Making Freeplay hard?

[Virosa]

So i just bought the full version of the game just now. I first played a older version before, it was 0.5.4 i believe. I enjoyed the short but nice campaign. The last mission with alot of creeper was really nice, it felt like tower defense but that you have to manage your economy and supply too. Kudos here. This here just made this game better than 98% of all other games out there. (And i played thousands).

So anyways. When i played freeplay, even with all the settings for creeper set to like, frequency = highest, size = highest, there was barely any creeper at all, even several hours into the game. Now that i have the full game and my own copy, i'm ready to try again, however, is there a way to make freeplay as hard and then gradually harder than how the last mission in the campaign was? (The one when you go loot the CPU from a chest)

I'd like to fight for my survival, having to carefully manage my ammo production and push research to get an edge, to keep me alive long enough just to finally get higher tech to survive that much longer.

So, what can i do to get the rush that i did when i played the campaign?

[ssilk]

Play the sandbox with low resources and high creepers as fast as you can and when you have built the rocket defense wait for them. But that's minimum 18 hours until you reach that state.

PS: the current creepers are only placeholders, the devs said more than once, that they will be changed.

[Virosa]

I dont really want to twiddle my thumbs for 18 hours.

Is there not a way, a value or a mod i can use that will make bunch of creeper spawn, more and more, just like the campaign?

[slpwnd]

Most of the people have said that the game is hard and there are too many enemies in the campaign missions. Nice to see someone from the other side of the barricade.

The enemies in the freeplay are controlled by the script and sent in regular intervals (defines by glob.attackdata.untilnextattack) of +- 5 minutes. For the first hour nothing happens though. As the time goes by the number of them increases (+2 with every attack). That is for now. From 0.7 the enemies will be guided by the pollution produced in the factory. There will also be changes to how the enemies attack and what weapons the player has at his disposal. However

Custom hardcore survival scenario sounds like fun.

If you want you can manually alter the control.lua script in your save directory to shorten the attacking intervals.

[ssilk]

No, all planned, but nothing finished.
Currently the single player sandbox is number one prio. In the end I mean the game should have such a tower-defense mod and coop. But there can't be no guarantee for that.
I think we all have the same opinion here: a hard to play campaign, difficult to stay alive, do everything on your own. But currently we (I mean the most forum members) try to find, how this game can be played best. In other words: it is playable but not so ready.
But the game has many sides and you should take the missing parts as challenge. Besides from slpwnd's tip to change the behavior of he creepers I also recommend to play it differently, try to finish the sandbox, it can be really hard if you have a bad place; you will learn to create big productions, eventually use the train, the car and many other stuff, you never imagined it is in this game, even, if it isn't ready yet. Try the other mods, there are some inbuilt and you can also download some from this forum.

If not: Sorry, I think you have to wait a bit.

[Virosa]

@slpwnd- Thanks alot for the info. And indeed. I consider myself a quite competent gamer and i found the last part challenging, i had to actually restart my game once to make something more efficient. After that, it was pretty easy to slam dozens of turrets in front of the spawns and rocket the turrets down. I would have to say that this kind of difficulty should be labeled hard/very hard(as it cannot be handled casually), between normal/challenging and masochist.

Please don't water down the game for everyone, having to figure out what works and what doesnt is what make a game good. If whatever work, it's not interesting and such difficulty should be labeled "very easy".

--

I quickly checked the Lua.

1-I assume glob.attackdata.attackcount is the value i can edit the +2 count to +3 or +4 to increase the growth?

2-Is attackcount = 5 the initial value?

3-And i dont understand glob.attackdata.untilnextattack (assuming its the value for the interval between attacks?), why not a flat number instead of 60 * 60 * 4 + math.random() * 60 * 60 * 10 ? Here i assume it pick a number between the 2 value? Are these multiplication? Its too low to be miliseconds and too high to be seconds. If i divide by 3600 i get 4 and 10, which could be the interval in minutes.

4-Is the 1 hour until first wave hardcoded? I would totally set it to 0-10 minutes *Dig more iron frantically to make enough ammo to survive the second wave*

-- @ ssilk
Gotcha, i will play around, thats the purpose of a sandbox anyways, right?
The info here was exactly what i was looking for. I may look into other people's mod tomorrow :3

[wrtlprnft]

3-And i dont understand glob.attackdata.untilnextattack (assuming its the value for the interval between attacks?), why not a flat number instead of 60 * 60 * 4 + math.random() * 60 * 60 * 10 ? Here i assume it pick a number between the 2 value? Are these multiplication? Its too low to be miliseconds and too high to be seconds. If i divide by 3600 i get 4 and 10, which could be the interval in minutes.

The unit is game ticks, of which there are 60 per second (at least if your CPU can keep up). math.random() is a random number between 0 and 1, so after any attack the next one will happen in 4 to 14 minutes.

[SilverWarior]

1-I assume glob.attackdata.attackcount is the value i can edit the +2 count to +3 or +4 to increase the growth?

Yes glob.attackdata.attackcount defines the maximum number of creepers that will attack that is if there is enough spawners on the map.
Each spawner can spawn only certain nuber of creepers at time. So if you see that number of attacking creepers doesn't rise go and explore the map more.

In the last beta mission the attackcount is increased exponentially while in freeplay the attackcount is increased lineraly.
Some time ago I explained how this is being calculated in one of the forum threads as I thought it is a bug, but the developers sad that this was intended to be so.
You can find that thread here:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=23&t=545

2-Is attackcount = 5 the initial value?

Yes this defines the size of initial attack.

3-And i dont understand glob.attackdata.untilnextattack (assuming its the value for the interval between attacks?), why not a flat number instead of 60 * 60 * 4 + math.random() * 60 * 60 * 10 ? Here i assume it pick a number between the 2 value? Are these multiplication? Its too low to be miliseconds and too high to be seconds. If i divide by 3600 i get 4 and 10, which could be the interval in minutes.

The reason why this is implemented the way it is to have somwheat random attack intervals.

4-Is the 1 hour until first wave hardcoded? I would totally set it to 0-10 minutes *Dig more iron frantically to make enough ammo to survive the second wave*

No it is not hardcoded.
The initial time for first wave is also definedin control.lua file under the "initattackdata = function()".
By default is is set to "untilnextattack = 60 * 60 * 60".
So to set the first attack to happen 10 minutes after the game start set this to "untilnextattack = 60 * 60 * 10".

[kovarex]

I'm also glad that someone wants to have the game challenging, for me as starcraft player, the game is much easier than I could handle

One of the options while creating map in 0.7 should probably be something like "aggressivity".
That would reflect how much would enemies react to pollution by attacking your base.
In that case, some option that would make the game quite challenging will be included

[Virosa]

Yeah i agree. I did alot of SC1/2 myself.

That being said, i modified the values so there would be an attack at the start, i set the value to 60 * 60 * 5. I set the delay value to 60 * 60 * 1 to 60 * 60 * 3. I set the initial value to 1(gotta start small ). Then i made a new game, saved, went back to main menu, replaced the fresh control.lua in that save folder to the modded one, loaded the game... but that didnt do it. It still used the 60 minute timer for first attack, 5 creeper on the first attack.

I assume the game must be still be using the default values, how do i make it load the modded .lua ?

[n9103]

Modify/Replace the control.lua in the base mod within the data folder, then start a new game.
Or, you'll need to manually reload the scripts within the save when you load it. (either "game.reloadscript()" or "game.player.force.reset()" should do the trick.)
And deleting scripts.dat within that save's folder couldn't hurt.

[kovarex]

What file did you alter?
scenarios\freeplay\control.lua? That should change it for any new game that you start.
You can also change the script directly in your savegame, that will affect just the single game.

[Virosa]

What file did you alter?
scenarios\freeplay\control.lua? That should change it for any new game that you start.
You can also change the script directly in your savegame, that will affect just the single game.

Directly in the savegame didnt work, i didnt try to delete the script.dat as suggested, however.

I just replaced the one in scenarios\freeplay\, made a new game and it worked 5 min before first attack + 1-4 minute delay with +3 growth was much better. At first it was challenging to get stuff up and running asap, but once my economy began flowing, difficulty became trivial again. :3

I had my fun for now, i look forward to play with the new enemies and maybe a balanced aggression option, when it comes.

[n9103]

If difficulty is trivial, perhaps you should switch to geometric growth of waves?
Can't imagine you lasting long against attackcount * 2.
True sadists would opt for the attackcount * attackcount however. Creeper Hell would be a nice place compared to what results from that.

[kovarex]

What file did you alter?
scenarios\freeplay\control.lua? That should change it for any new game that you start.
You can also change the script directly in your savegame, that will affect just the single game.

Directly in the savegame didnt work, i didnt try to delete the script.dat as suggested, however.

I just replaced the one in scenarios\freeplay\, made a new game and it worked 5 min before first attack + 1-4 minute delay with +3 growth was much better. At first it was challenging to get stuff up and running asap, but once my economy began flowing, difficulty became trivial again. :3

I had my fun for now, i look forward to play with the new enemies and maybe a balanced aggression option, when it comes.

If you want real challenge, try the supply challenge from the scenario pack (if you have it), I had to try it many times

[Virosa]

If difficulty is trivial, perhaps you should switch to geometric growth of waves?
Can't imagine you lasting long against attackcount * 2.
True sadists would opt for the attackcount * attackcount however. Creeper Hell would be a nice place compared to what results from that.

Not really, its not really sadism either. A scenario which is entirely impossible is no fun either and i'm not big fan of norush, as in, delay the first attack to get you started. You need constant heavy pressure to really outdo yourself into winning against all odds.

What file did you alter?
scenarios\freeplay\control.lua? That should change it for any new game that you start.
You can also change the script directly in your savegame, that will affect just the single game.

Directly in the savegame didnt work, i didnt try to delete the script.dat as suggested, however.

I just replaced the one in scenarios\freeplay\, made a new game and it worked 5 min before first attack + 1-4 minute delay with +3 growth was much better. At first it was challenging to get stuff up and running asap, but once my economy began flowing, difficulty became trivial again. :3

I had my fun for now, i look forward to play with the new enemies and maybe a balanced aggression option, when it comes.

If you want real challenge, try the supply challenge from the scenario pack (if you have it), I had to try it many times

Sadly i don't, since its kind of paid additional content and i'm not a fan of supporting DLC-like stuff.

[SilverWarior]

Yeah i agree. I did alot of SC1/2 myself.

That being said, i modified the values so there would be an attack at the start, i set the value to 60 * 60 * 5. I set the delay value to 60 * 60 * 1 to 60 * 60 * 3. I set the initial value to 1(gotta start small ). Then i made a new game, saved, went back to main menu, replaced the fresh control.lua in that save folder to the modded one, loaded the game... but that didnt do it. It still used the 60 minute timer for first attack, 5 creeper on the first attack.

I assume the game must be still be using the default values, how do i make it load the modded .lua ?

The reason why this didn't work is becouse "initattackdata = function()" is only executed on creating new game.
So the best option would be to make a copy of default Freeplay scenario folder (make sure you rename it) and then change the values in control.lua file in that folder. This will make a new scenario inside the scenario menu for you to start.

You can create as many of these as you wan't without the need to screw with original ones.

[Virosa]

Oh cool, i hadnt realized the scenario thing simply listed the content of the folder.

This will come handy when i fiddle around with values when the "real" enemies are implemented

Thanks.