Further thoughts on 0.26 - Impossible difficulty

[Pete Spicer]

Hello again,
Just played the game on Impossible - first time I've tried it.

While there were a few hairy moments in the early stages with
suspicion on the Covert side going as high as 75%, the minute you
manage to develop Advanced Stealth, the game gets progressively
easier. Even on Impossible, if you have the resources to build Adv
Stealth, you have some fair power - and that is the point whereby you
can play it safe for a while to lower Covert suspicion, then build
fairly freely until the end of the game.

I think Adv Stealth takes too much out of the Covert Suspicion under
the quadratic methods used in 0.24 (or 0.25? I'm not sure when non-
linear reductions to suspicion came in), so with that and Adv Media
Manipulation (I think that's the tech which reduces public discovery),
the game becomes too easy once you've mastered it.

Plus, once you have built the advanced Quantum stuff (MK3), everything
becomes too cheap to research, including all the projects.

Final score this game - OK, this time I did build the infamous
Impossibility Theorem, but I didn't need to, as stats were already in
single figures at that point...

Time to completion: 2040 days, final finance 4.632TR remaining

Suspicions: News 0.86%, Science 11.40%, Covert 3.63%, Public 0.00%

What I find is that for the first part of the game (until Adv
Stealth), if anything is going to discover you it'll be Covert
suspicion, with Public suspicion remaining a concern for the first
half or so of the game (under Adv Media Manipulation(?))

News never seemed to be an issue, I never saw it go above 25% and
don't think it's ever gone that high.

Science is only an issue in the end-game, even then only an
inconvenience rather than a fear exactly, by which time an equivalent
tech to reduce Science discovery is pretty much unnecessary anyway.

BTW, just before I started to write this post, I built a whole bunch
of bases on the moon with all techs, all researching Expert Jobs to
see how much money I could build up - I remember in earlier versions
being able to walk away and leave it (when incomplete bases were
undetectable), and coming back hours later when the number wouldn't
fit on the screen.

This time I left it until day 9999, and had a final balance of
809938.110QU (it's jumping >4500QU per day at this point). It may be
worth adding in the next order into the code just in case (I believe
Quintillion would be the next order up, perhaps QI as the suffix?)

Sorry if I sound like I'm going on, I just think this might need a
slight tune-up.

Pete

[Phil Bordelon]

Thanks for all of the playtest feedback; we definitely appreciate
it. I'm not going to respond to all of it right now, just a bit I
can give a quick response on:

Pete Spicer wrote:
> This time I left it until day 9999, and had a final balance of
> 809938.110QU (it's jumping >4500QU per day at this point). It may be
> worth adding in the next order into the code just in case (I believe
> Quintillion would be the next order up, perhaps QI as the suffix?)

Having another prefix would be confusing, and as far as I can tell it
never happens that the money gets that high unless you're intentionally
doing "how far can I go" testing. I'm content with leaving it as it is.

Phil

[Gustav Bertram]

Random semi-serious suggestion: Use scientific notation instead of
weird suffixes. I still can't picture Quintillions. But I can picture
$ 5.6 x 10^12. Loooots of zeroes.