How does the difficulty work?

[KNC]

So, I've restarted the game after i got myself the newest version, because I played it right after the release and it was a bug fest back then.

So obviously as I'm really used to fighting form X3: TC where I could take on 50+ ships (me and the enemy using M3s) at the same moment, I picked hard.

I take my ship, equipped to the brim (best weapons I can get, despite being MK 1, out to DeVries) encounter 2 pirates and... it takes me pretty much 6-10 seconds to just get one enemies shields down. Though it takes them not remotely as long, and bam I'm dead.
How can it be that with maximum equipment I take so long to kill a pesky pirate while they just shot through my shields as if they're decoration?

So my actual question is, what does the difficulty do? More enemies, more intelligent enemies, or do they all spawn with MK 6-8 Shields and weapons? It surely feels like that latter.

[VincentTH]

So, I've restarted the game after i got myself the newest version, because I played it right after the release and it was a bug fest back then.

So obviously as I'm really used to fighting form X3: TC where I could take on 50+ ships (me and the enemy using M3s) at the same moment, I picked hard.

I take my ship, equipped to the brim (best weapons I can get, despite being MK 1, out to DeVries) encounter 2 pirates and... it takes me pretty much 6-10 seconds to just get one enemies shields down. Though it takes them not remotely as long, and bam I'm dead.
How can it be that with maximum equipment I take so long to kill a pesky pirate while they just shot through my shields as if they're decoration?

So my actual question is, what does the difficulty do? More enemies, more intelligent enemies, or do they all spawn with MK 6-8 Shields and weapons? It surely feels like that latter.

In my previous games, up and including the 3.10 Beta, I run in Normal Difficulty. In my current game, I have tried Hard Difficulty and here are the differences, from my own experience and from hints from the devs:

1. More pirates. In my hard games, The BER station in the Third Duke is infested with SS pirates. For some reason, my miners (Midir and 2 Fedhelm, and their escort 1 Taranis for each miner) love to mine in The Thrid Duke. I have lost them all, and had to reload from saved games. I now group all 3 Taranis into a squad and ask the squad to patrol The 3rd Duke, while my miners are escorted by Heavy Sul (1 each). So far so good.

2. Your gun accuracy is less than at Normal Difficulty. I can visibly see the difference. I believe the DPS stay the same, however, as that is an entry in the Encyclopedia. This is hinted in one of CBJ or XenonSlayer's post w.r.t. to Difficulty in Boarding, and I paraphrase: Game difficulty is already factored in boarding because your guns hit with less accuracy.

3. In my previous games at Normal difficulty, I never got killed by missiles. In Hard Difficulties, I have been killed at least 5 times from Novadrones launched by already dead pirates I mean the pirates already launched the Novadrones prior to my/station defense killing them. Thinking that I was safe, I tended to other thing when I noticed in the lower right monitor that some red objects were flying towards me, and then the Game Over screen.

[Altimis]

Easy = less enemies, Hard = tons of enemies

I see nothing different, can kill easy as same as before, just a lot enemies pop up.

[VincentTH]

I take my ship, equipped to the brim (best weapons I can get, despite being MK 1, out to DeVries) encounter 2 pirates and... it takes me pretty much 6-10 seconds to just get one enemies shields down. Though it takes them not remotely as long, and bam I'm dead.
How can it be that with maximum equipment I take so long to kill a pesky pirate while they just shot through my shields as if they're decoration?

When you are in Devries, in a plot game, you need to do these 2 things. In a non-plot game, these upgrades are available from the get-go.

(1) Take the offer from the lady manager in Gushing Spring, and upgrade your Shield at least to level 2.

(2) When you cross into Devries, the Teladi Outpost gate is also opened. The best fighting gun IMHO, is the Heavy Laser Mk1. You have to do the aiming manually, but that gun goes through the shield, and 1-shots every fighter, including the Xenon M. The gun has a big drawback, and you will find out when you use it

[Xenon_Slayer]

The difficulty shouldn't affect the number of enemies spawned. It should change the amount of damage given/taken where the player is concerned IIRC.

[KNC]

Thanks for all the replies. I did seem to notice that my weapons tended to hit a lot less, I just deemed it my own stupidity or lack of playing a lot though.

The difficulty shouldn't affect the number of enemies spawned. It should change the amount of damage given/taken where the player is concerned IIRC.

This is exactly what I feared, and what the game feels like. Nothing personal, but that is the one lamest and stupidest way of rising difficulty there is, that's what I call fake difficulty. How to achieve this fake difficulty varies from game type to game type, but for a game like X Rebirth that is spot on the one thing no one should ever even think about when it comes to implementing different difficulties.
Either making the player weirdly weaker, or the enemies weirdly stronger, with no relation to the universe, it's statistics and the way it works, or in this case rather should work. Seriously, what good is a uber-prototype ship if the next best runt pirate with his 500k credits ship has better effective stats than I'll ever get with 20m credits?
It'd be a different thing if we'd be talking about an ego-shooter, but that's not the case. If my shields are 5x stronger in readable open numbers than those of my enemies, and they have the same weapons as I do, I expect my shields to last 5 times longer.

Turning off the hard mode then, I'd rather make it hard by fighting an excessive amount of enemies at the same time, while retaining the stats I used my credits on.


Personally I would prefer more enemies over being unrealistically weakened. You could also give them different AIs depending on the difficulty, with better and more precise maneuvers on hard. There are a lot of options to implement a difficulty, why once again choose the worst option?

[SPzzz]

The difficulty shouldn't affect the number of enemies spawned. It should change the amount of damage given/taken where the player is concerned IIRC.

I was hoping for the opposite I mean, as it is mentioned already, all numbers are available at the encyclopedia and this approach would be somewhat disappointing. On the bright side VincentTH seems to have a better experience with Hard difficulty, so maybe it is all good.

[CBJ]

The difficulty setting was created in response to a very specific problem: with early versions of the released game, we had contradictory feedback from players indicating that combat was both too easy and too difficult, depending on the type of player. In general combat-oriented players found it too easy, and the trade-oriented players found it too hard.

It has been a guiding principle of all the X series games to date not to have a difficulty level system that has too many potential knock-on effects through the game. There are a number of reasons for this ranging from the pragmatic, such as the problems it causes for things like balancing, through to the more abstract such as the idea that an immersive sandbox game should be designed not to need artificial constructs such as a difficulty level. This latter, incidentally, is one reason why in previous games, difficulty levels were limited to changing the game's starting conditions; in this case, however, it became clear that an in-game effect was needed in order to satisfy a wider range of players, so the decision was made to add one.

The aim of the chosen solution was to provide both sets of players with a way to tune the game to their own play-style. A simple setting affecting damage inflicted and taken by the player ship provides exactly that, not only addressing the problem without having unexpected side-effects, but doing so in a way which automatically covers all player combat situations that could arise in the game rather than just one specific case. The number of ships spawned by missions is only one of many scenarios in which player combat can occur; again, this is a sandbox game, and in many situations the game has no direct control over the number of ships that may become involved in a battle with the player. Even limiting the discussion to the mission scenario, a player who finds it too easy to kill one ship will often also find it too easy to mechanically kill several, one after another, while a player who gets killed fighting one ship isn't going to care whether there are three more waiting in the wings or not.

So, in summary, it may not be your personal preference but there were good reasons for the design choice that was made.

[KNC]

Thanks CBJ for taking the time to properly shed light on this.

Good reasons, I understand, but still a bad way of solving the situation, as I said, because it just simply voids the numbers provided by the game.
Even if you have the best reasons of the world, as soon as you get the game to tell me [17 Enemy shield Units]=[90 Player shield Units] you're doing something wrong, good reasons or not. 17=17, 90=90 and most importantly 17≠90. If that pirate runt is supposed to endure as much as I do, then give him the same amount of shields as me.
I know this game seemed to long have been lead down the wrong path before it has started to be patched up somewhat (evident by you now needing this difficulty level, whereas you didn't need it before), but please, think a little further than just "smack some number mods on the player ships". Egosoft was better than that, and still can be.
If you absolutely positively think you have to address the issue like that (making the fights harder through stats that is):
1. Change the stats but keep the numbers themselves intact. The concrete scenario that annoyed me so much was the enemy having 17k shields which I hardly came through, while I had 90k shields, and he pierced my shields with pretty much the same amount of weapon fire as I took for his shields. That's just unrealistic and confusing. Also invalidating the numbers like that (making my weapons weaker) made me sit roughly 10 minutes there firing at the Taranis to get through the shields to destroy the stuff, simply because I did less damage than usual. That IS an unexpected and undesired side-effect for me.
2. And also, if you use these modifiers, even if you change nothing else, please at least clearly mention what the difficulty levels do so people know what they sign up for at least, like:
-Easy: Enemies have 50% less shields, are 25% slower and less maneuverable and deal 50% less damage
-Normal: No changes
-Hard: Enemies have 100% more shields, are 25% faster and more maneuverable and deal 100% more damage


Even if you had good reasons for that choice, it simply was not thought through well enough.

[Ormac]

Sounds like I need to tone down from Normal down to easy then just to kill one or two pirate ship or a drone or two as I can't turn the Skunk fast enough with dashing engines to to keep a bead on the ship long enough to do more than glance their shields drilling him down my boresight.

Unless its with the plasma cannon but that has its drawbacks

I may have considered the combat a bit easy previously but felt it had more to do with the responsiveness of the AI rather than just the damage intensity.

Being more concerned with a mechantile fleet rather than a military fleet I was happy with the combat damage balance originally provided.

--Ormac

[Assailer]

The difficulty setting was created in response to a very specific problem: with early versions of the released game, we had contradictory feedback from players indicating that combat was both too easy and too difficult, depending on the type of player.

If you want all the Steam achievements, you must take the hard mode. This is little unfair to traders

[CBJ]

If you want all the Hard Mode achievements then funnily enough you have to select Hard Mode. That seems pretty reasonable to me. I also somehow doubt that many of the people who prefer trading over combat will be too bothered about a combat-related Steam achievement.

[KNC]

I have to agree with CBJ on that one. You can't say there won't be hard-mode achievements because some people prefer trade. Most of the games give achievements for hard modes and it's fine that way.

I stand firmly on my opinion that you people really should at least clarify though how the difficulty works and that it's just a dumb number modifier. When choosing the difficulty in the main menu you can make that properly visible, not just "Pick Easy, Normal or Hard, you'll have to find out what's inside yourself."

[Assailer]

Probably increasing the spawn size would potentially cause performance issues for hard mode players.

I have tried hard mode trading, and it's pretty hard indeed

[Ormac]

Well yeah I don't mind not attempting Hard and not getting the hard based achievements.

I made a suggestion in the general forum that probably got lost in the noise after the difficulty levels were implemented.

About if possible in some future version letting us the player adjust damage on a weapon basis thereby creating a custom setting that whould obviously override the presets and void the possibility of certain achievements.

So options whould be the Egosoft Presets (all/most achievements possible) or Custom (some achievements not possible)

-- Ormac

[UniTrader]

i think i have a good plan on Difficulty Scaling for my large Project, too (at least for the Xenon) - maybe you can get some ideas for better solutions from that:
My Mod revolves around implementing Research - basically meaning Weapons, Shields and everything gets better over Time (based on Ressources provided to Research Stations), except for the Xenon which have a complete diffrent Approach to that: their Tech Level increases by how many Ships they kill and how many of them are killed (think of that as "learning") - for a peacful trader they wont bee any threat after one or two weeks without any Invasions into their Territory because the other Factions have far more advanced Tech - but if you regulary invade their Territory they can evolve far faster than all Factions combined provided enough cannon fodder and could wipe out them easily after a few weeks because they 1Hit other Capitals (ok, before that point is reached many probably would have given up but i never intended to go easy on players who provoke it ^^)


(ok, you cannt use this 1:1 unless you also implement Research & Development, which would be probably for a Game of its own, but maybe consider scaling the Enemy Numbers by how many of them are killed over a certain time or how often the Player accepts a certain type of Mission - the more often something happens for the last 10 hours or so the difficulter it gets, after that it cools down to the easies default value)

@Ormac
since there is currently no modified-behavior you can customize the Weapon Strength completely without penalty ^^ (couldnt resist to write that ^^)

[KNC]

Hm, I can hardly see that implemented and working in the main game. The idea is really interesting though, I'll eventually take a look at all the mods available, but for now I try to get through vanilla. There's only been like 3-5 game-breaking bugs that made me reload prior saves, and one that had me completely restart the game, which is pretty good at least compared to version 1.0...

[SPzzz]

UniTrader, that sounds awesome, are you making Space Rangers of XR ?