Messages

The storyteller description is incorrect.  There is no time element.  There used to be a "long term rampup" which sort of but not really was time based, although that got switched into adaptation which is a little more reactive.  But even the old system was multiplied onto wealth.

How about we just have the old old OLD system: you got "leather" and that's it.

I think it'd be nice if besides extreme balance, which I think is probably almost done, there was a bit of work on convenience.

For instance, there is just no way to clean a big fort in vanilla (see screenshot), which means making the home zone only the inside which leads to all sorts of annoyances.  Maybe a rework of home zone duties or miscellaneous robots mod integration after multianalyzer research could have a look into.

In any case I'm sure home zone wasn't intended to look like the second screenshot, but this is just what you do in vanilla.

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Well, keep in mind he also said it's not like he's going to make large changes here this late in the game.
So any changes are probably going to be in mod form, and usually mods just buff things rather than seeking a good balance

They actually do have a goal, it's just it's not noticeable under most circumstances.  If you see an unstoppable sapper raid you can actually "bribe" them by just leaving a bunch of goodies in their path and they'll leave with it.  If pirates have a colonist in close range that they can kidnap, they'll switch to kidnapping mode.

It's just that most players want to defend their stuff and their colonists to the death.  And on an extreme biome that can make sense.

Mechanoids on the other hand... they just want to kill you.

I don't think it's going to change in vanilla.  Just to much history to it I guess.  But my idea is just time based raid sizes, no wealth/adaptation/etc, and I've started working on a mod that included that and other things to come.

It sounds punishing, but the reasoning is pretty simple: if you look at all the raid points graphs for people's games, unless they're doing something weird, they all pretty much follow the exact same curve at the same time.  Making it time based only removes odd restrictions people place on themselves, like never prettying up their fort, or not using combat animals or whatever because maybe the "right raid point multiplier" wasn't put on them.

It might need some tweaking.  Biomes probably need a multiplier on points, and there might need to be a hard cap based on # of pawns*difficulty for people liking that solo experience or whatever.

Well the only alternative really is removal of chemical fascination/interest, and this adds at least a fun way to just experiment with drugs.  Just buffing drug effects while keeping tolerance still makes them a dead pawn after a very short while.

It's not realistic, but neither are half the traits.

Well geeze... HAPPY BIRTHDAY DUDE!

Edit: drop at edge is still a bit iffy for small maps:


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I think the issue is that for animals to be worth it they'd have to give unrealistic meat/leather/wool values (e.g. chickens giving twice the nutrition they eat as opposed to ~30%, which makes no sense).  In the real world, manhunting giant space sloths don't deliver steak, so using real values gives odd results.

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Sea Ice
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): ~900 (last update was actually ~840)
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~10
Complete mod list: None

Only one more year of Sea Ice.  I think it's fair to say at this point, the map is basically conquered: in the last 2 years and with giving no care to raid size, no cannons were lost despite drop pods, nobody died except one guy I wanted to die, and I've got 12k steel, 1k uranium, 1k plasteel, 6k raid points, and multiple orbital strike targeters to handle extreme edge cases.  It took 15 years to get to this point, so I think it's fine that the player reaches a cozy end game at some point.  Graphs and upper/lower fort below.  I'll play this out some more just to see what happens when I start spamming gold statues and goofing around.  In any case, summing thoughts:

-I've said all I have to say about the raid formula.  Suffice to say there's ways I could even more severely game it that I haven't shown so that it would be easy to beat merciless if it's raid factor was 5 and not 2.2, but there's just no point in discussing it, as ultimately people who play "that kind of game" are just going to mod it if nothing is done about it.  I just find it odd that so much care and attention is spent nerfing and buffing various things when metagaming raids trumps everything.

-LRMS is very unreliable when you have only one of them and very powerful when you have more than one.  I noticed bulk trader ships cut their steel in half and this did not slow me down the slightest later on.  I would never start using it outside of sea ice now that I've done like 50 lumps, but it's an effective way to have infinite metals on other maps eventually.  Which is good.  But maybe there should be some sort of failsafe so the player doesn't go over a year with no lumps.

-Sniper turrets are surprisingly costly when you use a lot of them, I think this is because they seem to use the full 40 uranium to reload any time.  I ended up having to turn them off in the back whenever raids were weak, and mostly just turning them on to crush centipides.  Feels fine, though, they allow for a killbox limited only by economy and not size.

-Animals and EMP IEDs are extremely effective during drop pod attacks.  You can simply spam EMP IED traps everywhere in your base at a certain point in the late game and you can nullify about half of those attacks, and the ones you can't you can simply selectively release only a few sacrificial doggies to distract while keeping the rest alive.  I don't think this needs to be changed, drop pods need some sort of counter.

-Stone is crazily abundant thanks to trade ships on maps where it shouldn't be.  Once I could buy bulk traders out, I was getting like 5k stone per year.  Needless to say, you can see how I'm finishing up by expanding crazily, building a better killtrap, and just completely surrounding my turrets in traps all in the span of one year.

-Bigger and more expansive walls just make things very easy, particularly rings of walls, to the point where only drop pods, ships, and overwhelming raids were a threat.  Once you can mortar everything to death, that's the go to strategy.  As mentioned earlier, this might make sea ice the easiest "post end-game" map due to the movement speed.  There's no easy solution to this since removing area of effect attacks makes raid undoable after a certain point.  The only "real" solution requires dev time, and it's adding "bigger bads" that count for 2k+ raid points rather than bigger clumps.

-I never realized just how much I hate infestations till I found a map that cannot ever spawn them

-As many players better than I have echoed, it just makes no sense to put your pawns in any real danger since there's so many ways you don't need to, and high end power armor is the only real protection.  Mostly, I was using charge lances to outrange while using decoys, emps, turrets and traps to make sure I was never really shot at.  I guess it's essentially door peeking in drag only you can't retreat and lose everything if you screw up.  Eventually I planned to gear up everyone in inspired power armor and just nuke everything to pieces with miniguns, but I've yet to get to that point.

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Lighting might affect shooting accuracy, but definitely not due to color.

In any case, you're asking a ton of quickee questions, you might want to check out the discord.  I'm sure nobody minds, but that's a better way to get lots of quick answers that don't require lots of discussion.

These two traits have been changed a few times slightly and remain in the bottom 2 or 3 traits, usually resulting in people just banishing/killing/etc these guys.

I think a neat way to balance this would be to turn it around into an awkward buff similar to transhumanism.

Example:

Chemical interest
-Caps all drug tolerance at 30
-Mood debuff if not addicted to a drug
-Mood buff if addicted to at least 2 substances

Chemical fascination
-Removes all drug tolerance and long term side effects
-Mood debuff whenever not high.
-Very large debuff (-40) if not addicted to at least 2 substances (flake/yayo can offset this until they get the addictions)

Edit: blugh.  That would make raiders go insane.  Maybe just start with them addicted to 2 drugs as well in pawn creation.

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Savage
Biome/hilliness: Temperate forest/mountainous
Commitment mode: Nope
Current colony age (days):  305
Hours played in the last 2 days: 8
Complete mod list: Progress renderer


Is there something going on with the number of resources mined by drill? Like with the chemfuel a few builds ago? I'm getting a ridiculously low amount of uranium and plasteel. It already killed my uranium supplies. If that's intended, it's too little to maintain uranium slugs. I already invested research into the tech, materials into the scanner and drills, spending time drilling, fighting the occasional infestations (which also consumes the durability of the turrets), and presumably getting stronger events for possessing the resources  I don't feel like this amount it's worth all of that.

Edit: Oh, do I have to start a new game too? I think I started this game after chemfuel became unobtainable by deep drill.

Nah this was changed in the defs to those amounts.  I'm guessing it was in response to bbq's gigantic uranium piles and xeonovadan suggesting plasteel still felt abundant.  Which might even be correct for people with extreme levels of experience.  But that looks way too harsh for a normal player.

And that's the point where the topic switched away from spears, up to shields.

But, back to spears, I don't think it makes sense to give spears a higher range. Not because it's not cool(it is), but because it would be too difficult to implement in question of balancing and such.

I see the characteristics of a spear in stopping power. Horses know best, there's no joke in a spear to slow you down.
I dunno if melee weapons have a stopping value like ranged weapons do, but I would switch them as giving spears a high chance, clubs and ikwa medium, and  sword a low chance for stopping.

This would turn the spear more into a crowd control weapon, whilst swords stay high dps. Maybe the ikwa could become the high penetration weapon to make them anti-armor as their speciality.

There's also the point of why would you use a melee weapon as ranged when you have guns.  Cases where you'd want to use a spear, e.g. behind sword dudes, you're better off with a charge rifle or lowly heavy smg/shotgun

I honestly like the pre-nerf version of spears really, as a great counter to mechs.  Just you know, not QUITE so horrible overpowered.

One thing that can happen is if you double click on a growing zone it can sometimes select all the growing zones.  Then when you check a new crop, it will replace it with the new one and your pawns will cut down all existing crops and make it that new one.