This may lower difficulty a bit, but that's okay because there are certainly plenty of difficulty levels out there. The difficulty of level 7 has been creeping upwards steadily over the last few months, and this will rebalance everything a bit downwards, while also empowering the player more. I think it's telling that darke plays on a handicap all the time. It's more fun to be doing stuff than waiting around, and hopefully these economic changes will favor that.
I've actually stopped playing on a higher handicap the last month or so (*gasp!*), mainly because of all the little economics changes and game balance changes made it hard to "rebalance" the AI/my bonuses so it felt like I was playing the same game difficulty, just a little faster.
(100% for both never seemed to have that effect.)
I instead swapped to playing with multiple starting planets, usually 2, 4, or 8 (I avoid no more then 8 adjacent wormholes to the cluster of planets I need to defend, so that's how I end up picking things). It gave me the benefit of the extra boost at the start to get things going, without problem of hitting the 300k resource limits by the time you got half way through the game with the extra 100% bonus resources all the time.
Also, the AI is only going to be getting harder and more devious, so the difficulty is just going to creep back up again anyway. In the meantime I want the player to feel empowered rather than frustratingly slow. Fun factor is something I guard pretty ferociously, on par with the level of strategy. If the game isn't fun, it doesn't matter how strategic it is, and in the current resource model, balanced as it was, I was getting a bit frustrated myself. Hopefully the new version is better tuned, but I'll be interested to hear what people think of it.
On that note, I was noticing that even with this 8x planet AI10 start game, I was finding myself considerably resource constrained about 2 hours into the game. A collection of waves totaling around 300-600 Tech II ships hitting your planet every few minutes made it a bit of a challenge to keep the defenses up, especially for some reason that I was often seeing Tech III ships (usually bombers) clustered in them. I ended up in a perpetual defense mode since I never had quite enough resources to properly take up the offense.
Also more fortresses would be good. Or the ability to accelerate/heal them. They seem to be useful in choke points, and in 8x starting games, but you just get hit with so many ships that inevitably you lose one on a regular basis (almost every wave it seems?), that you need two or three per choke point to even out the damage and kill things quicker. That and they're, like, way expensive in comparison to damage output in comparison to starships.?Zinth are described as a "mobile fortress" , but the immobile fortress is a pansy in comparison (900 damage x 21 is nothing in comparison to 9800 x 9, especially since the Zinth attacks faster), even the Flagship is better then the fortress at the moment and it costs about the same knowledge.
(This is all taking numbers from before the 014E starship boosting patch, so fortresses are even more pansies now
).
