[A16] Balance Feedback: Quality System

[Granitecosmos]

Quality Scaling

So let's talk about the quality system and just how flawed it is. No, I'm not talking about high level crafters making shoddy things. That's RNG and I can live with it. This post is more about high-quality items being detrimental to the players.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, high quality things are bad for your health! Why, you may ask? First of all, the market price scaling. It works like this:

• Awful: 40%
• Shoddy: 60%
• Poor: 80%
• Normal: 100%
• Good: 120%
• Superior: 150%
• Excellent: 200%
• Masterwork: 300%
• Legendary: 600%

Wow, legendary increases the item value by SIX TIMES! Surely it must have awesome stats to compensate, right? Right?

Well, not so much. Here are the ranged accuracy modifiers for quality levels:

• Awful: 70%
• Shoddy: 80%
• Poor: 90%
• Normal: 100%
• Good: 105%
• Superior: 110%
• Excellent: 120%
• Masterwork: 135%
• Legendary: 150%

So legendary guns have 50% more acuracy for 600% more value. This has some interesting results, let me explain.

So let's say that we have 3 colonists. We can choose to outfit them with either normal or legendary charge rifles. A normal charge rifle has a value of 945, a legendray one is 5670. People might not know but every colonist has an internal value of 3700, regardless of health status.
Now comes the fun part. A normal charge rifle has X DPS. A legendary one therefore has 1.5X DPS. So if we give our 3 colonists normal ones we end up with a total of 3X DPS for a market value of 13935. Now let's try to reach the same DPS but with legendary charge rifles! That means 2 colonists with said legendaries, giving us 3x DPS for a price of... 18740.
Now that might not sound like such a deal breaker, after all, one does not simply get more colonists in RimWorld. However... Consider that every raid is based on the total market value of your colony. That extra 4805 value means the raids you receive will be bigger. And this is just for two colonists, and we haven't even considered the apparel!

It is clear that these small amounts add up over time, with each and every new colonist, creating a pretty unnecessary extra difficulty curfe that actually punishes the player for acquiring rare, high quality gear! So the higher you go in the quality system, the more you shoot yourself in the foot! Surely an intended behaviour, right?

If you think this is just for the guns, oh boy, are you wrong! Basically everything has horrible stat scaling compared to the value scaling. Except one, and that's the beauty stat.

Here are the melee weapon damage modifiers:

• Awful: 40%
• Shoddy: 70%
• Poor: 85%
• Normal: 100%
• Good: 110%
• Superior: 120%
• Excellent: 135%
• Masterwork: 145%
• Legendary: 155%

And here are the armour multipliers:

• Awful: 70%
• Shoddy: 80%
• Poor: 90%
• Normal: 100%
• Good: 110%
• Superior: 130%
• Excellent: 150%
• Masterwork: 170%
• Legendary: 210%

A bit better, yes, but still way below the desired values.

But dude, quality also affects deterioration and insulation so it's okay!
Nope. Insulation is increased by a pitiful 5% per quality level. Quality has minimal effect on wear damage and letting items deteriorate is considered an error on the player's behalf. Nobody will leave their charge rifles outside in the rain because they know it deteriorates. But even then, guess what! Good armour ABSORBS damage so it doesn't really matter, it will get damaged eventually anyway!

For melee damage this is very wonky. Melee has low damage values for those 10-20% differences and the game rounds the values. This results in some very strange things, like X quality giving way more bang for your buck or Y quality not delivering that extra performance you expected.
Example:
A steel good longsword has a damage of 17x1.1=18.7, the game rounds it up. You end up with 19 damage.
A steel superior longsword has a damage of 17x1.2=20.4, the game rounds it down. You end up with 20 damage.
So the diference between good and superior is just one damage, while the difference between normal and good is two!

Going back to accuracy for a bit; did you know that accuracy caps at 100%? Of course it does, silly! - You might say. But here's the catch: some guns' accuracy caps at 100% before they reach legendary.
An excellent survival rifle's accuracy stats: 90%/100%/100%/100% (short, close, mid, long)
A legendary survival rifle's accuracy stats: 100%/100%/100%/100% (short, close, mid, long)
So basically the only difference between excellent and legendary in this case is legendary having 3 times more market value.

Hell, it won't even matter if that legendary survival rifle got a bit damaged, it would still have maxed out accuracy stats... Which brings us to the next problem.

Weapon Trashing

This section is the product of XeoNovaDan and myself. I knew about the whole quality problems and when I shared this knowledge with fellow RimWorlders on a certain discord channel, Xeo came up with the idea of trashing weapons for even better value-to-stat ratios. Tests were made and the situation escalated quickly, to the point of ridiculous finding. This is what we uncovered:

Have you noticed how items at low health have almost no market value, yet they retain most of their stats?

A legendary steel gladius at 100% health has a value of 840 and does 19 damage.
A normal steel gladius at 100% health has a value of 140 and does 12 damage.

Now compare these:
A legendary steel gladius at 50% health has a value of 75 and does 15 damage.
A superior steel gladius at 100% health has a value of 210 and does 14 damage.

Or these:
A normal survival rifle has a value of 285 and 75%/96%/96%/90% accuracy values.
A legendary survival rifle at 40% health has a value of 16.98 and 81%/100%/100%/97% accuracy values.

That's right, since the higher quality weapons are raider magnets and don't pay for their values, might as well trash them and get high stats for the fraction of the market value it would normally take!

Just look at this table, the offender quality levels for weapon trashing are the problem levels that start to scale ridiculously regarding market value:


But dude, how can you damage your guns in a controllable way outside of devmode?
Molotovs, molotovs and molotovs. Did I mention molotovs? Anything that causes burning will work, though. Hell, you can even throw a frag on the weapon for 40 damage!

Miniguns, as well as any gun that has forced miss radii, are another big offenders. Their accuracy stats are basically ignored, which means an awful minigun at 1% health is as effective as a legendary minigun at 100% health. Do mind that rocket launchers have high value as well as forced miss radii, so make sure you leave them outside your base for some deterioration! Weapon trashing, the new meta!

The reason this works is because the items are coded in a way so they lose market value rapidly when getting damaged after a certain point instead of a linear change. This results in 4% total market value for 30% health items; their other stats, however, remain at 72% at 30% health.

The Solution

The whole problem lies in the market value scaling. It's ridiculously high, you can't balance stats for such scaling unless you want legendary knifes to become one-hit-kill weapons. This also affects basically every stat that scales with quality except beauty.

So... How could this be fixed?

First of all, make the quality price scaling linear. I've made a mod for this myself and it works rather well, using these numbers above normal:

• Good: 110%
• Superior: 120%
• Excellent: 130%
• Masterwork: 140%
• Legendary: 150%

This makes most guns retain their normal value-to-stat ratios, while a high quality armour and melee weapon is outright better. This is how it should be, rewarding players for high quality gear instead of punishing them for it.

However, this doesn't solve the melee damage rounding and ranged weapon accuracy cap problems. But those aren't that hard to solve after all!
For melee, shift multiplier from bonus damage to decreased cooldown. No more one-punch-man plasteel longsword shock troopers but no sudden jumps between quality levels either.
For ranged, something similar; halve the bonus for accuracy and put the rest on decreasing cooldown. Warmup time unchanged so the main balance switch remains untouched. There you go, DPS increase without worrying about reaching the accuracy cap.

Now, on to weapon trashing. The only fix is to bring stat loss and market value loss in line with each other. That's it, this will fix most of it...
...Except for weapons with forced miss radii. Let's be honest, the forced miss radius mechanic has to change. It turns 2/3 of centipedes into a subject of ridicule rather than a threatening force, it trashes the minigun for conventional use, it makes awful rocket launchers as good as legendaries. It's a nice concept but it doesn't really work that well in the game right now. Grenades aren't a problem; guess what, they aren't a part of the quality system either! So just exclude rocket launchers from the quality system and you can keep their forced miss radii. Make grenades' and rocket launchers' damage scale with item health and weapon trashing won't be a problem either.

I'd love to hear the devs' opinions regarding this problem.

[Greep]

Quality Scaling

The Solution
num = map.wealthWatcher.WealthItems + map.wealthWatcher.WealthBuildings * 0.5f;
            num -= 2000f;
            if (num < 0f)
            {
               num = 0f;
            }
            float num2 = num / 1000f * 11f;
            float num3 = 0f;
            if (map != null)
            {
               num3 = (float)map.mapPawns.FreeColonistsCount * 40f;
            }

-->
int ticksGame = Find.TickManager.TicksGame;
num = ticksGame / 6000 + map.mapPawns.FreeColonistsCount * 20f;

ftfy

[Britnoth]

Excellent: 200%
Masterwork: 300%
Legendary: 600%

Masterwork and legendary are for bragging rights or selling to traders. Having them as a sub optimal choice to use is hardly a game breaking issue. Either use them or sell them. Even a legendary charge rifle on its own is not going to massively increase raid sizes beyond your ability to deal with them.

A legendary steel gladius at 50% health has a value of 75 and does 15 damage.
A superior steel gladius at 100% health has a value of 210 and does 14 damage.

The legendary gladius also has only half the hitpoints remaining, which is why it is valued less than the 100 HP superior one.

[Tynan]

It's a myth that threat strength is based just on wealth. Wealth is one factor accounting for a minority of the threat strength calculations. Mostly, the strength scales with time, population, combat power. The wealth calculations also don't include the market value of colonists-as-slaves.

As for the scaling of quality-based stat increases, it curves sharply at the top along with the rarity of these items. This follows a very common principle where the first bit of improvement is a lot cheaper than the last. E.g. In an RPG, leveling from 1 to 2 costs 1000xp, leveling from 20 to 21 costs 20,000xp.

Why is it this way? The alternatives are broken:

---If the price scaling was linear, "legendary" wouldn't be anything special at all. So every player would just have legendary stuff all the time; it's be meaningless. Imagine saying you can buy a typical sword for 100 and a "legendary" sword for 150. That'd be a joke. It would make crafting legendary things really uninteresting. It would essentially erase the concept of really high-quality items from the game.
---If the stat scaling was exponential, legendary items would be absurdly overpowered.

So, the game is designed to have legendaries be really expensive, but with a moderate stat improvement over baseline. This solves the above problems and follows the "higher improvements are more difficult than earlier ones" principle.

-----

As for stat degradation from damage, I'd qualify that as an interesting exploit nobody's ever noticed before I'll have to look at that one, thanks.

[Granitecosmos]

Masterwork and legendary are for bragging rights or selling to traders. Having them as a sub optimal choice to use is hardly a game breaking issue. Either use them or sell them. Even a legendary charge rifle on its own is not going to massively increase raid sizes beyond your ability to deal with them.

So your solution is to ignore the elephant in the room and just sell them. Yeah, that's a wonderful counter-argument. I mean, the whole reason for the quality system was to give us rarer but better things. Yeah, let's ignore high quality things instead of fixing the problem, what a great idea!

The legendary gladius also has only half the hitpoints remaining, which is why it is valued less than the 100 HP superior one.

Please remind me why that's a problem. The only way that health is gonna go down further:

• Pawn getting downed and drops the weapon. Deterioration will take it's toll of 3-4%. Completely irrelevant, in fact, makes the value-to-stat ratio even better.
• The pawn suffers the effects of an explosion-to-the-face. Possibly negated by personal shield. If it goes through the shield you probably have more important problems already.

So... Your point being what again?

Also doesn't solve the situation of 10% health awful rocket launchers. Single use, baby!

[XeoNovaDan]

As for stat degradation from damage, I'd qualify that as an interesting exploit nobody's ever noticed before I'll have to look at that one, thanks.

One pretty simple fix which I can think of, off of the top of my head, is to have HP have a small effect on the actual market value, but then have a much larger effect to the sell value multiplier.

[Britnoth]

It's a myth that threat strength is based just on wealth. Wealth is one factor accounting for a minority of the threat strength calculations. Mostly, the strength scales with time, population, combat power. The wealth calculations also don't include the market value of colonists-as-slaves.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=20912.msg246117#msg246117

are we still here 8 months later? 

[Greep]

It's kind of hard to make a sweeping statement on colony wealth anyways.

Four years into a fort, wealth can look like

1,000,000-3,000,000 : experienced player on year round growing with good crop luck and trying to make a fabulous fort: wealth plays highest role in raid size by a lot

400,000-1,000,000 : experienced player on harder biome or average player on year round:  wealth plays highest role in raid size by a lot

100,000-400,000 : experienced player on hardest biomes, or average player on average biome: wealth plays the largest part in raid points still, but only modestly.

50,000-100k : experienced player deliberately gaming the system, average player on harder biome.  Wealth plays an average role in raid points

30k-50k: average player on hardest biomes, inexperienced players on hard biomes.  Wealth plays a decent but lower role in raid size.

So.  30,000 or 3,000,000 when a player plays "normally".  Wealth just doesn't make a good raid size balancer imo.  I can see maybe purely wealth with wealth influence being throttled by ticks or pop, but just wealth as an additive component is not great.

[RemingtonRyder]

Rough calculation.

$3000000 item wealth
*0.0011
=3300 points

3300 > 2000, taking half of the part which is over 2000

=2000+650
=2650

2650 > 1000, taking half of the part which is over 1000
=1000+825
=1825

Seems fair to me.

[Greep]

You added a decimal place (*0.011) and rampups weren't in what I posted, so it's about ~40x higher raw.  So more like ~15000 at a guess after stepdowns.

[giannikampa]

I would really like cooldown tied to quality and hitpoints left of a weapon. I mean an hi-quality sword is better balanced in your hands and faster to handle than the same sword that is damaged or not so hi-quality. Same for ranged weapons: you can faster reload a legendary rifle because of its perfect mechanics expecially when it is brand new. The advantage is not only in the brute damage but in the handling and possibility to turn back and run away faster or just change your target during the action.