations in dungeons.

I know the game is still in beta, and I know it was perfectly possible to kill the UFO with iron and go straight to steel under the old system, but bringing back some aspect of the risk/reward factor of exploring different planets, giving an incentive to find new gear stronger than what you can currently craft while not overshadowing the next tier, would be nice. Sure, when I crafted my armour pen 15 steel weapon it blew that pen 8 awesome hammer out of the water in terms of damage, but we had a great time before even leaving the first sector by finding a planet that posed a threat even with our iron weapons and being able to kick plenty of ass by the time we left.

A new patch just got done downloading as I was typing this. Hopefully it will be a step back towards some kind of balance that I can make sense of.

 

I would like them to expand on this further and make nearly every planet viable from early to end-game. We should feel like the content is endless on every planet we land on. Traveling should bring new rare loot, new NPCs,challenges and resources.

I hope they expand content and procedural generation enough that we could fully explore a world without outleveling it or getting bored.

 

Yeah, but when enemy NPCs are dropping trash there is little incentive to go looking for dungeons beyond looting furniture and decorations. Then it quickly turns into "Pointless, I outleveled that one 5 minutes ago" for the whole game. Before one could play the game at a slow pace, taking on progressively harder planets within the sector while still getting that rewarding feeling of advancement all the while taking in new sights, or they could just make a mad dash for the next sector and its craftable gear. Now it seems that the latter option is the only way to go for progression, with exploration within a sector being demoted to purely sightseeing and furniture/decoration looting.

I know they just completely changed up the whole system and it will take some time to get the balance down, but one threat level per sector with the enemies only getting stronger as you dig down is frankly boring compared to the way it was before. Maybe they could make worlds within a sector Easy, Medium, and Hard. Anyway, I'm just a beta player giving my thoughts. As much as I'd like to somehow get a hold of the older version and play that until the new system is more finely tuned that wouldn't be in the spirit of things. As it stands there is still plenty of balancing to be done. As a beta player I intend to keep going through the good and the bad, and give my thoughts alongside my early access bretheren so that hopefully the fabled 1.0 will be fun and rewarding for differing playstyles. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

 

I agree with you. I really liked the progression system as it was, the new system is sadly discouraging what the game was intended to be all about. With all planets in a Sector being almost the same difficulty level, what point is there in travelling? I know they were saying that if you dig down it will be harder, but still, on a planet that is the same difficulty on the surface, it will be nearly the same underground too. Most players will now stay on one planet, kill the boss, go beta sector, stay on one planet, gamma, one planet... and so on.

Right now, there is a huge gear jump between threat 1 and 2, the ufo boss can 1-shot me and my avian-racial iron armor and even the normal enemies can easily kill me if I'm not careful, moving planet doesn't give me better gear either.

My suggestion to any devs that are reading this is maybe have (like beerforce said) Easy/Medium/Hard planets in a Sector, that behave like they are doing now and, if you go deep enough on easy, you get medium difficulty (which is the same as the difficulty on the surface of a medium planet).

 

You have progression, you need to go down and dig for resourses. Some planets will not have the ores/gems you need. There will be goals for exploration aswell, like pets, fossils, maybe other stuff. Also the modders will probably make some more options aswell.

 

I literally just made this account to say that this level 1-10 change has 100% turned me off from the game. I probably wont play it again unless they switch it back, which is unfortunate. I was constantly thrilled by wondering if I could survive a planet or not after beaming down. Also it makes the exploration feel so much more genuine rather than every planet having the same challenges with only a change of scenery. I also enjoyed the the fact that the progression was so quick but at the same time it felt never-ending if the level cap was 100.

I hope they levels the way they were!

 

I disagree with posts stating that they wish to have the Armor Penetration re-instated.

The main point underlying my believe is that the Armor Penetration system did make predicting damage dealt very difficult. The end result being that a weapon rated as 9 DPS may actually be 3 or 4 DPS, depending on the armor of the alien you are fighting. This made some of my encounters slightly more unpredictable, which, I admit, may be what attracts some people to that mechanic.

Reading what the developers had to say about this mechanic: Armor Penetration was put into place as somewhat of a patch-job. They did not want to have players with ridiculous health and energy bars. Armor Penetration took the place of a variable health bar; at least that was my understanding.

I like the current system! There are still plenty of surprises with mini-boss mobs (the giant aliens you randomly encounter) as well as the randomly assigned abilities of the aliens!

 

for anyone who was still wondering how to get to higher level planets,
proceed with the quest line
defeat alien invaders
craft a metalwork station from the alien drop
Using metalwork station craft an addon for you spacecraft to get to the beta sector
You can now fly to the beta sector, and as someone else said, it's level 2

 

The best balance that I can think of would be ~3 Threat Levels per Sector and the current DPS system with level/difficulty markers on monsters

 

It's the same thing as before. They just hidden the number.

Level 1 planets have easy-med-hard difficulties, so that roughly equals to level 1-10 planets.
Etc..etc...

Number are just hidden so people explore more. Before patch, people were crying that there is no need to explore any planet under lvl 10, lvl 20, lvl 30 etc,
And post patch, people whine that they need to explore.

Make up your minds!

 

It might be useful to read this quote by one of the devs:

 

Threat level should only indicate planets minimum spawn level. A planet should contain all levels of challenge if you dig or explore far enough.

This way, if i see a level 1 planet that looks interesting, i know i could dig to its core and hopefully find something unique and relevant to my level.

 

I had wondered this. Thought maybe perhaps the more rigid tier system was to make testing specific tiers easier and quicker.

 

Just use starcheat to get all the tech upgrades and recipes, it'll let you roam free. I hate the new limits :\

 

This thread isn't relevant anymore -- try not to necro, @TEoS