Is it just me or Blindsight is somewhat misleading?

[Sorbo]

Or maybe less cool than you might think? Like you see its icon with the third eye which implies psionic sight and you have new mandatory precept assigned called "Blind psysense: Strong" which only reinforces this idea. Yet it's nothing like that.

Don't get me wrong, blindsight has still powerful benefits and is a decent meme. Its just could this aspect be improved on? Like could it also make its adepts scale their "Sight" stat from Psychic Sensitivity instead of body parts?

[AileTheAlien]

Are there more benefits that I don't know about? As far as I know, it's only a mood boost from the blindness precept, and psychic sensitivity from the blindsight precept. Sensitivity only affects psychic mood effects and neural heat. That seems pretty limited for benefits, compared to how much blindness affects your colony, even compared to other high-impact memes.

[Boboid]

Psychic Readers also scale trade price improvement based on your psysensitivity.. which is *something* I guess.

Blindsight is fairly weak in general however.
I'd personally like to see it have better access to psy levels, only being able to obtain +1 level from the blinding ritual and *only* if it goes well is a bit rough. Something costly but repeatable to that increases psy level would make Blindsight feel less like a punch in the crotch.

Given that the precept is only +30% psy sensitivity ( being blind is natively +50% ) the opportunity cost is definitely quite high.

[Sorbo]

Given that the precept is only +30% psy sensitivity ( being blind is natively +50% ) the opportunity cost is definitely quite high.

Really? Just being blind boosts psy sensitivity? Where can I check psy sensitivity stat actually?

[AileTheAlien]

It's under the pawn 'i' / info button, near the top. (Search works great in this UI!  : ) I just tested it, and it's a flat 30%. Seems fairly bad though, since vision is needed for so much of the game. If you take this precept, most of your pawns will be almost useless - wardens, councellors, traders, and dedicated psy-casters are about the only jobs not affected by sight. (So basically, the one person who's got social skill; Taming and training animals is unaffected, but animal gathering and tending are.)

[GoblinCookie]

We have eyes for a reason...... If you choose to play as something as stupid as an ideology that blinds it's own members, then I feel you should be basically electing to play on a very high difficulty.

[AileTheAlien]

The problem with that, is that the blindness meme isn't just pawns who enjoy blindness. The game tantalizes you with cool sci-fi powers enabled by your holy un-seers, and then fails to deliver something interesting. The game's already got a plethora of difficulty sliders to adjust, without using up a piece of brand new DLC.

[GoblinCookie]

The problem with that, is that the blindness meme isn't just pawns who enjoy blindness. The game tantalizes you with cool sci-fi powers enabled by your holy un-seers, and then fails to deliver something interesting. The game's already got a plethora of difficulty sliders to adjust, without using up a piece of brand new DLC.

It is deactivated on all vanilla randomly generated religions.  As you don't get superpowers just for tearing your eyes out, so I guess it all makes total sense that the idea of blindsight sucks. 

[Sorbo]

Would be cool if it was less one-dimensional. Like I'm ok with a hard start or even dealing with blindless permanently but I wish there was a pay-off even if distant improving your pawns in a different way. Like in an endgame you get something special, maybe psychic sensitivity growing in time or whatever. Some progression, anything to add to the experience.

[RawCode]

some people believe in wrong stuff, your story is playing with such guys and embrace how hard they suck.

[Sorbo]

some people believe in wrong stuff, your story is playing with such guys and embrace how hard they suck.

They are not really wrong though. Their way does allow them to delve deeper into psionics than anyone else. And it is easy to make them not suck. You just choose the least fanatical version of blinding and only blind your psykers. That way you will have sighted folks and most powerful casters at the same time.

[Locklave]

I love that people don't get how pointless the meme is if the downsides have no payout. If it's just a stupid meme for people who like making bad choices then it needs to be buffed or removed from the game.

Rp doesn't justify it's existence.
Difficulty doesn't justify it's existence. We have sliders.

Ty dropped the ball on this one. It's not interesting/fun or unique gameplay, it's a bad choice. He needs to fix it or remove it.

[Sorbo]

Forgot to post this. Basically what I thought it would be:

[glass zebra]

Don't fully understand the hate for blindsight. Blindsight was a meme I choose for one of my fist colonist and I had a rough start. That was my first Ideology colony that I played for a long time and it was one of my easiest after I understood the full effects of blindness and stopped trying to do what blind pawns are bad at. After that more than 50% of my colonies went for blindsight + scarification and I soon added individualist to the mix. It felt way too powerful given how broken psy already is, especially with that heavy +15 mood boost and +15 opinion boost, with all the other boost blindness already has without that meme (ignoring area and pawn beauty/ignoring corpses/50% psychic sensivity etc.).
You gotta play a different way but then the downsides to being blind are mostly just speed, if you don't blind 100% of your pawns.
- Melee combat is strongly affected in dodge by little in hit
- Ranged combat is only affected on long ranges. Just fight on low ranges and skip cast critical enemies into melee combat
- Construction fail rate is still ~0% at high levels with bionic arms
- Mining yield is affected buy very little
- Cooking is affected by butcher efficiency but not food poisoning chance
- Normal plant work is affected, but dryads are not. You can just get a pawn to tend 3 trees all day long
- Animal taming and training is not affected. Animal harvest still reaches ~100% on high skill levels,
- Crafting is only affected in speed
- Art is only affected in speed
- Medical is affected, but they got a medical specialist to make up for that
- Social is not affected
- Intellectual is strongly affected in speed

You also notice how much easier raids etc. are if you got blind people, because they are valued much lower. Just blind your elite and let your researcher and 1 plant worker have eyes. Your hunters and medical specialist can just wear a blindfold outside of raids. What mostly happens afterwards is a reduction in speed for people. Yes, that's a downside, but the quality of most of the work is hardly affected. You can e.g. just use egg laying animals, if you wanna work around animal harvest and butcher efficiency.

I really forced myself at one point to not play with blindsight anymore. All of them ended pretty much capped at 100% mood on losing is fun, because of an insanely powerful psyonic with a Psychic harmonizer and everybody loving the big part of the colony with very low effort. The individualist colonies were a bit different, due to -opinion, but in those the downsight of the blind elite was practically 0%, since I left all the other ideologies do their specialist work and only had medical specialist on the blind ideology (you can still wear the psy staff even when not capable of violence). Still: when choosing to play a full individualist colony I see very little point to not have your starting colony with blindsight since it's the only meme you can't get any more after starting the game. Other memes will be generated throughout the game and you can get people of those. From a power play point of view, I felt "forced" to choose blindsight on a start. Scarification and blindness are the only memes to boost psy (apart from transhumanism getting tons of gold for honour).

It has downsides, but much of them can be mitigated. The fact that psy is already so strong and blind blindsight people having a +80% sensivity, while always being happy (outside of a drone) is a pretty strong boost. I always hope for traders to show up with blindfolds when not playing with the meme, because they are so hard to get and are a "free" boost for your psyonic in combat. Blind people work slower and can't dodge (I didn't blind my tank though), but centipedes are still hit ~90% with charge rifles on 2 tile range by a blind pawn. It is not just something to gimp yourself, but you cannot expect to play the very same was as before and expect it to be great. You have to change things quite a bit to use it. If they had sight through psy, they would just drop pretty much their only downside.