General beginner difficulty level?

[Finkel_Gobchuff]

I did the tutorial play-through. To my surprise I defeated the final boss for Lonestar on my first run. How common is this?

Basically, I'm trying to decide if this game is for me or not.

It's been compared to the likes of FTL. But the enjoyment for me with FTL was the punishing difficulty, and feeling of 'just one more run.' Did I just get lucky on my first run with Lonestar or it is actually quite an easy game?

[Delta]

Depends on what you consider "easy". I too had a fairly easy time of the tutorial, but none of my runs after that felt nearly as easy. Enemy abilities can vary wildly and the second ship you unlock has much more resource management involved. There's also your standard roguelike "ascension" levels you unlock to increase the difficulty each time you win.

But yes, if you know how to play roguelikes and understand deck and resource management, you will probably do quite well at the lower difficulty levels the game starts at. But also don' get complacent because it is quite easy to get one-shot in this game if you are not careful about the enemy abilities (though there is the "retreat" option which let's you start battles over so it's not needlessly punishing like an iron man).

[r-cane]

As Delta said, there are 8 "Ascension" levels AND you can freely mix and match options in custom mode that make the game harder and easier. If you are someone who is realy good at roguelikes, you could make it to ascension 6 with most pilots. Then begins the meat on the bones for those who like to get punished and try again. The last two ascension levels are much harder, and besides, there are dozens of pilots, so if you wanna get them all to max ascension, that will be quiet the task. Especially since the devs clearly stated they didn`t do them for balance, but for different feels. So there are some with which you probably get to ascension 8 on the first couple tries, while there are some where I couldn`t even manage to get to level 6.
After that if you wanna punish yourself even harder, as I mentioned before, there is a custom mode, where you can enable options like "You have only 1 HP" or "You are unable to repeat a battle should you fail" etc. In that the game is very userfriendly and you can modify it to your own needs.
I had a great time, and hope so will you. ^^

[Finkel_Gobchuff]

Originally posted by Delta:

Depends on what you consider "easy". I too had a fairly easy time of the tutorial, but none of my runs after that felt nearly as easy. Enemy abilities can vary wildly and the second ship you unlock has much more resource management involved. There's also your standard roguelike "ascension" levels you unlock to increase the difficulty each time you win.

But yes, if you know how to play roguelikes and understand deck and resource management, you will probably do quite well at the lower difficulty levels the game starts at. But also don' get complacent because it is quite easy to get one-shot in this game if you are not careful about the enemy abilities (though there is the "retreat" option which let's you start battles over so it's not needlessly punishing like an iron man).

Originally posted by r-cane:

As Delta said, there are 8 "Ascension" levels AND you can freely mix and match options in custom mode that make the game harder and easier. If you are someone who is realy good at roguelikes, you could make it to ascension 6 with most pilots. Then begins the meat on the bones for those who like to get punished and try again. The last two ascension levels are much harder, and besides, there are dozens of pilots, so if you wanna get them all to max ascension, that will be quiet the task. Especially since the devs clearly stated they didn`t do them for balance, but for different feels. So there are some with which you probably get to ascension 8 on the first couple tries, while there are some where I couldn`t even manage to get to level 6.
After that if you wanna punish yourself even harder, as I mentioned before, there is a custom mode, where you can enable options like "You have only 1 HP" or "You are unable to repeat a battle should you fail" etc. In that the game is very userfriendly and you can modify it to your own needs.
I had a great time, and hope so will you. ^^

Thank you both.

I think I will stick with it, then. I guess my initial concern was that I was making some errors with resource management but wasn't really getting punished for them. I put it down then got hooked on Monster Train right after. I will keep this one in my library to give another go later. Perhaps the second ship will be more my cup of tea.

Cheers

[TheoreticalString]

It's still Early Access, and the way most Early Access games of this type work is they have a hard, but not the hardest possible difficulty during the Early Access period.

The reason is for tuning. You can't really tune the hardest possible difficulty when you're adjusting many components of the game. It'd be too easy to make a "very hard but doable" type of run, and either adjust things to make the game too easy or hard (making you redo the difficulty and waste a bunch of effort).

I anticipate another 2-4 difficulty levels, it seems reasonable. Right now I think near 100% win rates are possible, which is consistent with Slay the Spire Asc 15. Right now they have some custom difficulty modes you can enable, that would serve as a good start for extra tiers.

[Doctor Gitgud]

It seems way too easy to me. Haven't lost a run yet.

Once I unlocked the second ship, I had a build that was able to delete most enemies first turn one click without even loading any energy into the cannons. Just start the battle and press the "fire" button and it's over. Even the final boss was a first turn break, second turn massive overkill.