[Balancing] Neuroquake Trivializes The Game

[maarx1337]

[Balancing] Neuroquake Trivializes The Game

Neuroquake is incredibly powerful. It pretty much clears your map of all hostiles, by having them all fight each other until nobody is left.

Downsides

It tries to have downsides, but most of them are easily handled:

Knockout Caster for 3 Days

This tries to be the biggest downside, but it turns out to be the easiest to handle. The knockout scales with Psychic Sensitivity, meaning a Psychic Foil Helmet will reduce the knockout by 90%, to just a couple hours. Even if this didn't work, you commonly don't see large threats more than every 3 days, so odds are good your caster will be ready next time anyway.

Reduced Faction Standing

Honestly, if you're at this point, you should have a decent economy going, and mailing a little extra goodies to your allies in transport pods is not a big deal.

Negative Moodlet

Nothing a little extra drugs and recreation time won't fix. As a matter of fact, as a higher-risk higher-reward option, pawns under Anesthesia aren't affected (by neither the Berserk nor the negative moodlet). Which means, instead of gathering all of your pawns around the caster, you can just assign Anesthesia operation to all of them, make them all Doctors, restrict them all to a tiny room with sleeping spots and medicine, put them on Work schedules, and they will actually all knock each other out with rather surprising efficiency (log₂(n)). If you've got any Psychically Deaf pawns, they can all be left standing, to hold down the fort, as they are completely immune to both the Berserk and the Negative Moodlet. And you probably will have plenty of pawns, some Psychically Deaf, because ...

Strength of the Ability

... even more significant than countering the downsides, is simply the fact that it scales infinitely - it remains equally effective at all threat raid point levels. If you carefully protect this caster, you completely shatter RimWorld's careful wealth/threat balancing, letting you completely disregard it, and scale your wealth infinitely, and maintain practically zero other defenses, and do just fine.

Suggestion

We could numerically scale the downsides that are already implemented, but I think that's the wrong route. Making all the numbers bigger won't fundamentally fix the problem. I've got a different suggestion, one of two new behaviors:

(A) It doesn't affect literally every pawn, but somehow only affects a percentage, meaning you will (probably) still have a threat to deal with, albeit proportionately weaker.

(B) Have it affect the caster with 1 point of scarring brain damage. This is severe enough on its own that you could practically eliminate all the other downsides, and players would still use it less than they do now.

[Pheanox]

Thank you for the feature request.

[Tynan]

I appreciate the useful feedback! I suspect you're right and that it's somewhat OP, I should look at some ways of making the cost/benefit more even.