mechanoids way to OP and more and more OP in every single patch?

[Goo Poni]

Interesting, thanks for the info. I'll have to review the poison ship balance. It may be too hard - or it may be ok. You are on Randy Extreme. Not really supposed to be that survivable.

While we're at it, please give Poison Ship some visual indication. When it crashed, I thought it was bugged because it didn't seem to do anything. I thought it was some broken alpha feature. Then it came later in the game, and one part crashed in my courtyard. I knew there would be more mechanoids this time, so I built IED traps around it and peppered the area with shells. Soon my crops started dying before fully maturing.
But my point is, it felt very stealthy. I didn't see any indication that ground is poisoned or that it reached my hothouse. Unlike with toxic fallout, the ground looks the same. I watched colonist health for any sight of fallout-like sickness, too. Some visual effect would be very nice, or maybe status effect on plants.

Don't they create snow around them? I thought they created snow around them, though I may just be insane.

I recall the psyker parts emanating snow but having not played A12, I can't confirm poison parts doing the same. I imagine they would still do that, assuming Tynan used the psyker part as a base and repurposed parts of it. It's easy enough to test with debug, just call down a poison part.


As for OP, if you're six months into the game, surely you have some type of stone on hand. You're also playing Randy Random on Extreme. There CAN and inevitably WILL be times when Randy dicks you over and having the game on Extreme is what, 150-200% allowance to enemy spawning? At this stage, on a normal game, it should have been a maximum of 3 Scythers, or maybe a Centipede and a Scyther, if even that.

if it's out in the open you're probably buggered.

Hey Tynan, if you're still reading this mess of a thread, Mechanoids already disregard cover, why not adjust them so they actively seek to fight on open terrain with Centipedes working to sap bases so that they and Scythers can maintain their advantages of fire weapons and charge lances. We shall hear the lamentations of the colony's women yet! But seriously, Mechanoids are sometimes millenia old fighting machines that haven't learned from the garbled transmissions of destroyed units that CQC is a silly idea. That, or introduce a Scyther variant with Shredders fitted to double up on close range power with spiked bodies and shotguns. And a Centipede with a flamer instead of a flamethrower.

[Veneke]

anyways, in alpha 11 i had 20 normal raids before i got an evil ship (now called psychic ship), so i could be a bit more prepared. in alpha 12 i had (3rd savegame right now) a whopping sum of 5 human raids before i got 3 poison ships and a psychic ship. within the first year.

I actually had pretty much this same experience minus the AI ship (on Cassandra Challenge). I thought I was doing pretty weapon-wise before it happened. It was only a few months (6 I think?) in and I had 3 normal-to-good survival rifles, a brawler with a good longsword, and a paramedic (who had nothing). I had no grenades, shields or heavy weapons, except an incendiary launcher but I don't think that counts. I managed the first poison ship part eventually but it took quite a bit of save-scumming and I still lost a guy. I just did the collapsing roof trick to get rid of the other two after that. There's only so much save-scumming a man can take!

There are different kinds of mechanoids and not all of them are present all the time. Usually there is a hole in their composition, something you can exploit.

I think if there is a problem with mechanoids, then this is it. Every other threat in the game can be handled basically the same way - grab a gun, take up position behind some cover, shoot things until the enemy retreats. You start shooting at mechanoids from behind some rocks and something (probably a scyther) is going to hit you - and when it hits you the odds are good that your colonist will go down or lose a limb, assuming he's not killed outright. This isn't helped by the fact that mechanoids never retreat and (from what I've seen) are rarely downed.

In my experience you've basically got three options when it comes to mechanoids:
- Cheese - like the collapsing roof trick.
- Killbox - which is less cheesy now that sappers are a thing. Mechanoids can't tunnel though, so still kinda cheesy.
- Micromanage the fight in the open, probably with the EMP grenades and shield as you've mentioned Borsuk.

There are probably other options, but typically speaking I've not managed to get anything but the above three to very well/consistently (IEDs around the ship part, mortars, call in help from other factions, rockets are all just a bit of a crapshoot).

The one area where mechanoids are definitely OP is if they drop in right on top of you and you have a colony in the open. No cheese option, they've probably bypassed your killbox, and micromanaging the fight in that situation where your colonists are likely scattered all to hell is going to be iffy at best. In my experience it's basically a game-over event. Even if you win the odds are you'll have taken casualties and a good portion of your base is probably heavily damaged if not destroyed, and then there's player fatigue. It's happened to me once or twice where I got to this point, finally managed to beat the mechanoids off, and then wondered why I don't restart and just tunnel into a mountain.

Thinking about it though, that might be a problem with open colonies rather than mechanoids.

[b0rsuk]

Don't use rocks as cover if you can help it. They only offer something like 50% cover.  Sandbags are 60ish, walls the best at 75%. If you have to face them in the open, build walls.

I haven't actually built a proper mountain colony yet. So all my feedback is based on open colonies.

If there's a problem with mechanoids, it might be that they have too many resistances. They don't sleep, eat, bleed, or have morale. Their only weakness is EMP and shields. They are also utterly destroyed by warg police. They remind me of undead/demons in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, who also are immune to half the things in the game, making late game limited and monotonous. Maybe they could at least briefly short-circuit in the rain or snow ? For a few seconds.

Still, a charge lance has a warm-up of 2s plus cooldown of 2.8s. Several weapons, including pump shotgun, pistol, and charge rifle. That means if you have some hard cover (walls) you can take pot shots without risk of retaliation.

[christhekiller]

Don't use rocks as cover if you can help it. They only offer something like 50% cover.  Sandbags are 60ish, walls the best at 75%. If you have to face them in the open, build walls.

I haven't actually built a proper mountain colony yet. So all my feedback is based on open colonies.

If there's a problem with mechanoids, it might be that they have too many resistances. They don't sleep, eat, bleed, or have morale. Their only weakness is EMP and shields. They are also utterly destroyed by warg police. They remind me of undead/demons in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, who also are immune to half the things in the game, making late game limited and monotonous.

Still, a charge lance has a warm-up of 2s plus cooldown of 2.8s. Several weapons, including pump shotgun, pistol, and charge rifle. That means if you have some hard cover (walls) you can take pot shots without risk of retaliation.

I do believe rock walls (the bits you mine into) offer the same cover as walls, or in the same ball park at the very least. The crashed ship part itself also provides some good cover. And if you're really hurting for cover I do believe (but don't quote me on this) that trees provide some very very very minimal cover. This is really just going off the fact that I see raiders take cover behind trees all the dang time.

But yeah, my general strategy is EMP the big guys, or as many as you can at once, focus take down Scythers (with all your guns trained on the Scythers they should go down reasonably quickly. Then just pick off the Centipede while they sit their relatively helpless.

[Veneke]

Still, a charge lance has a warm-up of 2s plus cooldown of 2.8s. Several weapons, including pump shotgun, pistol, and charge rifle. That means if you have some hard cover (walls) you can take pot shots without risk of retaliation.

This is precisely the problem, as I mentioned above. Mechanoids require a huge amount of micromanagement in comparison to dealing with other threats. That makes them an absolute pain, especially if you don't have any advanced equipment, or don't know the various cheesy tricks (roof collapses, killboxes, this pop-in/pop-out cover thing) to deal with them. Simply setting up behind cover and shooting isn't enough with them. My money is that it's this switch in how to approach combat that makes them a major source of frustration.

Arguably, however, they should be this awkward and powerful. They're the end-game threat. So perhaps it might be better to leave the mechanoids as-is but push them into year 2+ event, and introduce some specifically anti-mechanoid gear. EMP IEDs, for example, would be a less awkward option than EMP grenades. Some anti-mechanoid rocket launchers or heavy rifles maybe? I don't know. I do know though that the current situation has this huge jump in difficulty from dealing with pirates/tribespeople/animals to dealing with mechanoids that is only possibly resolved by how willing the player is to micromanage and/or cheese his way to victory.

Unless the purpose of mechanoids is that you're meant to fall to them eventually? In that case they serve their purpose well enough, and they're designed to be OP. Which would be an interesting concept.

[akiceabear]

Unless the purpose of mechanoids is that you're meant to fall to them eventually? In that case they serve their purpose well enough, and they're designed to be OP. Which would be an interesting concept.

I think this is spot on. The game design at higher difficulties doesn't really encourage long plays - more like get the hell off this rock ASAP. That of course differs significantly with most players' colony goals, which essentially is to build an immortal city. The two naturally clash...

[Goo Poni]

EMP IEDs, for example, would be a less awkward option than EMP grenades. Some anti-mechanoid rocket launchers or heavy rifles maybe? I don't know.

Having some sort of anti-materiel rifle could be good. Though I am biased, I prefer permanent options to one-time use options because permanent options are obviously always there, one-time uses have a stock and I suffer from "too good to use" syndrome. The only issue is that such a rifle is gonna be pretty meaty. Either it should be an accurate manned turret or an unwieldy weapon that takes time to set up and aim (this could be readily emulating with weapon warm-up and cooldown time which is already in-game and only mechanoid weapons really make use of it (Scythers taking 2 seconds to aim and cooldown after shots)). But what stops players just outfitting the colony with anti-materiel rifles? High cost to inflate wealth would just encourage the use of killboxes to combat the larger raids. I don't know if it's a thing yet, but I was thinking maybe describe such rifles as being without a scope despite their obviously long ranged use which, coupled with their bulkiness and clumsiness, means they're still reapers against large targets like Centipedes, Thrumbos (Thrumboes?) or Muffalo and should hit nearly every time against such things, but are notably worse than just using a sniper rifle against people-sized targets and "why are you even bothering?" levels of bad against boomrats and similarly small creatures. That could be enforced with a multiplier against body sizes so that the size of the target is much more relevant for these cumbersome weapons.

Alternatively, just go the Torgue route and use more explosions. Explosions fix everything.

[FMJ Penguin]

Couple more difficulty levels?

More brutal sounding difficulty levels so folks feel bad ass even if they do ok on "normal and challenge" difficulty lolz.... Seriously don't forget to stroke your players egos

Imo 99% of us shouldn't even be giving the last difficulty a second look when looking for an actual challenge. Supposed to be for masochists who like to loose and can't get any challenge any other way aint it?

Maybe we've all just played the game to much and have accidentally turned into the hardcore crowd without  knowing it? Now we're the worst ones to listen to for game balancing advice haha.

Yall will prolly laugh but I think we need more mechs and enemy  types ..... yep even more enemies that would help ease the difficulty jumps when playing Cass and Phoebe specifically. If you don't like mechs and all you play is Randy Random..... seriously think about that argument for a second.

As long as the enemies all have viable counters then they shouldn't be imbalanced unless of course you decide that balancing the game around Randy RANDOM is somehow a good idea. 

[Veneke]

Yall will prolly laugh but I think we need more mechs and enemy  types

Yeah, more enemy types would be a welcome sight, especially if they can fill in that gap between tribals/pirates and mechanoids. What I've found is that the first few mechanoid events/raids are pretty hairy, and it's only when I've worked my way through some of these that I can finally get sufficiently good gear to combat them. A more gradual progression, and appropriate loot drops, would help things. Perhaps bionic-augmented humans, or a rogue military unit assaulting you with people fully kitted out in power armour? Something entirely new? There are lots of options here that can help bridge that gap.

Of course, this is all on the assumption that mechanoids are not designed to be OP. If they are then this kind of gradual build-up actively works against their intended function, which would be bad.

[blackrosezia]

So yeah, Mechanoids are a bit of a jump. I can see how playing on Randy and you get mechanoids would be annoying, and you'd have to try and deal, because that's how it's supposed to be. Random. But I just lost a colony in the summer of year 2, on Phoebe/basebuilder to three poison drop pods. After just barely managing to survive a winter with little food in a boreal forest, and nothing but a couple raids of 1-2 guys with shivs. Suddenly, 3 pods, with a centipede and scyther each... it was a bit much. And one of the pods landed right smack dab in the middle of my fields, I had 4 turrets around it, so I tried having them shoot it. One centepede with a chain gun later, and all 4 turrets were dead, most of my livestock, and the geothermal plant I had just managed to build was toasted.

While I'm not sure people should complain about such things if they go for the more challenging modes, especially not with the random storyteller, and I could see Cassandra slowly building up to something like this... on Phoebe however, when I'm trying to figure out the new animal things... It was sudden, and felt very unbalanced.

[b0rsuk]

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of *damaged* mechanoids short-circuiting in the rain and snow. They are not /that/ stupid not to protect themselves from rain, but when they have holes blown in them they become vulnerable.

I don't want to see any introductory mechanoid, especially not cyborgs that are pretty much humans. Keep mechanoids hard and unique. What they're missing for sure is a mechanoid that is vulnerable in melee.

[FMJ Penguin]

The damaged idea would be kinda cool. Just thought of something else while reading the last couple posts....,

Most of the time the toughest enemies are found by going after them and exploring or found on your own time in nearly every game(actually can't even think of one where the player doesn't have to take some kind of action to run into the toughest baddies). Well I guess that doesn't happen here. Everything just rolls your way regardless.... prolly be different if we had to go looking for the big nasty kinda troubles.  Dunno, that may get old too. Just throwing stuff out there I guess haha

Also, I've never tried Phoebe. Is there much difference between her and Cass?

[FMJ Penguin]

Yet another idea although it should prolly go in a diff forum haha.

Coms traffic watch. Leave a pawn actively sitting at coms "listening" and they have a chance to intercept incoming raider chatter and mech ships(justify it however). Maybe some forewarning would be enough to ease the difficulty spikes? "Eye captain, I hear raider chatter approx. eta 5 minutes give or take". "Eye Scotty, stfu and get off the coms we need to get ready".  I'm not a treky freak I swear   

[mumblemumble]

Honestly fixing the "shots through walls"  glitch would make them much more tolerable. This glitch makes fire fights SUBSTANTIALLY more difficult.

[b0rsuk]

Yet another idea although it should prolly go in a diff forum haha.

Coms traffic watch. Leave a pawn actively sitting at coms "listening" and they have a chance to intercept incoming raider chatter and mech ships(justify it however). Maybe some forewarning would be enough to ease the difficulty spikes? "Eye captain, I hear raider chatter approx. eta 5 minutes give or take". "Eye Scotty, stfu and get off the coms we need to get ready".  I'm not a treky freak I swear   

Great idea!

Someone also suggested researchers predicting eclipses and solar flares.

In absence of fog of war, maybe animals with good tracking skill could sense incoming enemies ? You know, like your dogs or squirrels are lurking in the area and warn you ?