I was thiniking that the game was too easily beaten by the [diplomat starter+containment Tech tree] combo, by not creating any cure and simply erasing the disease with medics, (and thus not hiring any researchers because no need for samples) and was wondering whether it was me being lucky or sthg else.
I would suggest that instead of having a bonus starter pack only, you add a malus starter in the same pack on another Tech branch

Ex :
diplomat : (+dimplomacy tech tree, -containment tree)
medic : (+containment tree, -another_tree)
And so on...
Packs should be prefined by the game but could also be left to our choices.

The form of that malus could be anything, for examples : double prices for that branch, or for only the first level, lowered bonus/stats on agents related to that tech tree, etc...

Players could also choose, instead having both a bonus and a malus, to have neither of those.


Rest assured, I love that game, it is great!

The "Random Event Cards" should display the cost of each action. Even a Low Danger event wiped-out my annual income. Otherwise explain the consequences in the Tutorial. Great Job on this game; i love it! :)

Good comment. We are looking for comments like these to help tune the game better during Early Access. Keep them coming.

Also, be sure to write a short review to give everyone in the community your opinion on the game. I'm sure people would like to hear your insights after playing.

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Since you gave Vince of Dad's Gaming Addiction a free preview copy of the game, I presume that you critique his videos. If not, when time watch the one below and towards the middle/end he mentions several things that could use some fine tuning. First a quick cosmetic comment from me: The popups with events that say RISK MEDIUM, the final M in MEDIUM is cut off of the display.

Some of Vince's comments (if I remember). Things I'd also like to see.
1) clicking a portrait lower left opens team selection window rather than centering on the character on the map
2) every time he clicked on an action (quarantine city, etc) the game would change the character rather than leave it on the one first selected
3) he yells out at the end not to make EASY any harder but leave it easy so new players can learn the game before challenging the harder modes. I agree! as EASY in Pandemic was impossible which turned me off from playing the game. Easy should be just that, easy.
4) one more but (damn it) I forgot :-)

Thanks for listening!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2AIcijxHeg

1. What about that in the beginning of the game it was not known which cities are infected? As long as the disease does not develop symptoms, it is necessary to seek in different cities, and the disease will spread and mutate in the meantime.

2. There is a thought to change the gameplay greatly. Go to the percent infection rate. Add fatality. Medics can hold infection and death rates, heal when you find a cure. Add panic level and marauding so spec.agents have job to do. This is more realistic and extends the gameplay.

3. Add more perks, such as enhanced sanitation standards, ban public gatherings. Add specific perks for diffetrent spread types, like air filters, water filters, shooting animals and so on. Availability of perks depends on number of agencies and agents.

4. Analysis of symptoms improves the performance of medics. Analysis of spreading improves the performance of special agents etc.

5. Actions take more than 1 day, so you need plan your actions in long term.

6. Make different starting location bonuses and minor bonuses for opened agencies.

7. Disease mutations can make it harder to analys or cure, add another way to spread, make it more deadly etc.

8. Increas number of agents cause game will be much bigger after all of additions.

9. Make starting classes straight. Military class have only military job, agents and perks. This can be realised in campaign or something like you have to keep control for 100 turns and so on.

10. Make scenarios like USA, Paris, China with local maps, cities and different features. Make them unlocked one by one or DLC.

11. Make really long term scenarios for 6/12/18 hours. Make hardcore/endless mods with 2+ diseses.

12. Add negative effects to perks, cities, actions etc.

13. Make game ambience more dramatic, terrifying. More Darkest Dungeon like.

Вжух и +25

I really like that idea and i was going to suggest somenting like that

Current difficulty on 3 paths of victory:

Path 1: Medic Path of using disinfectant to eliminate plague = EASY only have to worry about character death

Path 2: Soldier Path of using quarantines to stop plague until cure = MEDIUM have to worry about infection level and containing spread

Path 3: Scientist Path of seeking cure without containing the plague = HARD have to worry alot about infection level

Balance changes to correct:

1. Require samples to perform healing on characters and in events this will make a demand for samples to be collected and provide them a purpose outside of research that currently requires few if any. This will make the Medic Path more difficult because it relies on healing to prevent character death and will therefore require a more balanced team of characters. (1 sample to heal and 1-5 samples for event recommended)

2. Reorganize tech tree:
a. Switch Emergency Preparedness with First Aid (in both tech tree and on class selection) because First Aid has no use until body armor is upgraded otherwise it will still only heal 50%
b. Switch Improved Fundraising and Improved Logistics because the addition of another character is incredibly powerful and would not be of use early on when money is scarce while the passive money boost would be tempting and prepare the player for purchasing another character
c. Switch Bulk Sampling Collection with Mutation Inhibitor because the Mutation Inhibitor should be a required step in curing a disease like the virus with high mutation rate and Bulk Sampling Collection will be more useful early on especially if the balance change to make samples needed for healing is added

3. Increase Cure Difficulty by requiring more samples on the order of 10 per segment to research and change the tech Improved Microbial Cultures to half the required samples for the research to compensate.

4. Make Disinfect its own action so infected cities can be kept for collecting samples or so infected cities without infection levels can be disinfected. May consider this action to take multiple turns.

5. Make a Repair action for repairing quarantine strength

6. Consider adding additional techs to slow down tech advancement

7. Speed up mutation rate to add difficulty

8. Allow Lost cities to be reclaimed by advanced treatment only if treatment level is above 4 to give medics a special purpose because otherwise medics should be at cap level at level 2

9. reduce character ability level scaling to add difficulty such as allowing medics to reduce infection level by 1/2 per character level allowing the cap level to be raised from 3 to 6 on medium difficulty for instance
(recommended scaling by difficulty: easy = 1, medium = 1/2, hard = 1/3)

10. Allow research to be changed because it can be frustrating if misclicked

11. Allow mutations that increase the number of samples to perform cure research, that increase mutation rate, that slow down cure research speed, and / or that must be cured first

12. Add a trade tab maybe even through a diplomacy research that allows the player to trade money for samples or vice versa

13. New research techs to consider adding:
a. healing of 1 point per turn
b. sample generation per turn
c. credit generation per turn
d. construction speed (would require quarantine zones or field offices to take more than one turn to construct)
e. aerial transportation (would require that characters can not move across the map as they currently do)
f. trade station (as mentioned above in 12)
g. infection tolerance to increase the number of infected required before losing
h. immunities research that removes risk from conducting advanced treatment, quarantine zone, and / or field office (could be broken into one for each)
i. actions that can be made for money
j. multiple actions for each character
k. hazmat suits upgrade that lets the character make actions immune to harm (or require a suit up action first that make them immune for the next action for a more hazardous action like treating a lost city in which case lost cities could just be setup to deal guaranteed high damage) (could be only allowed for medics to perform)

On a side note about the achivements I would like to see some more long term achivements and maybe even an achivement wipe at the game's launch since it was currently easy to do all of the achivements in only a couple of hours

BUG:

Scientist upon leveling while performing sample collection will state that he has collected 1 more sample than he actually did due to the way leveling occured before sample collection report occured but after samples were actually collected.

In other words:

3 samples collected --> reports scientist leveled up to level 3 --> says 4 samples were collected
however only 3 samples were collected

I would like to see the ability menu when clicking on the character portraits insted of opening the team menu so that i can quickly heal up specific characters or make use of other non location specific abilities.

Helping diplomat scale into late game:

Let their cost reduction also work for quarantine zone purchases AND give them a higher avoidance from harm considering that they will be dealing with the government officials not the infected like medics, soldiers, or scientists

A new plague type:

Replicating Strain one of the mutations it starts with will cause the plague to split into another plague leaving you with two to cure if you do not research a cure to it within 10 turns and again at 20 turns 4 to cure and so forth to a limit of 4 since it would take 8 turns (less than 10 or allow each one to have a cure research made against it allowing no limit to the number of them) to remove all of the spliting mutations also it needs to be able to replace any partialy cured ones so that the player does not just try to cure them all slowly leaving weak ones as blockers.

Sample collection risk vs reward
currently there is no reward for risk involved in collecting samples instead could the samples collected be increased by the level of infection they are collected from

Love all your comments Sniper. Keep them coming. We know we still have alot of tuning to do with the game and look forward to everone's ideas. We will be doing tuning updates over the next weeks so be sure to give us feedback on how we are doing and if we are going in the direction you are talking about.