Very needed balance changes (0.19.2009)

Started by BLACK_FR, September 18, 2018, 02:20:52 PM

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BLACK_FR

New wealth and raid system is not very good. Detailed way how it can be abused is described here: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=45664.0.

So here is a list of changes that can make balance very good (cool thing about them that they won't make game of average player harder but it will remove all main weaknesses of previous system):
1. Rework wealth generation. Make ancient ruin floors claimable like ancient ruin walls (it's stupid that you can and should deconstruct them in order to make raids less powerful). Add efficiency to most of the items dependent on the health. Weapons should have less accuracy, food should have less nutrition, art should have less beauty, workshops should have less work speed and so on. For those items where changing efficiency is a bad idea (see erdrik reply below) remove wealth reduction.
The way you can now reduce wealth without any drop in utility of items is ridiculous.
2. Rework minimum wealth threshold. Make it dependent on difficulty. Make it 28k on peaceful, 14k on rough, 0k on merciless or something like that.
3. Make threat multiplier that increases with time! Make an option to choose between raid strength that scales based on wealth and raid strength that scales based on time. You can choose one of them or both (in that case raid strength should be increases by both multipliers). You can change that multiplier for different difficulties (with 1 for lower ones). It should be the case that you can't just chill indefinetly on low wealth levels, you HAVE TO develop your colony.
4. Make an option to add raid strength/wealth with new research. You can count it as 0 on lower difficulties, but on higher difficulties it should be a factor. It's not good that I can basically research ship without making complex base. It should be the case that if I'm progressing with research (which represents progress in the game) I HAVE TO face harder threats and develop my colony accordingly.

Other than that I really want to see rework on cleaning mechanic. It's so annoying that there is a gap between time mess appears and time that you can actually clean that up. Please, please remove that gap, it creates nothing other than frustration.
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me

vzoxz0

Melee skill is one of the easiest skills to train in the game actually. Just force attack dumb animals that aren't prone to attacking back. You get a huge amount of XP for that and can eat the animal after. Melee hunting is quite, quite effective.

BLACK_FR

Quote from: vzoxz0 on September 18, 2018, 03:27:37 PM
Melee skill is one of the easiest skills to train in the game actually. Just force attack dumb animals that aren't prone to attacking back. You get a huge amount of XP for that and can eat the animal after. Melee hunting is quite, quite effective.
All animals are attacking you when you melee attack them. And in those fights you have risk of scars and infection later. But you are right, in b19 you get xp fast that way and scars are not so often and scary as before. Because of that I will remove that suggestion from original post.
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me

vzoxz0

I guess they changed it. Still works when animals are sleeping though, they usually die quick and give a nice XP boost.

BLACK_FR

Quote from: vzoxz0 on September 19, 2018, 10:03:36 AM
I guess they changed it. Still works when animals are sleeping though, they usually die quick and give a nice XP boost.
There is literally no difference if animal is sleeping or not. It respondes same way after first hit. You just have to choose weaker animals when you have little skill. Alpacas or bucks work fine because they leave bruisers that can't get infected or get scarred (instead of scratches).
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me

BLACK_FR

By the way, I'm willing to participate in making game challenging for good players for free. Because I think that it's challenging for average and casual players but it's waaaay too easy for good and hardcore players because of flaws in balance that can be easily fixed (and thosw fixes won't affect average and casual players almost at all).
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me

erdrik

Quote from: BLACK_FR on September 19, 2018, 02:13:08 PM
By the way, I'm willing to participate in making game challenging for good players for free. Because I think that it's challenging for average and casual players but it's waaaay too easy for good and hardcore players because of flaws in balance that can be easily fixed (and thosw fixes won't affect average and casual players almost at all).

Then you want to go to the modding forum.
Free balance changes that cater to your needs and excludes others is exactly the kind of changes that modding is well suited to support.

BLACK_FR

I sadly don't write code, I just have good understanding of how to make good balance. I also understand that those changes are in different structural places and there are quite a few of them. So even if they would be done in mod they would probably conflict with future updates.
Also I think that vanilla should have good balance, so that more people enjoy it.
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me

Kirby23590

While i agree with almost everything in this post.

I don't know about decreasing weapon accuracy. I don't want everyone in my colony or even my allies or even my enemies in the game to act like stormtroopers from starwars or XCOM rookies or even start shooting like they can't hit a broadside of the barn like an muffalo on front of them with an shotgun.

Why not instead make shooting or melee hard to train to gain another level?

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BLACK_FR

#9
Quote from: Kirby23590 on September 20, 2018, 12:41:24 AM
Why not instead make shooting or melee hard to train to gain another level?

Why not just make or buy or choose not damaged weapons? There will be a reason to make weapons yourself (now I never make advanced weapons and just take them from raiders).
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me

erdrik

#10
Quote from: BLACK_FR on September 19, 2018, 10:28:47 PM
...
Also I think that vanilla should have good balance, so that more people enjoy it.
What you think is good balance is not what others think is good balance.
You will not end up just making it so more people enjoy it.
You will end up making it so more people enjoy it in exchange of more people hating it.

For example:
I disagree with 1.

  • Floors originally did not have wealth. It led to spamming gold floors.
  • Deconstructing ancient ruin floors is not stupid. It is no more ridiculous than finding still usable "compacted steel" in mountains.
  • While I would like to see more items get reduced item efficiency as they are damaged, it should not be added to every item. An organ's health is an abstraction of the box it is in, so it's reduction in health should not effect the organ's efficiency. A light stand's health should not effect it's light range or intensity, since most of the light stand is the stand and not the light bulb. (damaging a light fixture very much has a binary affect on it's ability to produce light) The same for conduits, and most other appliances that deal with electricity.

Frankly, I trust Tynan's sense of balance way more than yours.

BLACK_FR

#11
Man I wrote complete guide to how beat merciless naked brutality with no risk with 1 pawn with no micro-managing. I pointed out to weakness in balance which can reduce ALL big threats to laughable degree. You don't have to trust anybody, you can just check this to understand that current balance is bad for good players.
Also my suggestions are careful enough to not affect average people, only make game of good people more interesting.

To your example. I think that solution to floors is to make ancient ruin floors claimable like ancient ruin walls.
Deconstructing ancient ruin floors for resources is not stupid. Deconstructing them so you can get rif of resources to make raids smaller IS stupid.
I agree that some items should retain their efficiency independent of their health. But those item should retain their value/wealth as well. That would be even better system that I proposed (and better than current system).

Overall my idea is to fix wealth exploits and add some challenge to hardest diffuculty. If you can play merciless with same engagement as peaceful difficulty - than balance is in need of improving. Spamming gold floor was an exploit. You don't need to trust anyone to see that. So with other proposals - you don't need to trust Tynan or me to see if they are good. It's not rocket science, just check them yourself (your idea of retaining efficiency for some items works very well with my idea to retain wealth for those items).
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me

vzoxz0

QuoteI sadly don't write code, I just have good understanding of how to make good balance. I also understand that those changes are in different structural places and there are quite a few of them. So even if they would be done in mod they would probably conflict with future updates.
Also I think that vanilla should have good balance, so that more people enjoy it.

Just learn it then? It's not hard.

erdrik

Quote from: BLACK_FR on September 20, 2018, 11:53:20 AM
... I wrote complete guide to how beat merciless naked brutality...
Beating the hardest difficulty or identifying exploits, does not make someone good at balance.
It helps, but it is not what makes someone good at balancing.

Also, I have heard this argument for decades. The idea that being a top tier player makes that player good at balancing the game for the lower difficulty levels is BS. You think you can account for the "average" player but the very fact that identifying those exploits and playing merciless naked brutality as if it were "laughable", is what ensures you don't know how to balance around the average player.

Not every player reads guides. Not every player is observant enough to identify exploits(or even when they should be used). Not every player knows how to beat the "Rough" difficulty, let alone merciless naked brutality. Even more so merciless naked brutality "with no risk with 1 pawn with no micro-managing".

Quote from: BLACK_FR on September 20, 2018, 11:53:20 AM
...
To your example. I think that solution to floors is to make ancient ruin floors claimable like ancient ruin walls.
...
I see you edited you OP to reflect this.
Before the edit, and to which I was responding, it simply stated "wealth should be removed from floors".
Also, your solution is not a balance fix. It is a mechanic fix.

AFAIK, The only reason Tynan has not implemented claimable floors, is because floors count as terrain and mechanically terrain can't be claimed. Changing that is going to require either a complete rewrite of floors to be a different class than terrain(which means also rewriting how literally everything else in the code reacts to the new floor class), or a complete rewrite of terrain(which require rewriting how literally everything else reacts to claimable terrain, and ensuring there isn't another avenue for exploits as a result).

Im not saying I don't want to see claimable floors.
Just that the change is not a balance change it is a mechanical change. And the change would require significant dev time to implement.

BLACK_FR

I provided those details only as a reply to your statement of your lack of trust. You are right that you can be good at game and bad in balance (but at least you can identify exploits). That's why my main argument is that you can (and should) asses details of proposed changes  independently of any other points. And make assesments based on their merits and not based on your trust or distrust to the author.

I can imagine how average player is playing, but may be I'm not best in it because of my mindset. But that's easily solvable problem (if it even exists which I have no evidence for yet).

With regard to examples. In me post before editing there was suggestion that "wealth should be removed from floors OR floors should become claimable". After your point about gold floors I decided that second option is strictly better and deleted first one. It's not like second option wasn't there before editing.
I don't understand difference between balance fix and mechanic fix, it's same to me.

Also I don't understand why you think that making floors claimable will require significant dev time to implement. I don't know how excatly it's working now but I imagine that there are different terrain classes with different properties. You just add property "claim" to that like you added property "wealth" before. It's no big deal.
You say that mechanically adding this property is hard. On what information you base that statement?

Also are you satisfied with my correction on link between health and value of the item?
Guide to mastery of the game - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=46290
If you have idea how make merciless naked brutality run more challenging and fun - tell me