Unstable build feedback thread

[Admiral Obvious]

Pila basically split everything in half, assuming it doesn't hit the torso of the target. It it supposed to be that powerful?

A pilum will absolutely ruin any limb it strikes directly. It doesn't go as fast as a bullet, but it is much, much bigger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilum#/media/File:Pilum_light_-_cropped.jpg

Oh, I definitely know that. It's more of a matter of "you broke his leg with the pila" as it should be, instead of "the Pila literally removed the entire leg in one strike".

[JavaWho]

The standing still bug happened again today .. Scenario .. Refugee, i stopped him at the edge of the map, checked out his traits, did not want him thus I drafted him to fight his assailant.  He won, I banished him, the assailant who was far worse off eventually got up and walked off the map.  The banned refugee stood there for so long I finally opened dev mode and deleted him.  This bug I have seen with the resting action and standing action.  I have seen it with colonists and raiders.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1430811637

[Injured Muffalo]

What is your envisioned fair fight on extreme fighting outnumbered?

Tynan has explained this. It's "extreme." Not "fair."

I don't know if he has some kind of target survivability rate for extreme level, or how much luck should factor into fighting versus this allegéd class of extremely skilled players, buuuuuut, I believe his answer will be choose a different difficulty setting unless you just want to see how long you can withstand unfair encounters.

[bbqftw]

Its tynan himself who refers to players who actually have an unusually high tolerance for trading shots on extreme as exhibitors of cheesy play (and I play far, far, more cheesier than him). So I am curious what he designates as non cheesy play on extreme? Does it correspond to anything we see in reality?

[ashaffee]

Its tynan himself who refers to players who actually have an unusually high tolerance for trading shots on extreme as exhibitors of cheesy play (and I play far, far, more cheesier than him). So I am curious what he designates as non cheesy play on extreme? Does it correspond to anything we see in reality?

I don't agree that Tynan ever said that. You are implying a statement. However I do agree that I am now unsure the direction he is trying to pursue. I am no longer sure what he considers the optimal way to do combat without micromanagement. It seems to me the easiest fix to this was lower difficulty required less micromanagement.

[TheMeInTeam]

You could set door hp to 1 and it'd still be possible to manipulate thrumbo pathing with them and kill thrumbos with bows on day 14 without anybody being attacked.  Not that anybody seems to care once "exploit" or "cheese" start creeping in to kill rational discussion.

The word "cheese" in gaming is almost universally incoherent regardless of who uses it.  To be an exception, one would need to actually define it in a self-consistent way (failing that makes a stated position necessarily incoherent = irrational)...and this definition would allow us to anticipate what would get named cheese in the future *without* naming common "WAD" game practices.  Players and devs alike across every genre consistently fail to do this in any way that does not literally constrain the definition to bug usage.

Broadly speaking, when people use this they really mean "tactics I don't like", usually because game interactions done by other players are different from what was anticipated.

Calling a strategy "cheesy" or "exploit-y" necessarily designates an abandonment of the evaluation process used in this thread: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41839.0 .  Notably, if you hit control-F and search for either you won't see one instance of either word on the entirety of page 1.

Nerfing or buffing door HP is disjointed from what makes AI manipulation aided by doors a 9 tactic.

Does it correspond to anything we see in reality?

No.  It doesn't matter if it's here, EU 4, FTL, Civ forums, or even stuff like Fortnite/CoD/madden (madden community is particularly bad).  When someone falls back on "cheese" to call out something they don't like without presenting supportive reasoning for why it's a degenerate tactic, it's a giant red flag on the rationale and a white flag as an argumentative proposition.  In this case, the disconnect with reality results in a change that can't and won't address the problem on its own, and the problem wouldn't exist under different AI patterns.

All of this is completely separate from the consideration of "how much HP should doors have in general".  There are lots of factors that go into that.  However, if we want to partition different methods of presenting pawns unfair advantages over raiders into good vs bad from a design standpoint, simply stating "cheese" or "exploit" is not and can't be valid on its own.

I don't agree that Tynan ever said that. You are implying a statement.

He's not exactly reaching far:

After you nerf an exploit-y strategy, the game will often become harder/too hard. The solution then generally isn't to bring back the cheesy strategy, but to redesign/rebalance game to be nicely playable without the cheesy strategy. So I may end up e.g. nerfing the manhunters, for example.

As for which strategies are cheesy vs "too good" vs acceptable, who knows at this point.  But if you want to weaken door micro, the answer is in AI response, not door HP.  If you just want the game to better constrain which defenses are viable, making raiders a bit more likely to target doors and make doors even weaker certainly accomplishes that.  Depends on the goal...but removing "cheese" is literally meaningless.

[zizard]

Other feedback:

The plate armour angles on the side view are too exaggerated. It looks like they are cosplaying centipedes.

Reduction in work cost for many crafted items makes it cost an inordinate amount of materials to train crafting.

Contribution to killbox discussion:

There are cases where pawns will not moved to the ordered tile if other pawns are in the way. This is really annoying since the game gives feedback with the green circle on where a pawn has been ordered to move. So the pawn better actually end up there.

Funnily enough, the fact that drafted pawns now block each other means that killboxes are relatively stronger than before. They also don't require smooth control, or pawns to end up exactly where ordered. The patch that was supposed to nerf killboxes turned me into a killbox player. A properly constructed one works just fine, even against sappers and whatnot.

[Greep]

Whee, getting ready to blast off!

I think this sums up my first ship warmup battle with 64 tribals lol.  Looks like the pathing that now blocks pawns has some interesting effects on sappers.  50 sappers took about half a minute to pour in from a 1 block hole, enough to have two mortars slam into them.  It wasn't pretty for them.



[attachment deleted due to age]

[Teleblaster18]

Grammatic recommendation:


I don't believe that the term "Prosthetic Heart" is grammatically correct: I'm pretty sure that prosthetics only refer to external replacement body parts.

I'd suggest a replacement along the lines of "Simple Artificial Heart" (which brings to mind the Jarvik 7)

https://www.jarvikheart.com/history/robert-jarvik-on-the-jarvik-7/

Back to the game...

[Greep]

aaaaaand this is why you can't entirely rely on a killbox  This would have been the worst way to lose if I didn't also gear myself xD

[attachment deleted due to age]

[ChJees]

aaaaaand this is why you can't entirely rely on a killbox  This would have been the worst way to lose if I didn't also gear myself xD

Why use one killbox when you can use many ? Also i improved the killboxes by having doors on the sides so i could kill the sappers while they were busy doing sapping stuff.

Also people should use IEDs more. They are quite great problem solvers.

[Greep]

Well, by now my fort is pretty much one giant killbox.  At first I was mainly using autocannons for cover and some assistance, now they do most of the dirty work.

But, solar flaaaaaaaare nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Thinkfully the tribals were the braindead preparing for assault kind so I mortared half of them to death before breaking out the charge rifles and shield melees

Edit: Is you fort an FTL ship? o.O

[Dargaron]

Your whole base is a box.
Much killing happened within.
Therefore, your base is a killbox. .

On a serious note, I notice a distinct lack of stone chunks in your screenshot except for the lower-right corner. About how much of the map do you guesstimate that you've stripped of stone chunks to build perimeter walls and stuff? I've never actually used up all of the stone chunks on a map before, but now that Deep Drills can produce stone Chunks, I might need to stop thinking of stone as a non-renewable resource.

EDIT: Holy carp, Orassans has been updated already? Wow. That's dedication.

[Greep]

There's a fair amount of stone left on the map but I think I used the majority of it. The infestations from deep drilling are a serious pain, though, so I would honestly not bother drilling for stone unless the infestations do not occur when drilling for non-metal.

[Perq]

I'd like to raise a point that I know is entirely subjective, but one that I think is critical to raise, after a few dozen hours of playing the various iterations of 1.0:

I consider the genuine genius of this game to be the ability for a player to indulge in the weird, the excessive, the outright ridiculous and funny.  I don't consider combat to be an end unto itself, but rather the means to the end: another hurdle to be dealt with, so I can get back to doing weird, hilarious and excessive stuff.  As a result, anything that distracts or frustrates me from my goal detracts from my fun.

It's not critical to me if combat is perfectly balanced, because I don't play this game for the combat...it's one element of a larger picture, and raids are one threat among many to be dealt with in the overall scheme of things.  As a result, I will use cheese tactics unabashedly so I can preserve my colony, keep my colonists safe, and continue to do ridiculous stuff.  I will build obscenely large trap mazes, with 24 turrets waiting in a killbox at the end - because there is something glorious and inherently satisfying about watching 50 pirates blunder into it.  I'll take a week, realtime, to build a 3-thick wall around my base.  I build slowly, play slowly, grow attached to my pawns, and want to keep them from dying by any means necessary...so that I can continue doing ridiculous things.  I can absolutely play this game without "cheese", and have - and often make a conscious and deliberate decision to use it for these very reasons...cheese is often hilarious, and lots of fun.   

With my personal ethos stated, my conclusion is this:  I know that we're in a phase where the game is being re-balanced, so the conversation is naturally being directed towards how combat is being re-vamped, how AI will path better to increase tension and remove "cheese" tactics, etc., and I understand the importance of that in it's context - but I personally feel that the camera lense is narrowing on this to a degree where the other, and for me, more important elements of the game are somewhat falling by the wayside in the conversation: the weird, the bizarre, and especially the hilarious.

Again: I'm speaking subjectively, but I would love to see the focus turn somewhat into how the game is expanding upon those elements that drew me to this game to begin with.  I guess it's a fundamental shift from the question "is it balanced/fair" to "is it fun?".  For me, fun in this game IS excess.  It's watching a Pirate's brain light on fire when they get hit with a Psychic Shock Lance.  It's hitting an Animal Pulser for the first time, not knowing what exactly it will do.  It's cracking open an Ancient Evil.  It's watching two factions battle it out in front of my base with incendiaries, with me running around putting out the flames through the crossfire.  It's the first time I discover I can harvest kidneys.  It's the first time I tame a boomalope, put him in my barn, and then realize it's got a heart condition.  It's Muffalos getting into the yayo while I wasn't watching.  It's Pirates running off with one of my colonists.  It's manhunter Capybaras.

In short, what I really hope the conversation will turn to at some point in the near future is an emphasis on those elements: a new version of a shock lance that's never been seen before, a new animal that does something weird, new gameplay elements that haven't been seen before which will make a player curse and laugh at the same time...and in equal measure with the attention that re-vamped combat is currently receiving. 

Thanks for listening and reading.

I just want to add that I completely disagree with this notion. If you want easier combat, just lower the difficulty. That is it.
If you leave in those cheesy tactics, many people feel like they should use them. They are fun. For a while. But then it becomes a boring chore. It essentially removes element of a game, and instead add something you have to do every time, just to render one part of the game pointless.

Pawns getting hurt and scarred in different (weird, funny, etc.) ways is part of the game. Losing is part of the game. If you want to play the game in a different fashion (render combat pointless) just mod it out. Completed game should have all of its elements meaningful.