Leveling up continent civilization, is there a point?

[Professor Paul1290]

Maybe Continent Tier should be re-named to Defense Condition, or Alert Condition, or Overlord Progress (was that what it was called before?).

Yes I know it sounds absolutely silly, but it might actually help new players understand the idea better.

The thing is, raising continent tier doesn't make you more powerful than your enemy. It makes you better equipped to kill the Overlord and his Lieutenants, but it doesn't make you more powerful than normal enemies, in fact it does quite the opposite. This is fine, but I think new players are seeing "Continent Tier" and thinking "Continent Tier" is something they want to intentionally raise as soon as possible.

If I recall correctly, it was named something different some-time before during Beta, but then it got changed because it wasn't that descriptive anymore.
However, it seems to me like it's now back to what it was before, more of a number describing the enemies rather than the player character.

[Martyn van Buren]

I rather like Tegga's idea of bringing back region tier instead of continent tier.  Now that there are only five tiers, having regions set in a particular tier would make sense again, and it might give you the sense of a journey as you grow stronger and are able to enter tougher and tougher areas.  I suppose there would still need to be continent tier for orbs (and perhaps to control the migration of enemies).

Anyway, the gradual opening up of the world is something I miss from early beta days, and while I totally understand why they did away with it, I think now that tiers are finite it would make sense to bring it back.  And it would give confused new players a very easy to way to "play up" in difficulty without raising the difficulty level.  I don't know why people won't but it does seem to be awfully hard to get one's head around (mine too).

[Toll]

How would that work with missions though? Would they only seed in the regions matching your tier (thus potentially (and very probably) limiting the resources you can get), or would they seed all over (thus giving you a very hard time in the beginning of a continent)?

[Martyn van Buren]

I think that could be solved. Continents could be enlarged a bit so there's enough space for different regions of each tier, missions could follow continent tier regardless of what region they're in, or the game could used a mixed algorithm offering you a lot of missions at your tier and a few above and below.  But that last would mess with the opportunity costs, so probs not.

[Bluddy]

Like it or not, level scaling makes sense. Fighting lower level enemies gets old fast. And then you have to decide if you're going to spawn resources in areas that have low level enemies, and how to guard for exploits... Also, once you upgrade a spell, you already get the experience of kicking monster butts.

[TechSY730]

Like it or not, level scaling makes sense. Fighting lower level enemies gets old fast. And then you have to decide if you're going to spawn resources in areas that have low level enemies, and how to guard for exploits... Also, once you upgrade a spell, you already get the experience of kicking monster butts.

I'll say.
In Skyrim, there is some level scaling of enemies, but most of it is done by switching out enemy types for improved versions of those enemy types. The problem is that even the top level enemy types, except for bosses, have a level cap.
Basically, the end result is that I am at level 46 or something, and already there is almost no challenge in the game unless I get swarmed by large numbers of elite types of enemies (which is rare in Skyrim) or bosses (and even most bosses have a low enough level cap to not be a problem). And difficulty won't solve that. I turned up the difficulty to Master and still almost nothing can reasonably stand up to me, I merely have to heal a bit more often.

So yes, enemy scaling can be done to harshly, but it can also be done too softly.

[Terraziel]

I think first it needs to be clear what you mean by "regions", do you mean an area of a continent that contains multiple time periods all set to tier 1? or do you mean that all Ice Age Plains are tier 1, and all deserts are Tier 2?

Both approaches have flaws in my mind. For Tier Regions containing multiple time periods, to me that is no different from having Continent Tiers, that the different tiers are available at the same time won't actually change the fact that you are fighting the same enemies just with different stats.

For each time period being bound to a particular tier, even if that tier was randomised by continent, what you are essentially doing is mapping out how people have to play that continent, unless I am confident enough to play up a tier then I am obliged to go to stay in tier 1 areas until I have earned the right to enter tier 2 areas, and importantly as noted previously this would interfere with spell choice, if all the resources required to upgrade a spell are only located in a tier 4 time periods then there is no way I am going to be able to use it in any preceding tiers.

[Martyn van Buren]

I think it's worth thinking about; if we had enemy scaling by area rather than by CP, it might come off as a more organic thing and would help players who feel like they're on a treadmill. Since we have a level-five cap for both mobs and the player, we'd still have pretty much all the advantages of this system and some of the advantages or the other --- which are much more about the feeling the game than the hard balance numbers, admittedly.

I assume this would work in a pretty similar way to the infinite level system we had a long time ago. Each tier would contain a mix of regions, but not all, so you'd gradually get access to content as you grew more powerful in a semiVrandom way. Some kind of rewards could tempt you to play up tiers, but I feel like curiosity and adventurousness would get you to try it sometimes anyway.

[Tegga]

Like it or not, level scaling makes sense. Fighting lower level enemies gets old fast. And then you have to decide if you're going to spawn resources in areas that have low level enemies, and how to guard for exploits... Also, once you upgrade a spell, you already get the experience of kicking monster butts.

Fighting always equal to your level enemies gets old fast, every enemy is same the whole game.   And since killing enemies is discouraged anyway level scaling makes even less sense here.

edit: There is no benefit to killing enemies (aka discouraged) so you wouldn't fight weak enemies, you'd simply run past them

[Bluddy]

Like it or not, level scaling makes sense. Fighting lower level enemies gets old fast. And then you have to decide if you're going to spawn resources in areas that have low level enemies, and how to guard for exploits... Also, once you upgrade a spell, you already get the experience of kicking monster butts.

Fighting always equal to your level enemies gets old fast, every enemy is same the whole game.   And since killing enemies is discouraged anyway level scaling makes even less sense here.

edit: There is no benefit to killing enemies (aka discouraged) so you wouldn't fight weak enemies, you'd simply run past them

To be more accurate, every enemy that's the same level as you is the same relative strength to you as it was originally. That's why new enemies are introduced. But even that isn't accurate, since you can power up your spells by one level, or buff your attack or use an enchant and then be stronger than that enemy relative to the strength ratio you had before.

And enemies are supposed to be obstacles in your path (even if you choose to escape from them), so making them lower level than you means that they're no longer obstacles. Plus, there is benefit to killing enemies since they're the only way to heal in the field, and it's fairly easy to rack up some damage.

[Tegga]

Like it or not, level scaling makes sense. Fighting lower level enemies gets old fast. And then you have to decide if you're going to spawn resources in areas that have low level enemies, and how to guard for exploits... Also, once you upgrade a spell, you already get the experience of kicking monster butts.

Fighting always equal to your level enemies gets old fast, every enemy is same the whole game.   And since killing enemies is discouraged anyway level scaling makes even less sense here.

edit: There is no benefit to killing enemies (aka discouraged) so you wouldn't fight weak enemies, you'd simply run past them

To be more accurate, every enemy that's the same level as you is the same relative strength to you as it was originally. That's why new enemies are introduced. But even that isn't accurate, since you can power up your spells by one level, or buff your attack or use an enchant and then be stronger than that enemy relative to the strength ratio you had before.

And enemies are supposed to be obstacles in your path (even if you choose to escape from them), so making them lower level than you means that they're no longer obstacles. Plus, there is benefit to killing enemies since they're the only way to heal in the field, and it's fairly easy to rack up some damage.

I disagree, running around with 1200 health at tier 1 never really 'need to heal' even clearing almost the entirety of a deeper cave tier up system

[khadgar]

Thank you for the replies guys, I'm enjoying the game immensely.  Perhaps I'm used to old school RPG's.  I much prefer zone based difficulty even in open world settings.  Scale-to-your-level-enemies take away from character progression in my opinion.

I agree entirely. I really hope this is changed in future patches with a more zone-based difficulty. As it stands now, every zone is virtually identical. It's... really boring.

[Wanderer]

Thank you for the replies guys, I'm enjoying the game immensely.  Perhaps I'm used to old school RPG's.  I much prefer zone based difficulty even in open world settings.  Scale-to-your-level-enemies take away from character progression in my opinion.

I agree entirely. I really hope this is changed in future patches with a more zone-based difficulty. As it stands now, every zone is virtually identical. It's... really boring.

Sadly, I agree.  There's a reason I boycotted Oblivion.  This was the primary reason.  The resets on continents does help to mitigate that though.

[TechSY730]

Why not a combination of both the old zone based system and the new CP per continent system?

In addition to per region "difficulty adders" (often lumped into areas of the same number, like before), but also have each region get tougher upon every civilization tier, though possibility at different rates. (Like higher level regions get more "goodies" in terms of enemy types, new enemy behaviors, and to a lesser degree, enemy stat bonuses, faster per tier than lower level regions) This would give an interesting dynamic. Should I rush the high tier regions early, before civ tier goes up, but I have far less tools and upgrades to work with, but possibly get more rewards per mission/area/enemy earlier if I do survive? Or should I play a more "standard" progression and play up through the regions, and thus have more tools by the time I reach the high tier areas and overload areas, but they may have gotten more awesome stuff to work with as well?

Again, with their being a tier cap, this sort of system is feasible now, where previously (with no tier cap) it wouldn't be.

[Martyn van Buren]

That sounds pretty cool.  Devs, is there any chance of our talking you into this sort of thing?