Starting options: separate critter difficulty from overall difficulty

[Elver]

A feature I'd like to see added would be to decouple critter nastiness from overall game difficulty. After some of the patches of the last year improved AI regime tactics and made higher difficulties reduce the amount of Fate Points awarded, I've found myself less inclined to play on max difficulty like I used to always do... but that means xeno fauna are no longer nightmare fuel and kaijus. I'd like to be able to play with most rules at the lower level, but make the wildlife to the most awful things imaginable - that's one of the biggest attractions in single-player play.

Alternately, add a history setting that makes the xeno critters particularly abhorrent regardless of other settings...

[Thrake]

I don't think difficulty affects xeno wildlife generation.

For bigger xenos I think the best chances are to pick a planet type that commonly host life, pick the option that force generates wildlife and then pick an old planet.

[Elver]

No, difficulty absolutely affects generation. It doesn't impact size - that's based on what you mentioned - but it impacts the stats and feats assigned to wildlife, and those play a larger role in making critters awful than simple size. I'd rather fight a small handful of your average 60m critter than a large pack of 10-15m high-difficulty-setting critters with 8 (or 16!!!) attacks and 3-5 levels of feats like Evasion, Absorption, Toxin, Bane, etc. Or more to the point, as indicated by my suggestion, I'd rather fight them... but not on what the upper levels of difficulty have now become.

[Elver]

I'm going to bump this with the latest patch adding more Fate cards. In SP in particular, it's really disappointing to have to make a decision whether to have access to a significant number of Fate cards vs. having truly strong xeno critters on the planet, as they often represent a more serious hurdle to expansion than minors or sometimes even majors. It would be very welcome to separate some or all of the various factors currently bundled into each difficulty level. My preference would be to keep the existing difficulty levels but also have a "custom" difficulty that allowed for all the factors that vary by level (Fate packs, AI difficulty, critter difficulty, etc.) separately adjustable.

[solops]

I'm going to bump this with the latest patch adding more Fate cards. In SP in particular, it's really disappointing to have to make a decision whether to have access to a significant number of Fate cards vs. having truly strong xeno critters on the planet, as they often represent a more serious hurdle to expansion than minors or sometimes even majors. It would be very welcome to separate some or all of the various factors currently bundled into each difficulty level. My preference would be to keep the existing difficulty levels but also have a "custom" difficulty that allowed for all the factors that vary by level (Fate packs, AI difficulty, critter difficulty, etc.) separately adjustable.

+1

And I will repeat my plea for more customizable victory conditions.

Perhaps introducing these things now makes game balancing with the AI more difficult?

[JagdFlanker]

If you are not opposed to save editing, you can turn on the built-in in-game debugger and manually add FP points. If you play with FP for a bit perhaps you will be able to suggest to Vic how to adjust FP to keep the game balanced. In the meantime for the sake of fun I wouldn't be afraid to manually add FP if you think you need it

to turn on the debugger go to the SE directory, open debugger.txt, set false to true, and save

when you are in-game click on the MNG tab, and on the far right there is a 'debug' tab

FP is located in 146 regime keys

You can find out what your regime number is by looking at your credits, then look for that number of credits in the list

Your regime will show up a few times in 146 regime keys list, the first appearance will have your credits, keep scrolling down until your regime number shows up a second time, and in that area there will be your FP

[Elver]

The thing is, you can make your own Fate Points with Mission Impossible stratagems. What you can't make are the Fate cards to spend them on. And savegame editing won't help with that.

(I mean, technically I suppose it probably could, but that's getting messy, and also the lack of randomness means it'd feel a lot more like cheating than merely adding FP.)