I'm not sure how far I am into the campaign, although I suspect I'm nearing the end; I just finished the mission at the docks.

So far almost every fight has been really easy (I'm playing on Hard mode). I haven't gotten many karma points so far. Off the top of my head, my stats are something like 5 Body, 4 Quickness, 3 Ranged Combat, 3 Rifles, 2 Dodge, 2 Willpower, 2 Spellcasting, 2 Intelligence, 2 Biotech, 4 Charisma, and a few other random points scattered around. I'm using a smartlink version of whatever the next-to-worst version of the assault rifle is, the most basic healing spell and the ganger armor with the rabbit mask.

I didn't use a companion for the first mission, brought along the decker chick for the corp run and the Orc for the grave / pier missions. I think the main issue is that, although there are quite a few enemies, the vast majority have like 30 hp and hardly any armor. A single assault rifle burst will down 90% of the foes I've faced. The only time I've gotten even close to death was the first mission, and there only because a troll with an SMG managed to consistently land every one of his shots against me, even when I was behind decent cover.

I get that this is probably intended to be a minimal-resources campaign, but it's kind of odd that I'm kicking all kinds of ass even though none of my stats are particularly good... it's actually so easy that it's a little bit difficult to retain interest.

Thanks a bunch for the detailed write-up! That gives me some really good information in balancing the game. You will run into more heavily-armored enemies later on, but in any case it sounds like I may need to bump up the difficulty in the early part of the game. Cheers!

Fight: Under the Armory vs Shavarus and his minions
Archetype: Street Sammy (pistols & katana)
Companion(s): Orion, 2 NPC allies
Difficulty: Normal

My main issue witht he the fight is the Immunity from all of my attacks possessed by all but one of the enemies at a time. In theory this isn't bad per se, but since there's no clues as to why or how this works it seems a bit unfair. I lost 2 NPC allies before, by chance I realized that the people who most recently spoke are the vulnerable ones and that all others were immune. It would be nice if there was some bit of text somehwere or an object with a tooltip that indicated some sort of magic shennanigans are afoot. Otherwise it was a fine battle.

@jtravers333: Good suggestion! I just pushed an update, 0.4.2, that adds some snippets of dialogue that give some hints about the mechanics of that fight while it's in progress. Previously, the dialogue only showed after you had already succeeded in attacking the "correct" enemies, which wasn't very useful.

Fight: Final push into the mission district
Archetype: Street Sam (rifle)
Companion(s): Dalmin
Difficulty: Hard

This gets rough fast. The major issue is that the gangers spawn behind you, driving you further into the map, and into the Tir in front. One turn, I had 7 guys firing on my 2, one of which was support. I survived, but it was hairy. Two issues-
*No cover that I could discern, beyond light.
*Dark area makes it hard to see how many opponents.

Maybe you're supposed to fight the gang first...?

Fight: Most
Archetype: Street Samurai (rifle)
Companion: Hailey
Difficulty: Normal

Let me open by saying you've got some really fun and clever fights set up. The spirit boss battle and the showdown with Shavarus, for example, show you put some thought and love into them.

I started the game out with Body 3, Quickness 4 (Ranged Combat 4, Rifle 3, Dodge 1), Strength 1, Intelligence 2 (Biotech 2), Willpower 1, Charisma 4. The fight to reach Kali at the start was tough (note, I did NOT have a runner with me in this case), but after that I could basically sit at the far end of my weapon range and have 99% chance to hit with a smartlinked assault rifle (66% was the lowest I ever remember seeing, at that was for boss-like enemies).

As JackArmstrong mentioned, the low armor/HP count made it really easy to one shot enemies, especially when they cluster together - a grenade launcher can wipe out a group of five in a round. On that note, the enemies cluster together A LOT - I don't know if you can control that or if that factors into the difficulty setting.

I hope that helps - I know I was kind of general.

Ha! I may have spoken too soon - the fights beneath the graveyard are pretty intense. My chance to hit is still very high even at long range, but almost lost half my party a few times down there - good stuff!

@Karisse : Thanks for the detailed info! That's another great data point for me to work with.

It sounds like rifles might be very powerful for this campaign, potentially overpowered. Thinking over the combat design, there are a lot of maps where you have long lines of sight, enemies appear at the edge of the map, and they may not have adequate cover available to them. Since rifles are so effective at long distances, it's very possible to get critical hits on them before they can close the gap and pose a threat to you. The exception would be the fights like those underground, as you noticed; in those cases enemies appear at short distances, negating the rifle's advantage.

That's a great point about clustering. It won't be simple to break up those clusters, but I think taking the effort to do so will help a lot with making the standard fights more interesting. I'd like AOE attacks to still be useful, but not wipe-five-enemies-out-in-one-round useful. Thanks again!

In general I find this very easy on Normal; haven't lost anyone except for when I tried to solo the very first mission.

Enemies often don't go for cover at all, which makes it easy for the dwarf mage companion (terrible with names, sorry) to blow them up. For anyone else, my troll adept kills just about anyone with one use of the 2-AP melee weapon ability.

Hit chances also rarely go below 85%, with 95%+ being common, especially for the dwarf mage companion.

If enemies had even just +1 to all combat stats, I feel like they'd be a lot less prone to being killed with 2 AP.

Probably more armour too; I've killed a tremendous amount of enemies with Fireball's -10 HP per turn effect.

@Allafif : Thanks for the thoughtful write-up! I'm definitely seeing a trend of people experiencing overly easy combat for much of the game. I'll look into bumping up the difficulty. Cheers!

Okay, I'm *sure* I'm actually at the end of the game this time, since the campaign explicitly said so :P

My combat stats are pretty similar to what I had in my last post- Body is now 9 (+8 HP from cyberware), Armor is 10, Quickness is 8, Ranged Combat is 7, Rifles is 5, Willpower is 3. My rifle is a smartlinked version of the one with the small clip that does 13 damage per shot.

Battles continue to be very easy. I have fought a few foes who took a couple bursts to go down (mostly skinhead leaders), but the only battle that has actually been challenging was fighting the fire spirit boss, and that one largely because I had brought along the dwarf fire mage (who was obviously useless). As you've noted, rifles are extremely powerful throughout the campaign, because most foes spawn out of cover and exposed, which combined with low armor and health means they'll die very quickly if the PC has even halfway decent accuracy. In the Dragonfall campaign, most of the foes aren't _that_ much stronger- maybe 10 more health on average and a few more points of armor, but they notably almost always start off preplaced behind cover, which makes them much more difficult to kill. Dragonfall also seems more difficult because enemy groups are often larger to begin with- I'm sure my body count in this campaign is higher, but it's very easy to kill 30 dudes in a mission if they're spawning in three-man squads.

That said, I would be wary of bumping up the enemy stats too much- a lot of the missions in the final third of the game have a time limit of some sort and/or respawning enemies, and the combination of those factors and hardier foes might make certain builds unviable. Since there isn't much Karma, you don't want to make it so that someone who invested their first 20 points poorly is completely screwed for the rest of the game. I would suggest one of the following two options- either increase the difficulty via boosting enemy stats, but raise the post-mission Karma rewards as well (perhaps 10 points instead of the usual 7), or introduce some enemies in most missions tailored to cause rifle builds some trouble- something like bulky foes with good armor who have poor mobility but excellent cover.

Speaking of the final act, it's great! I know this isn't a thread for gushing, but I really have enjoyed it a ton. I only wish there were more team-building missions before it's time for the Final Battle- not because there aren't enough already, but because I enjoyed the ones I've played so much.

Came here to leave a comment, but JackArmstrong already summed it up. No need to make them much tougher, just less likely to run at you in a straight line firing a pistol that never hits. Ok, maybe they could be a little tougher.

The easiest fix would be more cover, without drastically changing the landscape I suppose. Maybe this belongs in the bug list, but it seems like cover is very inconsistent. For example, two vans next to each other on "5", One of them provides heavy cover, the one next to it provides nothing. Same goes for 2 trash cans on the same map.

A few rooms where enemies were possitioned, instead of spawned in the same puddle would be cool, unless there's a resource limitation I don't quite understand? Adding more enemy types and mixes would help. I think the last paragraph would solve 90% of it, but maybe this along with tougher enemies and more Karma, may add the final 10% of combat being enjoyable.

Thanks again to everyone for taking the time to share your experiences! Based on your feedback regarding combat difficulty (or the lack thereof), I've published an update to version 0.5.1. It contains a ton of tiny tweaks throughout the whole campaign, and hopefully will help improve the combat experience.

The primary effect of this change is that humanoid enemies now act more intelligently in combat: taking cover, attempting to flank the player, etc. I had planned to also bump up enemy stats, but after playtesting I felt like the combination of improved AI and improved stats was pushing overall difficulty too far into the "frustrating" category, so I've only increased stats for a couple of specific fights that were feeling too easy even with improved enemy AI.

I'm guessing most of you have already finished the campaign, but if any future players stumble across this thread, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts, especially if any particular fights are feeling too easy or too hard.

Cheers!

Hello, I just want to say good mod and I have been enjoying it. I am near the end of the game as of writing this and can see that it could use some balance tweaks.

I have been playing the game on Hard with an Adept character with focus on Melee and Throwing for when I cant get up close. The first mission required a few reloads due to me trying to solo it because I needed a weapon and better armor more then I wanted to pay 500 for a runner. It was doable but required a lot of hit and run tactics. The only other time i had to reload was when you get pincer attacked in an alley. The game seemed to gradually go from punishing to easy to simple. (I think a lot of this has to do with the late tier items and expansion content).

My tactics have been to focus on +move (via armor,stride and I even grabbed that reflexes cybernetic) and made sure to bring along a runner that could haste me. That worked great because I could run in kill a dude and run back to cover, or pommel hit someone if they are the only one left. As a result most conflicts were simple but required a bit of patients. I think what could make the game a little harder is to increase enemy hp by about 50% and get the ai to use cover more often like someone else mentioned. as the flanking system even my support runners often one hit kill someone standing in the open with a flanked crit.

The other balanance issue I ran across is that pay seems minimal for runs. Why should it cost me 2/3's of my reward cash to hire a support runner for a hand. And I was shocked when I made more money producing a demo then I did doing 2 runs combined lol. If it was me in real life I would leave the shadows and become a musician more money and no ones shooting you in the face with shotguns! I dont know it just seems like the corps are handing you pocket change for saving their asses and not to mention the city several times... Basically as it is, more toys should mean more cash in my eyes.

And thats about it, like I said great game, nice length and the story is pretty good as well. I really liked the random banters latter on in the game, brought be back to my baldurs gate days. Not many modders take the time to add the small stuff like that that really makes a difference to us playing the mods.

@rude_dogg - Thanks for checking in! I think you're the first phys adept I've heard from who's played the campaign, that's very useful info for me to have. Glad you enjoyed it, I appreciate you taking the time to send your feedback!