Extensive Feedback on Royalty/1.1

Started by Troxism, March 23, 2020, 11:42:48 PM

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Troxism

Not sure exactly where the best place to leave a large feedback post like this is, but this seems as good a place as any.

I played through a full Royalty playthrough in 'almost vanilla' (nothing that affected gameplay outside of very minor things) to get a feel for gameplay balance and esp combat balance in Royalty/1.1. For reference, the colony ended at 1.45 million wealth and a population of 21 and was played on Cassandra Classic Merciless, so I feel like I got a full range of experience with the new mechanics even up to very large raids (40-50 centipedes + a bunch of trash mechs was the typical raid I was facing by that point).

Based on that, here is my feedback/thoughts covering a wide range of small and large topics. Hopefully it is helpful.

Royalty content related feedback:

Nobles:


Honestly I don't understand the very recent changes to Nobles to allow them to do all work types. I think it was fine with the first round of changes to make the higher ranks slightly less restrictive. There are already various advantages to siding with the Empire (easy access to Techprints, you get to call down meat shields, and generally getting favor isn't too difficult). Now it feels like there are barely any drawbacks at all (the room requirements feel more like a checkbox). It's also kinda weird to have a 'noble' who mops up blood and vomit and hauls corpses 24/7 but DEMANDS that he/she has an impressive throne room with 2 lit braziers. It feels like all the 'teeth' have been taken out of the noble mechanics and IMHO it makes it less of a tradeoff. At the very least I don't think high tier nobles should be capable of dumb labour. Most of my playthrough was done before this change went in, and it honestly felt fine. It's fine to have a few people not capable of a lot of jobs, the benefits of having psycasters are massive and it's totally worth it anyways, it just meant you had to be a bit careful in picking who went to what rank (I had various people 'pause' at Praetor since that is where you get most of the 'good' psycasts and don't have too many restrictions).

I would have preferred instead a more granular system where nobles won't do unskilled work, but will do skilled work (becoming more strict in higher tiers). For example having high rank nobles be unable to deliver food to patients/prisoners, but they can still do surgery/chat with prisoners. Or being unable to break up stone blocks, but can still craft weapons. Or can't milk/shear animals, but can still train them. Or unable to deliver to construction blueprints, or build things that lack quality like walls, but can still build furniture. But to be fair I realize such a system would be difficult to communicate to the player why some specific jobs are unabled and others disabled, as many of these fall under the same umbrella job type.

Either way, it's certainly not gamebreaking to have it work the way it does now, but it is a little disappointing, and it IMHO eliminates most of the gameplay reasons to play rebel (now it's just roleplay reasons to do that).

Mech Clusters:

There has been a lot said about these, mostly people complaining about them being too hard. In my opinion they have been generally overnerfed over the course of the recent patches. While they were kind of silly in many situations at the start (10-15 mortar clusters protected by shields  and with a Psy Suppressor were just insane), now they have been almost completely defanged, except if you get very very unlucky (which just feels terrible). They scale VERY poorly with wealth compared to raids.

What I mean by that is, generally a raid of 100 people is more than twice as hard as a raid of 50 people (well it depends on the specifics, but still). But mech clusters don't really scale like that, as most of their negative effects are fixed (EMI generators, weather controllers) and don't scale at all. On top of this, the static portions of them (turrets, mech manufacturers ect) can be trivialized by high tier psycasts or even just smoke launchers/mortars. Once I had Smokepop/Invis on my main psycaster, she basically took some frag grenades (since they deal 200 building damage they are extremely effective) and would just solo the static parts of the mech cluster. Sometimes I would even have her invis into the middle of the cluster to grenade the mortar shield so I could shell the mechs and draw them to my base to later clean up the static parts with her. The reality is with a combination of mortars/psycasts/smoke launchers/emp grenades, it doesn't really matter if a cluster comes with 2 turrets, or 20, as it just takes a bit longer to clear in the latter case, but the strategy is exactly the same and it's just as safe if done correctly. In practice clusters became a very small mech raid combined with a bunch of trivial to beat static defenses, which is overall much easier to beat than just a normal full strength mech raid at the same point value. This is the opposite of how raids work generally (although it is true IEDs/Mortars can do similar things vs human raids) where smaller raids are trivial to beat with things like door popping tactics or just a choke point but larger raids of 200+ people or 40+ centipedes tend to be slightly more tricky and require some other strategy due to how pathing AI works on massive raids where they can just all walk through your pawns even if you try to block a door to nullify their numbers. Plus you know, just the sheer weight in numbers making a straight up fight impossible.

And in terms of what I mean by the 'RNG' factor, well even with 1+ mill wealth I would still sometimes get clusters with no bullet or mortar shields and some trivial condition causer like Smoke Spewer or fixed weather Fog, that were easy to just shell to draw out the mechs/destroy the condition causers, and then clean up the turrets afterwards at my leisure. Those types of clusters were literally a free plasteel/steel/component delivery. However you could also for example get an instantly active Suppressor or EMI generator behind a Mortar AND Bullet shield that will be active for 9 more days, and with a lot of mech drop beacons and not many turrets, so that it's not so easy to just charge in and abuse LOS on the turrets to snipe the key structures. While there is plenty of variance with regular raids too, there is far more with Mech Clusters because of these types of factors, and while randomness is certainly an intended part of this game, clusters suffer from a little too much RNG IMHO.

Ultimately the problem is clusters are hard before you have the tools to deal with them, and then they are really easy once you do, to a much greater extent than regular raids are. This IMHO is why they received so many complaints (not that I'm saying all the complaints were invalid, but this dichotomy certainly didn't help, since most players were initially giving feedback from the early game). I would suggest reverting some of the stat nerfs to the turrets, removing the shield recharge periods, maybe tweaking how mortars spawn so they can spawn with an effect causer at higher point values (but not having more than one mortar spawn ever still), but further raise minimum point value to spawn clusters to give players more time to get the tools needed to deal with them.

On a slightly different note I was actually going to suggest adding a dormancy to the effect causers, before that made it into the game. However, I think it should just be a fixed 1 day timer, not the current random 0 to 15 days (would help with the before mentioned RNG problem). Before the timer existed, it kinda defeated the point of the clusters being 'dormant' if it had something like the EMI generator or Psy Suppressor active right at the start which FORCED you to immediately attack no matter what pretty much. But with the current timer, if it's a long one, it's often too easy to just wait for the mortar shields to drop, and shell it, without any strategy or thinking involved. And if you get no timer at all, it's the exact same problem as before, where the cluster is pretty much the exact same thing as a normal raid and doesn't really feel much different since you have to immediately fight.

Psycasts:

I'm just going to run through my thoughts on the various Psycasts/tiers. As a rule of thumb, I'm okay with something being situational, as long as there isn't some way better alternative. To me the goal should be that all Psycasts are useful in SOME situation, not to always make them equally powerful as that is just not possible anyways.

Tier 1: Burden is generally by far the most generally useful, even with the nerfs to it. It makes for example killing Thrumbos early very easy as you can just kite them with this while a few people shoot it to death (to be fair this usually worked even without Burden, but Burden makes it very safe instead of slightly luck dependent). And it's very useful vs small early game raids where you can use it to kite melee enemies like Scythers easily. However it's not really overpowered in general as it falls off VERY fast later in the game just due to sheer numbers of enemies. The problem is more that Stun/Painblock are almost completely useless even at the time you initially get them. The only real use of Painblock I can see is to make Wimps better at combat. However that forces you to babysit them to make sure they don't die instead of collapsing like a normal colonist. And that is a way too situational use in general, as it's not common you get a Wimp who you would want to use in fights anyways, enough to dedicate spending entropy on them and micromanaging them. Stun just honestly doesn't do enough to justify the cost, esp later on when there are hundreds of enemies anyways and stunning a single enemy for 3 seconds is a waste of 12 entropy.

Having said all this, it's fine that the tier 1 powers 'don't scale' or are very situational, so I don't think there is a drastic need for changes here.

Tier 2: Entropy Link seems like it's main use is supposed to be recruiting trash pawns to basically use as psionic batteries (ie just link with them and just let them overload and if they get permanent damage just euthanize them and get more) to double the psycasting ability of your 'main' psycasters. Either way it's pretty situational. Blinding Pulse is generally pretty useful, but also not that powerful in practice as the effects on enemy accuracy are less drastic then they might initially seem, esp considering missed shots can still hit other targets. This is fine because these are just Tier 2 powers, and in this case both powers are actually useful in some cases, so it works out.

Tier 3: Chaos Skip is just garbage in practice. It's too random to be useful and sometimes can even make things worse if you are unlucky. Vertigo Pulse is one of the best psycasts period and is highly useful in MANY situations. Even vs Mechs it's actually decent, although it's way more effective against animals/humans ofc. Beckon is situationally useful, although it's basically worse, lower tier version of Skip in most cases (as it's too expensive to spam on many ranged enemies, you end up using Beckon to pull specific priority targets out of cover or into melee, but Skip does a way better job at that.) Having said that, I did sometimes use Beckon over Skip, so considering the fact that it's lower tier, I think it's fine as it is. Overall the issue with this tier is you have 1 great power, 1 useful power, and 1 godawful power. Feels very bad when you upgrade your amp to tier 3 and you get Chaos Skip. IMHO Chaos Skip should just be replaced.

Tier 4: This tier has the most 'balanced/consistent' set of powers, although many are situational. Initially I thought Wallraise would be the best power in this tier, but in practice I found myself using Skip the most (I had multiple psycasters and used trainers to have as many powers on each as possible to test out combinations). Smokepop is by far the most situational (it's basically only useful vs mech turrets, or if you are going for some melee heavy strategy to give you cover vs ranged) but I did end up using it sometimes. Wallraise is also very situational but can be absolutely clutch in some cases, like creating cover to let you advance into grenade range, or breaking enemy line of sight at a key moment. Focus is probably the worst power this tier, just because it's a more general boost while most of the others can be absolutely game changing if used at the right moment, but even Focus is okay. As for Skip, well, despite it being a single target power, it can be VERY useful in some cases. Obviously it can be used to save an out of position ally, or blink your meleers into melee, but my favorite use of it ended up being 'abducting' specific enemies into my meleers behind cover in massive firefights where I couldn't just send meleers out. I used it to great effect to pick out Inferno Cannon Centipedes during large 40+ centipede raids to prevent them from disrupting my firing lines/forcing colonists out of cover while I fought the charge blaster centipedes. Also let my meleers actually do something productive in those types of massive all out ranged fights where it's impossible to safely leave cover no matter what armour/shield belt you wear.

Tier 5: Invis is the standout here, although Berserk used on the right target can be decent (doomsday pirates, centipedes). Invis lets you do things like walk right up to pirate sieges and wipe them out with a Doomsday without risking them firing their own/sniping you with a lucky brain shot. Or utterly trivialize mech turrets combined with Frag Grenades. Or even allow you to use Frag grenades/EMP grenades safely in straight up fights. Overall while Invis feels much more powerful than Berserk, both powers are actually useful, so it's not too bad.

Tier 6: Berserk Pulse, even with the huge nerf (it was utterly broken before the nerf), is still really good and overall the best T6 power (to be fair it doesn't have much competition, and T6 powers SHOULD be good). Mass Chaos Skip is HIGHLY situational and often just causes more issues in my experience, but it's not as bad as Chaos Skip, since it at least scales to higher enemy counts well and can be great for splitting up a large group into easy to defeat pieces, or just buying some time. Manhunter Pulse is utterly useless. It's biggest issue is it just doesn't scale with difficulty/wealth, and since I was playing a high wealth game on Merciless, it's not a surprise I never found a single use for this power. It is especially useless if you play on more 'barren' biomes. I'm not really sure how to fix it however, but I would probably start by making it lower tier. I don't really think it belongs in Tier 6. Or just replace it outright.

Overall in my experience the powers I ended up using the most were Berserk Pulse, Skip, Vertigo Pulse, and to a lesser extent, Invisibility. Most others were used pretty sparingly/in specific situations (although I did use Burden a decent amount in the very early game). I don't think psycast balance is too bad after the last round of nerfs, but IMHO Chaos Skip/Manhunter Pulse need a serious look as they are just so much worse then their alternatives in the same tier. Focus and Mass Chaos Skip could probably use some buffs too.


Drill/Field Arms:

Drill/Field arms are pretty OP with the changes made to them a few patches ago and should probably get a pretty hefty nerf. You can easily get to 500-600% mining/planting speed with two of them, and the only drawback is -16% movement, which can be easily made up with bionics (and even before you get bionics, it's still totally worth taking the penalty to increase your work rate at those jobs by about 4x on average). To top of it off, they are cheap to make since they are made from just components/steel. Now yes, they do require a techprint which can be annoying to get a specific one, but frankly I don't think that is enough. I managed to get a miner mining at 2000% speed with wakeup + drill arms + work frenzy, which is just insane. I don't remember ever getting over about 200-300% normally and 600% with all possible buffs in 1.0. I think drill/field arm bonuses should be at least halved to 80%, maybe even reduced further then that.

On a side note, they also act as a better version of Prosthetic Arms which is kinda weird (usually I'd rather have an 8% movement penalty then a 25% manipulation penalty). However due to the Techprint gate this isn't too much of an issue in practice.

Minor things:

Trigger Happy seems to lower the casting time of psycasts since it looks like they just use aiming time. Not sure if intended.

Not sure why but I got a Manhunter pack once during the 'Stellarch Defense' raids. I thought you couldn't get Manhunters during 'endgame raids', but I guess something changed? Not sure if it's a bug though, but I figured I would mention it, because this literally never happened in 1.0.

Speaking of the endgame raids, I got 4 raids within the span of 0.5 days during them at one point, which I don't think is supposed to be possible? For reference, was a 121 man pirate siege, with another 161 man pirate siege coming about 10 seconds later, then 0.4 days after that, 200+ tribal sappers, and 0.1 days after that, 150 pirate sappers (so at the same time). AFAIK you are supposed to have at least 0.5 days break between 'pairs' of raids, but to be fair it's possible that I might have gotten the times slightly wrong when taking my notes. Earlier before that point, I also got 3 raids immediately in a row, first 56 scythers podding in the middle of my base at 2.2 days after accepting the quest, then a 160 man outlander siege at 2.4 days after accepting it, and then 2.5 days after accepting it, a mech cluster dropped, which also seemed kinda strange (are you supposed to be able to get mech clusters during endgame raids? Seems strange). I've never seen these sorts of patterns, and I take notes on endgame raids in every game I play to that point. Either way I don't think anything is actually broken, but it did seem 'off' to me based on plenty of 1.0 experience with endgame raids at similar wealth levels.

I would like to suggest some kind of 'Extinguish' psycast added, probably in tier 2 (there are only 2 powers there, and I think this would fit in terms of power level) that instantly put out fires in a (small) area. Kind of like a mobile mini firefoam popper.

When you upgrade your psi amp, but already learned another psycast of that tier via psytrainer, you don't get a new power, which feels like you screwed yourself over. Not really a 'bug' or anything game breaking, but I think you should always learn a new power from upgrading your amplifier tier unless you already know all the powers of that tier.

It is more efficient to sell gold in small quantities many times rather than in a single large amount to a Tribute Collector due to how Favour is rounded up currently. For example I get 1 favour for selling 34 gold, but it takes 100 to get 2 favour. Would make sense to change favour on a pawn to be tracked in decimals rather than integers. Also it doesn't really make sense that a prisoner with half their limbs and organs missing gives the same value as a healthy one, favour for selling slaves should be based on the pawn value IMHO. Again, this would require favour to be tracked in decimal points to work however since you would rarely end up with integer values.

Continued in next post due to length...

Troxism

1.1 related feedback:

Charge Lance:

Charge Lances got a pretty big nerf and pretty much seem completely pointless to craft now. Obviously I don't know for sure, but it feels like the nerf to them was aimed at nerfing Lancers to make them less scary in the early game, but the result of this is that I don't really see a situation where I would ever bother crafting Charge Lances anymore, as they are worse then Charge Rifles/Miniguns in any practical situation that I can think of.

Following numbers are using a 98% shooting accuracy shooter, against a target at 25 tiles away and using good quality weapons (frankly through, changing these numbers won't change much, just the exact ratios might differ slightly)

Vs Unarmoured Human (100% size, 0% armour): Charge Rifle: 4.93 DPS, Charge Lance: 3.93 DPS, 25.4% advantage to the Rifle

Vs Marine Armoured Human (100% size, 106% armour): Charge Rifle: 2.31, Lance: 2.13, 8.5% advantage to the Rifle

Vs Centipede (180% size, 70% armour): Rifle: 6.55, Lance: 5.54, 18.2% advantage to the Rifle

Vs Scyther/Lancer/Pikeman (100% size, 40% armour): Rifle: 4.75, Lance: 3.93, 20.9% advantage to the Rifle.

Note that I used a range pretty favourable to the Lance, as the Charge Rifle becomes more accurate at closer ranges relative to the Charge Lance (which doesn't really become more accurate). In addition, the Lance is accurate, while the Rifle is inaccurate in general. This actually means that if firing into a group of enemies (which is very common in the late game), the rifle has more effective DPS then this single target example, as some of the missed shots will strike other targets. Finally, using 'Good' quality weapons actually favours the Charge Lance (so my comparison was VERY favourable to the Lance and it STILL lost), since it scales worse with weapon quality then a Charge Rifle; it's high base accuracy means it 'overcaps' accuracy even at Excellent Quality, while the Charge Rifle benefits all the way to Legendary. The Lance does have the advantage of being able to remove limbs/heads in a single shot, but frankly usually blowing off limbs from raiders doesn't do much as they are often immune to pain due to Yayo/Go-Juice, and they are swarming you in insane numbers. And while the Lance does have a staggering effect, it fires too slow to make that very useful in practice (the LMG is way better for that, or just use Chain Shotguns in a tight space) as again you are always outnumbered badly. The 4 extra range just can't make up for these overall massive deficits, and I'm even ignoring the fact that the Lance is more expensive to craft. Also, the addition of Pikemen with their 45 range is another indirect nerf to the Charge Lance, even if it retained it's old 37 tile range, since you can no longer 'kite' mechs with long range weapons. So the Lance would have already become much worse just due to that reason. The Minigun is even better in a lot of these cases then the Charge Rifle (even ignoring missed shots hitting other targets), and even has 1 further range then the Charge Lance, but I don't want to bog this down with numbers comparing 3 weapons.

Overall my point is I'm not sure what niche the Charge Lance is supposed to fill currently. I would suggest making it uncraftable (it's the only mech weapon that is craftable, which is already inconsistent anyways), and adding some kind of Charge Sniper Rifle with 37 range and similar damage stats to the Charge Lance to fill it's old niche for players. As it is the only 'long range' weapons in the game left for players are Bolt Action Rifles and Sniper Rifles, and it feels pretty weird to have the best 37 range weapon be the one you start the game with by default.


EMP Launcher:

This thing honestly just sucks. Obviously it's hard to make it useful without making it completely replace EMP grenades, but the combination of painfully slow firing rate and absurdly tiny AOE + inaccuracy means I struggled to find an actual use case for them (and I used EMP grenades all the time even in 1.0 so it's not like I'm a stranger to the value of EMP weapons). Even when I did try to use it, it missed way too much even firing in a huge group of mechs. Grenades obviously miss just as much but their huge AOE/fast firing rate makes it work out. It would be nice if the AoE was SLIGHTLY bumped (keep the slow firing rate/inaccuracy the same). I fully understand the need to keep it overall worse than the grenades since it has a much longer range, but it's just unusable ATM. Every time I tried to use these, I felt like I would have been better off using a 'real' weapon or EMP grenades instead, even if it meant risking having to get closer. And even vs mech clusters, EMP grenades due to their large aoe can be used around corners vs turrets, while the launcher cannot. And if there is a lack of cover when facing turrets, the smoke launcher does a better job (or just use Smokepop/Wallraise/Invis comboed with Frag Grenades vs Mech turrets, but obviously comparing Psycasts to a weapon isn't exactly fair).


Turrets:

I know a lot of people have very strong opinions about the turret nerfs. Personally I never relied heavily on them, but I still think some of the nerfs were way overboard, specifically to Uranium Slug/Autocannon turrets. I'll break down my thoughts on each turret:

Mini Turrets: They got a range buff to 29 (they are so inaccurate at that range that this 'buff' seems to be mostly aimed at making turrets at enemy outposts less trivial to defeat by outranging them), and a reduction to burst fire count from 3 to 2, so about a ⅓ damage nerf. They also got a 16.666% HP reduction. Another change that seems to have gone mostly under the radar is that plasteel/uranium mini turrets now cost 70 steel/30 plasteel or uranium instead of 40 steel/60 plasteel or uranium.

Overall I would almost argue mini turrets got buffed in 1.1, or at least are about the same as in 1.0. Their main use was always to just soak enemy fire as decoys, as their accuracy beyond point blank range was terrible (they seriously struggled to break even 1 DPS in some cases). While they do have less HP now , it is also much cheaper to make them out of more durable materials now, so it's easier to build more of them, although ofc you are still limited in terms of spacing due to their explosion range/missed shots hitting other turrets, which greatly limits your turret count in practice (this is a solid mechanic, don't get me wrong). So I don't really have any issues with the mini turret changes, as I don't really think much changed at all for them. They never did any real damage unless you literally had 50+ of them, and their use as distractions hasn't really changed.

Autocannon Turrets: Their damage was cut from 40 to 20 per shot, armour pen went from 60% to 30%, their HP went from 450 to 380, and their rearm cost went from 120 to 180.

Honestly, even in 1.0, I always considered Autocannon turrets to be the worst turret, mostly due to their piss poor accuracy and slow fire rate. They also didn't have much range (effective range that is due to poor accuracy), meaning enemies would usually shoot back and you would risk losing your relatively expensive turrets. With these nerfs they are (IMHO) utterly useless now. I don't see why I would build them at all anymore. For reference, a v1.1 Autocannon turret shooting at an unarmoured human at 25 tiles does about 3.32 DPS (Autocannon turrets have 96% shooter accuracy, so they are much less accurate than a skilled pawn). Compare that to my previous values for a Charge Rifle at the same range (admittedly wielded by a fairly skilled pawn with 98% accuracy, but that is pretty reasonable for the late game with a single bionic eye) which would deal about 4.93 DPS. And that is with a decently skilled pawn, not a super skilled shooter, and with a Good Charge Rifle, not Excellent, or Masterwork/Legendary. A skilled 99% shooter with a Legendary Charge Rifle would deal 12.87 DPS in the same situation. Considering that Autocannon turrets take up much more space then a pawn, cost materials every time they fire, and while they have more HP, they also can't take cover/wear armour, and can't ever reposition, it's really hard for me to see why I would use Autocannon turrets at all. Obviously I didn't have anywhere near all legendary rifles in my actual game, but I had many masterworks and the rest excellent, and most of my pawns were between about 98.5% to 99.5% shooting accuracy due to skill/bionics. So this isn't some crazy comparison I'm making, it's based on real world values.

To equal the combined DPS of my 18 shooters I would have had to build something like at least 50-60 autocannon turrets, which would be both insanely expensive to build, to sustain/rearm (I am talking literally 5000+ steel every single raid just to rearm), and impossible to actually let them all shoot the same target(s) at the same time due to space issues (this IMHO is the main issue tbh, obviously you can combine pawns + turrets so it's not either/or, but the turrets take valuable space in your firing arcs), and vs armoured targets the rifles would have done even better due to their higher penetration. And all of this completely ignores the fact that pawns can reposition to backup defensive lines if their position is overrun, and actually work vs drop pod/sapper raids, while you obviously can't use your big turrets for those (unless you get lucky with where the pods drop). In practice the scariest raids in the late game are drop pods or massive mech raids, and autocannon turrets are useless against the former and tend to just get killed by 'missed' centipede shots in the latter (their large footprint means missed shots have an easy time hitting them) and become big expensive explosive hazards for your own pawns, or just block useful firing arc space while doing trivial damage. And the argument that Autocannon turrets keep your pawns safe (therefore increasing their effective value) doesn't really work, as they are actually quite flimsy for their cost and again, can't wear armour/take cover. If you want to keep your pawns safe, mini turrets/using longer ranged weapons/emp/psycasts do a way better job then autocannon turrets ever could. Or just doing better defensive setups in terms of how you funnel enemies.

Ultimately I never built an autocannon turret in my playthrough despite facing huge raids, and at no point did I ever feel like that was a handicap. In every situation I had some issues, the correct answer was never 'build some big turrets', it was basically always 'position better/use the right weapon type/use tactical tools like EMP/Mortars/IEDs/Psycasts'.

Uranium Slug Turrets: They went from 75 to 30 damage, 112% armour pen to 75%, rearm cost from 60 to 80, range from 50 to 40, their shooter accuracy went from 98.9% to 98%, and HP from 450 to 380.

Honestly pretty much everything I said about Autocannon Turrets applies, although there are a few other factors to consider. First of all, due to the range nerf, they can't even outrange Pikemen, and barely outrange Doomsday Rockets, meaning their use as 'snipers' is just gone. Although I assume part of the reason for the nerf was to make it so they can't outrange mech turrets which does make sense. But the range nerf actually completely destroys their effective range. Their weapon accuracy (different from shooter accuracy) is 99% at 40+ tiles, but it's 40% at 25 tiles (and even worse below that). This means the moment an enemy starts getting any closer then 40 tiles to them (their max range now), their accuracy absolutely drops like a rock. Before you had about 15 or so tiles of effective range between 50 to 35, now it's more like 5 tiles of effective range between 40 to 35 before they can't hit anything anymore. And on top of this, due to the shooter accuracy nerf, they struggle to hit enemies even in their effective range now.

In addition, their damage was absolutely gutted (they can't even 1 shot a human with a torso hit anymore, although in practice their damage did often end up being overkill vs humans, so the nerf to damage isn't as bad as it looks on paper in that case). The most significant nerf is vs Centipedes, where the damage actually wasn't overkill most of the time. v1.0 Uranium slugs did 18.75 DPS vs Centipedes at 40 tiles range. Now they deal about 6.08 at the same range, or about 32.4% of the DPS they used to do. And while this might seem fairly decent compared to a pawns DPS, keep in mind Centipedes are a large target, which inflates DPS values against them, and if Centipedes close in to 27 tiles (their own max range, so they will end up this close or closer), the Slug Turret drops to a fairly pathetic 3.82 DPS, and it gets MUCH worse the closer the enemies are. While this isn't really a 'fair' comparison, a pawn with a Legendary Charge Rifle and 99% accuracy at 25 tiles will do about 17.25 DPS. Even with Excellent and more modest accuracy, it will still end up being about half that, still way better than the turret, and again with the advantage of being able to reposition, or use a different weapon for a different situation. And again, you might say 'well it's BONUS damage in addition to your pawns'. But the problem is the increased rearm cost again. If I build 10 of these turrets, they aren't even as good as 10 decent combat pawns. But they still cost 400-800 uranium to rearm after every raid depending on how long the fight was. That isn't exactly super quick/cheap to replace, esp during endgame raids where you will face 20+ raids over only 15 days with basically no time to recover/do anything but sleep/eat/heal/repair.

I actually did use to use Slug Turrets in 1.0, at least sometimes (although I was already moving away from them before 1.1 even came out because I felt like they were fairly resource inefficient), but in 1.1 I just don't see why I would ever build this turret anymore.

In and of itself I understand and agree with the general reasoning behind the turret nerfs. I was never a person who spammed 50+ turrets, and I can see how that could be considered sort of broken esp on lower difficulties. But the consequences of the changes are that I don't really see any situation where I would want to build the big turrets anymore. They just do too little damage, cost too much to rearm, and are even more relatively flimsy than before, while retaining all their old drawbacks like taking a lot of space and being useless vs sappers or drop pods. I feel like at least a partial revert of SOME of the nerfs would make sense.

Having said that, I certainly was perfectly fine in my playthrough without them (I did use a few mini turrets but no big turrets) even at fairly high wealth values, so it's not like the game is 'unplayable' with these turret nerfs. My concern is more along the lines of the fact that I don't understand why they weren't just removed from the game if the intent was to make them effectively useless. Currently they are just a red herring for newbies to waste resources on. If it isn't intended that you should be able to use turrets to help defend your colony, they should simply be removed (although personally I feel like the existence of drop pods/sappers already punishes players sufficiently for overreliance on turrets). Nerfing things to the point where they are just vestigial makes no sense to me.

Continued even further...

Troxism

Animal Balance:

I'm not going to through every animal because that would take forever, but I'll hit a few highlights:

Cows got a 20% buff in Milk production in v1.1 (to 18 milk a day). Which I guess is fine (it hardly breaks anything, Cows are still only situationally useful for biomes that lack sufficient game to hunt for meat like Extreme Desert/Ice Sheet/Sea Ice), but is a bit weird when you compare them to Goats, which were added in v1.1, and produce 12 milk every 2 days (so 6 a day, ⅓ as much). Now Goats do eat less, but a Cow eats 85% as much as a human, while a Goat eats 45% as much. On top of this, if you have more Goats to compensate for the lower production, it means you have to spend more time keeping them tame. And as far as I can tell, Goats are 'farm only' animals, so you can't find wild goats (just like you can't find wild cows to tame and have to buy/get them from an event). So I don't see any situation Goats are ever worth it compared to Cows. I guess they can be good if you really want milk producers but can't get Cows, but that seems a poor reason to add a new animal, to just be a bad version of an already existing one.

Speaking of milk production, Muffalo lost their ability to produce milk, and Dromedaries lost their ability to produce Wool. Now again, this is fine, rebalancing animals to whatever is the new baseline is reasonable. But then if you compare them to the other pack animals in the game, why are Alpacas unchanged? Alpacas already produced Wool way faster, on top of eating less per Alpaca, meaning they were about 2.5 times as efficient at producing wool then Dromedaries/Muffalo, and still double as pack animals (and have decent capacity relative to their hunger rate). What is even worse, is that Sheep were added, and produce wool slower then Alpacas, while eating just as much, and being unable to serve as pack animals. It would make more sense if Sheep were the best wool producers, since they are dedicated 'specialists'.

Chickens also seem to have been nerfed, which just makes no sense (they were already horribly inefficient, now they have a 2 days lay interval instead of 1.7, meanwhile as mentioned above Cows got a buff, and were already the most efficient animal product producing animal to begin with), and I'm not really sure what niche Goose/Ducks are supposed to fill as they lose out horribly to Cows as well. Although I will admit, it's not really possible to make all the animals have a unique niche, but at the very least they could be brought a bit closer together. For example egg laying birds obviously have the advantage of not having to actually milk them (ie less work/skill required), but that doesn't help much when they are so horribly inefficient anyways. I will however admit some of this comes from the perspective of playing almost exclusively on extreme biomes where you cannot graze animals for 'free' and must grow all your food for them, which does change the equation a bit if you are able to do so in your chosen biome. But it's not like Cows become worse if you have access to grazing land, it's just more that Goats/Chickens are less awful if you can feed them for 'free'.

Overall it feels like the only animals out of the new v1.1 animals that have any real purpose are Horses/Donkeys (they are pretty good haulers + pack animals, although foxes are still better for hauling and alpacas are as good for pack animals while producing tons of free wool).

I realise not every animal is supposed to be 100% equally useful, but some are way worse than others. It is especially strange that most of the new animals are just straight up worse than existing ones, because it makes v1.1 feel like one of those mods that just add 'content' without considering balance, or even what purpose said 'content' actually serves within the framework of the game. If I wanted that, I'd just go to the workshop and get one of dozens of large mods that add 'stuff', whether it's animals, weapons, armour, clothing or whatever. Generally the vanilla game does a pretty good job of making everything have some niche or purpose, even if it's a narrow one, and it bothers me to see these sorts of additions creeping into vanilla. Ironically my concerns here are much the same as my concerns about the nerfs to the Charge Lance/Big turrets; it's not really that these nerfs/changes/additions break the game in any way, it's just that they create this batch of content that 'exists' in the vanilla game but lacks any sort of purpose or niche.


Minor things:

I'm not a huge fan of the double dipping consciousness/manipulation penalties on anesthetic wearing off. It should penalise one or the other not both at once.

The 'Tough' trait seems to work weirdly now (and I'm about 99.5% sure it didn't work like this before). When a shot doesn't 'penetrate', a tough pawn takes half damage. But if it does, the outer layer takes full damage and the inner layers take half. What I mean is for example if a Tough pawn is shot in the Torso with a Chain Shotgun, they take 9 damage (halved from 18) as expected. If they are shot in the Lung, the Torso will take the full 18, and the Lung will take an additional 9 (whereas a normal pawn would take 18 to Torso and 18 to the Lung in that case from that single shot due to how 'internal' injuries work in this game). This is the same with legs/tibias, brain injuries ect. Not sure if this is intended because it's kinda odd. At the very least, if it is intended, should be clearer in the trait description that it works this way.

It seems like you can Deep Drill on Sea Ice now, which is a pretty considerable change (as you can discover nodes there using the scanner now). I'm not sure if this is a bug, or intended, but I figured I should mention it as it changes the Sea Ice dynamic a lot.

Speaking of scanning, it would be nice to be able to 'tune' Ground Penetrating Radar to a specific mineral, but I could see how that could be too good.

Not really v1.1 related, but I've always found it very strange that flagstone tiles cost the same amount of resources as stone tiles. Yes flagstone is faster to build, but you also get nothing back from removing it unlike tiles, and flagstone is obviously not as pretty. And compared to Concrete/Paved Tile, which also have the same tradeoffs (Concrete is uglier but faster to build then Paved Tile), Concrete is half as expensive to compensate for its lack of beauty. It just always seemed to me like flagstone should only cost 2 stone per tile, not 4. But I will fully admit this is a very minor gripe. And to be fair if I am going to go down this road, there are tons of similar 'minor balance gripes' I could bring up about the base game and frankly this is already long enough so I'll leave it off there.

mooguy

Quote
. Once I had Smokepop/Invis on my main psycaster, she basically took some frag grenades (since they deal 200 building damage they are extremely effective) and would just solo the static parts of the mech cluster. Sometimes I would even have her invis into the middle of the cluster to grenade the mortar shield so I could shell the mechs and draw them to my base to later clean up the static parts with her. The reality is with a combination of mortars/psycasts/smoke launchers/emp grenades, it doesn't really matter if a cluster comes with 2 turrets, or 20, as it just takes a bit longer to clear in the latter case, but the strategy is exactly the same and it's just as safe if done correctly. In practice clusters became a very small mech raid combined with a bunch of trivial to beat static defenses, which is overall much easier to beat than just a normal full strength mech raid at the same point value. This is the opposite of how raids work generally (although it is true IEDs/Mortars can do similar things vs human raids) where smaller raids are trivial to beat with things like door popping tactics or just a choke point but larger raids of 200+ people or 40+ centipedes tend to be slightly more tricky and require some other strategy due to how pathing AI works on massive raids where they can just all walk through your pawns even if you try to block a door to nullify their numbers. Plus you know, just the sheer weight in numbers making a straight up fight impossible.

I agree with this. Personally i think the player shouldn't able to use mortars. As soon as a mech cluster spawns without a mortar shield, it will be mortared. Mass Mortars are also too good against other mortar teams ect. Mortars need to go, or limited in the number to even 1.
Maybe the invisibility duration's cooldowns or costs could be increased , or make sensors able to see through invisibility, but it still could be a viable tactic.

QuoteI would like to suggest some kind of 'Extinguish' psycast added.

That would be great because as of right now the inferno cannon on the centipedes has no counters without resorting to cheesy tactics.

I agree that the charge lance nerf was overboard, especially while its market value is so high.

I'm sure though tough trait shouldn't be working in a way that makes the pawn take extra damage..maybe this is a bug.

You're right, sheep should definitely produce wool faster than alpaca's, i noticed this bug too.

For meI think autocannon turrets are great against centipedes, which is important as they are one of the few major threats to a base. Uranium turret costs i do think are a little high.

Lexa

not done reading get but i wanted to touch on this

>Ultimately the problem is clusters are hard before you have the tools to deal with them, and then they are really easy once you do

Thats because both the clusters and the invis stuff is horrifically unbalanced. invis and berserk trivialize pretty much anything and mech clusters literally have only 2 ways of being dealt with: invis psycaster or a mortar spam.

zizard

The reason for the charge lance range nerf seems pretty clear. They added a new super long range mech to stop players from kiting (because pawn damage = storytelling), but this made two kinds of long range mechs, so they nerfed the lancer range to differentiate it.

AileTheAlien

Quote from: Troxism on March 23, 2020, 11:46:55 PMnew animals [...] makes v1.1 feel like one of those mods that just add 'content' without considering balance, or even what purpose said 'content' actually serves
Dang, I was actually a bit excited to try the new animals after reinstalling the game. Most of the vanilla content is heavily in a 'niche', so that (nearly) every piece of content is unique. All the vanilla crops, stone blocks, foods, etc.

Troxism

QuoteI agree with this. Personally i think the player shouldn't able to use mortars. As soon as a mech cluster spawns without a mortar shield, it will be mortared. Mass Mortars are also too good against other mortar teams ect. Mortars need to go, or limited in the number to even 1.
Maybe the invisibility duration's cooldowns or costs could be increased , or make sensors able to see through invisibility, but it still could be a viable tactic.

It is possible mortars are the chief issue, but I didn't get into that because it would have extensive knock-on effects to other aspects of the game to massively nerf or remove mortars. It might be a viable route to take however, would just be complicated.

QuoteThat would be great because as of right now the inferno cannon on the centipedes has no counters without resorting to cheesy tactics.

Well they already do have some counters. Obviously the best one is 'don't let them shoot' (EMPs, Melee, Skip helps a lot with this). Also you can have them shoot at things that aren't your colonists. And you can use firefoam poppers in combat (leave some undeployed next to combat zone and use as needed), however this is fairly cumbersome. But I assume this is what you meant by 'cheesy tactics'. I just figured it made sense to add another counter.

QuoteI'm sure though tough trait shouldn't be working in a way that makes the pawn take extra damage..maybe this is a bug.

Well it's not that they suffer EXTRA damage, it's that the description of the trait doesn't match reality; it does not provide the damage reduction in some cases and while there is a method to it, it doesn't really make that much sense. If the trait is only supposed to reduce internal injuries, then tough pawns should always take full damage from hits to the torso/head/limbs but not internal organs. Currently it's inconsistent.

QuoteFor meI think autocannon turrets are great against centipedes, which is important as they are one of the few major threats to a base. Uranium turret costs i do think are a little high.

It's interesting to me to see this because I pretty much think the opposite. Had I chosen to use autocannons vs Centipedes I would have been forced to burn literally thousands of steel per raid to achieve significant results. And it would have lowered the effectiveness of my defence by wasting valuable firing arc space on relatively low damage output turrets* since the most basic way to improve your odds in a fight is just having as many of your people shooting as possible while as few enemies can shoot you as possible.

*Autocannon Turrets went from about 12.30 DPS vs Centipedes at 25 tiles range in v1.0 to 4.19 DPS in v1.1, due to both the damage/armour pen to the turrets and size calculations changing in v1.1 causing Centipedes to only give a 1.8 shooting accuracy multiplier against them instead of 2.0.

QuoteThats because both the clusters and the invis stuff is horrifically unbalanced. invis and berserk trivialize pretty much anything and mech clusters literally have only 2 ways of being dealt with: invis psycaster or a mortar spam.

I mean I was able to deal with clusters before I had mass mortars or invis. Best tactic basically involved a combination of smoke launchers, emp grenades around corners to stun turrets whenever possible, and frag grenades. Obviously after first triggering/luring the mechs out, but that is sort of a given in general as I don't think anyone would ever recommend fighting the mechs with the turrets. But I can't deny that invis/mortars are the best/easiest counters.

QuoteThe reason for the charge lance range nerf seems pretty clear. They added a new super long range mech to stop players from kiting (because pawn damage = storytelling), but this made two kinds of long range mechs, so they nerfed the lancer range to differentiate it.

Yeah that sounds about right as well, but honestly my point wasn't really to speculate on reasons why (was probably a mistake to speculate at all as it doesn't really matter). Either way, that is why I suggested adding a new player weapon to fill a similar niche/role, not reverting the nerf.

QuoteDang, I was actually a bit excited to try the new animals after reinstalling the game. Most of the vanilla content is heavily in a 'niche', so that (nearly) every piece of content is unique. All the vanilla crops, stone blocks, foods, etc.

Yeah generally vanilla does a fairly good job with this, hence I felt it was needed to point out things that seemed problematic with the new animals. I wouldn't say they are all bad though and I think with a few tweaks even the ones that seem 'off' would be good additions. If I felt like it was beyond hope I wouldn't bother saying anything.