Making the switch to hard mode

[The Captain]

Congrats, Crouchy!

[Leylite]

the boarders are way stronger (they must have combat training maxed out).

There's no difference in boarder strength between difficulties (or else Mantis would be even worse than they already are, and Lanius and Rocks would be a nightmare). However, for some reason door strength is reduced on Hard, so enemies will break through your doors faster (and suffocate less). However however, this also applies to player boarding parties, so it's easier for them to break through opponents' doors on Hard mode for some reason.

Well done! Hard mode was truly designed for those who thought Normal was too easy or too rarely vicious - it's a struggle, but a fun one.

[The Captain]

the boarders are way stronger (they must have combat training maxed out).

There's no difference in boarder strength between difficulties (or else Mantis would be even worse than they already are, and Lanius and Rocks would be a nightmare)....

Maybe only the squishy meatsacks have combat levels?

[Crouchy]

Thanks for the congratulations guys!

I could swear that the boarders from the Rebel Flagship had combat training. I'm specifically talking about the humans who teleport over during phase three.

Four versus four was definitely not coming out in my favour in a big way so I can only assume that they have some kind of combat training. I mean, I'm feeling pretty sure they must, as they were doing so much damage to my guys. I could be wrong but I would be surprised.

I did a terrible job dealing with them. They teleported into my shields room. I should probably have just vented the oxygen in the room but I was worried about keeping one of my crew alive who was mind controlled. In the end, I lost no less than five crew trying to defend against boarders. It was definitely an element of poor tactics on my side but boarders have never been that difficult to deal with on normal mode so I guess I was taking it for granted that I could easily deal with the onslaught during phase three.

I really ought to have done something clever like jump away with some of the boarders still on board, kill them off without the stress of fighting the flagship, and then jumped back. Alternatively, just venting the key rooms on my ship would probably have helped a great deal just to get them away from the most important systems. I made a bit of a mess of it but the rebels were defeated and that's all that matters, right?

I think I'll be exclusively playing on hard now but I'm seriously expecting to struggle. I think normal was getting a bit too easy for me so the challenge is welcome. It's nice to get the first victory under my belt but I'm not expecting the wins to flow in like they used to when I played normal mode!

Next up, The Red-Tail. Should be fun! Thanks for all of the encouragement guys.

Oh, one thing I wanted to mention is that it seems to me that the lower scrap rewards on hard are somewhat mitigated by the fact that you're often fighting higher level ships with bigger rewards. Anyone else find this to be the case?

I think from my first time on hard, I noticed the following:
- Lower scrap rewards, obviously
- Higher level enemy ships
- Higher enemy evasion
- Possibly enemy crew have training in combat (maybe repairs also?)
- Enemy targets and hits vital systems more often
- Flagship room connections (i.e. missile bay and laser room are connected to ship)

I think maybe that's it? Can anyone confirm? Are there any differences I'm missing?

[Leylite]

Oh, one thing I wanted to mention is that it seems to me that the lower scrap rewards on hard are somewhat mitigated by the fact that you're often fighting higher level ships with bigger rewards. Anyone else find this to be the case?

As far as I can tell, the "level" or "system bar budget" of the enemy ship has absolutely no correlation with how much scrap you get from blowing them up. Most of the degree of scrap you get is based on whether the event gives you a "low", "medium", or "high" scrap reward, and this has nothing to do with how difficult the ship is - you can fight a tough Auto-Scout trying to jump away for low reward, or you can fight a slaver with two Halberd Beams who can't hurt you, for high reward.

I think from my first time on hard, I noticed the following:
- Lower scrap rewards, obviously
- Higher level enemy ships
- Higher enemy evasion
- Possibly enemy crew have training in combat (maybe repairs also?)
- Enemy targets and hits vital systems more often
- Flagship room connections (i.e. missile bay and laser room are connected to ship)

1. Pretty much as advertised. You do get a good amount of scrap in sectors 5 through 8, but it's definitely a lot less than you would get on Normal, and it's a struggle to get the run started in sectors 1 through 3.

2. Enemy ships only seem to get harder around sector 3, and even then not by very much.

3. There's two factors that affect this: first, in sector 1, the engines system is set to "second manning priority" where the second crewman will try to man that system, rather than the Shields system. (Shields is still the top repairing priority, though). Thus, enemies in sectors 1 and 2 will tend to have 5% more evade from having their engines manned, which is incredibly annoying. This manning priority matters less as the game progresses and crew counts start increasing (in which case all systems will be manned on the enemy ship anyway), but it matters again for Flagship Phase 3, where as the hordes of Rebels leave the ship, they'll keep the engines manned so their Zoltan Shield will stay up for longer.

The second factor is that, since system bar budgets are slightly higher in later parts of the game, ships will statistically tend to have higher levels of piloting or engines, for better evasion.

4. Just from anecdotal experience, enemies don't seem to have repair levels. What they will do, however, is send two people to repair piloting if it gets damaged, or send multiple people to fight fires and then repair a system if they're already in there, and three humans can repair one system bar pretty fast.

5. I'll leave it to a developer to comment more in depth about this, but yes, this has been widely observed and confirmed. The AI will still occasionally target empty rooms or "less important" rooms like doors, oxygen or sensors, but they do have a tendency to target shields and weapons - play the Stealth B on normal and Hard a lot to observe this. The Rebel Flagship can still hack your sensors though.

Another thing I'll mention is that the AI's boarding drones and ion intruders seem to benefit from hard mode targetting - they almost always seem to land in a system room rather than an empty room. I'd appreciate more anecdotal evidence (or developer commentary) about this.

6. Yeah, this is a big one, and I appreciate it a lot - it means that you can't just board the missile system, smash it up and have an easy Flagship fight anymore, you have to be a bit more clever. It also means that if you're trying to kill off all the crew, you need a plan to deal with the missile launcher while you're doing it. (Usually it's hacking, fire, or both.)

However, that extra room is a real boon for beam-based builds, since you get to tag an extra room if you're beaming the missile launcher, shields and piloting.

[ManDude]

The main thing for me that got me going on hard mode, after being very good at normal mode for a long time (pre-AE) was to learn the importance (oddly) of not upgrading engines and shields too early. Also, not wasting scrap on most anything, especially early (Say, the first 4 sectors). And finally, living with what you have and not hoping for what you want.

This was the first idea that popped in my head after reading the topic title. I do, however, recommend getting level 2 shields immediately for most ships. Weapon upgrading should take top priority after that because you simply cannot afford to buy/upgrade weapons and upgrade the engines/shields simultaneously in the early to mid game. Yes, you will be taking damage but it damn sure beats the snowball effect you'll face when you have to run from enemies because you can't penetrate their defenses.

Power juggling as someone mentioned before is a strong skill/tactic to become familiar with. You don't need to power up both shields and engines fully for every fight, especially in the early sectors. Enemies at this crucial stage of the game will usually have lasers/beams or a laser/missile. Having the ability to dump all power to shields or engines is much better than having them both at half strength for every fight. Later on in the game I sometimes run many beacons with 6 power bars short of optimum(optimum=powering everything except the med/clonebay). The extra money I save from not buying power I float so I can actually buy all the great items that the shop never stocks. But seriously, money floating is very important. There's nothing worse than finding a store selling a weapon pre-igniter with no scrap on hand.

Knowing all weapon timings and every little cute trick in the game will surely help. There are far too many for me to list but I'll give a helpful example:

You're 1st jump in the game(using any ship with lvl 1 starting shields, 3 or less crew, and no cloak) you come across a Rebel fighter with a heavy laser 1 and a mini beam(a very common weapon layout early). How do you negate the likely damage from the first volley that is synced?

If you're me(and likely every high-level player) you have your 2nd and 3rd crew members in the engines and weapons. Move either crew member to the shields so they charge fast enough after the laser hit to block the mini beam. Alternatively, if you have a teleporter and crew in position, you can immediately jump into their weapons room which negates the manned system charge bonus adding about 1/10th of a second more time between the laser and beam shots, which is barely enough time to recharge an unmanned shield system. Using tactics like these that are relatively unknown to the casual player are key to having a higher win percentage. There's probably a thread here that you can look up or you can watch Youtube or streams to find more tips.

Never buy cloaking too early, it's just too expensive. Almost always buy long-ranged scanners if possible since they are cheap, help you to avoid pulsars, and help to find profitable beacons.

XP farm. This game can be brutal on hard and I have no shame admitting that I XP farm sometimes. The evasion bonus of 10% you can obtain in the early game can save you much money and worry. It works great for a procrastinator like myself. All I want to do when I get off work is immediately relax and game. I buy level 2 shields in sector 1, find an enemy with 2 single-shot lasers(you can do this with lvl 1 shields if the weapons are the same and you damage their weapons, de-syncing them), then I'm off for a few mins to do some work around the house. Win-win. I wish I could do this to boost my odds with Starcraft or CS.

[The Captain]

... There's nothing worse than finding a store selling a weapon pre-igniter with no scrap on hand. ...

Oh, I'd say it's worse being one scrap short of something you really need (say, another weapon, when you need extra firepower to deal with better defended enemies), when you have nothing to sell. And you can't go back to the store, because you're only one jump ahead of the rebels.

[ManDude]

Oh, I'd say it's worse being one scrap short of something you really need (say, another weapon, when you need extra firepower to deal with better defended enemies), when you have nothing to sell. And you can't go back to the store, because you're only one jump ahead of the rebels.

That happens all too often. I used the pre-igniter as an example because it's the Holy Grail of anything to find EVER.