The Foundry Roundtable Episode 101: The Cave of Requirement

drogyn1701

Welcome to the Foundry Roundtable, a weekly podcast dedicated to Foundry missions, mission building and other UGC issues starring Foundry authors Drogyn1701, Markhawkman and Greendragoon, with special guest, STOAdmiralAaron.

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--- FOUNDRY NEWS

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Bug fix for Herald Mobs
Trending working on community project restructuring

--- DISCUSSION

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Foundry Challenges and Spotlights
Foundry Bugs
Foundry in Champions Online
Nemesis System in STO
Building combat difficulty
What elements make for a good Star Trek story
Unnecessary exposition
When our ideas get usurped

We livestream on Wednesdays at 7:30PM EST/4:30PM PST on twitch.tv/thefoundryroundtable with episodes launching the following Monday.

If you have a topic you'd like to see us cover, have a mission you want promoted, or would like to be a guest-host, e*mail us at FoundryRoundtable@live.com or follow us on Twitter: @FoundryRoundtab

paxfederatica

Re: Building combat difficulty
I have hit upon a "quick & dirty" way to approximately gauge the combat difficulty in a mid-to-large-scale combat scenario, where the player is joined by a bunch of NPC mobs, before publishing for testing purposes. Once you've placed all the friendly and enemy mobs, go into Preview mode, make yourself/your ship untargetable, then sit back and wait for one side to finish annihilating the other.

If the friendly forces have prevailed without the player's input, the mix of mobs is probably too easy and one or more friendly mobs should be removed or replaced with enemy mobs.

If, on the other hand, the enemy forces prevail and there are more than, say, two mobs' worth of enemy ships/NPCs left (YMMV on this depending on how long you want the combat to last), the mix should be adjusted the other way, toward more friendly/fewer enemy mobs.

Once you seem to have the right mix, then go ahead and publish for playtesting to ensure that the different NPC behavior doesn't make the combat way easier/harder than was suggested in preview mode.