Don't know why some are complaining about "Recommended" Difficulty.

[Max The Playboy]

The resource management in the game really isn't that hard. Stuff only gets expensive when your driving like crap. Stick to the roads when you can. Plan better before you take a load. Take some time to check the shops. Buy cheap. Salvage whenever you can. Turn off breakers you aren't using. Stop driving with your cab lights on. Stop hitting asteroids.

I started on recommended and finding it way too easy. Bout to throw the switch to the hardest mode. I'd like to see MORE options on stuff to maintain, fix, and upgrade. More activities outside and inside of the ship, and more diverse loads.

Would like to see LONGER hauls. I like the idea of the jump gates, but would like the option to just cruise. Multiple stop deliveries would be cool too.

[Hazmat]

Because I'd like to be able to drive more than two or three deliveries with the lights and grav on before having to replace batteries. It gets tedious.

That and there's something infuriating about having to throw out air filters while they still have filtration capacity left.

Edit: I agree about the more options thing. Having to manage hunger and sleep around deliveries would be fun.

[Max The Playboy]

Originally posted by Hazmat:

Because I'd like to be able to drive more than two or three deliveries with the lights and grav on before having to replace batteries. It gets tedious.

That and there's something infuriating about having to throw out air filters while they still have filtration capacity left.

Oh, sounds like you don't enjoy that part of the game. I'm not really referring to people who don't like the "hands on" mechanic style of recommended difficulty. Im mostly referring to people who complain its too hard and are dying in space.

[Hazmat]

I don't mind having to maintain batteries and consumables.

I just don't like that in order to get a reasonable duration out of them we have to disable large chunks of the ships functionality.

[Konsaki]

Because the tutorial system currently doesn't prepare players for the Recommended difficulty in time to prevent a hard fail state from resource shortage.

[Madkine]

Originally posted by Max The Playboy:

Bout to throw the switch to the hardest mode.

Ignoring other settings for the moment, in the Mechanic mode they halve the cost of everything to allow you to afford parts in the early game.

In the hardest mode, they double the price of everything (in order to restrict your access to parts).

However once you get past the start and are seeing salvage on a regular basis, this means you have 4 times the money to play with, which is not harder.

The other settings are harder, but they clearly don't understand the economy side that well.

[CPTVoid]

but there aren't roads in space

[Uber]

The issue is not that recommended is to "hard". The issue is the inability to adjust the settings mid-game. Resetting the game over and over to fine tune settings gets annoying.

I want to make the game harder, but can't. I did enjoy the story, but I really dont want to play though it again to unlock everything.

[Dwarf80]

it takes me so long to get to the last point i was at before i started over, usually a weeks time. Seems ea time i go back to start over to re-adjust what i found needed to be changed and get going again i always find something that doesnt agree with me again. One thing seems this last time i turned up the More salvagable items, thinking that it would give more items to salvage which i didnt notice that much. But what i did notice seemed to be more asteroids to run into. Im constantly hitting asteroids but i never see them, cruise always kicking off so i know im hitting them and i do have points in the hull resistance. I try not to go over 60 just so they dont destroy my hull so much. Guess my eyesight is not what it used to be.

[DaddaZilla]

It would be nice if they included a preset for each of the game modes, where we can set the difficulty to say Recommended, but then say press customise and it let's us tweak it from there to fit more what we want. Trying to find out which setting is used in each mode is difficult. As it is, in Hardcore I noticed the power consumption is using High, doesn't even go into the Extreme, but I would have just assumed it was set to Extreme.

Sometimes we like the default settings with slight tweaks here and there.

[Dwarf80]

i would hate to be a programmer having to deal with every players differences. Would be nice to see what changes a person made with the last custom change. Do need a config file for the custom so we could back those up and to keep track of. I never rem what i had just changed until its too late.

[Ottomic]

Originally posted by Max The Playboy:

The resource management in the game really isn't that hard.

There are a few considerations that players might not catch on at the start and can completely screw you over. Grinding up money instead of chasing missions, following roads, and finding out how thisty your truck is for resources (very). Having to build up a stock of spares and get some money at the start is a lot at once and I can see players getting frustrated if they don't catch up to things while getting used to the rest of the game. And even if you do, I genuinely had my doubts that I could just keep up with things just doing the initial contracts until I unlocked more through the skill tree.

And on top of that there's the little optimizations you can do that people might not consider, like keeping one of your dual cell systems lower so you can optimize batteries, coasting to places to save up on fuel, microing your lighting, stuff like that.

The default difficulty is fine, once you get settled in, but I can see how it can screw over new players who unwittingly don't catch up to how the game wants to be played.

[Dwarf80]

default not really for beginners, still should be renamed

[Menacing Scarab]

Originally posted by Ottomic:

coasting to places to save up on fuel, microing your lighting, stuff like that.

I think it still needs some tweaking though. The problem is that I never feel safe coasting because it puts a huge chance that you come on a random piece of debris too quickly and have to re-engage drive assist and slow down enough to avoid which just wasted all your effort to coast. I wish the lights drained less. I shouldn't have to constantly drive around in the dark just to feel like I'm not totally screwing myself. 4% per light switch is pretty awful considering how few and small some of the lights are. All the exterior lighting would likely be required by law in the game universe to be on when you aren't docked so that's 12% right there.

Now I'm not saying it is too hard of a difficulty that is getting me killed or anything. I actually haven't died at all since I got the game. But I did restart my save because my original one was so un-optimized that it had gotten to a point where I felt like I was grinding just to barely keep up with my systems instead of getting ahead. In my new game I'm running comfortably with 4 air filters and 2 extras and 4 extra batteries and 1 battery+ right now with only about 2 hours of play time on the save and $20k in the bank. So it is definitely possible to have a good game on recommended, but I think it takes experience to get that good game and it can be hard to recover if you don't start off with that knowledge already.

[Ottomic]

Originally posted by Menacing Scarab:

I think it still needs some tweaking though. The problem is that I never feel safe coasting because it puts a huge chance that you come on a random piece of debris too quickly and have to re-engage drive assist and slow down enough to avoid which just wasted all your effort to coast.

I'm more talking about simply letting go off the throttle way in advance so the ship coasts in, not going assist off. If you leave assist on you'll still have some authority on how you glide, but it takes over 2 km to slow down from 120mph, and that's a couple km you just saved.

I always keep my auxiliaries on to roleplay them as position lights, and honestly I'll keep my beams on most of the time, but even if you don't go crazy with the optimizations, there's a bunch of stuff you can do to save up on consumption as you play and get used to the ship. It's not going to be a make-or-break factor in your playing, but every bit helps.

[ContactMushroom]

The only complaint I have with it is air filters, batteries and UCCs should be available at EVERY shop, or at least every cosmos supplies. The rate at which they deplete is totally fine and having to stop and do maintenance is awesome, whats not though is not having the funds just yet for an air filter and then when I need one they're nowhere to be found and one bad filter will plummet the other filters so it's a time bomb of game over that should not be so easily hit on "recommended" settings.

Also I should not have to turn off all my outside running lights to save some juice when they should be on at all times while driving legally speaking. Roof and Aux lights do not need to draw the same power as headlights. I know this is a small complaint but I enjoy "living" in my truck and the balance is just not good on the economy side as is.

Also there is no getting around jump gates as a system. They can add in sectors where the gates are much further apart but there is never going to be "just drive" from one sector to another. We don't have an at will jump drive and it would take thousands of real life years to travel.