Balacing base defense/mountain bases/turtling and so on

Started by TrashMan, February 28, 2020, 07:06:04 AM

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TrashMan

How to fix it without it being stupid and gimmicky:

- tool requirements - you can't dig solid stone with bare hands. You need to make a pickaxe to mine. Slows down the entire mining process and limits hte amount of pawns that can dig based on equipment. Heck, you can apply it to cutting down trees - make an axe requirement. A stone chunk and some wood and you have a stone axe. (but how can you get wood if you can't cut trees without axe? Simple, you can gather wood without axes by breaking branches. That would yield only a tiny amount of wood, take a long time, the tree would stay and it's growing would be re-set)

- slow down mining. Simple. Mining should take time even with good tools. Because it's stone.

- have raiders attack farming plots and reduce farming yield, requiring bigger farms that would have to be on the outside, making it harder to turtle and protect. Also, makes sense. A tiny farm isn't going to feed an entire colony so easily. Might also require some nutritional value balancing.

- earthquakes (artillery bombardments too) that can cause cave-ins. Support pillars and walls for strong, but flexible materials help.

- vehicles. Blimps and ariplanes/shuttles (can drop bombs). Trucks/apcs/tanks (can carry troposp to your walls or carry big weapons). Usable by the player AND enemies. Old-fashioned siege engines, like a giant drill (goes trough walls like butter). SOME of these would be impervious to small arms fire, requireing tank mines, AA guns, heavy guns and interception.

- combine with Preemtive Strike Stuff. More reason for the player to leave the colony and the safety of the walls. To thin/weaken a raid before it reaches the base.

- actual AI settlement simulation (simplifed). Population (number of paws, decreases with losses. Sending a raid also decreases it), defense (defensive fortifications/turrets), wealth (affects how attractive it is for other factions to attack, how quick the population grows) - these 3 variables would be enough.

- all the basic QoL additions and fixes (Pawns are Capable, metal doesn't burn, vein miners/designators, death rattle, improved surgery, medic bags)

I can think of a lot more things.

lugaruclone

I have a list of things that are 'easier than they should be' and 'harder than they should be' and all things mining and mountain are easier than they should be for sure.

I was in love with a mod but I do not think it ever made it to 1.0 much less 1.1 that had tools pawns could pick up and put down when performing actions, so for example it would be brilliant to see pawns (including non violent ones) grab a pick axe or shovel, dig, and then put it back.

Serenity

There are plenty of mods that add various tools. But I think they all just increase the working speed without drastically lowering the baseline. Not sure though. It's a good idea though

Whifflepits

Not sure if all of this is necessary for "balance". It'd be nice to have yes mo' features mo' better, but I've had so many cave-dwelling colonies completely decimated by a bad infestation in the wrong place at the wrong time that it doesn't feel like turtling to me at all, but a pretty risky gamble.

Sure most of us around here mod the rate the events occur or remove them entirely, but most don't. So if you start adding in "balance" fixes to a common style of play like digging into a mountainside you're really going to skew the game to the far side of un-fun for people who aren't modding infestations.

TrashMan

Quote from: Whifflepits on March 03, 2020, 05:53:46 PM
Not sure if all of this is necessary for "balance". It'd be nice to have yes mo' features mo' better, but I've had so many cave-dwelling colonies completely decimated by a bad infestation in the wrong place at the wrong time that it doesn't feel like turtling to me at all, but a pretty risky gamble.

Sure most of us around here mod the rate the events occur or remove them entirely, but most don't. So if you start adding in "balance" fixes to a common style of play like digging into a mountainside you're really going to skew the game to the far side of un-fun for people who aren't modding infestations.

Infestations were added to punish "turtling". Now mech clusters are added. And turrets nerfed.
I am proposing something more natural that doesn't really nerf mountain bases or turtling in term of how effective it is when set up, rather makes it more time consuming to set up (which would mean you transition into the mountain later, which means dealing with infestations later).

If you use embrasures, infestations are easy to deal with. Personally, I use 3-tile wide main corridors in my mountain base, with embrasure walls and heavy doors spaced around AND defensive rooms.
If you don't use them you can remove the thick roof for some venting shafts (to prevent cooking), you can use chemfuel bombs to get rid of them easily.

gCvdA

Primary reason of having a mountain base is to not get shit dropped into your base and to save on heating/cooling. Prevelsnce of mountain base has to originate from the game's quite unrealistic threat scaling, since it seems to be part of the game design that some fights are straight up unwinnable without a killbox, which in turn prompt the player to have a killbox, which is what made the devs making the threat scaling even worse in the first place. The killbox/raid arms race is in turn originated from unrealistic pawn skill scaling, mood and lack of finer control of pawn actions. Pawns are a significantly worse option to turrets because turrets does not suffer mental breaks from eaten without a table, unsightly environment and recreation deprived; turrets also scale better due to being cheap, and being cheap make up for the lack of accuracy, which pawns suffer from as well. You don't see people using turrets everywhere because small automatic gun turrets are not versatile, expensive and not nearly as useful as a human fighter. The game should allow wider range of actions for pawns (manual pick up item, control of carrying drugs/consumable without the need for a schedule/stockpile nearby, command to interact with environment (ie, build) while drafted, control group, different set of mood during combat (presumably a mood/Moodlet overriding system, where "under safety threat" would override/partial override the effect of, say, unsightly environment. The current mood system works well enough in a daily life basis, but doesn't make sense at all once any threat emerges, which is a very important aspect of the game

There is also some fundamental problems with the setting and colony development. Assuming raiders often are around industrial tech and have access to drop pods, and they presumably rely on ancient satelites, and presuming raiders have a basic sense of tactics, with the current turret/threat scaling, raiders have no reason to ever not drop pod right into the center of your base and the game would be virtually unbeatable.

There's just something with the game's take on reality that's weird and self conflicting. There are so many things that are just close enough to resemble reality but not enough solutions, which make it infuriating sometimes. The only thing exempted from this is probably drop pods, drop pods are cool

TrashMan

Quote from: Serenity on February 28, 2020, 08:01:53 PM
There are plenty of mods that add various tools. But I think they all just increase the working speed without drastically lowering the baseline. Not sure though. It's a good idea though

I'm saying go beyond lowering the baseline. Without tools SOME things should be downright undoable.

But that also means smart tool managment. the AI being smart enough to pick and and return tools as needed (preferred solution) or carry tool on them (without taking up the weapon slot)