Detailed Feedback: Hard Mode

Early-days hard mode is extremely difficult. I found that I had to use old MMO tactics in order to beat early groups of wolves or whatever:

  1. make sure your fort is only enterable at one choke point. Early on, this means a cliffside and stockpiles taking up the empty space on that cliffside.

  2. Put your camp standard at the top of the ladder on that cliffside – right at your entry chokepoint.

  3. Have your one soldier “pull” enemies by running up to them and then running all the way back to your camp flag. Enemies will string out; if you’re lucky, you can “grab” them one at a time, even. Then your whole fort will gang-bang them together, with your other hearthlings backing up your soldier “tank.”

This works very well for the first ten days or so but you need to absolutely prioritize getting a herbalist/cleric because you take a lot of damage and will need to recover. I play Rayya’s so that means starting with wooden sword, farmer’s hoe, herbalists’ staff. You also need to buy shields and more swords from the iskender trading caravan ASAP (again, if Rayya’s).

Pull this strategy off and you will make it through early days hard mode fairly reliably, even on Hard Mode with Rayya’s. Should work much more effectively with Ascendancy.

Make sure you have three troops by the time you’re at ten hearthlings (two footmen and a cleric); after that keep roughly that same 1/3 ratio of troops to other hearthlings and you should, generally speaking, be ok.

That said there were some encounters that were essentially unbeatable and seemed to force a reload. The big one I remember was that if the medium size or large size stone golem showed up, a single wooden-sword newbie couldn’t damage it sufficiently through its armor, no matter how much they pounded away, and similarly it dealt too much damage for hearthlings to face it in a group and survive. Beating it essentially requires either two levelled-up footmen or footman/cleric (which takes forever).

I’ve come to compare playing this game to coaching T-ball. After you finally get your kids ready to play you will always have 1 or 2 that will listen, a big group that will essentially follow the first 2, then a couple more that pretty much just wanna catch butterflies and wave at their mom.

Lesson 1: don’t make the butterfly kids your clerics.

Lesson 2: no matter what the parents say their kid isn’t as good as the top two, make that mistake and little Timmy gets mauled by Kobold Wolves cause he thought they was fluffy.

Lesson 3: save often, start fast and have fun with your virtual kids, they grow up so fast.

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My experience has been a bit different than most in this thread.

I play Ascendancy, Hard, no buying stuff up front or re-rolling, for a little extra bit of challenge. Two footmen and a herbalist asap, and a third footman when I get a new villager with the right stats. I don’t take any special measures to fortify but I do wall in the town slowly over time. Early days are pretty simple. Hoards of five little golems are easily dispatched by my starter troops, as are the occasional goblin. Zombie attacks are more dicey, especially if there’s more than two, but manageable.

The problem comes as the days wear on and my troops are too stubborn to properly rest. If a goblin camp spawns too close to the village, they insist on running into the camp after the goblins’ first attack. If I order them elsewhere, they immediately attack the camp again. I’d desperately like a way to order a villager into bed so they can be healed instead of charging off looking for trouble with very little health. That hunk o’ stone the goblin took isn’t worth losing a footman over.

I’ve not gotten to the later game stuff in this latest update, so I can’t yet comment on that. I guess I should stick to a more defensible starting position until the troops are a bit less suicidal.

I’d really like to see more detailed posts like this. I suspect they’re pretty helpful for balancing purposes.

Personally I’m cool with the current balance (about one third military), I like having just under the right amount of capabilities, its a compelling place to be. I’d like to mention that the amount of soldiers you need at any given point is being balanced against the complexity of the tech tree. For example, the reason its hard to use three hearthlings at eight population is that you can’t tech up to blacksmith without four hearthlings. If they want to keep the producer / crafter / military split around even thirds they could tweak the level requirements for crafting talismans. Just a thought.

I have some more extreme experiences. I find the hard mode absolutely demotivating as it punishes you for using your technology knowledge.

The hard mode forces you to turtle things up. If you know that you need to keep your networth and technology on the down-low it becomes boring and tedious. I’ll explain what I’ve done

Start with:

  • 5 food items
  • Sword
  • Hoe

I start with the hoe because I NEED the herbalist to survive the massive barrage of enemies. food to prevent day 1 starvation and sword for quick survival. (might replace with something else.

Day 1:

  • Get lots of wood/stone/flowers
  • I manage to get 3 warriors with shields (all 6 starting hp). Very close to getting stone mauls.
  • Herbalist capable of making bandages. so my warriors get healed up after each fight.

Night 1:

  • get attacked by small varanus, zombies, stone golems. Every one of them nearly destroy my 3 warriors. I’d be dead without my herbalist.

Day 2:

  • Get 3 stone maul
  • get REALLY close to getting a forge to create next level weapons/armor

Night 2:

  • Get obliterated by large varanus/ 4 zombies / Large iron golem(whatever its name is)

Now the problem I have with this is that you’re simply not allowed to rush for any technology. The difficulty of the enemies depend on your tech/net-worth. It PUNISHES you for trying to make your warriors more powerful.

Now lets compare to the game I turtled:

  • I didn’t take any new tech other than carpentry/warrior/farmer until my warriors hit lvl 2. (3 days)
  • I went for an herbalist and waited for a traveling trader to to get leather so I could upgrade to cleric (day 8)
  • Destroy literally everything with 3 warriors, 1 cleric. 10 villagers. (day 12)
  • Get archer with super bow
  • Get all tech, 100% safe environment, no challenge.

See how this does not do the hard mode any justice?


For hard/nightmare mode I would really want the difficulty to scale differently to make it more challenging and less of a turtle fest.

  • Don’t make the difficulty dependent on your tech/net-worth.
  • Do make it dependent on the night you’re at.
  • Do send out barrages of non-stop enemies. don’t give the player any rest.
  • Possibly give a cool-down of rest when a unit has been killed.
  • Town defend mode needs to be fixed (see the ending of the video I posted below)

By reading the other comments I noticed that some people overestimate certain units and underestimate the specialty workers.
I feel like the jobs that the specialist and workers can do are fine.

  • Warriors are capable of hauling and transporting items. This is a HUGE thing as that’s most likely one of the most needed jobs in the game.
  • Masonry is capable of mining. So you technically don’t need workers for that either.
  • Workers are quite useless despite being jack of all trades. They just need to cut down trees and place objects into the world. They don’ t even need to haul things.

Guys, for hard mode, you should not overestimate your workers. I’ve worked with just 1 worker most of my hard games and it works very nicely.


Here’s a recorded video on how I’ve been doing things before :
Twitch
I’ve greatly improved since that recording was made. The turtle mode was done after these games too. Building more walls would not have helped much as I need to get the experience to get knights at some point.

Questions and such about my game-play is obviously appreciated :slight_smile:

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Hi everyone,
Thank you for all the feedback. We have been adjusting Hard Mode for balance and pacing throughout the unstable release. Thus, the hard mode experience will change from update to update, meaning some of these early game experiences might be out of date.
Currently the difficulty of enemies in hard mode is only based on your town’s population and the number of days elapsed.

@aMdivided Can you explain what you mean by “technology”? Does it mean upgrading crafters and armor? Also, have you tried the early game experience with the latest version of A16? I ask because the Hard Mode curve was too punishing when A16 first went out, but that has since been rebalanced. So maybe it will play better now. Finally, being attacked by 3 waves of enemies in the first night seems like a bug because the minimum time between attacks should be at least 6 hours in hard mode – perhaps it was a very unlucky spawn timer? In which case, maybe I should increase the minimum spawn time a bit.

Again, thanks for all the data everyone.
-Yang

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With technology I mean going from carpenting to masonry to forging, etc.

As for the version. at the time when I played it I just opted in on the steam version. Which I believe was last Wednesday. I’m not a 100% certain as to how the difficulty increases, but I did find that if I switched to masonry and stone mauls, I die if I don’t have clerics. The other way I think I could have survived was through the town defense mode. However that one seemed bugged as you can see near the end of the video I posted before.

This means that I’d be unable to progress to masonry before getting a herbalist to lvl 2 + get leather from a trader to get a quick cleric. Also, I don’t think the quantity of spawns was much of a problem as I had a herbalist to heal my warriors to full health between battles anyway. It was just a bit harsh.

My current tech order.

  1. Carpentry
  2. Farming
  3. footman
  4. Herbalist
  5. masonry
  6. Blacksmithing
  7. -dead-

Note that I didn’t get to cleric because I didn’t have the level, nor the leather on the character. Also, it’d be a miracle if any of my footmen would be able to reach lvl 2.

@yshan Once I get back from work I’ll do another quick game and post my findings. Are there any things in particular you’d like to know?

I could try a game where I advance in tech really fast but not in networth. (simply live inside a mountain would do the trick)
a game where I advance fast in networth but not tech
and a game where I advance fast in both.

Hi @aMdivided
I just saw your twitch video and I think you were playing the develop version that had a bug where difficult enemies spawned much earlier than they were supposed to. The build from last Thursday fixed that. So sorry! It is not supposed to be that unreasonably hard!
Please try a new game on the latest dev build (which I believe is 2960). It should be much better.
Apologies!
-Yang

Well, at least you now have the formula for a nightmare mode I suppose. :smiley: All it needs to do is put those hard enemies on night 5 with 3~4 encounters a day and things should be interesting. ^^ Nightmare mode at that point would be highly dependent on the farming speed of the flowers/cotton. Possibly have enemies that bash through your gates on night 7 or 8. I’d say the difficulty would also depend on what level your footmen can reach. So while there are a bunch of high level enemies, you’d want to throw a few low level enemies in the mix for your footmen to farm on. (could also work for the current hard mode)

Maybe I’m just masochistic about this. But I’ll see how fast I can rush through the current hard mode. :slight_smile:

Atfer playing some more, I finaly have a playthrough where I managed to survive. That said, I had to reload 3-4 times because I lost some crucial soldiers. So I think the difficulty is good, but like I mentioned in my other thread (Level Restriction for equipment really needed?) I would like to have a good chance to make a comeback once I lose some of my better soldiers. Right now, there is no chance to make a comeback when you lose your best guys.

You’d think that a soldier could leave a pack on the floor when they die (plus a gravestone), so equipment could be retrieved by a soldier (plus maybe a chunk of XP?). So, anyone who dies close to home can be replaced (not like-for-like, but at least getting a kinda-levelled XP amount) and anyone who dies close to an enemy camp is harder to replace.

But then, I suppose that would reward not leaving ones’ camp.

Well, they DO leave their equipment, don’t they? Or is it only their talisman?

Do they? I am always busy trying to get my defences ready I guess I’ve not noticed.

Their equipment seems to get left behind in my games. Granted, I reload if more than 1-2 of my soldiers dies. Even then things may be unrecoverable.

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Well, strip me down and call me Betsy. I had no idea. Am tempted to save and send a soldier off as a test, but I think that would make me a bad person.

don’t worry, for science i killed off a footmen in my test world, and they do indeed drop all their gear upon death…

You monster. It’s a dark path you are taking.

i may pretend to be a support crab, but your right, i truly am a monster…

welll… i’ve taken it before… and i’m sure i’ll take it again in the future :wink:

To say it in the words of a certain small lord: “Some of you may die, but… that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” :smile:

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my feedback for hard mode so far:
It feels ok. The start can be hard and without loading it is hard and depends on luck.
Now i have 5500 networth and a strong fighting troop (1 tank, 2 archers, 2 footies and a healbot). No problems at all. Last big fights was goblin wolves… attacking the camps is very easy. But then an orc rading troop, 2 orcs, 2 kobold archers take me out (or at least kills so many units that i give up). The gap between the encounters before is to big. I have no experience with sniping the archers before and now they are so deadly.

I also noticed that the most fights start very fast. -> Alarm bell, and enemys are inside your base (or at the front door). Everything starts very fast and you have only a small amount of time to react (or hit the pause button). I think it can be very hard for the multiplayer games.
I think it would be a nice feature if some enemeys (especially the harder groups) would come slowly to your town.
(you know the problem with the trapper? He is always the first how gets attacked…)