[A13] Tougher base building

[levgre]

http://www.mediafire.com/download/414osmsg5ujhhrd/tougherBaseBuilding.rar

This is a balance mod that makes base building slower and more challenging.  This is done through reducing work speeds, increasing unhappiness, and so on.  Joy activities will have to take up a larger portion of the day to keep colonists happy.

To offset this increased difficulty, combat will be much more infrequent than is normal on extreme difficulty.  Wanderers will join more often, and enemies will be easier to recruit as well (you will need that larger workforce).

This is an example of a base you might expect to have after one year of time (although results can vary greatly)



Instructions: Install mod, choose difficulty. The only differences between difficulties now are happiness, and how fast threats scale up.

Each difficulty beyond basebuilder is -5 happiness, to a max of -20 at Expert. 

The rate at which threats increase (such as raids and random events) now maxes at what was rough difficulty in vanilla.  Here's a table comparison



Threats now scale at equal pace for Cassandra and Phoebe.  However Phoebe has a much larger minimum days between large threats.
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This mod makes use of Bulk Meals v2.4,  with some changes to the professional stove cost, time to build, and longer time to make bulk meals.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=11155.0

Bulk simple meals are 65% the work of individual meals, bulk fine meals are 85%, bulk lavish meals are 95%. Keep in mind fine and lavish meals have a larger base time to make, plus all bulk recipes save the time of transporting ingredients.  So the actual time saved might be 50%, 75%, 85%.

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If you have suggestions for other mods you'd like to see implemented into this mod, feel free to make suggestions!  For many mods I'd have to tweak a few stats before they were fully compatible, for example the cost and time to make of items.


Other modpack makers can include this mod in their modpack


Other modders can make derivative mods based on this mod



Here is a list of most of the changes, although not all.

Meals can be made with any combination of foods, meat is not needed for fine or lavish. However fine meals and lavish meals take more time and more resources to make.  Part of the reason is it's much harder to grow crops, meat might even be easier to gather than plant food.

Joy activities are now much less efficient, won't fill colonist joy meters easily.

Wanderers will join your base much more often, it's a bit less frequent than visiting traders now.

raiders other than sappers should now most likely stage before attack

Walls and Doors all take 15 resources each, most furniture, crafting, floors, etc. require less resources now.  Expanding your base is more expensive, improving it is less expensive. Mostly everything takes longer to make, except art statues and clothing.  Electronic items take much longer to make.  Power production items take more components and a lot more time. Abandoned walls will give you a lot more resources for deconstructing as well.

Wind and solar generator 25% less energy.  Thermal generators, wind, and solar all cost some plasteel now.

Batteries can store 20k energy instead of 1k, and are 30% efficient instead of 50%. Short circuit events have been removed.  The goal is long term energy storage to be viable, and battery breakdowns are enough of a hassle.  Requiring a separate network for each battery is pretty annoying.

Skills level up slower, and levels have a lower impact on reducing work times.

Trading sells prices start at 60%, and go up 2% per social level so can reach 100% for even trading.

Lots of item prices changed to make cheap resources worth more and some expensive items more affordable (lots of basic guns are cheaper now, but not high level guns)

Research is much slower (remember you can use multiple research benches)

Melee and shooting are a bit more inaccurate.  Most weapons have been buffed a bit for damage, although grenades have been nerfed from 40 to 13 damage,  and a bit less range, but the delay for them to explode is a lot shorter.

Training animals takes a lot more work.

Crops grow at half speed, take 4x longer to plant, 2x longer to harvest, and some of them last a lot longer before rotting.

Hauling and Cleaning is no longer "dumb labor", but mining and plant cutting are.

Fog, rain, and snow all have a bigger penalty to move speed and ranged accuracy.

Green thumb is half the happiness.

Traits that affect move speed, work speed, happiness (or unhappiness) are all about half intensity, to make people more stable.

Many negative mood modifiers like disturbed sleep, shared bedroom, eating raw food, etc. have been made weaker.

Art sculptures half the work and resources, 2/3rds the beauty.
Snowmen doubled beauty 4 to 8, half the work

Crash ship parts take much longer to deconstruct.

Standing lamps, comp trade, stoves, and turrets require less power.

Gold is more beautiful (6 to 9, was same as silver).

Deadfall traps are much cheaper to build, although longer to make.

Work Tables and multi-analyzer have 2x the bonus.

Some utility items like batteries, windmills, and Fire Foam Popper are a lot less ugly, either neutral or slightly ugly.

Fueled Smithy and Fueled Oven consume wood at half the rate.

electric smelter power reduced from 700 to 450, heat per tick doubled

Beer and Chocolate joy increased a bit

kibble takes 2x more work, but gives 6x product for same materials. The goal is to make more animals actually worth keeping.  I'm looking for how to change each animals' food consumption but haven't been able to so far, so this is a workaround.

Meal items + milk give more joy, paste hurts joy less

Herbal medicine potency reduced from .75 to .5

Gold beauty increased from 6 to 9

Personal Shields Max energy increased from 1.1 to 1.7

filth and animal filth a bit more work to clean, sand is same amount of work

Wild plant harvest times cut significantly, growth time doubled

Trees take longer to cut down, grow back at 3 times slower.

eating meals is sped up by 30%

Chances to recruit increased by 33%, pirates and other raiders are less resistant to recruiting.

Social skill levels have more impact for social chatting, diplomacy, trading, etc.

damage modifier for shoddy through legendary weapons narrowed (shoddy weapons are stronger than before, legendary weapons are weaker)

Animals self tame much more rarely, more a realism change.

Thrumbos arrive about 50% less, to make them more rare and special.

Solar Flares are less common.

Animals all sped up, you'll need a backup plan other than running away if a herd or predator turns on you.

Cougar speed increased from 6.5 to 9

Wild Boar speed increased from 5 to 6.5

Warg Speed increased from 5 to 8

Yorkshire speed increased from 3.1 to 4

Husky Speed increased from 5.2 to 7

Labrador speed increased from 5 to 6.8

Cat speed increased from 4 to 6

Hare Speed increased from 5.5 to 6.5

chicken speed increased from 2.1 to 4

Pig speed increased from 3.6 to 4.5

cow speed increased to 5.5

Alpaca speed increased to 5

Bear speed increased to 6.7

Muffalo speed increased to 5.5

Iguana speed increased to 4.5

Rhino speed increased to 6.6

Dromedary speed increased to 7.5

Elephant speed increased to 6.5

[pbr7994]

This sounds like a lot if really good changes, though one thing that I'm curious about is, is it even going to be possible to get enough food before your first harvest with all the changes to the farming times?

even bigger drop for melee accuracy (ranges from 10% at level 1 to 70% at level 20)

This is probably my favourite change, it gives a real reason to check the enemies melee skills against your own do you know if you're 12melee y stands a chance

[levgre]

This sounds like a lot if really good changes, though one thing that I'm curious about is, is it even going to be possible to get enough food before your first harvest with all the changes to the farming times?

even bigger drop for melee accuracy (ranges from 10% at level 1 to 70% at level 20)

This is probably my favourite change, it gives a real reason to check the enemies melee skills against your own do you know if you're 12melee y stands a chance

I've actually done relatively little combat so I'm just making ballpark guesses for that. but it seems melee combat hitting all the time isn't necessary. And longer battles could be easier due to letting your guys escape, being able to make decisions, so on. I'll end up seeing if the decreased accuracy is too harsh over a range of tiles.

I think food should be fine, I'm pretty sure I'll increase animal counts.  On more maps the player may need to scrounge for food at first by trading or making nutritional paste. I could also increase amount of foraging plants. 

[viperwasp]

This mod is interesting. But scares the cr@p out of me! lol  What I mean is I'm probably not good enough of a player to be ready for a mod like this. I already find it's sort of slow as it is because I build massive bases for 30+ colonists. My goal is about 34 colonists when I am finally satisfied. That's a long time with your mod but it sounds good. I like the idea of most of those changes but I won't be testing it out for a while. Keep it up!

[pbr7994]

one other thing I noticed, the animals have been made a lot faster...
if the guns are doing vanilla damage then this is going to make hunting a lot more dangerous...
when even a cow can outrun you unless you're putting them down in a few shots then if you anger one, they will almost certainly catch you and then bye bye hunter, I get the feeling that we'd have to micro teams of hunters at a time if we wanted it to be safe :/
the only way I can think to keep this balanced if you want those kinda speeds is to reduce the health of the animals to compensate for their new speed

[levgre]

one other thing I noticed, the animals have been made a lot faster...
if the guns are doing vanilla damage then this is going to make hunting a lot more dangerous...
when even a cow can outrun you unless you're putting them down in a few shots then if you anger one, they will almost certainly catch you and then bye bye hunter, I get the feeling that we'd have to micro teams of hunters at a time if we wanted it to be safe :/
the only way I can think to keep this balanced if you want those kinda speeds is to reduce the health of the animals to compensate for their new speed

I've been testing this a little.  So far I've found that most animals retaliate only very rarely anyways, and the upped damage for weapons can stop a critter in less shots.

But I think it might be fine to have non skilled shooters or shooters with weaker guns needing a backup melee defender for hunting larger stuff.  Will keep an eye on it though.

[levgre]

Done a large amount of balancing so far after play testing several games, reformatted the description here in this thread to make the changes easier to see.

[levgre]

For some reason adding the bulk cooking files, even though bulk cooking worked perfectly fine, stopped chairs from being built.  So those files have been removed and everything appears to be back to normal.

edit: figured out the problem

[axeladalidez]

Hello the mod is awesome and very realistic , thanks for making it!

Also I don't know but seems like it doesn't work with prepare carefully , Am I the only one that has that problem? Also in my debug console there's some errors since I installed this but it seems to work correctly.

Anyways , thanks for the mod!

Also I edited a bit the weatherdef so it can be compatible with darkness revamp.

[levgre]

Hello the mod is awesome and very realistic , thanks for making it!

Also I don't know but seems like it doesn't work with prepare carefully , Am I the only one that has that problem? Also in my debug console there's some errors since I installed this but it seems to work correctly.

Anyways , thanks for the mod!

Also I edited a bit the weatherdef so it can be compatible with darkness revamp.

Glad you enjoy it, still working on making changes to have it more dynamic.  Biggest goal is making more random events .

I can take a look at "Prepare carefully" to see what the problem could be, since I think that is a popular one.

[axeladalidez]

Hello the mod is awesome and very realistic , thanks for making it!

Also I don't know but seems like it doesn't work with prepare carefully , Am I the only one that has that problem? Also in my debug console there's some errors since I installed this but it seems to work correctly.

Anyways , thanks for the mod!

Also I edited a bit the weatherdef so it can be compatible with darkness revamp.

Glad you enjoy it, still working on making changes to have it more dynamic.  Biggest goal is making more random events .

I can take a look at "Prepare carefully" to see what the problem could be, since I think that is a popular one.

I changed the mod order so prepare carefully is the last mod to load and now works fine, so the mods are both compatible with each other , sorry for the inconvenient.