Game Difficulty

[Kreivi]

Well Im still glad I KS it - just would like a challenging game. And hope the devs put it in automatically instead of having to mod it in.

Same here. Without kickstart (or supporters who were part of it) base game would be TOTALLY different. Only base skirmish game.

I am really happy for deep singleplayer campaign and specially for these features:
Player-Character Origin Stories: In BATTLETECH, you’ll create your own mercenary character to star in the story. If we hit this funding level, you'll be able to choose one of six origin stories for your mercenary commander's career. Are you the only heir of a once noble family that has since fallen from favor? The bastard child of a famous MechWarrior? You decide.
+
Legendary 'Mech & MechWarriors: In addition to the game's standard 'Mechs and customizable, procedurally-generated MechWarriors, we'll include rare legendary 'Mechs to find, and rare hero MechWarriors to hire - including some famous characters from BattleTech history. Such legends may not stick around for long, but will be well worth hiring if you can afford them.

So it might well be that you end up meeting your parent who is that legendary warrior... Sure multiplayer is "nice" and I might even end up trying it. Specially if you can get one on one mach against your friend.. but for me singleplayer game is what I was after and more then happy to 25$ for it. Heck now days you might be happy if you get good expansion pack for that price...

 

[Pode]

Yeah, you're not buying the ammo itself, .... We decided costs per-missile or AC round were just too damn fiddly for us.

It's always been way too damn fiddly for me too, which is why I have waited 30 years for a computer to do the fiddling instead of me.

Also re: difficulty. I'm thinking a lot about Iron Man mode and how to make shit harder for everyone. Mostly cuz I want it for myself.

This, this gives me hope. Thank you sir.

 

[Bersercker]

The game gets harder as it goes on, judging from Cohh's streams. Let's not judge the game prematurely.

I'm just asking you to wait for the initial game reviews before judging. Give the game a fair chance.

Well, he just completed a mission where he had to go against 9 mechs, mostly lights but one heavy and one medium at least, and he only took some light structure damage on one mech. That is because he maxed armor on his mechs and started using bulwark more often. I bet if he would have done that after the first mission he would have never lost a single mech up to this point.

I watched the first three episodes of Cohh's streams on Battletech. One thing he said and I am paraphrasing this here:

" I played MWO a couple of times with a experienced friend. The people playing MWO have there mechs maximized for efficiency and enjoy crushing noobs who come to play. It is rough".

With that assessment from a streamer it is easy to see why this game seems easy to some players. I bet MWO has a very strong core of players but never any new players willing to sign up. You have no chance for a learning curve sense you are seen by the MWO community as fresh meat to kill. This game was meant to have the ability to introduce new people to the Battletech community. Most people do not understand mech customization and LOS rules, etc. etc. etc. This game will hopefully increase the battletech community and beathe life into game sales.

I played a lot of MWO and imo the community there is not bad at all. Its quite often that i hear some dude explaining to the newbie how he should improve his mech and offering to add him to friendlist on the team voice chat.

 

[Lord of Riva]

i am not sure if someone already talked about that so my apologies if it already happened.

While watching Cohhs stream i only saw missions difficulty increase, my question is: Do you only have access to increasingly difficult missions or do lower difficulty missions still come up?

It is a matter of recovering from a defeated missions and loosing the heaviest mechs and best pilots. What if you only have low tier mechs accessible and you only have 5 Skull missions?

 

[Cyttorak001]

i am not sure if someone already talked about that so my apologies if it already happened.

While watching Cohhs stream i only saw missions difficulty increase, my question is: Do you only have access to increasingly difficult missions or do lower difficulty missions still come up?

It is a matter of recovering from a defeated missions and loosing the heaviest mechs and best pilots. What if you only have low tier mechs accessible and you only have 5 Skull missions?

If it's possible to get lower-difficulty missions, I'd bet you have to travel back to lower-difficulty star systems like where you started at (Detroit, Alloway, etc.).

 

[shadojak]

i am not sure if someone already talked about that so my apologies if it already happened.

While watching Cohhs stream i only saw missions difficulty increase, my question is: Do you only have access to increasingly difficult missions or do lower difficulty missions still come up?

It is a matter of recovering from a defeated missions and loosing the heaviest mechs and best pilots. What if you only have low tier mechs accessible and you only have 5 Skull missions?

I think mission difficulty has been assumed to be geographically associated with the different star systems. So, in theory, if you want a lower degree of difficulty you travel to a lower threat area.

Edit: Well lookie there at Mr Ninja!

 

[Deaghaidh]

Ok my 2 C-Cents on this:

In the early game (which is what we see here) the game needs to punish players for stupid decisions enough that they realize they were stupid decisions, but not so much that one early mistake can cripple them permanently. Too light punishments and the newb player doesn't learn the lessons he'll need later. Too heavy and most people get frustrated.

Watching Cohh blunder along, frustrating as it was, was probably a good test of this. For instance he kept overheating. Each time he realized what his mistake was, and why it was a stupid, risky thing to do very quickly after making it. There was immediate feedback. Overheat->Structure Damage->Repairs and delays. By his stream yesterday despite being a self proclaimed "Dingus" Cohh had learned not to overheat. He was starting to put together what the proper roles in a lance ought to be, and trying to match those roles with loadouts and pilot skills. His experiments were often not ideal, but he was asking the right questions and trying solutions. This seems to have developed organically, though chat helped him out. This is IMHO a great sign for the game's viability. It's not so much an issue of 'dumbing down' a game as making sure that the player knows WHY what they did was dumb, and giving them some leeway to recover.

To me this looks promising. You want the early game to be a bit forgiving. I think the hardest mission we've seen so far was a 2 skull, maybe 2.5. I hope for the difficulty curve to start becoming steeper a little after this point so as to keep things lively and discourage complacency. By all means brutalize the player at the higher difficulties!

 

[Hawk.eye]

I watched the first three episodes of Cohh's streams on Battletech. One thing he said and I am paraphrasing this here:

" I played MWO a couple of times with a experienced friend. The people playing MWO have there mechs maximized for efficiency and enjoy crushing noobs who come to play. It is rough".

With that assessment from a streamer it is easy to see why this game seems easy to some players. I bet MWO has a very strong core of players but never any new players willing to sign up. You have no chance for a learning curve sense you are seen by the MWO community as fresh meat to kill. This game was meant to have the ability to introduce new people to the Battletech community. Most people do not understand mech customization and LOS rules, etc. etc. etc. This game will hopefully increase the battletech community and beathe life into game sales.

I admit that there are a number of things that I would like seen changed. CT destruction equals loss of mech. Armor and ammo need to be bought. Stock rebuilds need to be entered into the rebuild task list. But for the developers, the most important concern is to increase the battletech community and hopefully get the game back into hobby and game shops. It is hard to find places where battletech is being played. The playing core needs to be built up more.

MW:O
His "mistake" was probably playing with a friend (as much as I understand wanting to do that).
I played MW:O for, I don't know 6 to 9 months and found it rather easy to get into (ok, I played all the other MW games so that might have helped too). In solo play, you start at tier-5 (back when I started it was still tier-4) and are placed with players of similar tier. This means that newbies are basically placed with other newbies and a sprinkle of "green" or "regular" players (to use the battletech rating)

If you group up, however, you are thrown in with other groups and tiers are taken out of the equation (unfortunately, the population in MWO just isn't large enough to split group-play for tiers) . As a newbee, you simply get rofl-stomped.

I'm not a huge MW:O fan, but just wanted to point that out


BattleTech
I agree that it is important to provide a smooth entry for new players. That's why I would like to have a lot of options to ramp the difficulty up aside from the contracts. I'm sure the modding community can help a whole lot there, but official options sure would be nice (and HBS_Adarael has already said that he wants to implement some changes/options in that regard in this very thread).

 

[TheDarkestStig]

(My bad, turns out I have the release build installed at home, and that has debug turned off. I'll check tomorrow morning.)

Tease!

 

[Gorski123]

I think we,including myself, asking for a very difficult game are asking for too much at launch. HBS could have made a strictly linear game of 30 missions with difficulty settings and satisfied everybody's desire to have an xcom ii experience, but we would have had to give up the beautiful sandbox they have made for us and nobody wants that.

The retreat and eject options make this game ridiculously hard to balance. Raising mission difficulty just results in more retreats. The simple way to balance frequent retreats is to raise the upkeep to the point where you can't retreat very often without bankruptcy. Letting us choose the star rating of the contract complicates things even more. I think solving this balancing challenge is more suitably solved by 10,000 monkeys at a typewriter, than a small studio with budget constraints. There are a lot of balancing levers built into the very accessible jsons and one of those monkeys will find the perfect setting. Yes, I just called all of you monkeys.

At launch, I am going to try to beat the game as fast, game time, as I possibly can on Iron mode. I will post my time and I challenge all of you to beat it. I will probably lose, but at least we will get to see how high the hard core players set the bar.

 

[TheDarkestStig]

<znip>

At launch, I am going to try to beat the game as fast, game time, as I possibly can on Iron mode. I will post my time and I challenge all of you to beat it. I will probably lose, but at least we will get to see how high the hard core players set the bar.

How will you beat a game with no end?

 

[Exemplar Voss]

I don't really consider speed runs to be hard core. Especially as the focus would be story missions, not the really challenging stuff.


As an aside, if I get an 'x com 2 experience' out of this game, I am going to be -deeply- disappointed. Timers, glitches and repetitive, empty content gets a no thanks from me, no matter how much money the studio throws at the star trek: next gen cast.

 

[Bersercker]

As an aside, if I get an 'x com 2 experience' out of this game, I am going to be -deeply- disappointed. Timers, glitches and repetitive, empty content gets a no thanks from me, no matter how much money the studio throws at the star trek: next gen cast.

Actually, from what i've seen so far the mission variety of non-story missions isn't that great. There were some escort, defence and assasination missions but you end up you having to kill all enemy mechs 99% of the time anyway(or kill half of them and evac, if you want). It would have been great to have some timers like in xcom 2 e.g.: enemy base radios for reinforcements if you didn't take out the communications tower fast enough and then you have to fight these reinforcements, the assasination target tries to escape to the edge of the map instead of fighting the player mechs, and if it does - mission fail. Something like terror site missions from xcom would have been great too, like the enemy is already tearing up friendly buildings at the beginning of the mission and if you let them destroy less than X you get increased pay, if more than Y then decreased pay.

This could have even influenced which mechs you'd take for the mission, like get more lights to definitely make it in time or get more heavies to easily tear through reinforcements or the assasination target's escort, etc.

I wonder if some of these could be modded in or are already in.

 

[Tovarisc]

Actually, from what i've seen so far the mission variety of non-story missions isn't that great. There were some escort, defence and assasination missions but you end up you having to kill all enemy mechs 99% of the time anyway(or kill half of them and evac, if you want). It would have been great to have some timers like in xcom 2 e.g.: enemy base radios for reinforcements if you didn't take out the communications tower fast enough and then you have to fight these reinforcements, the assasination target tries to escape to the edge of the map instead of fighting the player mechs, and if it does - mission fail. Something like terror site missions from xcom would have been great too, like the enemy is already tearing up friendly buildings at the beginning of the mission and if you let them destroy less than X you get increased pay, if more than Y then decreased pay.

This could have even influenced which mechs you'd take for the mission, like get more lights to definitely make it in time or get more heavies to easily tear through reinforcements or the assasination target's escort, etc.

I wonder if some of these could be modded in or are already in.

Assassination targets can try escape. Cohh had such attempt in one of his earlier assassination missions, but as target was planning to start booking it he was able to core the target.

 

[Ozymandious]

there are also likely extraction missions as there was dev talk of mechs specifically designed to grab and get. I forget where the thread is and am not tech savy enough to link it if I did remember but a weaponless spider was mentioned by one of the devs. so we have assassination, defence, escort, extraction, and possibly others we haven't seen yet. Cohh is stuck in the kiddie pool lvls after all so it is likely that the more complicated and difficult missions might be beyond the scope of what he can play. just speculation on my part but I can hope

 

[pmaura]

i wonder if the json files will be easily modable for salvage chance right and or destruction

 

[Wanderer2142]

I recall from the old discussions on the prior forum that there were 8 or 9 categories of random missions:

Capture Base
Defend Base
Destroy Base
Ambush Convoy
Escort Convoy
Assassination
Escort Target (Rescue)
Annihilation

Where there are just enough random variables to have a different permutation of that particular objective.

As far as adding new categories, I'm doubtful of that, as that would require basically coding in functionality to implement the randomization choices of said new category.

 

[Stormforge]

Some of the half skull missions look super easy, and honestly I do not really mind that, especially bringing in new players. The story missions seem to give even people that are versed in Battletech a little challenge. I just watched a stream where a not-named person lost a mech and pilot on the first mission, and I can guarantee a lot of people who are unfamiliar with Battletech will lose the same if not more. For more veteran players I would like to see a mode where there is no reduced armor on enemy units, and Demolishers cannot be one-shot by a kick. I so wanted to see that Demolisher tear him apart.

A lot of other good ideas here too.

 

[Stormforge]

I am not looking forward to running into an SRM Carrier. Reduced armor or not.

 

[ED-209]

I am not looking forward to running into an SRM Carrier. Reduced armor or not.

In his last stream Cohh ran into one I think? It had like 10 x SRM6s. The volley it launched seemed to go on for ages.