How are people playing the game?

[x4000]

Nice idea on the Ilari Progress -- I really like that a lot.  I'll have to talk to Keith about some of these things, and see what we can cook up.  I also agree on reduced penalties for losing missions, though a penalty for player death seems like something that players have wanted, heh.

But making this a little more freeform of a tug of war could be a really good thing, so that the penalties for failure aren't huge.

[KDR_11k]

The problem is probably that many materials are tied to enemy progress, many unlocks require certain enemy tiers, some materials do as well and of course the tier orbs. Since you want high tier gear to take on the bosses of the continent you need to drive up the EP until you get access to the materials for tier 5 spells.

I'm not sure how that can really flow together with the uniform enemy tier mechanics. Maybe enemy tiers could be higher the further a tile is away from the settlement while missions can only appear outside of windstorms. Possibly a tier limit to windshelters (so a MkI wind shelter can only remove the windstorms from regions up to tier 2) so the player must expand his territory by establishing the shelters and increasing the regions that missions can appear in but also has to develop his strength by at very least dealing with the increasing wind shelter mission tiers.

[x4000]

The problem is just how the materials are defined, don't worry.  It's not that big a thing to change, it's just not defined right.

[KDR_11k]

It's not just the dependency chains, the tier orbs themselves require enemy tiers to hit 4 or 5 before you can reach the tier 5 spells.

[x4000]

Yes, I know -- that's also a problem, to be sure.