Unstable build feedback thread

[Oblitus]

I understand that disassembling means we can only salvage a small amount...

Why? It's a raw material, recycling it should be efficient enough.

[Greep]

Yeah if we're talking irl reasoning, you get like 90% back from metal recycling I think.  It was just done for balancing late game.  Maybe crashed mech ship parts could give more plasteel to compensate?  That's a flat amount of plasteel for the early game that doesn't scale badly like when you start getting a dozen centipedes.

[bobthegiant]

Cass - Hard - Naked Brutality - Permadeath

After 30 days, I haven't gotten anyone to join or recruit? Within expected probability?

[Tynan]

Cass - Hard - Naked Brutality - Permadeath

After 30 days, I haven't gotten anyone to join or recruit? Within expected probability?

I'd expect one or two by then, but you may have gotten unlucky or made some mistakes. Any more info on what happened would be helpful (e.g. ever took a prisoner? Ever got a wanderer or refugee event?)

[zizard]

Level 8 doctor in a decent hospital and industrial medicine reliably tends with 90%+ quality. Kinda makes glitterworld medicine obsolete. Maybe rework it into a serum-type item that instantly tends all conditions with 100% quality bypassing pawn's medicine skill? Then it would be valuable backup in case of emergency.

IMO glitterworld should be able to "overtend" past 100, or stop infections completely, or heal some number of hit points in a few seconds. It should give something beyond regular medicine, apart from the incredibly niche case of somehow still having bad doctors when you get some.

[bbqftw]

Armor calculation is very misleading now. Tests have shown that overall armor rating is an abstract number that is relevant to nothing. While flak+devilstrand has the same armor as power armor set, the actual efficiency of power armor is way higher.

Wouldn't it have been easier and more accurate to say " I have no idea "?
At least then someone isn't going to assume that you're giving them a piece of information.

The overall armor figure on a character's Gear tab is some sort of average armor value across all bodyparts. I don't know what the formula for it is but I can tell you for certain that it's not particularly informative. No matter what that number tells you putting on pants is not going to protect your eyes.


In regards to the armor system - The description of it in game is 100% accurate with the exception of the fact that it doesn't cover how pieces of armor that cover the same location interact with one another. I don't know how that works.
It could be additive, using some average values, or some other system entirely.

since I am not code wizard, I did a simple test.

on one pawn I equipped:

legend hyperwevae button down shirt - 72 sharp
thrumbofur - 68.6 sharp

on another:

legendary charge lance - 72 arpen

If the layers are calculated additively, there should be a 68.6% chance for deflect/mitigation outcome
If the layers are rolled separately, there should be a 0% chance of deflect/mitigation - this guy might as well be naked.

Result - 18 torso shots, 18 torso destroyed, zero deflections, zero mitigations. The chance of 18 consecutive torso shots failing the 68.6% mitigation roll is .314^18, or 1 in 1.1 billion, so I'm pretty confident it is indeed the second.



TL;DR power armor king, and vest/duster combination for weakbois

Also regarding flak: it only coveres the torso.  If you actually want to just worry about torso damage, flak + devilstrand is actually better, but the neck is important and I don't think flak covers that, and losing limbs isn't that great either.

Even against torso, the power armor is better since you don't let the other guy double dip their arpen, and each later point of armor is actually worth more EHP than the one before it. So its incredibly deceptive to add up the sharps protections for the individual components.

e.g.

good power armor, 138 sharp
dstrand excelllent duster + excellent flak vest - 51.8 + 110 sharp - 161.8 ! But it is illusory.

in low arpen regime -  say, something like normal  autopistol with 15 arpen - power armor provides 123 effective armor, or 61.5% deflect, 38.5% mitigate, or 1/.192 = 5.2x  EHP

whereas duster / flak combination is 36.8 / 95 effective. 1.38 (duster) * 3.47 (flak vest layer) = 4.78x overall

And this is the most favorable regime for duster / vest vs. power armor!

Obviously at high arpen, the duster might as well be made of paper, and power armor dominates even more strongly.

[Oblitus]

Yeah if we're talking irl reasoning, you get like 90% back from metal recycling I think.  It was just done for balancing late game.  Maybe crashed mech ship parts could give more plasteel to compensate?  That's a flat amount of plasteel for the early game that doesn't scale badly like when you start getting a dozen centipedes.

That's actually a huge balance problem. The game is free to throw anything on you, and you would have nothing from dealing with threats. Armor? It would be "tainted." Weapons? Vendors pay only a small fraction of their worth, and they are often damaged, reducing the price even more. Meat and leather? Well, that's why manhunters are the best "negative" event in the game - it gives fair rewards. You kill 20 angry elephants; you get tons of meat and leather. Still, 20 mad squirrels is a horrifying event. The game can throw 30 elephant-sized armored mechanoids on you, and you'll only get few kgs of useful metal by breaking down their wrecks. Overall it is an obviously unnatural factor that breaks any immersion.



My melee pawn just got their nose and jaw bitten off. Why we can make bionic heart, we only have wooden denture for a jaw and nothing for the nose?



Caravan doctors should self-tend without manual assignment.

[Greep]

So I've been playing a mountainous arid shrublands, randy extreme and seeing what a 0 turret run looks like.  I cheated a little and built a sniper turret to test it out, though

It actually feels a little easier since my wealth is a bit more efficient, although part of that could just be I found a pretty good alcove to hide out in.  Instead of the rush for turrets I went rush for armor and then power armor/drilling.

Some thoughts on the run so far(~80 days): 

1)The sniper turret is weird.  Because it costs and maintains with uranium, you basically get to build exactly one, and only after deep drilling.  It's a useful thing to build when you have nothing left to research, but it's not useful for where it is on the tech tree really. 

2)Power armor is extremely effective at preserving your life, plate is super risky.  This is mostly because 120% armor is like triple the effectiveness of 70% armor.  Just buffing plate sounds iffy, as plasteel plate would become too good.  It'd be nice if steel and wood had better armor strengths.  Probably same for rare cloth/leather.

3) A deadfall killtrap is still worth building even if 50-60% of threats completely ignore it.  In particular, those massive refugee chases seem to go right into them, and that takes a lot of the bite out of it, not to mention manhunter swarms end up being free meat.  Well except for the boomalope swarm, that hurt.

4)IEDs are awesome.  For the dudes that ignore killtraps, placeing a few outside the walls usually nabs one or two guys, and that's even without swarming raids.

5) Holy strombolli are spears effective against centipides.  Like.  Wow.  WOW.  dang.  I've been used to just using a cheap gladius to stop them from using their big guns and then shooting for damage, but spears just absolutely wreck them. 

6)  It's just really disapointing how rare joywire and painstoppers are, and I wish they were craftable like bionics, or just more common from exotic caravans.  One of my dudes got psychite addiction after he binged on flake and I was too afraid to arrest him (he was a melee in power armor!).  So I was trying to get some joywire so I could later put him off the stuff before he got brain damaged.  It took 3 summons of an exotic caravan to get it.  Luckily he's worked off the tolerance to 90% so I thin he'll make it, but that took a really long time.

7) This mostly has just been a feeling I've had since about alpha 15 or so, but it's a little disappointing that crafting flake or selling corn is overwhelming the best way to make money.  Sculptures get you maybe 1/3 of that for the work, and clothing was completely nerfed into oblivion in a15 or so.  It does make sense that drug crafting should make the most profit since it's the only thing with a large potential risk (one addicted pawn is a big disadvantage), but it's just over the top the best. Selling corn seems to be the second best way of making money, which just feels weird.  Heh.  Corn flakes 

I haven't tried the LRMS yet, in the processing of building it, but being able to choose the target metal sounds excellent.

Current fort as it stands:

[attachment deleted due to age]

[EvadableMoxie]

I'm on day 327 of my current colony.  Cassandra Extreme, no mods.

I've been defending myself mostly using mostly just pawns to see how difficult/viable it is.  I haven't used many animals in combat and the only turrets I have are in my base to re-direct sappers.

Obviously, I've survived thus far, so it's working, but attrition is slowly creeping up. My starter pawn who was a soldier pretty much his whole time in the colony has lost an eye, both arms and a leg over time.  All have been replaced with biotics.  One of my fighters is in a cyptosleep casket until I can get some healing mech serums because he's down to 3 / 10 in his brain from 2 different scars.  One of my general hauler pawns also has brain damaged and the only reason I haven't banished him is he's married to a far more useful pawn, so he's basically just a walking mood buff.  Various other soldiers are all missing fingers and toes here and there and the only one that doesn't have at least one biotic replacement limb is the one that's died and been revived twice.

I think healer mech serums should be a lot more common.  In fact, I think they should be sold by Exotic Goods traders.  I understand that ressurection serums are special and should be rare, but why exactly are healer mech serums rare? They can't really be abused, the most they can do is a bring a pawn back to their natural state.  They aren't considerably stronger than Luciferium or Biotics.  Exotic traders already sell things that could be problematic if you have an unlimited number, like psychic stun lances, and yet those items remain rare enough to be valuable. It would be nice if there was a more consistent and controllable way to mitigate permanent injuries. The injures themselves are purely random, why should the cure for them be?

That said, I've managed to get to day 300+ on Extreme without abusing animals or turrets, so there is definitely an improvement here over B18, I feel. Before I couldn't even get a few months before I'd have 8 colonists sharing 5 eyes.

Also, prosthetic noses and ears to fix disfigurement would be nice. There are biotic ears but I don't necessarily want a hearing bonus so much as I just want the pawn to not have a social penalty.

[Jibbles]

I think healer mech serums should be a lot more common.

I think so too, or have other alternatives to heal permanent stuff like scars.  Never liked how my options are to cripple a pawn with prosthetic or make them op with bionics.

[bbqftw]

By the way, is it actually intentional that 0% part efficiency for the neck begins at 3/30 health, and only then linearly scales?

This seems a bit inconsistent, because for the case of all other vital organs that I tested (heart, stomach, brain), part efficiency scales linearly from 0/X to X/X health.

Seems a bit odd that 1/10 brain is survivable while 3/30 neck is not.

[EvadableMoxie]

Finally got a healer mech serum stash just now.  I sent two pawns and they got ambushed by 3 lancers. I could have beaten them with good positioning but since they appear instantly out of the blue and surround you, there was no way to handle it. This is really annoying with an enemy that has the possibility to kill pawns in a single shot, because it's more or less unavoidable that they'll get a few shots off each in such conditions.  I was prepared with fighters standing by pre-loaded into drop pods and dropped in a third pawn to even the odds. One of my pawns lost a hand in the battle, but I won. I'm saving the serum to fix brain damage so that's another biotic part I'll need.

Then, when was on my way back to the colony the 3 of them got ambushed... by 2 Labrador retrievers.  Yes, two of them, against 2 melee in power armor and a third in flak with a pulse rifle.

I think the random encounters in stashes and caravans still needs some tweaking.

[Madman666]

That's actually a huge balance problem. The game is free to throw anything on you, and you would have nothing from dealing with threats. Armor? It would be "tainted." Weapons? Vendors pay only a small fraction of their worth, and they are often damaged, reducing the price even more. Meat and leather? Well, that's why manhunters are the best "negative" event in the game - it gives fair rewards. You kill 20 angry elephants; you get tons of meat and leather. Still, 20 mad squirrels is a horrifying event. The game can throw 30 elephant-sized armored mechanoids on you, and you'll only get few kgs of useful metal by breaking down their wrecks. Overall it is an obviously unnatural factor that breaks any immersion.

Thats true, but with the way 1.0 handles raids, crapton of plasteel you d get if the rewards were "fair" would make next raids a game-ender. I don't even know if you can make rewards fair with current threat generation system, without totally breaking the game.

[Syrchalis]

Level 8 doctor in a decent hospital and industrial medicine reliably tends with 90%+ quality. Kinda makes glitterworld medicine obsolete. Maybe rework it into a serum-type item that instantly tends all conditions with 100% quality bypassing pawn's medicine skill? Then it would be valuable backup in case of emergency.

I agree with this. Glitterworld medicine needs some kind of extra goody effect. Simply because by the time you have some of it you generally have doctors who do very well with normal, industrial medicine, if not some who even use herbal to great effect.

Right now Glitterworld medicine is only useful when you don't have it. Maybe the only exception is the rich explorer scenario.
IMO glitterworld should be able to "overtend" past 100, or stop infections completely, or heal some number of hit points in a few seconds. It should give something beyond regular medicine, apart from the incredibly niche case of somehow still having bad doctors when you get some.

[Tynan]

...Then, when was on my way back to the colony the 3 of them got ambushed... by 2 Labrador retrievers.  Yes, two of them, against 2 melee in power armor and a third in flak with a pulse rifle.

I think the random encounters in stashes and caravans still needs some tweaking.

Oh come on, this sounds adorable.