ALPHA 47C Balance issue?

Hi,

just started new game with Alpha 47c. Reached to day 10 and three XX Jaeger troops stormed in with riffles. With new duty time and everything, building a new colony is extremely slow. I just managed to build kitchen, barrack, Carpenter and ceramics shop. Maybe this is intended game feature, but for me this early attack seems a bit unbalanced. They killed my NCO and his only follower in seconds and butchered all but two colonist after that. There was no warning, they just appeared out of no where. Only good thing was that game immediately recognized the situation and the empire send 5 new overseers for help. In that sense it was fine.

br.
JFin

 

Something similar happened in my current playthrough of 47C. I was attacked twice by my 8th day.
First wave was 3-4 bandits in heavy armor, then the second was 5-6 bandits who killed nearly everyone, leaving me with two overseers and a handful of workers.
I didn't even have any goods worth stealing, just a kitchen and carpentry shop, and thankfully my barracks was done by the second invasion.

I think we may have just got a bad roll of the dice, and i'm gonna start over to see if it really is a balance issue.

 

I don't mind attack itself, but the weapons they used was a bit too much. One shot one kill. My NCO and his follower didn't have a slightest change against that attack. Either the game should not allow these really precise riffles before day "x" or the colonist should have similar riffles 1-2 at the beginning. In 47b you could still attach 2 overeers and 4 followers to "army". This gave you a some kind of change to defend your colony against bandits and other misfits. Now with new duty time system, the food becomes real issue really fast which means you have to make more fields and assign more people to them. And this of course limits how many people you can assign to army. All that combined to really powerful attack at this early, makes it quite frustrating, because at least in my opinion there was nothing I could have done better. If I would have raised the size of army, my people would have starved. On the other hand, with only one NCO and one follower, everyone in colony was butchered in seconds.

I think the best way to balance the game would be to limit the weapons used in early attack to something similar the colonist have. Meaning pistols and maybe weaker riffles (if there's somthing like that :>). and maybe even limit the size of the assaulting group. This is especially true with hostile enemies like XX Jaeger that you can't even negotiate with. At least with bandits and fishpeople you usually have change to make a deal and it's up to you what ever you take a diplomatic approach or hostiles one.

 

Something to stop Obeliskians from waking up during the first few days would help as well. Had a new start yesterday on day 1 where a single random cube happened to be awake just on the outskirts of where the colony landed and killed everyone before anything could happen.

Come to think of it, having them not sit on the surface so obvious waiting for anything to wake them up, and instead being buried like artefacts to be uncovered from mining or other activities would be kinda cool....

Imagine having a mine on the outskirts and being told your miners have discovered a wonderful new material that could be used and are starting to tap into the vein, then a while later being told something has been awoken from the depths and a load of Obeliskians swarm out of your mineshafts.

 

Glad to hear. I will run a new test with 47D during weekend when I have time.

About Tikigod comment: During one of my game start with 47C, the "start NCO", while scouting near by area found himself eye to eye with Obeliskians. Strange thing with that fight (that fare to say I didn't start ^_^) the NCO died, because even though I tried to tell him to retreat from fight by pointing new rally point, he didn't retreat but kept fighting with Obeliskians. Even though his death being devastating blow for the colony, I found that battle quite funny.

 

I think sophistication of those military events can wait the implementation of more sophisticated military tools for the player. Otherwise it's a bit pointless to balance it against the current bare-bones military system.

For now you could just give the foreign troops the same weapons the player is using.
Levying 3+ squads early to fend off the attack is hard enough (usually in those case i dump all my work force into rag tag militia squad), having them using weapons is also hard because you don't necessarily have enough, and finally you have to deal with foes equipped with Superior Gunnery while you barely have enough rifles and pistols for one full squad.

 

Really the funny thing is that past a certain point (like with the bandits previously, but in sharp contrast to them now) depending on how much to affect the "early" foreign militaries, you affect basically all of their "challenge" as they will comply once the player gets them to Neutral.

Now perhaps with later random events affecting standings, but one would hope a sudden "by the way your allies are about to drop an Exterminatus Fleet on your head" would not be part of this...

 

Well the whole idea that a single colony can single handed control the relationships between the Empire and foreign nations is a bit of a daft one really, and that's what the player is building at the moment... a small insignificant outpost colony for a empire governed by others.

Unless the old hints from devs way back of eventually being able to break away from the empire ever happen (which is increasingly unlikely), then at most all the foreign office should really be able to influence is how those nations regard your colony within the context of their relationship with the larger empire.

So a nation that is in some kind of cold war involving trade embargoes with the empire might be persuaded with some ass kissing to still trade with your colony, but it should never really be possible to make them friends/allies or anything else.

And if they were to go to war with the empire then they should regard you as a empire outpost and treat you as such, though perhaps if you're on respectable terms they'll offer up some kind of paid off occupational deal rather than just sending in the troops to kill everyone.

 

Sure. See stochastic goblins then***.

Not that it necessarily means much, but supposedly they will "play by the rules" unlike bandits according to recent blog post.

But hey, stochastic goblins.


***IE: Play better so you can amass guns and things like food (currently no need for combat supplies *shrug*). And if not you need to play even more efficiently. And faster, since these attacks are like getting hit by a rush strat, you might need that 4rax build.