How do you feel about the game's current difficulty?

I firmly believe weapons would be less annoying to use if they didn't use the same energy as Tech abilities. It means that you can't attack and kite at the same time if your using ranged weapons.

 

And? Everything that would make it harder is being equalized by you getting stronger.
Enemies get more health. You get stronger weapons.
Enemies deal more damage. You get better armor.

 

I think the sector system is fine...and isn't that a normal thing? You've being given better materials to overcome said boosts in difficulty, so you're not being stuck being assraped by a horde of angry monsters.

I just want AI to be smarter.

 

Well, no.
The old system where you had multiple threat levels per sector was better in my opinion. The main problem right now is that once you get the new armor (and weapons if you like), which - I remind you - you can accomplish within minutes by mining, nothing poses a threat anymore.
With the old system you could be equipped well for TL 6, have a hard time on TL 7 and get totally destroyed on TL >= 8. As you progressed, you gradually got stronger until you mastered the hardest TL of the sector and were ready for the boss. Now you can just dig down on your first planet, get the ore required for armor and weapons, defeat the boss and repeat the same thing on the next one.

 

Too keep it short and sweet I think the current difficulty is a bit on the easy side but that's expected as the devs want to us to progress quickly for finding bugs along the way. As they tweak mob & boss AI, rebalance ore generation and tune weather effects then finally adding difficulty settings and a hardcore mode, It will become very challenging.

 

Personally, it couls till use some tweaking and balancing, but I like it. And yup, it's true, I am a casual and not ashamed of it at all.

 

Actually, I think I agree with you.

 

Exactly.

Imo they could have best of both worlds by making each sector have its own threat level count from 1-10 for each planet, instead of using threat level for the sector number... And then, they could make better loot spawn on the harder planets, but it has to be a chance, not something that's per definition true like with previous versions and armor penetration (basically you went to the highest TL planet and looked for a chest, if you found a weapon it it, you could handle the entire sector).

 

Fully agree.
Weapons shouldn't be a problem. Higher TL planets drop stronger weapons. That would do it.
Armor is where the problems begin. With the current armor system you simply couldn't balance it. Let's say silver armor is the best you can get in your sector. If you were to balance it you'd run into problems with the threat levels. If the armor is decent at TL 10, it will be overpowered in all the threat levels under 8. Considering that silver is available from the start, you could get it right there. If you'd balance it so that it would be decent at lower TLs, it would be useless on higher ones.
Luckily someone already posted a suggestion for a fantastic armor system:
Read and let your mind be blown away by the awesome.
It wouldn't even have to be that complex, but it would improve the game either way.

Another option would be to make those ores only available later, but I don't really like the idea since I don't want to be stuck with a copper pickaxe longer than necessary.

 

Okay, let me clear up my opinions here.

I do not mind the specific aspect of this difficulty, as far as "tier 1"/ your very first planet goes. It seems fine, as the player should not be having a hard time on their first planet. Sure, there's the factor of the random generation with every start, but still.

As for the current sector/system tier? I do not like it at all. Being restrained to one tier at time, with an arbitrary limit system telling me where and where I can't go. So what if I want to go to a more hostile planet? Sure, I might get killed, but I can tough it out in exchange for better loot and weapons.

 

I agree that right now the difficulties is not hard enough, but I also know that its extremely easy to change that you can if you want simply change 1 number in 1 file to make everything painfully hard, tiy also wrote on the main website their planning to have a Smoother Difficulty Curve where enemy difficulty will change while still being in the same threat level, so they will be working on it.

right now, with very simple modding, you can have the random monsters level vary so you could find monsters of threat level 1 to 10 on your very first planet, or 1 to 100 with just a bit more modding, you can even do that with the random weapons you find. In short the dev have plenty of ways to change the difficulty, so i'm not really worried.

edit: to LaDestitute: I know this is not official change but right now by modding, you can change things so every sectors have threat level 1 to 10 if you want.

 

I must confess I read the first couple pages and stopped there. So if this has been said I am just agreeing with it.

In my opinion (as humble as it is) I believe the challenge that Starbound offers right now is very easy prior to sector X. Once in sector X I can challenge myself a little bit by exploring planets that I am not ready for yet; which I do and frequently (not on my main he has almost everything). Now I wouldn't mind seeing each sector acting like this last sector where you can visit harder planets if you choose but at the same time the easier planets can offer reward also. I do understand why it is this way, and I do know that the plans for the sectors are changing. Now with this in mind, it is very much a moot point seeing as how the enemy behavior and generation has not been finished yet. Enemies are going to get specific abilities based on parts and the biomes they are found in, so the challenge is going to also be changed. This means that whatever reservations I have about the difficulty of the game is still a fair bit off from being able to have full criticism of. Thus the combat which can be very entertaining at times (I am one who enjoyed the old system more) is obviously lacking in technicality and for better or worse the enemy AI is very basic and easy as pie to bait in to your attacks (not including cheesing). I expect this to change after the enemies get more abilities than charge, body slam, various mid-range attacks, and shoot from distances.

As others have posted I think a difficulty slider is brilliant, however I would rather see the difficulty slider implemented after much of the enemy tweaks are done so that when you do mess with the slider (or multiple sliders) it can change not only damage/hit points but things like how often enemies utilize abilities, what abilities they actually get, and even the spawn rate of said enemies. This way a player can specifically create the difficulty curve that they want or even one that they want their server to have. Imagine an enemy that has an attack that totally annihilates you every time with this type of system you can tweak it so you can actually experiment with that type of creature until you get confident enough to try to take it out on the hardest scale.

Anyway just my musings please feel free to ignore it all if you dislike them. =D

 

I think its decent in terms of difficulty, I rather not have it increased/decreased.

 

Mostly I just wish that hp/damage didn't scale so wildly. It goes from 9-10 hp at lvl 1 to several thousand hp at lvl 10.

 

I think the difficulty is fine, what I have problems with for now is cheesing enemies/bosses by caging them in dirt or whatnot, I feel like they should be able to break those as easily or maybe a bit harder than how you lay them, it's kinda silly to just trap a mini-boss/legendary creature/whathaveyou in sector x on a threat level 10 planet when you're barely past tier 4 in armor and weapons and just sit there for 5 minutes firing arrows from a steel bow to kill it and hopefully get a good weapon. I think other than that the game is relatively easy, I don't know if it's been implemented yet or thought of but I think natural disasters would add a bit of hazard to the game, of course in single player there should be an option for that from the get-go I feel, but I think it would be fun. Also one more thing would be packs, I heard some creatures making horse noises, maybe they can gather in like 3-4 and have an "alpha" creature among them and you can duke it out with them, if you're solo I'm sure that'll be a bit of a challenge and in a party it'll be fun.

 

Way too easy atm for me. I don't mind surface enemies not being that tough, but I don't really notice much difference deeper down to be honest when I'm fighting. I get why tier bosses won't be all that difficult since as of now they are required to advance in tiers and you don't want to make it too frustrating for someone, but they are far too easy whether you cheese them or not. And that's alone, in a group of 2 or more they may as well not be labeled bosses.

Using this as a base difficulty would be fine as long as there is a hard mode, with much tougher boss fights. Personally I view the current as "easy" but it's got a steep enough curve to work as normal mode I guess. I expect the later tiers to be balanced more than they currently are, since they are only in the game now for you to check out really.

 

Current Area: T10
Framerate: Shoddy (Lower-end computer, not the game itself)
Difficulty: Annoying

Regardless, I was hoping the high-tech bandages would heal a bit more, or last longer, or something. It's annoying to be in T10 armor, trying to heal up. Having to huddle down and gobble down HT Bandages and stims like a junkie whose supplier is having a christmas sale.
More efficient healing, please.

 

The issue is that we were promised "Threat level 100 planets that will always be difficult" (Paraphrase, I believe "A run for your money" was actually said), and after the level condense it's simply not true. When 96 was the highest level of armor you could craft, and scaling was based on armor, not lazily upon health, level 100 planets WERE challenging. There were numerous ways to fix this, and I've seen little but gameplay problems (Ineffective healing unless you chug medkits, etc) spawn from the new "Balance" changes. Streamlining wasn't the answer to improving how difficulty worked, IMO - we had a lot of options to fix what we had.

 

I agree with this, but ALSO agree with tre288.

I don't think the problem with difficulty we have now is numerical. The damage enemies do is pretty okay for a base level. The amount of hits they take when properly geared is aboooout right as well (though I feel they might die a little quicker than necessary but that's not a huge deal).

The problem is more with the fact that they dropped 90% of the effective content when they dropped armor penetration.

Yes, yes, all the same planets are still there, but empty content is not content. Having 2000 planets in alpha sector doesn't really mean anything if they're all mechanically the same (same enemy types, same level of difficulty). You can't branch out and explore threat level 6 and above planets anymore while wearing armor with only 5 defense (leading to taking damage multipliers and doing less damage until you find a better sword). There's nothing more difficult than the base to shoot for. And no rewards for doing it.

The content wasn't very full before, (lots of the hardcore players would drop on a level 10 planet, grab a 9-11 pen weapon, then head back to threat level 5 or lower planet for materials one shotting everything, and then, summon the UFO and beat the crud out of it, repeat for each tier), but it could have been filled in the future.

Now we're stuck with a system that only allows ten levels of gradation in enemy difficulty* and only allows you to deal with one gradation at a time. I don't know if it's going to get better when they change the sector/star map system, but something needs to be done. People are complaining about it all over, though many of them don't realize that their complaints about 'linear progression' are actually based pretty much entirely in the fact that you can't explore anything outside your comfort zone. At all. Ever.

And that's the problem. Not enemy statistics.

Well that and the fact that there's exactly four enemy AIs in the game outside of bosses and dungeons. . . which brings it to a grand total of, let's see, four bosses in, ranged humanoids and melee humanoids, so that's 10 total attack patterns. Ranged ground based animals, ranged birds, melee ground animals, melee birds, the four bosses, and melee humans, and ranged humans.

We really really need more enemy types--but that doesn't really relate to difficulty (as properly balanced alternate enemy types aren't going to be any harder).

*Technically thirty, with weak, normal, and strong on each planet, but the difference between anything not from a dungeon is laughable, and dungeon enemies are still incredibly easy, so I don't feel like being generous enough to count them as different 'difficulty levels'.