I am playing SP snow start and my settings are as imaged here. Enemy at medium, drone normal, base attack off. I like PvE survival with a splash of combat and a lot more environment and building. I appreciate there are some who enjoy the combat which is fine and they can choose harder settings if they want but for me its a balance, I dont want too much of it. Is why I switched base attacks off as they were too much. Every time I cored a wreck I would get troops attacking it when I approached it and its just too much to do that all the time every time over and over again. Whenever I go to get any common ore now in this version 1.7.1.1 3639 I am met with drones and then two or more waves of troop transport after shooting the drones, which is a big escalation on previous versions and I think that is OK. But its not just one troop squad and on with the show, which would be about right, its two or more and each threat means you have to stop and wait which is tedious and becomes a blocker to gameplay rather than a natural progression. imho its too much and gets irksome. For medium settings one wave of troops would be about right, two should only be for rarer ores like promethium and gold surely or in Zirax territory. If you set hard then fine have three waves for picking a berry tree but for medium imho this is over the top and I dont enjoy it, its just a chore. I think the balance on the UCH Dart recovery mission is also way over the top with half a dozen of waves of multiple drone and troop which is just bananas. Personally this is making me think again about bothering with the missions. The balance is off, this is not how to make it fun, for me.
OK I have just replayed the UCH Dart recovery mission in a new game with a new seed and it was totally different. The reason for the difficulty I had in the previous game is the Dart spawned right next to a drone base and a Zirax wreck with an operational sentry gun on the roof. After dealing with half a dozen waves of at least three drones defending the drone base and then the troop drops destroying each drone wave caused I found my avatar being killed by "wreckage" on approaching the Dart, in the dark. The Dart was within range of a sentry gun (the gun range extended around the Dart and made it impossible to approach) and the latter killed my avatar several times before I realised it was not a bug when it said killed by wreckage! I took out the gun with snipe and was able to recover the Dart as thankfully the Dart was not in range of the Drone base guns but it was close. Second play through there were no opponents so refuelled the Dart and was straight out. I think maybe the POI placing check for teleport and Dart is not looking for a long enough distance from other installations. You can see the layout in the included screenshot of death by wreckage! lol
Scout, patrols, drones or troops could be a way of setting off base attacks in the future. Only if they discover your base or they detect you, your base or vessel in there zone. This way base attacks wont happen at your base only if you lead them there. Maybe some improvements can be made in future developments.
Loot drops for everything in the game are not worth it. You use more ammo killing a thing than you can get resources off of the corpses. I'm also puzzled why this is balanced this way. I'm rebuilding a custom scenario where I boost all the drops, just getting started though because modding is a bit flakey.
