NPC difficulty slider

The comment leaves me confused, many games have a feature to adjust difficulty. Vanilla NPC characters are new to SE2 and will require feedback to adjust the gameplay to suit. Every player is different, some will accept the current offering, others will compare there skills to the game and either want more or less in challenge. Why deny a choice, when it could help both KSH and the players to get the best experience out of the game.

If mission difficulty affects progression, then any impasse will affect the FTUE and the player experience. The reliable method to overcome this would be a difficulty setting, not everyone who plays SE has the benefits of a fast reaction, and good coordination, others may find the play lacks intensity.

I mean, fair enough. A difficulty slider does solve a fair amount of issues.

I remember attacking Factorum research outpost with a tiny fighter trying to dodge artillery fire, they still felt too accurate. All weapon types, in particular large caliber capital ship ones, should have terrible accuracy or can't even fire upon small targets. And if you are still being hit from a long distance, the damage can be reduced drastically. I know it is unrealistic, yet we need a game where you don't die because of being unlucky. Close range should feel much more dangerous and intentional.

@Wilhelm, @4Peace Seeing as dodging fire in a small-grid and picking off all the weapons before moving in to board has been my go-to for factorum-encounters, I have questions about your strategies, evasive-patterns, and the design of your "tiny fighter" (pictures of front/back/sides/ect would help).

Also I might suggest not jumping directly in to brawling range unless you're trying to surprise a player, against AI it is much better to get to just inside loading-range and wait for things to load before proceeding so you can evade and shoot back.

Well, in the case I'm citing is less a tactical approach, like sneaking up on the factorum location by doing shorter jumps so you don't warp directly in next to the factorum 'whatever'. I'm speaking to the absurdity of using the actual GPS as the jump drive target and jumping to that coordinate, which puts you ~1km from the ship or base. In this case, I've appeared from jump to the sound of railgun drones firing and hitting my hull...within a second of arrival, I've got critical damage. In one case, I jumped in and a second later, a rail drone one shot my cockpit and knocked me drifting into space while the factorum warship shredded the rest of my ship. It did this because my own weapon AI wouldn't fire at something 1.4km away, but the enemy drones would remain at that distance and pepper me with precision. When I say accuracy is one of the key 'difficulty' sliders, I cite this use case. Instant reaction times/ enemy detection at long ranges/highly precise accuracy are often the deciders (unless you do the right tactics, fine)

This is also one of the points in the 'armor should have a minimum threshold for damage' feedback (under consideration hopefully still), heavy weapons, artillery, railguns should be more of heavy ship to ship long range (I'd increase the ranges even). These should be ineffective against smaller ships like fighters as too small to reliably hit. Conversely, smaller ship (and handheld) weapons should be much less (or ineffective) against heavy ship armors like capital ships, and be able to sustain numerous hits of these heavier armors without critical failures unless you have gaps in your armor scheme.

In any case, I like the idea of difficulty slider(s).

@Wilhelm

...So you put a jump-drive and 4 gat-turrets on a starter pod (I'm forced to guess), jumped in to the most difficult vanilla encounter in the game, got repeatedly blasted in to space-confetti while at most "flying fast" in a strait line... and therefore instead of you engineering a solution to your problem (with or without the help) in the game about engineering, you want the devs to add in a mechanic to make the npcs both react more slowly and intentionally miss shots aimed at targets smaller than an arbitrary length?

...I'll gladly help you improve your designs an tactics if you'd like, but what you're asking for there isn't a difficulty-setting, its plot-armor.

Haha, literally no, that's not what I'm doing...but funny visual.

The point I was trying to make was that within a second and sometimes before the ship fully ends the jump animation I am being hit from long range and very precisely.

I was screwing aroun din SE1 last night with an armed fighter you can grab off of the workshop https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3811688402 I would never even consider taking something like this into a factorum encounter, but I was exploring a pirate encounter. I had two 'wingmen' that were AI controlled and set to follow and attack. I approached the pirate asteroid base, it had a single artillery turret mounted into the asteroid.

The two 'wingmen' drone versions of this rushed ahead when we got inside 2km. The first one hit ~1.4km range, the pirate artillery turret fired once, completely disabled that fighter with a direct hit. The second escort was coming in from the left, the turret shot once at that one, and disabled that escort completely. As I was watching this, I was coming up the center. The instant I got into the range of that turret, it fired (I saw only one round) and it direct hit my cockpit and took it out. As far as I can tell, it fired three rounds and took out three ships. That's what I'm talking about above. Heck, after my cockpit was destroyed and I was floating in empty space near the ship, the artillery almost hit me (I had to dodge and barely did so since my jetpack wasn't on when I got ejected). I can't even see the turret through a zoomed in gun camera, but it can pick me off at over a kilometer with a battleship naval gun??

I have plenty of battleships and the like, with layers of armor and auto repair that can go handle those encounters fine. Even in those cases, my AI controlled turrets are no where near as accurate as the NPC ones. I watch my turrets fire till they're empty and unless I'm shooting at a big, slow ship I don't think they hit a bleeping thing.

Also find it annoying that said pirate turret above can instantly start shooting at me at the exact point they come into range. My artillery had a 1.4km range, but the AI enemy detection in my turrets are 800m? So they get 600m of shooting at me before my turrets will start shooting back?

Anyway, yeah I'm asking (and others on the thread) for the devs to consider some sliders to allow it to get easier or harder depending on your desired gameplay. It's just like in SE1 where you can adjust your backpack carrying capacity, block inventory size, whether you take lightning damage, etc. All are settings that allow players to set their own desired play environment, and I'm describing a couple things that I could see sliders for combat difficulty.

Cheers