Think combos are OP, don't use them

Games are most of the time balanced with the normal level in mind, as this is the standard experience with the biggest audience. Easy / Hard difficulties just get parameters variations (Like soldiers have more HP on easy, less on Hard; There will be less enemies on Easy and more on Hard).

Most of the time it’s a “good enough” solution. Not ideal…but keep in mind, that resources are limited. Would you rather have devs creating new content or hand crafting those other difficulties?

Problems arise only when devs forget to scale some part of the content (like that “pandoran evolution”, or rather “dynamic difficulty”, or rather “you think you’re good? I’ll show you”) or have bad mechanics that might be hard to get around by casual players (like: I’m still baffled on how armor escalates on even most basic enemies vs gun mechanics - It does little to snipers but shuts down AR play almost completely).

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In this game now, everywhere unfinished mechanics and curves of communication between them. Make it softer and it will be ideal conditions for “Learning the game - Beginners” and “Finding the Kernel and balance of energies for the Devs - for the Veteran.”
And further, with each new difficulty, the game will be more and more “accurate and subtle”, which will allow you to introduce an upgrade to existing mechanics.

I’m tired of imagining what a cool game will be in the future.
I want to see Model Results.

(A top-down system should be created in closed conditions, with good funding, a powerful team and a large margin of time.)

I am sorry but don’t think I understand what you are saying.

Easiest difficulty is never good for learning how the game works. By it’s very definition it’s easy - if the game doesn’t punish bad play, it can’t stop players from learning bad habits.

If you suggest that “beginner” should be balanced as “normal” difficulty then I disagree - there are people who want to make their way through the game without being punished to hard for bad play - for those there are the easiest difficulty levels. And taking this difficulty as a starting point for balance is a silly idea - by definition it is not balanced - it is scewed in favour of the player. You balance around normal difficulty and then scew the balance in favour of player or enemy on lower and higher difficulties.

Considering it’s game replayable, it make sense for me to treat “normal” as balanced 1st playthroug experience, punishing enough to communicate how the game works, but allow for a wide margin of error as people are not familiar with systems and progression, and “veteran” which assumes that players already know how things work.

We need a good example. In my opinion, all games have a Tutorial at the Beginner level.

Further it

Contradicts this

add:
If you cannot balance your whole system, then break it down into levels of understanding and start with the lowest / simplest.

What’s the contradiction?

  1. easy is a difficulty where players don’t get punished too much for bad play (aka. Play bad and still succeed)

  2. because of that there is no incentive to engage with systems and player can develop invalid strategies (aka. ones that won’t work on balanced difficulty)

  3. therefore, playing beginner is unlikely to equip players with tools needed to do well on higher difficulties.

That doesn’t make sense. If the system cannot be balanced it means it has a design problem needs needs to be overhauled. Some form of that is supposed to come sometime this month. This thread seems to be against that very idea, mistaking balance problems with difficulty options.

If devs find a good middle ground (aka. Normal) making game easier and harder shouldn’t be a far way off.

I am betting that “this solution” will not solve the balance problems and will not differentiate the difficulty levels before opening in Steam.
Then, everyone will be unhappy again, and they will be deceived twice.
Rather than throwing all your strength and remaining time to prepare a Nice Tutorial and a Resilient / Round difficulty level for the Beginner.
Stable, Quality Gaming Experience - Yes, in the Beginner’s Zone, but for an Honest Restart.

(It seems to me that the current state of the game is a situation in which four heroes (Beginner, Veteran, Hero and Legend) are sitting around a vat of medicine. And each time, they try a new spoon again after the Potions Master adds a new ingredient. This will go on forever …)

I still can’t decipher any concrete suggestions out of your posts … Do you want “beginner” difficulty to be harder or easier than what it is now ? Whats got a tutorial to do with OP combos ? Try short, simple sentences. Straight to the point.

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Let’s make the assumption that you really want to understand me.


Imo, Not a Tutorial and Not a Beginner, Don’t give good teaching now.
All of this should be redone and upgraded to the max level on available resources and with community support before “release to Steam” - as the final “death or life” point for the project from Devs from Snapshot.

Tutorial:

  • This is the Game Wrapper. It should be Beautiful, to show the best side of the product. This is attracting new customers and their first impression of the game. (Cool and beautiful scenes every 30 seconds.)
  • Should teach and show everything, even to a fool. It is fun to show and explain how to “play correctly” without forgetting the subtleties. There should be no questions “Why or I don’t know how” after training.

problem areas:

  • aiming system / where “% for hitting”, ballistic system and fragility of covers … … … here the help of “CC” is needed

Difficulty Beginner:

  • Should give this “inexperienced player” to use all the knowledge from the Tutorial with benefit and fun. This is a continuation of the Tutorial.
  • Keep his Interest and return him “tomorrow” and Eliminate all possibilities of the Reverse.

problem areas:

  • everything that makes you Don`t believe what is happening on the screen or deny it
  • after training - remain Questions, invincible enemy, unfair game …

Adjust the balance by “trial and error” with the Main Resources from Devs and with the help of the Community. (Resources: 50% Tutorial / 50% Beginner)

-Master, why should I keep repeating these simple tricks all day.
-Remember well you lazy person, there is nothing more important for your future than a solid and stable foundation.

I would not respond or even read your posts if I didn’t.

I agree, a nice tutorial would be great. Still did not answer the question of what a tutorial has to do with balance. Isn’t that off-topic ?

here I’m lost again. What is not believable ?

Do you have an example of “invincible enemies” in the beginner difficulty ?

So they should spend half their resources on the tutorial, and the other half on the beginner difficulty ? How exactly do you imagine a “trial and error” balance work ? Isn’t that the case anyways ? You patch your game and see how it goes in practice. No internal balance team will ever catch all edge cases. This is a meaningless suggestion.

Please stop talking in riddles, especially if you use google translate.

Ok, I admit that I can’t explain anything to you.

Make it a plural “you”. :slightly_smiling_face:

Ok, you deny my point of view.
I really hope like you, that patch / devs can make everything much better. But to deny all unsuccessful results previously would be a mistake.

Everything in this game was broken during creation, so you need to start fixing from the very beginning.
Rate the streamer’s response
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqmxMw5aDLk
and I believe that “you will forget this video in an hour”.

This is a trifle for you, but for me it is a perverse systematic approach.

Small notice. He’s playing old version of game. That’s not a derleth. On my opinion the derleth is minimum +20% to game. And it will be huge better very soon.

I agree, game has some underlying issues that need to be fixed.

What you seem to assume is that devs work on the game same way players might play it - tutorial => easiest difficulty setting => harder difficulty settings. That is not so. Beginning of the game and tutorial are made as last in production- you don’t start building a game from the beginning, but from foundations - just as you don’t start writing from the introduction, nor do you compose a piece by writing down opening notes. If you are to built an effective introduction to the game, you need to know what content the game has and what you need to teach the player.

I don’t think introduction of PP got enough attention, but I see it as a symptom rather then the cause.
I do believe the tutorial could use a overhaul - I think it poorly introduces mechanics, gives bad first impression and is wonky narrative wise. But it is not the source of games underlying issues, nor is it the “beginning of fixing things”. Realisticly, if devs were to impliment a robust tutorial (ideally not limited to just one mission - but popups throughout the game ala. Stellaris [I think UV mentioned long time ago devs are working on that sort of thing]) it would be a waste of time before devs lock all systems in. Right now game constantly changes - we are currently waiting for a major overhaul of Alien evolution, game balance, loose conditions. With those kind of changes a good tutorial would need to be changed every time such changes come.

So let’s dev focus on implimenting all systems they want to impliment first, and balance the core experience, then work on first impressions, giving players an ability to mod the game, and improve begginer/hero difficulites.

Maybe not huge but definitelly better in some aspects. :wink:

There is only ONE way to balance a game and that is for what is deemed “Normal” difficulty. Whenever you tweak stats or level of power of opposition then traits and abilities will change with it. Some ability which are really powerful in easy might be worthless in legend. Some abilities that are meh in beginner might be mandatory for a legend play through.

An easy example would be a weapon or skill that can shoot several times a turn that do X damage where X kills monster with a high chance of success at beginner level. But in Legend it will never kill anything in one attack because monsters have generally more armour. A skill that removes armour will suddenly be more appealing in legend than in beginner for example.

Therefore balance should ALWAYS be targeted for a specific difficulty and everything else is just a deviation and you will have to accept they are not as balanced as that specific mode.

I do agree that there are some problem with combination of certain skills in this game.

In my opinion the main problem is that skills really have no conditions in where they can be used or how they can be combined. In general restriction will give more options in the end as there will then be multiple ways to solve the same problem instead of just one obvious best one.

There need to be some restriction for how certain abilities interact or how many times they can be activated in a round. There are many ways to “fix” things… from increasing the cost of repeated use to adding AP cost of repeated use of certain abilities to outright stop certain abilities to interact at all if they simply are too powerful.

You can say that no character can ever use do no more than 6 actions (not AP) in any one turn no matter what ability is used, this could be one restriction that would hinder some abuse or feel of super fantasy soldiers. So no more shooting a weapon at zero AP as long as you can feed them willpower for example or give them more AP. Moving (any distance) would constitute one action for this purpose no matter how many AP it cost.

These are just example of general restrictions that could be implemented to remove some of the more OP stuff you can do without completely stop their general use and function as still being powerful.

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I agree with this. Also, it will ensure that there are viable solutions to a problem at all difficulty levels.

It will be done eventually by the devs, one way, or another.

Yes… if there are multiple ways of roughly equal ways to solve most problem at “normal” difficulty you can most probably also guarantee there are several for all the other difficulties as well.

We will obviously have to accept that certain difficulties will have less overall balance than the other in general, I think that is unavoidable. People can then argue how the game should be balanced. But in my opinion a game should always be balanced around what the developer deem to be “normal”. How difficult that level is would be up to the developer to decide. If they want the game to be hard they might deem hero level to be the best balanced level. Or they might simply choose whatever level they think most players will play. Whatever it is I can’t really decide just give my opinion… I generally favour a rather hard game as I get bored if things are too easy… I would be fine it Hero or Legend was the most balanced, but I don’t think they would ever do that.