Difficulty

[Xavier]

As a test I started 5 games. First 3 on Difficult, last 2 on Normal. All with the beta patch from last week.
I tried to play what I would consider to be 'normal' so build various things and grow expedition/city equally.
First 3 games I had to abandon before turn 100, it just got too hard and too many characters died.
4th game (Normal difficulty now) lasted only 26 turns, I got really unlucky with spider queens who went first and 1-shot a character who then died that night. That happened several times in the early game and was actually my shortest game having lost 4 wariors in a couple dozen turns.

5th game I decide to cheese the system. On turn 1 I put all but 3 people into expedition and first 3 children become warriors and join the expedition, so basically 10-11 expedition size by turn 20. In the city I spam nothing but cabbage patches for 50 turns.
This game was an utter joke in terms of challenge, my expedition easily tore threw everything all game long losing only 1 character (very early spider queen 1-shot before I could do anything). By turn 100 I had expedition of 15 characters just walking around auto resolving everything, another expedition of 10 off mining mithril and a town of 6 chugging out nothing but food to keep expeditions going. I have 28 children, yes, TWENTY EIGHT.
It got to the point where the game was ultra boring, the only scary thing is risking a bad auto-resolve result against 4/5 difficulty units. I didn't even bother looking at loot, didn't bother crafting, didn't bother upgrading characters, who needs all that when you are winning 100% of the time? No reason to bother even moving my mithril mining expedition back to town, just let it sit there indefinitely. The game went from really difficult to so easy it was boring with one simple strategy: early stack expedition size.


The difference between trying to play organically and cheesing the system by stacking characters in early expedition+cabbage spam is ridiculous.
I've said it before, but some sort of limit to how big expeditions can be that is organically grown would help. In addition, too many quests give a free character, if you are doing well this snowballs into doing even more well. Take a look at FTL, it is an outstanding rogue-like, which has a limit on the # of crew members you can have so you can't just cheese the game by early stacking crew members.


Side note: I got the 'listen to a log' quest 9 times by turn 133, might be a bug with frequency on this one or maybe it was fixed in recent days?

[glass zebra]

1. They are planing on doing something against the zerg stacking but nothing is clear yet afaik. It's also not so much of a problem if you get 1 shooted early on since you don't die 100% of the time afterwards. Planing your expeditions for the day when you can see danger from far away and enemies are less aggresive in gernal helps alot avoiding spider queens etc.
2. You get new people faster when you are low on people and slower when you have many. This makes you snowball less while also making recovering much easier. The quest mostly grant rare characters and not just "add characters".
3. TFL is a bit far away from this. TFL consists soley from events and loosing a character is much more painful yet more rare. Here you do not have the elite squad with a mission to get somwhere quick. Here you have some people from a small village who live in the middle of danger. People join, people die: it's the course of life especially for that time and place. While having limited reload and randomizing, this is still more of an adventure/building game with tactical rougelike elements. You just dont have that limited party on a mission, you've got a living village.

[Frenetic]

well you should play higher difficulty then if you find the game too easy going with a certain strategy, all i have to say about it. on higher difficulty attracting new villagers isnt as easy and even if you only have 3 guys in the village at the start (which is the normal strategy on true thea) you still only have 4+god bonus chars in your starting expedition ;)

[Frenetic]

but i agree the lategame is really easy once you reach a certain strength, and the 5* encounters arent a challenge anymore. the upper end scaling of enemies needs to be tougher. the only hardcore thing i encountered so far was this giant bee hive of doom xD

[Answulf]

Also sounds like maybe cabbage farm bonuses shouldn't stack? Or that they are too cheap if you can spam them easily. I like having the option to go for a "early, heavy population growth" strategy.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Answulf:

Also sounds like maybe cabbage farm bonuses shouldn't stack? Or that they are too cheap if you can spam them easily. I like having the option to go for a "early, heavy population growth" strategy.

It's different to have a high population and to have the ability to put them all in 1 fight. You can give everyone wooden swords, wooden shields, woddens bows (everyone who can carry it) and they will all support the offense hand with +defense and +damage.
If you just had a high population but max groups of e.g. 6 ppl, you can still zerg down dragons in an emergency, but you will probably need ~4 groups and all the people in the first 3 groups will risk death. If they are all in 1 group, you maybe have 4 people risking death. (These arent exact numbers ofc, but show you what I mean).
The stacking of people is still way to powerful and doens't change much on higher difficulites. On higher difficulties everything gets weaker, but stacking people is still the easiest tatic present.

[imasu]

I have to agree that the party size versus monster party size is the biggest condition to determine an events challenge. The hardest fights are ones where the ratio favors the enemy. Dragons are far easier than Leshy for example.

Adding a "hit all" component could help resolve this. Dragon breath, magic use etc. It would also help change the 1shot/act first or be 1shot mechanic and make tank builds more viable. It would also encourage bringing a medic type along. As it is currently either you totally stomp the enemy and barely get scratched, or you have half+ of your party 1shot in battle and rely on the RNG gods to determine who lives and dies. AE or "hit all" could also open the door to granting special resistances on characters adding more flavor too!

Another issue with party size is that the UI barely supports 12 6/6 people in your party before the clutter of cards makes it tedious to mouse over to check what abilities are available. 10 5/5 people is far easier to see at a glance what you have to work with. A group of 10 or 12 though has a harder time against Leshy or Werewolves and anything with a ratio of 1:2 party to monsters.

Also the number of cards you get to play per turn is a big factor in all these considerations. Afaik thats based off of how many characters are left to play in your deck. Meaning a stack of 20 with be able to bury their heavy hitters behind there fodder troops and you cant do much about it. There are other drawbacks too but card burying is a big one since players value their characters survival while the AI seems to be happy getting a single kill per battle.

[RegalKain]

Being someone who is playing on True God of Thea as of late, the zerg tactic works A LOT less then it does on lower difficulties. Just by shear number of battles you get hit with, and enemies tend to split up a lot more and hit your city. So if it's not well defended you're pretty much boned. That said, I still rush pastures/cabbage patches. As having 10 of them in a city can be a huge boon. Infact a lot of my early research goes into buildings. A Good watch tower and help minimize damage to the city by having expeditions close by, and send them back when you see enemies getting close. Most of my end-game cities have double pallisades and barracks, so that a small group can auto-resolve the city on 5 skull encounters. Medi hut helps a lot as well, it's just that early game? Yes you need a way to generate people, and generate them quickly. As you will be losing a person every 10-15 turns unless you're getting pretty damn lucky with wounds. Just because of how quickly things scale in relation to you.