It's not too difficult, the power curves are too harsh.

It's not too difficult, but the gear power curves are far too harsh. You go from getting one shotted, to face tanking and one shotting enemies in a split second between the various threat levels. Also there is a level variance on each planet, you can easily be on a planet you can handle, but then run into a particular mob that kills you in one hit. In other words, it's usually too easy, or too hard, while not being obvious often time which it's going to be, and with very little middle-ground.

For example, I tried the penguins first at iron armour with a friend, we did essentially no damage to it and a lot of the ships attacks were 1 or 2 hit kills. Tried it again with silver armour and I could pretty much face tank the whole thing with no issue at all. That was the difference between only 1 tier of armor...

The power curves probably need to be compressed a bit.

 

Hrrmmm... I'm not even up to that yet (too busy dicking around) and I already agree with you for the most part.

 

I find this to be true. Last night I was exploring a lvl 5 planet in lvl 5 gear and it was like i was back on my starting world, because enemies took about 4 hits to kill and I could take about 5-6 hits before keeling over. I found a purple lvl 5 weapon that shot bubbles and all was cool.

Then I found a crappy lvl 6 weapon with 17 Damage, wich was half the damage of the level 5 purple. I equipped it and suddenly enemies died in 1 or 2 hits.

I am really not sure how the item progression works in this game, but from this one test I can only come to the conclusion that the progression cliff needs to become more of a hill, because it looks like a wepaon one tech level higher does 4 times as much damage, at least to lower level creatures. This mechanic leads to most exploration either being either far too hard or far too easy and thus either frustrating or boring.

 

Armor penetration seems to have a very great affect on damage output, maybe your new weapon had higher armor penetration. Or this stuff just needs more balancing.

 

Seems like the current setup is to have a x5 weapon and an x 3 and x5 armor set for every tier.

We probably need an x 3 and x9 weapon and an x9 armor set added to that. x5 weapons would probably need to be increased in cost as well. Since we can get random weapons in chests though, that's not nearly as big a deal as armor is, which can only be crafted.

Defense and Armor Penetration = level, more or less. 15 defense armor is for level 15 planets, 23 defense armor is for 23 planets, etc. Likewise, 15 armor penetration weapons are for level 15 planets, 28 for level 28 planets, and so on.

After the 1-10 bracket which seems to be on it's own bizarre ruleset, being even two levels below in defense compared to your attacker pretty much means you will be two shot. at 6 levels difference you will be one hit killed.

And yeah, likewise, the level(armor penetration) on the weapon will affect it's damage far more than the actual damage number.

 

Yes, that is what I meant by lvl. It was one higher and so was immediately hugely better. The progression is far too steep. A purple of a given level should be useable for a while at least and not be made obsolete immediately by a random white weapon 1 level higher that has half the raw damage.