Unstable build feedback thread

Started by Tynan, June 16, 2018, 11:10:34 PM

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Teleblaster18

Quote from: Zoolder on June 23, 2018, 08:46:07 PM
Quote from: Teleblaster18 on June 23, 2018, 08:06:02 PM
Quote from: PatrykSzczescie on June 23, 2018, 07:52:03 PM
Maybe you should stop playing NB mode if you can't stand dying for certain. Maybe this scenario mode shouldn't have been introduced as it seems to bring a significiant amount of complaints. This mode is for those who are not that perfect, but skilled enough to know pawn's age, skills, traits as well as location's biome, disease frequency, vegetation time, temperature and deal with most inconveniences. If devs implemented some features that remove this certainty of a loss in NB scenario, it would also affect the remaining scenarios, which are non-extreme ones, meaning that you'd get an easy way to make everybody pretty, healthy and rich. Years with no one dying - this is what devs are trying to avoid in a decent difficulty.

Try NB on peaceful mode and give a feedback. Once you get bored getting out of loneliness, you may start again from a base builder, and so on.

About sappers mining walls so quickly, I know a great counter to it - fight. As you do against drop pod attacks inside your base - just man up and fight your enemies. Stop depending on walls as a way to stop your enemies or manipulating them into your traps - use them as cover for your shooters and put melee fighters behind them to engage sappers into melee fight.

Both my Naked Brutality starts have lasted well over a game year without any deaths on Cassandra/Rough, and are still going - no deaths on either.  First colony is at 6 pawns, second colony is at 3.  I've restarted (and am doing a third re-start) to gauge the changes of the daily patches for 1.0 on gameplay, and my own strategies.

Commenting about difficulty is entirely different than complaining about it...as is noting potential scenarios which arise with 1.0 that make gameplay prohibitively difficult, if any are found.  This entire thread is about feedback and user experiences of 1.0, so...this is the place to discuss impressions and suggestions if there ever were one.

Bro on extreme I've never been in a situation like that, A18 or 1.0. If I'm being attacked by a massive raid I may be out numbered but I usually have comparable fire power. Sappers still also pour through a choke like a bunch of idiots which makes for easy pickings of people running for cover. Basic strategy and pawn placement will have you easily win any engagement like that, and if you are a ever at a point like that in a game you should have at least one disposable rocket or orbital strike to clean that shit up if you're that late game. This really just sounds like complaining from someone who needs to play on a lower difficulty. Just cause you can't handle every situation with a kill box doesn't mean the game is broke.

Uh...why are you quoting my post?  Go back and re-read the last page...think you got me mixed up with someone else.  And I disagree...I don't think he's complaining at all:  I think he plays the game the way that is enjoyable for him, which is as valid as any other opinion here.

Some people don't mind a body-count for their pawns.  Others do, and that makes a difference in their strategy choices.  Advice like "man up and fight" is somewhat condescending, and sheds no new light on things;  I doubt highly that Madman666 is a rookie at this game, and I'm positive I'm not...

Madman666

1531 hour played in RW... yeah. If I am still a noob after that, maybe i should just retire.

Ramsis

Friendly reminder to all testers to play nice and don't be rude to one another over their experiences compared to yours. We want ALL FEEDBACK.
Ugh... I have SO MANY MESSES TO CLEAN UP. Oh also I slap people around who work on mods <3

"Back off man, I'm a scientist."
- Egon Stetmann


Awoo~

Diana Winters

Now with the inclusion of plate armor, perhaps add a medieval faction?
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.
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And matching helmets?
Additionally, what about chainmail? Studded leather? Crossbows? It would be great if the medieval era was fleshed out a bit more.

Tynan

Quote from: Nightinggale on June 23, 2018, 11:19:59 AM
Speaking of code modding, I have a question. Verse.ModContentPack.LoadDefs() has [DebuggerHidden] set. It seems to interfere with Harmony Transpiler, making it impossible to mod the method, only do stuff before/after or replace it entirely. While it turned out that this specific case doesn't prevent me from doing what I want to do, it does leave the question why it's even used? Wouldn't it make sense to search and remove all [DebuggerHidden] from the entire sourcecode to ensure the code to be as modder friendly as possible? None of us can predict which method will need to be modded a few months from now because the modder haven't gotten the idea yet. Because of this, it would make sense to unlock all of them.

Wherever [DebuggerHidden] is coming from, it's not defined in our source code. Kind of a mystery... and thoughts from anyone appreciated.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Roolo

Quote from: Nightinggale on June 23, 2018, 08:45:17 PM
Quote from: Ser Kitteh on June 23, 2018, 07:34:53 PM
I hope Mechanoids can be turned off/harvest for scyther blades, if only because I've been looking forward to Roolo's mechanoid mod since forever. Even if it doesn't, I hope it's in the game code somewhere so modders can use them!
I tried look into this and it looks like Defs/PawnCapacityDefs/PawnCapacity.xml holds the answer. It has Consciousness on top and it has a bool called lethalMechanoids set. I assume setting it to false will allow mechanoids to be disabled without actually killing them.

Quote from: Ser Kitteh on June 23, 2018, 07:34:53 PMAlso devaluing scyther blades to like 50 Silver a pop may be a good way so as to not make the game too easy. I don't mind Centipedes automatically dying since shutting them off was just extra work, but as some modders rely on this frame, I hope it does come back. Maybe even have a very low chance to salvage the minigun off them?
Just make other factions reject buying mechanoid technology. It's against their religion or something. Problem solved. Another issue to consider is what if you sell lots of weapons to some faction and then they turn on you? Should you be killed by an army full of people with scyther blades or miniguns or whatever you sold them? The whole concept of selling weapons to potential future enemies is a bit weird if you start to think about it. And even if the faction in question is ok, they could be raided and then the raiders have the weapons.
Realistically speaking, some weapons should be so dangerous in the wrong hands that your best option should be to take them apart if you don't want to use them yourself.

Good to know mech downing can probably be turned on again by setting one parameter to true, that's at least one problem solved. However, the ability to operate has also been removed. Getting that back is definitely possible, but asks for the extra effort of reimplementing a system that was basically there already (including the shutdown operation at least). Again, this is all possible by just throwing in some time, but reimplementing something that was already there makes me wonder why it was removed in the first place, hence my feedback earlier.






Tynan

Quote from: Yoshida Keiji on June 23, 2018, 02:32:18 PM
I don't remember if it was different in B18, but in VU1.0 Extreme difficulty, selling slaves only earns you $100 silver. It feels like you cannot become a "Slaver tribe", can you up the prices so that we can play another game strategy variant? It's like you took away another gameplay style.



That dude is 96 years old! Reasonably-aged, healthy slaves are still quite valuable in-game.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Tynan

Quote from: SpoonBender on June 23, 2018, 03:29:59 PM
I've been playing the unstable branch for a few days now and it seems the game got A LOT harder. I have almost 1200 hours experience in this game and I've always played on extreme difficulty. But now I've not been able to set up a successful colony on extreme difficulty. I have been killed by sappers and mechanoids mostly.

I admit I was a bit reliant on walls and a killbox. I don't use turrets, just a construction to feed them nicely to my gunners. But now there seems to be no use in building walls or a killbox whatsoever. I rarely get 'normal' raiders, mostly sappers, sieges and mechanoid ships.

Early game raids seem to have gotten a lot stronger too. Once I was up against 4 centipedes and 2 lancers with just 6 great bows to shoot at them. That didn't work out very well. One colony was destroyed by 6 raiders when I had just a short bow and 2 pawns, of which one was incapable of violence.

Walls get destroyed a lot quicker. I used to build granite defense pillars around the mechanoid ships, but now a burst from a heavy charge blaster destroys them and my pawns are without cover.

Then there's this change: "--Missed shots now have a 50% extra chance of hitting nothing; this will make missed shots less likely to hit random things (but doesn't change the chance of missing).". I think this is actually a pretty big thing. With many enemies clustered together missed shots used to have a good chance of hitting other enemies. This 'miss damage' is now reduced with 50%, which reduces the total damage output a lot.

I guess all these things were intended by the devs. It creates more dynamic gameplay, instead of the lemming trains into your defenses. I like it; the game is a huge challenge once again and i need to come up with new strategies. But maybe a bit more balancing is needed. Or maybe extreme difficulty should be next to impossible, which it wasn't before. What do you think?

Anyway, congrats to the devs. There's a lot of nice stuff in this update. I'm off playing Phoebe Chillax on rough difficulty now.

Edit: I just read Tynan's post 'The balancing process'. He says overall challenge got lowered, so maybe I'm just on a bad streak or something.

For the main gameplay modes I think the overall challenge is lowered, but critically, the cheese tactics you were depending on before have been countered. Especially at Extreme.

So the result is, normal tactics work better, and cheese tactics don't work as well. Which means if you were using cheese, it'll seem harder, and if you were using normal tactics, it'll seem easier. Since you were using cheese, it seems a lot harder.

Honestly the way you describe it is how I want Extreme to be. It's supposed to be really fucking hard. Finishing on that level should be a serious achievement not possible without some dedicated play and a dose of luck.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Tynan

Quote from: Madman666 on June 23, 2018, 03:58:41 PM
I agree about "mining" sapper raids. Those are absolute bullshit.  If grenadiers need to stay there for a minute chuking nades at 2tile wide granite wall, those miners rip through it like paper in 4-5 seconds. That one was kind of bullshit even in B18. They mine both through walls and through mountain tiles 10 times faster (if not more) than any of your colonists can.

Really no need to get angry, just give your opinion please. We do have rules against sustained hostility and anger venting like that.

That said, your point has been echoed elsewhere so I am planning on slowing down miner sappers somehow.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Tynan

Quote from: Roolo on June 23, 2018, 04:09:37 PM
I have to say, I like most changes in 1.0. Especially the new QOL things that are added, the bridges, the improvements for caravanning, how armour works now, and yes, I even like the training decay for animals.

There's one thing I dislike though, that mechanoids now die on being downed, and that it's no longer possible to perform operations on mechanoids (for instance shutting them down, or removing scyther blades). I can imagine for vanilla this was only a small part of functionality that could be considered clutter, and it might have been in the way when implementing the two types of scythers. However, it offered great opportunities for modders. For instance, the more mechanoids mod had some addidtional mechanoid parts that could be scavenged. Moreover, I almost finished a mod that allows mechanoid hacking, which relied on this system, and I'm disappointing to see that it's dropped. I really hope this is revised, and that the system makes its way back.

It's perfectly possible to mod things so mechs don't die on being downed, that shouldn't be a huge problem I think.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Tynan

The mechs' death on downed behavior is implemented in Pawn_HealthTracker.CheckForStateChange().

Thanks for the feedback everyone! Please keep it coming.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Madman666

Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:34:42 AM
Really no need to get angry, just give your opinion please. We do have rules against sustained hostility and anger venting like that.

That said, your point has been echoed elsewhere so I am planning on slowing down miner sappers somehow.

Thanks for answering. No hostility of whatsoever, Tynan, i guess using the bs word sounded a tad too rude, so if it offended anyone, accept my apologies. Its just that compared to actual grenadiers, that have to throw nades at walls\mountains, sappers that mine through make it seem like a walk in the park - couple "tinks" on a limestone wall and its gone. While colonists on the other hand take forever to dismantle walls, both by deconstructing and through use of weapons. Seems a bit unfair. So i am glad its being revised.

Roolo

Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:47:21 AM
The mechs' death on downed behavior is implemented in Pawn_HealthTracker.CheckForStateChange().

Thanks for the feedback everyone! Please keep it coming.
Thanks for replying and looking into it, it's appreciated. Sure, but it's also the ability to operate them and shut them down that's removed. Of course that can also be modded back. But like I said to Nightingale, reimplementing things that were already there made me wonder why they were removed in the first place, hence my feedback. 

Tynan

Quote from: Roolo on June 24, 2018, 12:59:09 AM
Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:47:21 AM
The mechs' death on downed behavior is implemented in Pawn_HealthTracker.CheckForStateChange().

Thanks for the feedback everyone! Please keep it coming.
Thanks for replying and looking into it, it's appreciated. Sure, but it's also the ability to operate them and shut them down that's removed. Of course that can also be modded back. But like I said to Nightingale, reimplementing things that were already there made me wonder why they were removed in the first place, hence my feedback.

It was removed because it was just busywork to have to shut them down. Taking their guns was removed because it was a massive free money fountain at the exact time in the game (late game) when money was already overbalanced. Scyther blade was removed for related reasons to above and because it created a bug that was nearly unsolvable without serious changes to how our health system works: It reduced Manipulation ability, which also made the pawn bad at fighting in melee. The system doesn't suppose distinguishing manipulation-for-the-purpose-of-melee and manipulation-for-the-purpose-of-work, so the system was unable to express what scyther blades really meant. It was always bugged for this reason. I decided I'd rather cut it and add other stuff that fit in cleanly.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Roolo

Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 01:04:32 AM
Quote from: Roolo on June 24, 2018, 12:59:09 AM
Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:47:21 AM
The mechs' death on downed behavior is implemented in Pawn_HealthTracker.CheckForStateChange().

Thanks for the feedback everyone! Please keep it coming.
Thanks for replying and looking into it, it's appreciated. Sure, but it's also the ability to operate them and shut them down that's removed. Of course that can also be modded back. But like I said to Nightingale, reimplementing things that were already there made me wonder why they were removed in the first place, hence my feedback.

It was removed because it was just busywork to have to shut them down. Taking their guns was removed because it was a massive free money fountain at the exact time in the game (late game) when money was already overbalanced. Scyther blade was removed for related reasons to above and because it created a bug that was nearly unsolvable without serious changes to how our health system works: It reduced Manipulation ability, which also made the pawn bad at fighting in melee. The system doesn't suppose distinguishing manipulation-for-the-purpose-of-melee and manipulation-for-the-purpose-of-work, so the system was unable to express what scyther blades really meant. It was always bugged for this reason. I decided I'd rather cut it and add other stuff that fit in cleanly.

Thanks again for the reply. That clears things up. Still, the money fountain problem could have been resolved without removing the feature, but the other complaints seem valid, so I can see why you didn't bother to spend more time on it. Good luck with wrapping things up!