had a thought, scary, madness, the voices tell me to pass it on My idea would be to have the "environment" of the game when loading up have the option of how a person likes to play this game. Back when I started in the early days before saving was even an option, the only threat was wandering fishpeople and a popup window of doom. Since then, we've gotten bandits, then oblisks, then allied/enemy soldiers wandering about, giant beetles, and pretty hefty invasion forces. The game has gone from some starting necessities then grow at your own pace, to "you have to be at this point and have this built and this many soldiers" and such, and you don't really get to "grow at your own pace" at all till you've already grown into a decent sized colony. So I would like to suggest a secondary loadout option when starting a new game. *I'm a pacifist* and *You can't scare me!" pacifist option would have the same elements but simply lower the npc's by a factor of 4. So there is still an amount of defensive things needed, but you can concentrate much more on developing the village and managing people. The counter to this could be that keeping people happy and sane would be more difficult. that and possibly easing back the timeframe of gaining colonists a smidge. You can't scare me! would be the way it is now so that the buildup and defense of the colony is more prevelant and the risk of being dissected for lunch is still a factor. I'm not saying that the current way things are aren't fun and challenging, but the game has moved quite a ways from the initial appeal of working a successful colony by governing the people to more of a survive the onslaught. Just a thought, other opinions on this are welcome Sethius
At the moment it sort of feels like the threats loosely scale up with how well or how fast you're progressing. I don't know if this has just been coincidence in my games so far, or if its how the game is designed, but I sort of like that pace. ...on the opposite side of that coin though, the masochistic, rogue-like side of me loves when things can go extremely, horribly wrong from the very start. (I remember playing FTL one time, and the game was a freaking cakewalk up until the final boss. ...and then in my next game, my entire ship was a bunch of scraps held together by duct tape, on fire and venting oxygen before I even picked up my first extra crewmen.) Its a tricky thing in a game like this, because you 'want' those interesting/horrible things to happen on occasion to add a little spice to your game, but at the same time, you've just sank several hours of your time into building all this stuff. I'd be okay with a difficulty option or something, like they've got in Dungeons of Dredmor, so you can either tell the game "Aw yea, roll them dice, baby." or "Leave me alone, I just want to build."
