Comments:
First time I ever played GH. Liberally savescummed in the beginning, then, after modding out my Savin, restricted myself to savescumming to get more missions and to get a better shop inventory (hint: save before you first talk to them, then reload if the inventory sucks. Yay paladin armor.)
The difficulty rises pretty smoothly from 0 to 50, where it spiked. But given that I was very close to buying a Savin (I had 2.5m$), a few more missions allowed be to buy one, which alleviated some of the problems... the Savin can take punishment like a prize boxer.
From then on, it was a pretty smooth ride - I didn't have Mecha Engineering back then, but two weight-reduced reaver railguns. Those are pretty sweet, by which I mean absurdly powerful. Whatever they hit is going to suffer and they combine great range with incredible firepower at the downside of 'only' 15 shots apiece. I think I ran out of ammo ... twice. Both times against one of those flyers with -15 to-hit from speed... until I rammed them.
Midgame, I picked up the coolest, most awesome skill in the entire game: Mecha Engineering.
I love it. Really love it. Careful expenditure of several million $ on Arc Thrusters (One of my merchants, before I took up scumming to refresh their inventory, sold both AJ5 and AJ9 arc thrusters, which were liberally used in the revamping of my Savin.
Thanks to a fat wallet (since I spent a lot of time just grinding missions, because shooting things is fun) I didn't really have problems funding the at times very, very expensive improvement of my Savin (do you know how hard it is to beat a roll difficulty of 30 when installing L9 Overchargers into an already full torso? Very hard. And expensive.)
After I was done modding my Savin (well, the first round, I did more modding later), the combat missions stopped being a challenge. This was not fun.
I did some of the SF0 quests at this time, which brings me to my next point.
The Cayley Mine quest at renown 100 is hard. Really freaking hard. Even with a Heavy Bolter/Rocket Rifle, three spare clips and a Saga Suit I almost died thrice, and my Saga Suit was down to 0 DP on every part but the body and the left leg. Not good in a vacuum area. I hate Exorgs. (Note: The dataslate should only be destroyed if the character's body armor is completely destroyed/greyed out. Breast pocket, whatever. It's annoying to fight your way through 15+ layers of mine praying to the RNG so that the dataslate doesn't go poof)
The Theles Spinner SF0 quest was ... disappointing. I go up, get a quest "Go kill the rebel", then go down, and the Gateman, who never saw anyone come down again, doesn't care. This really should warrant some extra flavor dialogue.
I sided with the rebel, but really, that part needs more fleshing out than just "Join us, attack us or let the quest idle". The top of the tower was an added disappointment - sure, I was decked out in quality gear that cost more than most mecha do, but still. Not enough options to actually RP, just a straight choice and a firefight.
Core Story notes: It started out pretty average ("Go stop that criminal"), but quickly turned into more - my dastardly foe was a criminal, I was the force of order, so far so good. Then, he turns to the Pirates, whom I stop, in turn antagonizing the Red Masks instead of the Crinhas through an (un)fortunate choice in the dialogue.
After that, we fight a few more times, with me always arriving and kicking ass, until it turns to the point of infiltrating a base to retrieve a datachip held by the Rival's stalker/lover type. After retrieving the datachip, she attacks me and in self-defense I kill her, upon which the Rival declares his undying hatred for me and that he will never stop at anything becaue I murdered her in cold blood, never giving me an option to explain.
A
VERY Gundam-ish scene. I loved it.
The Rival went from full-hate to "Obsessive" in the next mission, declaring me to be his soul-foe and that we were destined to kill each other (turns out that in the final battle, his Corraich got shot down in one salvo from me. So much for dying, eh?). Also pretty cool.
The final battle? A total disappointment. It was an even fight, numbers-wise, with the opposite side having a battleship in space.
They got curbstomped. I lost one allied mecha, but due to my custom-tuned Savin (and its clone, the one my LM was riding) the enemy just -died.
Hell, I had been behind the battleship engines sto shoot it from behind when the Rival's lance spawned and they couldn't hit me -_-. 18 Piloting, yes, but still. >>
Notes on general difficulty:
Difficulty scales well from 0 to 40ish Renown, where it rapidly picks up, shortly after 50 it becomes REALLY brutally hard if you haven't lost a mission to that point, but at 60-65 renown mission pay is enough that you can quickly buy the best hardware and just straight up MURDER everything without much in the way of problems.
45-55 renown was the hardest time for me - not enough XP to have good Piloting and Gunnery levels, not enough money to just BUY them from a trainer, and a new wave of difficult enemies.
High levels of renown, however, are pretty easy. You have the best gear, the best pay and your enemy still throws the same crappy force composition at you. Post-70 Renown, the enemy should no longer field BuruBurus. Those are
bad when going up against things that have 16x10 railguns.
Also, really high renown (90+) should give the enemy downright cruel advantages - like skills in the 17 to 19 range, greatly increased budget for their force setup (so they can actually throw seven savins at me, or five corraichs and two gigas) and a prevalence of themed mecha to give them better weapons.
Yes, I know that means the player might LOOT those weapons, but that doesn't mean the next group of elite pirates/rocket stars/whatevers won't have those weapons to shoot you in the face with anyways.
I think I wanted to write something else, but I forgot to post it yesterday and just rediscovered I still had this tab open in firefox. Might edit it in later.
edit 1: More options to gain Pragmatic / changed prequisites for Extropian (science 5/10 OR pragmatic 25)
edit 2:
http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/4796/meinstorygegner.jpg - so very gundam.
