On the Alpha 16, not just that the dev added new enemies and reinforced the old ones, making the fights a little bit longer; the hard point of it is that is always impossible to engage a fight 1v1 even with an elite Footmen thanks to the armor of our enemies; some of the new adds also are nasty ones: the Kobolds Archers are a real pain, because they got a range far more of our archers and our infantry can have some troubles with the Wolfes, who can defend the archers, letting them to slaughter our troops; it is almost impossible to finish a fight without casualties, so it could be a great idea to add new units that can help us to re-estabilish this handicap.
I think you might be in a minority here. I’ve been playing on hard for a while (around 32 hearthlings or so without actively trying to expand) and have only had one death: a trapped who got stuck outside due to a construction error.
Try making sure that you have the roles well represented amongst your troops. I have a knight, footmen, cleric, and two archers (one with each kind of arrow flavor) per party, and haven’t run into any dangerous situations yet. Keeping your troops well armed and armored is also pretty helpful, and you can usually store the next upgrade in line for your troops as they’re training, so that your crafters are busy and ready to provide the best gear for your army.
You’ve been lucky then - I’ve been having the same problems as the OP in regards to combat in A16 in Normal difficulty mode. Fully geared Knight, Cleric, Footman and 2 Archers and at 20 Hearthlings a kobold/wolf raiding party comes (4 archers and 4 wolves) and lays waste to my party with my village coming shortly thereafter. This has happened on three maps for me now (all Ascendency in Temperate biomes) without fail. The only strategy I’ve found that works so far is to completely separate my village from the rest of the map using motes and a guard post that prevents mobs from getting into the interior - which also means I can no longer fight or progress my troops. (Or get new animals for my Shepard pens.)
The jump in monster difficulty in Normal mode is not scaled at all - it goes from “all enemies can be dealt with using 2 Footmen” to absolutely brutalizing the moment you hit 20 Hearthlings.
The best result I wound-up having in one of the maps was losing a footman and an archer plus one Trapper (wrong place wrong time for him sadly) before I was able to get a handle on things. That was also the first time I used the “charge the archers” strategy, but I still find this to be a pretty unsatisfactory outcome. Once the rest of the gang got levelled up and I got some fresh replacements for the dead folks, it started getting easier and easier to beat back the same attacks, but it’s still brutal when they first start hitting you. Some more “quantitative easing” on mob difficulty might be a welcome give for Normal mode. Instead of getting hit with 4 wolves and 4 archers at 20 Hearthlings, maybe it should be 2 wolves and 2 archers at 20, and scale to 4x4 around 24-28 so you have some time to gain levels in your new classes (Knight, Cleric and Archer).
That’s pretty interesting to hear. I’m playing on hard, with 10 “militant” hearthlings in the party combos I described above. I also haven’t done a whole lot of micro for my troops, the biggest issue I’ve run into is having to pull back overly aggressive footmen. I find that once I get an “enemy sighted!” flag, quickly getting the whole party in on the action leads to pretty clean encounters.
That being said, I do have some big walls to sit behind to protect everyone else… I started off going pretty much full turtle, and have been expanding slowly but safely from there.
Due to building issues in-game right now, I have been completely unable to build walled communities. The hearthlings will build one segment of wall but not the one next to it. And if I do a complete “single building” with the walls and some smaller utility buildings mixed together to act as a blockade they build just the floors and one or two walls then simply stop, period. Motes are the only method I’ve found to section-off my areas, and they are tedious and tricky to manage. =/
Fighting, for me, has been the only option to playing the game. I also can’t manage to spare 10 soldiers when I only have 19 hearthlings - that leaves me with zero workers and a short in some crafting profession. If I have to make more than 1/3 of my hearthlings into soldiers then it really feels like a bad game balance. It’s also severely unrealistic for any building/crafting games.
you could have used the teleport console command to rescue your trapper, especially if they were trapped due to a construction error to alleviate any since of “cheating”.
No, my Trapper wasn’t trapped, he was out working a trapping area which was near where the NPCs attacked from. He got one-shotted by the Kobold archers - never had a chance to even run away. They spawned right next to him (they must have since the trapping area was on the edge of my moted-in area).
I was commenting to Aethrios saying he had only lost 1 person with his 32 hearthlings game.
Saying he had lost them due to a construction bug.
Ah, I see. Is there a wiki or post explaining how to open/use the debugging tools and console that you speak of? This is the first I’ve heard of it.
@Aviex I try to minimize my use of the console (despite having needed to use it liberally in this alpha unstable), but you’re right, I probably could have. Even then, he wasn’t totally stranded; rather, he had to path way to far because of unfinished construction. He died, in my eyes, fair and square, so I wasn’t temped to save-scum him back or anything.
@ursapolaris Not that I’m aware of, only scattered references across discourse. You can open it with Shift+Ctrl+C, and then enter commands. My two favorites are destroy, to delete anything you have selected in the game (great for scaffolding in walls that won’t be deconstructed), and ib, to instantly finish any building. Both of these (ib moreso than destroy) can throw brand new errors, so use them gently.