[0.8] Campaign too difficult

[FrozenOne]

Mission 3. This is just plain ridiculous. I play factorio for quite a long time and i finished freeplay many times, but i just couldnt complete this mission. I can't even imagine how some less experienced players might play this mission.

You cant even look around and you already start getting swarmed by wave after wave. Ok, that can be managed, first base shot from the car, then i built a wall of turrets. But what then? With the defender capsules, slows and rockets i could manufacture i was able to siege the left base, but to my horror i found that the target isnt even there. After about 20 deaths failing assault on the big base i just decided to suicide in with a car, run through swarms by using slow and snatch the quest item with last breath before being killed.

The small biters are TOO fast, you cant see them, you cant read their stats, the time between when you notice them and they surround you is just a second.

The infinite continuous spawn is such an annoying mechanic, come on, this is no longer used in games for about 20 years, when you kill the swarm, let the player time to counterattack, let the new biters stay in eggs for a minute before hatching.

I mean, first set the mechanisms to not be annoying, and then ballance about them, not set infinite stream of enemies and set weapons to keep killing it.

[Nova]

Which difficulty did you choose?

[FrozenOne]

The easiest, of course.

[Trollsama]

I have to disagree with the mission being too hard.
II did the tutorial / campaign missions the first time i ever played the game and had no issue beating them all first go despite having basically no idea what i was doing.
( it was no cakewalk, but thats good IMO... it actually makes you think )

But I do agree with basically everything you noted about spawn rates. It can get stupid hard.... or in some situations, literally impossible to push on biter hives when there is a few in 1 area. I had to abandon a 24+ hour save becasue every biter base was like 12-20 hives big, and without killing biter bases, i couldnt advance tech enough to have any chance in hell of even touching the hives. ( even with my nearly max level wall of 100+ laser turret walls)

[FrozenOne]

Note that the campaign was reworked so missions are different from what you played, if you didnt play it in last 2 days.

[Nova]

There was no 3rd mission before the update. ^^

[kovarex]

The truth is, that I balance it to make it ok for me, but that is probably way too hard for other players
I will make it easier for the easier difficulties.

[Nova]

I have played the third mission now: WTF??? How should i conquer the enemy base with such means? I don't even know how to defend properly. My piercing rounds munition gets used in nearly 3 minutes. Assembling new munition eats up my copper in the same time. And why do we have so much steel??

Oh, I have thought that there may be some more things inside the car. Yeah, much munition. Should make the mission much easier. But please mention this in the start text of the mission. ^^


Edit: Nope, sorry, I have no idea how to win this level. Defending against the attacks IS possible, but how should i conquer the enemy's base? Could someone just make some screenshot of his/her base and of the attack against the enemy? Maybe you kovarex?

[FrozenOne]

We should probably remember it if we had to shove it there in previous mission, but i also realized this after crashing the car, waiting 2 minutes for the game to unfreeze and then seeing a wide area around covered with thousands of items.

Shooting out all 16 defender robots they can almost hold the incoming hordes if you run backwards, but you still cant move forward and assault the bases without being overrun and shot down by worms.

[kovarex]

The way I tested it was:
1) make few turrets and wall, it easily hold the enemies for as long as I needed.
2) Make few chained assemblies to build defender robots
3) defeat the smaller base in the lower left corner (It provides the player with more robots and increases the robot max count to 24.
4) Defeat the main base.

I agree, that there should be less enemies in easier difficulties, and some hint, that the lower left base upgrades the count of robots (Or maybe it should be disabled and set to 24 directly?)

[ssilk]

I mean for newbies: How should they find into all that stuff? This is a bit surprising and too much at once. Before that level you have lots of time and there you get be killed easy within seconds.

I think there should be a mission 2.5, where the robots and the other weapons are explained in a way, that is not so deadly, for example because there is water between. Should help to become firm with the stuff and doesn't make so much stress.

[Lossantos]

Share please save game for 4 missions

[Volturing]

I basically turtled into alien nest with walls and turrets. That's extremely gamey, but the game didn't let me have other choice

When Factorio attempts to be Alien Shooter, it becomes outright boring. Devs could at least adopt some good features of it, for example, vehicles which don't break after hitting anything larger than a cat.

Share please save game for 4 missions

Here. The fourth mission seems to be broken too, however.

[SilverWarior]

For all of you who can't finish 3rd level of New Hope campaign and are losing patientce with it the same whay as I did:
WARNING!
Instructions on how to cheat ahead:

If you go to folder "C:\Users\YourAccountName\AppData\Roaming\Factorio" you will find file named "player-data.json". This file contains information about which level of which campaign did you finsh. So by editing this file you can cheat the game into thinking that you already completed certain level of the campaign.

[ataaron]

The campaign should never be dumbed down when it is beatable ( at least it was for me even though it did indeed cost a lot of retrying).
It would be much better if the campaign teaches the player how to use the tools at hand instead of randomly throwing some at them without explanation.

[Nova]

That's stupid. When the campaign is too hard, it's just annoying. That's the reason there are various difficulties. You can play on hard, and "normal people" ( ) play on easy.

[malokin]

I hope ultimately we end up with a tutorial/learning campaign, a "story" campaign (the main singleplayer campaign), and maybe they will move the extra hard maps or maps that are only beatable with 1 strategy to a series of "challenge" maps in a campaign ordered by difficulty.

It really doesnt matter how hard the stuff is now because they might introduce balance changes and new technologies that change the face of the game.
For me, i do think there is a reason to"dumb down" some scenarios, I want there to be more than one solution to the maps. I felt like some of those scenarios, i think the one with the bug colonies and weapons caches for instance, can only be completed with a single straight forward startegy. I really don't like it when I don't get many tools to design my way out of an enemy invasion. Maybe the more combat oriented stuff just turns me off.

[Sedado77]

I Think the campain IS too hard. I've played sandox games for 12+hours, and can get a big biter base wit5h no prob after a few hours... but M3 in the campaign is TOO DAMN HARD (I'm on normal dificulty). Also I didn't realized there was things in the car untill I picked the car up and looots of shit fell on the floor...
ALSO! there's nothing that tells you that the purple circles left in the floor are "alien artifacts".
I'll explain:
I started in the campaign mode to learn the stuff... Gave up in lvl 3 after dying 100+ times, when i realized my autosave left me without any more ammo nor materials to buid some...
Then I started a sandbox in "easy mode" (Large starting area, lowed everything in the "bitter" category and NOT passive critters. Played 8+ hours, researched everything red green and blue... and got stuck again!!!
After that, I saw some let's plays (Mal's and Inzania's) and ONLY THEN i realized the violet circles left whenever i killed a bitter next could get picked up!!!
There were NO MESSAGES in the tutorial about this! (this is a SMALL CHANGE that can be done in seconds
KEEP THIS GAME ALIVE. IT IS GREAT!!!

[slpwnd]

@Sedado77 Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the campaign. Some more hints and messages are indeed necessary. We also plan to fix the difficulties to have some actual meaning.

[immibis]

It's interesting that you didn't realise the alien artifacts could be picked up, because I tried picking them up the first time I saw them, in 0.2.something. Did 0.2 have tooltips for dropped items or something?