[A17] Traps Plus: More Traps [14/07/2017]

[shite]

ABOUT
This is a mod that plans on adding more traps to the Rimworld universe. These are the current traps that are included in the mod:

   
• Bear Trap (Rearmable)
• Spikes
• Caltrops
• Body Crusher (Rearmable)
• Body Slicer (Rearmable)
• Heat Pad (Powered)
• Freeze Pad (Powered)
• Saws (Powered)

More will be added in the future 

If anyone would like to help me with creating better textures, please message me!

DOWNLOAD
Current [A17]

Thanks to:
stigma (Texturing and testing)

[christianmc1101]

What do the different traps?

[Igams]

Looks neat! I'm looking forward to see where you take this.

[SpaceDorf]

looks like some cool shite.

[shite]

What do the different traps?

The caltrops, spikes and bear traps damage the lower region of the body

The slicer cuts the body while the crusher damages the body and head.

The current damage tier looks like:
Caltrops, spikes, bear trap, deadfall, slicer, crusher

[shite]

Update:
- Added Heat Pad
- Added Freeze Pad
- Added Saws
- Changed every traps trigger chance

[henk]

The standard is to put a folder inside the .zip file
with everything inside


I want to thank you :p
cause here are the only traps in A17   which you don't have to rearm.
Humans are lazy

[shite]

The standard is to put a folder inside the .zip file
with everything inside


I want to thank you :p
cause here are the only traps in A17   which you don't have to rearm.
Humans are lazy

Ah, I see, I have updated the file on dropbox. And it's good to hear that you enjoy the non-rearm traps

[shite]

Update (11/07/2017):
- Lowered damage values for heat and freeze pads
- Lowered trigger chances for all traps
- Made some of the traps rotate-able

[stigma]

EDIT: a lot of my opinions here have changed now just 1 version later, so I am optimistic now that this mod has potential to be good.

More traps would be cool, but if you want my honest opinion this doesn't add enough real new mechanics. Most of this just seems like variations of the same thing with some differences in stats - some of which seem either largely irrelevant or unbalanced to vanilla deadfalls.

I DO like the traps that hurt feet. That's genuinely useful and a good idea since it ends up slowing down enemies (and should do on average a little less damage probably compared to a deadfall in terms of work and resources).

There is also a lot of weird balance issues here. I only took a quick look at the stats, but here are some things I noticed immediately:
- (wood) Spikes are quite overpowered. They cost about a third the resources, are faster, and deal slightly more damage. It's not balanced if one option is always clearly better than the other.
- Spikes can be made out of steel, but that doesn't affect their stats at all compared to wood. it definitely should like with deadfalls, or else why ever waste steel on them?
- Caltrops just seem like spikes to me, except half the cost and half the damage (of steel spikes anyway). Seems superfluous if it's just a different magnitude copypaste of another trap - and 10 damage you must use steel to create makes them seem like they will rarely be useful. Now if caltrops also added a movement debuff (or at least made the tile very slow to move across) then that would be a different story...
- Beartrap again seems like a different magnitude copypaste - and poorly balanced against deadfalls. Why make a 40dmg trap for 100 steel if you can make a 60 dmg trap out of 70 steel? Even though it targets legs I don't think that makes it viable.
- Crusher slicer and saws seem ok I guess. Expensive, but getting more trap-damage in a compact area makes them viable later on when you have steel to spare - and saws are at least interresting in the sense that you can sacrifice components to cut down on steel costs.

Finally, the art needs some rework. It's not that the current textures are that ugly - but the problem is that they don't fit with vanilla rimworld style very well, so they stick out like a sore thumb. If you run several mods that have conflicting artstyles the game starts to look really messy and bad, so I think it's pretty important even if it's just visuals. You already acknowledged this though, and it's easy to change later if you can find someone to improve them for you. It just needs more stylizing and less sharp details basically.

So in short, aside from some stats balancing and some art-work I think the key to taking this to the next level is to see if you can figure out how to add more effects to traps - so that they don't all feel like the same things with a few stats changes. Leg damage IS a good example of this, but there needs to be more. Here's a few ideas you can maybe investigate if can be viable:

- Flame trap: Low damage, but sets pawns on fire (and maybe a chance to spawn a random fire on the ground nearby too). Since pawns can panic when on fire this could be a very useful different strategy to just dealing a lot of damage.
- Movement speed debuff on caltrops (maybe spikes too to a lesser degree if you balance this with the damage). A trap meant primarily to slow people down would be a very different thing to have.
- Trap that adds stun for a short time (this could be the bear-trap's thing since you'd need to pry it open to move again)

There already exist a lot of effects in the game - so if you can just figure out what is needed to apply those existing effects via traps then you can really make some interesting stuff (but it may require more than just some XML editing ... I dunno).

Please don't take this as bashing your work. All I've said here is intended as constructive criticism and I really hope this can pan out into a quality mod that really brings freshness and options to traps.

[Canute]

I agree to stigma.
One trap each category in a powered/unpowered version are enough.
- damage  (deathfall,saw)
- slow + food damage (caltrops, floorspikes)
- stun + minor damage (beartrap, electric pad)
- burn (campfire, heat pad)

[shite]

More traps would be cool, but if you want my honest opinion this doesn't add enough real new mechanics. Most of this just seems like variations of the same thing with some differences in stats - some of which seem either largely irrelevant or unbalanced to vanilla deadfalls.

I DO like the traps that hurt feet. That's genuinely useful and a good idea since it ends up slowing down enemies (and should do on average a little less damage probably compared to a deadfall in terms of work and resources).

There is also a lot of weird balance issues here. I only took a quick look at the stats, but here are some things I noticed immediately:
- (wood) Spikes are quite overpowered. They cost about a third the resources, are faster, and deal slightly more damage. It's not balanced if one option is always clearly better than the other.
- Spikes can be made out of steel, but that doesn't affect their stats at all compared to wood. it definitely should like with deadfalls, or else why ever waste steel on them?
- Caltrops just seem like spikes to me, except half the cost and half the damage (of steel spikes anyway). Seems superfluous if it's just a different magnitude copypaste of another trap - and 10 damage you must use steel to create makes them seem like they will rarely be useful. Now if caltrops also added a movement debuff (or at least made the tile very slow to move across) then that would be a different story...
- Beartrap again seems like a different magnitude copypaste - and poorly balanced against deadfalls. Why make a 40dmg trap for 100 steel if you can make a 60 dmg trap out of 70 steel? Even though it targets legs I don't think that makes it viable.
- Crusher slicer and saws seem ok I guess. Expensive, but getting more trap-damage in a compact area makes them viable later on when you have steel to spare - and saws are at least interresting in the sense that you can sacrifice components to cut down on steel costs.

Finally, the art needs some rework. It's not that the current textures are that ugly - but the problem is that they don't fit with vanilla rimworld style very well, so they stick out like a sore thumb. If you run several mods that have conflicting artstyles the game starts to look really messy and bad, so I think it's pretty important even if it's just visuals. You already acknowledged this though, and it's easy to change later if you can find someone to improve them for you. It just needs more stylizing and less sharp details basically.

So in short, aside from some stats balancing and some art-work I think the key to taking this to the next level is to see if you can figure out how to add more effects to traps - so that they don't all feel like the same things with a few stats changes. Leg damage IS a good example of this, but there needs to be more. Here's a few ideas you can maybe investigate if can be viable:

- Flame trap: Low damage, but sets pawns on fire (and maybe a chance to spawn a random fire on the ground nearby too). Since pawns can panic when on fire this could be a very useful different strategy to just dealing a lot of damage.
- Movement speed debuff on caltrops (maybe spikes too to a lesser degree if you balance this with the damage). A trap meant primarily to slow people down would be a very different thing to have.
- Trap that adds stun for a short time (this could be the bear-trap's thing since you'd need to pry it open to move again)

There already exist a lot of effects in the game - so if you can just figure out what is needed to apply those existing effects via traps then you can really make some interesting stuff (but it may require more than just some XML editing ... I dunno).

Please don't take this as bashing your work. All I've said here is intended as constructive criticism and I really hope this can pan out into a quality mod that really brings freshness and options to traps.

Thanks so much for the information! I guess I did make the caltrops/spikes/bear traps very similar. I already had plans on adding a flame trap which would be really nice to see in the game. And I will most likely add the debuffs to the caltrops and bear traps aswell.

[shite]

Update (13/07/2017):
- Decreased damage for caltrops and spikes
- Added debuff named poisoned to spikes
- Added debuff named slowed to caltrops
- Decreased damage for bear trap but added stun effect on hit
- Changed Body Crushers DamageDef to crush
- Changed build cost on Caltrops, Spikes and bear trap

[stigma]

Now we are talking! (damn that was fast)

This is already starting to look a lot better than that other "trap defence" mod - because this one now has actual unique stuff in it, which makes all the difference.

I was pretty skeptical about heat/freeze traps at first because they seemed like just another boring damage-dealing trap with a cheezy gimmick - but whether or not it was intentional of you I found out in testing that these traps are very good at live-capturing because the burn/frostburn damage type adds so much pain that there is a decent chance for people to pass out before they take enough damage to die. Now that makes very cool as a less-lethal option (and probably keep this benefit in mind in later balancing, because this can be a pretty valuable trait).

The idea to have traps that do not need rearming is also very interresting (I missed that fact on my first glance at the mod). Those crappy little caltrops are much less terrible when they can hit many guys in the same raid - not to mention you don't need to waste time rearming every single one. Maybe consider adding that these types of traps take a little bit of damage each time they get activated though - so there is some kind of maintaince (albeit much faster) required if you don't want them to break in the long run.

I'm just going to do a quick list here of what I think is worth looking into for the next version:

- Balancing seems much better now overall. Nothing obviously OP compared to vanilla in terms of damage or dmg/resource (except for stone as mentioned later), and the "special status" traps now all deal low'ish damage. I need to test more, but I think traps that do not need rearming (except for caltrops) need some urgent attention if you don't want them to completely break the game. The ability to hit many people in the same group makes that damage add-up very fast - and just reducing the damage doesn't really fix the problem since if you can funnel the enemy then you can kill everyone no matter how many there are with X traps - and making that need 2X traps just delays breaking the game. I think the ultimate solution would be to add a re-arm timer and keeping the damage as-is - meaning they don't rearm instantly. if you make it maybe around 3-5 seconds or something normal-speed (balancing testing later obviously required) you will hit maybe 2,3 or 4 people in a group - but you can't super exploit it and hit all 30 raiders because you funneled them into a corridor where 2 saw-traps killed all of them... I think this is a very critical thing you need to resolve. For caltrops you might want to consider keeping instant re-arm and reducing damage to 1 or 0 because even a short re-arm time will make it so that in a large group the first 2-3 people will soak up all the slow debuffs - but if you drop the damage you should probably make them a little cheaper also.

- Materials across the board do not seem to impact stats, and if they CAN be made of an different material then they absolutely should - to make sense with how vanilla does it. If you just balance around steel then the other materials should fall into place since they already have bonuses to "sharp" and "blunt" and such from the vanilla game - so just model after how deadfall traps work in this regard. If possible - you should consider also multiplying and magnitude of the duration of the "special effects". If you only multiply damage that is (a) boring, and (b) you won't really have any good reason to make fancy plastfeel caltrops for example - but if they slow people even more and longer than steel then... THAT'S cool (the same muliplier value as for damage is probably fine I guess to start)

- Some materials available to build from are not very plausible. Spikes/caltrops/beartrap/slicer can be made from stone even though they are obviously "sharp" traps. I have a hard time imagining this working out with stone. Once you add material modifiers stones bad "sharp" bonus will make those traps made out of stone suck anyway. maybe just consider removing the stony materials as an option in these traps. On the other hand - spikes (and arguably caltrops too?). The crusher seems more logical to use stone for - but this will be a big balance problem. If you can make loads of powerful traps 100% from pretty easily obtainable stone they will be very OP. I suggest you make the slicer/crusher/saw cost half steel and half whatever material you choose. The result would be that stone crushers could be cheaper if you have a lot of stone - but not THAT cheap, and slicers on the other hand could become extra deadly if you decide to spend some very valuable plaststeel on them.

- Crusher traps still say they deliver "cut" wounds. Lots of decapitations actually... are you sure you fixed this?

- Slicer traps versus saw-traps, and heat vs cold traps.... I am not sure that I see enough difference between these. Especially the hot/cold seem identical. I don't know if burn and frostbite damage is identical, but that would be the only difference. My advice to you is this - only include the traps that are do something unique. If two traps are too similar - find something to change to make them interesting and useful in different ways - or just cut one. Trimming the fat to avoid bloat is important. For example, traps that only difference is "heat damage" vs "cold damage" is not interesting (if they have the same stats it's just a reskin essentially). If you want to keep both then do something like making the heat trap have a small change of igniting the enemy (and thus causing panic), and the cold one could do a slightly weaker but combined slow and poison (rename "numbness") like you made caltrops and spikes have ... or some other interesting debuff that makes sense for cold.

I have more ideas for other trap types but I think I have rambled enough - and I think it's probably a better idea to make everything you have so far really good before you start adding more stuff. It's already adding a lot of interesting stuff.

I hope I'm not overwhelming you, but I'm impressed and want to help you make this good.
I might even try my hand at making making those graphics a little more rim-worldy. I'm no artist my any means, but this game's style is pretty basic so MAYBE I can help there unless someone who is actually good at drawing wants to pick it up

-Stigma

[stigma]

Ok, at risk of embarassing myself... here is my terrible attempt at replacement artwork.

These were done quick&sloppy, so if you find this acceptable and want me to contribute I will re-do with a little more attention to detail - and try to make replacements for the rest also. The beartrap is probably the most detailed thing, so I figure this is a good sample to give you to see if you like. The others I expect to fairly straight-foward, though I'm not sure what idea to go with for the crusher and slicer (they just need a total redesign to understand what you are looking at).

No doubt someone (anyone?) else could do this better than me because I'm no artist, and I certainly can't draw worth a shit (with the mouse no less because I have no digital drawing board) - but here you go anyway - you decide if this is something you want me to do. Don't tell anyone but I think the low resolution hides my lack of skill

EDIT: you are free to use these straight away if you want while you wait for updated versions.

-Stigma

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]