The Newbie Guide

[Pallington]

many thanks! will do

[Pallington]

Odd question, how do you deal with 8 sets of ninjas suddenly popping up and wrecking your score? I attached the save.

[vadracas]

Are you sure they wreck your score? Cause I've had these swarms of bandits happen many times before I could shoot them down and it has never really affected me.

[Pallington]

I let it run and my score hit -1000 in less than 10 days. There were other ufo's flying around, but I'm pretty sure they don't tank it that fast. also, in the charts, shipping in south asia shot up to above 1k in that time

[vadracas]

Bad luck then, As I can consistently have three of these swarms in a month and still have well over 1k score. Sure, they could be dropping it somewhat, but not a huge amount unless...

How many brainers do you have?

[Ashghan]

Unless it's been changed recently, shipping (UFOs) will score 1 (negative for you) point for each half-hour of flight time*. So an average band of raiders will net you -48 points/day. Not that bad, unless you count the fact that they often spawn in large numbers and stay up for couple of days. Same issue is for Necroplanes (I had one fly around for 20 days). If this happens before you have the ability to shoot them down - pray to the Gods that you have enough score to offset the loss. Or remember - you need to consecutive months in the negative (score or money) to lose.

*Landed time is double the negative score, so Survey/Resource Extraction missions are not as harmless as they seem.

[vadracas]

 If this happens before you have the ability to shoot them down - pray to the Gods that you have enough score to offset the loss. Or remember - you need to consecutive months in the negative (score or money) to lose.

*Landed time is double the negative score, so Survey/Resource Extraction missions are not as harmless as they seem.

I suppose the rest of my score has been fantastic, as I have 3 or 4 instances of a swarm of bandits in one month for multiple months before I could shoot them down, and still got 1k+ points.

[Ashghan]

You can check the Charts screen for a rough estimate of the points lost.

or, like I said: "Unless it's been changed recently..." Though last I heard talk about UFO scoring it was a hardcoded option.

[Pallington]

I had some 8 ish brainers cuz I could afford it, got 4k score last month because of a series of good missions. Ended up just duplicating the save and deleting 6 sets because I didn't want to deal with it

[vadracas]

8 brainers is fine, most of your score comes from research, I was just making sure it wasn't something else misleading you into thinking it was the fault of the bandits.

[legionof1]

snip
 Though last I heard talk about UFO scoring it was a hardcoded option.

The ufo score is limited/hardcoded in the sense that it only accepts whole integers. The problem that arises is that long duration or multi entity waves rack up a lot of score, because the floor for score penalty is: 1 per tick per craft. You can set a craft score to zero but that doesn't make any sense for actual hostiles.

[ReD2222]

3.  DIFFICULTY

Generally speaking, there is jack sparrow and everything else.  If you're playing something not jack sparrow, you will have a good idea of later game difficulty based on your initial missions.  However, the highest difficulty also has some wrenches thrown in and additional base defenses.
There's a button for iron man, but you're better off just deleting your save if you lose than pressing it: the game is extremely long and there's no point in having a save wrecked from a bug.

So basically only the highest difficulty provides like all of the stuff that can happen ingame? (Including some tech like base defense buildings (or that's related to the base assault events themselves like some new enemy groups that can try get some?) and some mystical "wrenches" that enable additional mechanics for the game, right? Like theoretical 100% of content?
I'm asking just because I like it when all the stuff is unlocked and purely hate when features are locked behind the wrong difficulty level I plea to recieve an answer on my question.

[Fugazza]

AFAIK, all content is unlocked in the second difficulty setting and above

I.E, I think first one has all Voodoo related stuff locked

[ReD2222]

AFAIK, all content is unlocked in the second difficulty setting and above

I.E, I think first one has all Voodoo related stuff locked

Then why'd OP say that there is JS diff and "Other non-JS", including some mechanics and base defenses that are exclusive to JS? If you're correct - I'm prefectly fine with it, but if there is hidden stuff - I wish to hear something more about specific Jack Sparrow features from OP with that "some wrenches thrown in and additional base defenses" line...
But I don't want to sound like a jerk and really hope that YOU're right cause knowing difficulty scaling for such games is a real pain... And I just wanna get some excitement from the game knowing it's a pretty long run.

[vadracas]

I haven’t played JS piratez extensively at all so couldn’t tell you about late game wrenches, however. The only differences in JS are not content differences. One major difference is the game forcing you to get base defense within a couple of months, as well as much stricter negative events, higher enemy stats, and worse sell prices