The balancing process

[TheMeInTeam]

I feel for you Tynan.  I've had these discussions myself with my players.  It's never pleasant and you always get yelled at for ruining the game and other fantastic hyperboles.  It must be much worse at your level with thousands of users giving feedback compared to my experience.

At worst, one can always dry the tears with $$$ :p. 

More seriously, nobody is going to be perfect, and this game gets more right than wrong.  At lot of the changes are unambiguously good/QoL, and a quite a few beyond those are uncontroversial.  This type of thread will always have a bias towards pointing out mistakes, which are comparatively rare in Rimworld and have a pretty good track record of being addressed.

[gladosexe]

Why not use both armor systems? Tone the reduction down a bit on heavy armors and add a new stat that allows armor to specify which body parts it has a chance of blocking, and how high the chance is.

I think this framework could be used to add a lot of depth to the armor system. For example, simple metal helmets would provide no reduction but have a decent block chance. Bullets would usually bounce off, but if they penetrate the helmet, it's good as going straight through. On the other hand advanced helmets could provide a bit of reduction.

I'm envisioning a tier of armor existing between power armor and devilstrand clothes, something like "kevlar" or "light combat armor", that would provide good reduction but low block chance, similar to B18 power armor.

A somewhat wider variety of armors could then also be added, to specifically protect certain body parts. For example, helmets with visors. They would extend protection to the eyes, at a slight cost of resources, and more importantly, vision. Armour would then come with very specific trade-offs.

It sounds complex, like something better suited for a mod, but I'm only proposing 8 items be added:

- Light combat helmet
- Light combat armour
- Light combat pants

And alternate versions of:

- All 3 helmets w/ visor (trade vision for blocking on eyes)
- Reinforced light combat armour (trade manipulation for blocking on hands + arms)
- Reinforced light combat pants (trade speed for blocking on legs + feet)

The tradeoffs would be greater for power armour, but the blocking effect would have full coverage.

Vests already provide coverage for the body, and the advanced helmet could provide coverage for the ears. Armour would have more variety, it would be fairly intuitive (Visors protect eyes. Hard things block, soft things absorb. etc.), and IMO this system would provide an excellent framework for modders to add more armours, and have them accurately reflected in the game.

Of course, I'm just theorycrafting.

[toxicbubble]

That was one concern about the damage deflecting system, for sure. I decided to leave it in for now for simplicity's sake and because it's hard to think of a better alternative that doesn't jam complexity into the game for very little benefit. Besides just zeroing out armor for soft clothing, I suppose (which also isn't satisfactory).

I've not played that long in 1.0 but I can already feel that the deflection on cloth items needs to be changed a bit.
Nothing feels more frustrating than having a colonist with armor and an autopistol get downed by a tribal raider with a club and magical cloth duster that deflects BULLETS

One idea to fix this might be to have armor penetration values on the various weapons, which basically ignore a certain amount of armor value. Wearables like cloth T-Shirt would have lower armors, that can still deflect attacks with a low armor penetration. A jacket might have an armor of 7, a club might penetrate 4 armor, so it will do a bit less damage to a jacket wearer than if they were naked. Basically 3 damage 'spills over' after armor penetration is taken into account. Swords would pierce clothing relatively easily compared to clubs with their higher armor penetration values, but high level armors could still resist sword blows. This allows clubs to do high or near equal damage as swords to unarmored targets, but have trouble applying damage to heavily armored targets.

A tribal cloth might have an armor of 2 or 3 - it will deflect some fist blows, sometimes, and mitigate a tiny bit of damage but not much else. Pistol Bullets would have a high armor penetration like 100, so unloading a pistol into a cloth tunic provides higher amounts of damage.

Power armor might have an armor of 200, so would deflect pistol bullets, but sniper rifles might have an armor penetration of 250 and so still occasionally pierce through etc.

Just an idea and numbers only as examples, but may provide a way of having both clothing and armor work a little more realistically, where they can all provide some levels of protection against some things, but it depends on the attack type, so bullets don't get stopped by a tshirt. I imagine all of this would happen after the hit/miss calculation as part of the damage calculation.

[Bones]

I don't know if this was already mentioned and people are going to kick me for this but I think a cool idea for animal taming would be to increase it if other wild animals are close to them, making them wild themselves faster.

So tamed animal not very wild close to tamed animal very wild would increase the speed of degradation of the less wild animal.

And wild animal close to any tamed animal will increase the speed as well, faster than above.

Lastly this is an idea I have seen on reddit, is to give a trait to animals born from tamed animals, that would make them easier to tame or less wild themselves.

[Revshawn]

Thanks for the post T! Not a lot of game developers, especially from AAA companies obsessed with lootboxes and making several editions of the same game, even take the time to explain their changes to their game let alone address feedback given by the community. A lot of people are very passionate about the game and that passion fuels their posts, even if it does come off as negative, and I think that's a very good thing. I appreciate you for making the post and I think you for your efforts.

There's a lot of things I loved about this patch and I like the vast majority of it. Forcing the player to have a few dedicated beastmasters, as you stated, is a great change simply for the fact that it provides a constant flow of experience for a pawn that dedicates themselves specifically to that craft. I think that you should reward a delegation of certain skillsets towards different individuals and this change allows a constant flow of XP to combat the XP decay you're going to get from having a high animal skill. So any changes towards that front is welcomed. And the adding of a maintenance cost to turrets in order to curb excessive usage on that front is another welcome change, as it is simply a way to avoid risks in battle and automate raidfighting and as a player I can't understand how that makes the game any more fun. At least now they have to maintain such a strategy! And that in itself is a good thing, nudging the player to use turrets as a supplementary tactic with the other defensive measures in the game instead of a whole solution.

I've spent a little bit of time in the new Beta and I'm on my new colony, 3rd attempt in the bare naked start. I've run into some issues along the way and I feel that combat still needs a little more balancing if we are going to go ahead with this new system. And the biggest issue I feel is that a lot of attacks by the wildlife and by most major can now simply one-shot your colonists despite efforts you try to counter it. Think about it. The neck has 10hp. And that's a very low total that many enemy mobs in the game surpass with a single attack. So at any point in the game you could have a colonist out there, roaming around in full power armor and a chain shotgun, and a bear is liable to just run up on him and rip his head off in one shot because the bear was hungry and he got a lucky roll.

I've always been against things that you cannot counter as a player and this is one of those things in mind. There's no counter to a bear coming up to you and ripping your head off. You can take steps to make it less likely. You can give him a full plate armor that will make the roll where he rips your head off less likely to happen. Power armor. Anything. But if he rolls that roll and he targets your neck, your head is coming off. There's nothing after that you can do to curb the damage. Your pawn is dead.

It was the same way used in this example prior to 1.0 of course, but I feel as if 1.0 did a much better job in balancing the game. Especially when you put the changes side by side.

Prior to 1.0

• Each point of armor from 1 - 50% reduces damage by 1%.
• Each point of armor between 51 - 100% provides a 1% chance to not take damage.
• Each point of armor beyond 100% reduces damage by 0.25% and gives a 0.25% chance to not take damage.
• Total protection is capped at 90% damage reduction and 90% deflect chance (i.e. 260% armor).

Post 1.0

• Each point of armor gives a chance to negate damage completely.

I'll just be honest. I prefer Pre-1.0 far more than I did 1.0 as far as calculating damage is concerned. I haven't tried this yet and my testing of 1.0 is still pretty early in its stages, but this new system would likely take strategies such as equipping a few strong melee colonists with power armor and shield belts and rushing centipedes, thumbos, and great sloths off the board because whether your colonist lives or dies is based purely on luck. The magic percentages. A degree of chance. And I wouldn't risk a melee colonist I've put several hours of training improving his stats on such an ordeal when a single or a couple bad rolls could break any one of his limbs or kill him completely without any means to counterplay. Against Raiders? Probably. They don't do enough damage to break vital limbs. But against the toughest mobs of the game? Their standard attacks do far too much damage for me to risk it. 20 damage for centipedes for a blunt attack? 22 damage for Thrumbo/Megasloth? A thousand nopes. Not gonna risk it. Not when a single bad roll unleashes all of that damage all at once upon a single body part. It's far better to take your changes from range. You can just kite the melee enemies after you do enough damage with the first hail of bullets and slow their movement speed enough so that your pawns can outrun and shoot.

It doesn't break the game by any regard, but I did enjoy playing the game in that fashion by overriding the fact that I was effectively applying medieval knight tactics to modern warfare through extensive preparation. And when you have that kind of mindset, that of an autistic barbarian that rushes any foe before him wearing a full suit of power armor, it's tough to turn off that switch.

I fear that if a new system isn't designed soon...

...innocent pawns will die.

In all seriousness though, this is but a small criticism upon a vast swath of new additions in 1.0 that I really enjoyed. Hopefully my small criticism will not outweigh the sentiment of my vast enjoyment of this patch. Thanks again!

[NiftyAxolotl]

As someone who abused the overpowered zero-maintenance boar-swarms, it is my civic duty to try the new some-maintenance boar-swarms and report on whether they are still OP, fair, or useless.

[ashaffee]

Well boars don't haul so they are kinda useless anyway besides just general defense and a different way to store meat I suppose. I'd do that test of yours with labs or wargs.

[Tynan]

Been playing with ideas for a new armor system.

Since it's not an RPG, I've been really afraid of complexity for a long time. The idea is that with an RPG you're focused on one character, so you care enough to think about complex calcluations. But in RW, you maybe don't want to do that do so many people.

But I'm thinking maybe it's better to just let it happen. At the end of the day, newbies still know the non-numeric version: thicker armor is better. And some RPGs have party sizes bigger than RW colonies.

The design notes. Still under consideration. This is not a promise it's just an idea, one of many I'm considering:

---

Weapons have an armor penetration stat. By default, AP is the weapon's damage amount as a percent. The AP stat can be overridden if set directly on the weapon (but no immediate plans to do this for any of our weapons).

Armor has a damage reduction (DR) stat. DR is how many points it'll remove from incoming damage. DR is calculated from armor rating by the formula: armorRating * 0.15 rounded. DR cannot be overridden specially.

• Subtract the weapon's armor penetration from armor's armor rating (this effect also applies to the armor's damage reduction).
• Incoming damage amount has damage reduction subtracted from it, to a minimum of 50% of the original damage. This value is rounded randomly using RoundRandom, if it goes to zero damage is cancelled and the deflected effect plays.
• Roll for damage deflection based on armor rating. If it passes, damage is cancelled and the deflected effect plays.
• There's a chance to convert sharp damage to blunt: 100% at 2dmg lerping to 0% at 12dmg.
• Armor takes damage based on the original weapon damage.

After this is done we'll have to rebalance some weapons (specifically weapons with weirdly low per-shot damage, like the assault rifle and LMG, and extremely armor-prevented now. They need to change from ~7 to ~11 damage per shot. Charge rifle should go from ~11 to ~13.) Alternatively we could look at just forcing AP on some of these weapons, but I'd prefer to keep things "pure" if possible and use direct AP definition only for really special weapons.

Here's my spreadsheet analysis.

[IndustryStandard]

While you're tinkering with weapons, have you thought about making the shotguns shoot multiple smaller projectiles instead of just a big large one?

[Tynan]

As someone who abused the overpowered zero-maintenance boar-swarms, it is my civic duty to try the new some-maintenance boar-swarms and report on whether they are still OP, fair, or useless.

I look forward to your report!

[Madman666]

I kind of like current 1.0 simple mechanic of armor just blocking things with certain probability. A lot more actually than DR based one from Beta. Adding armor penetration and damage reduction over it, feels way too complex. Plus as you said, that d require revising damage on weapons towards being more deadly (which is always in favor of pirates more than you ).

Also i sure hope clothing retains its ability to also shrug some hits off if the pawn was lucky enough. Clothing made from advanced materials especially.

[Albion]

Regarding weapons and armor I prefer the simpler system of just one value. It communicates clearly what to expect and how much the armor will impact incoming fire.

Another alternative for armor penetration:
Give the weapon an armor penetration value of 1 by default and higher values up to 2 or maybe 3 for advanced weapons.
If a shot hits armor, the armor deflection value gets divided by the armor penetration value. This means you could still create weapons with a high chance to punch through heavy armor while not dealing too much damage.

Armor penetration has to be at least 1 to work properly though.

[Panzer]

I really like that new armor system design idea, hope it turns out to be decent and not too heavy on the performance.

Whatever the outcome, conversion from sharp to blunt damage is a good idea and should be included in the final design, it always felt wierd to recieve bleeding wounds from a wood shiv despite wearing a state of the art piece of power armor

The impact on the medical side of things is gonna be interesting though, I guess that blunt and sharp damage are equally painful? Else a good piece of armor would mean you go down faster to low damage weapons Or maybe I havent thought far enough, at this point Im just speculating.

[Canute]

Another alternative for armor penetration:
Give the weapon an armor penetration value of 1 by default and higher values up to 2 or maybe 3 for advanced weapons.
If a shot hits armor, the armor deflection value gets divided by the armor penetration value. This means you could still create weapons with a high chance to punch through heavy armor while not dealing too much damage.

Armor penetration has to be at least 1 to work properly though.

To made it too simple, we don't even need the difference between blunt/sharp anymore.
But i don't think this don't like the most people.
It would hard to explain why a blunt weapon could have an armor penetration abilitity.

[Revshawn]

The spreadsheet looks pretty nice! I think I would welcome a DR/AP system based on armor/weapons. Just the idea of it sounds pretty fun. My major concern with 1.0 is the late game mobs with high melee damage one shotting a melee pawn just because they had a good roll. You don't feel that as much with ranged pawns because you have the chance for your enemy to miss due to proper cover on top of the deflection given by your armor. Plus ranged weapons are sharp and the 1.0 armor system really protects against that.

I especially like the part about the partial conversion of sharp damage to blunt damage as well and the damage to armor.