Ground combat balance advice needed

zebgodwin

I've been working on a new mission, and I've had the devil's own time trying to balance one of the ground combat encounters.

A brief summary: Last week, I published the mission to run my level-60 tactical officer through it for testing. All was well with the combat - in fact, it was a little easier than I expected. I took the mission down, tweaked a few of the dialogs but made no changes to the NPC enemies, republished the mission and ran the same tac officer through it this morning - but this time the combat was insanely hard, to the point where I couldn't finish the battle. I'm using Tholians as the NPCs, and I've noticed before that they tend to scale in difficulty rather dramatically as the character level increases, but I can't figure out why I had such a different experience with the exact same character on two different run-throughs. Can anyone give me any insight as to what is going on here?

This inexplicable variability in difficulty is going to make it very hard to figure out how to fix this. If anyone else has run in to this problem before I would appreciate the benefit of your experience.

spiritborn

I dunno if that happens on tholians but with some NPC groups like the Starfleet ones. the difficulty of a fight might depend on what "template" (for a lack of a better word) the system chooses for the NPCs when they spawn with certain types being much harder to fight then others, sadly there's not much we can do about that as we can't force the system to certain templates.

duncanidaho11

For why one time its easy, second time you might need to track exactly what happened in combat (what buffs were used, when were they used, ect.) Difficulty does scale with level but that shouldn't be a factor with 2 runs at 60. What this would tell me if it were my mission is that the balanced is balanced at a razor. For some people it would work, others no, so I'd tone things down.

Generally, one player can pretty reliably handle two mobs in a single encounter, at least one of which being low level (ensign, lieutenant). If you have two high level mobs (commander, captain) then you want to give the player some backup (friendly NPC's). Levels with a higher level cap make these considerations more imperative. If using Iconian or Vaadwuar, you want to be a lot more careful than with Klingon or Gorn.

If you want to have more difficult combat without making your mission less accessible/playable, the thing to do is include combat difficulty options. Here are the steps.

1. Create an ON MAP dialog pop-up that gives the player the option for [Normal] or [Hard] difficulty. This can be written in the context of the mission as the player being given information about the upcoming encounter and being able to respond in different tones, with the [Normal]/[Hard] label following the in-character response.
2. Include additional enemy NPC's that are not tied to the main objective. Place these with the mission objective enemies.
3. Set these to spawn in with the dialog box following the player's choice for hard difficulty.
4. Additionally, you can set friendly NPC's to spawn close enough to enter battle with the [Normal] difficulty option.

As an added safety measure, you can also set additional friendly NPC's to spawn when the player enters a very small location marker placed on that encounter's respawn point (trigger: component reached). If the player dies, they get automatic reinforcements. This can also be used to tone down the hard mode by despawning [Hard] spawned enemy units.

zebgodwin

Thanks for the feedback. I've decided to just tone it down a little. There were already friendly NPCs in the fight - the whole idea was to have a big ground battle with the player leading the charge. I'm going to test it a few dozen times to see what happens now.

spiritborn

there's up 5 (or maybe even 6 I dunno if there's more then 1 Tac "build") possible variations on just SF NPCs based on rank with 2 variations per career for Sci and Eng as far as I can see with those 2 getting a support and damage "builds".

I had this backround fight I have to have additional additional packs spawn, since randomly the wrong (for story reasons) side won. I had it so that if group 1 was wiped out group 2 would spawn. That's a simple way of making sure that you don't make the fight too hard either have some friendly NPC groups in "reserve" so that if too many of the friendly NPCs are killed you can have additional helpers but at the same time there's not too many helpers so that fight would be too easy.