Messages

211

XPiratez / Re: Piratez Difficulty Curve

« on: May 16, 2016, 11:43:31 am »

During my current (first) playthrough, at one stage I sacked a couple of brainers because 1) I could barely afford to keep them. 2) my research was just about to hit a bottle-neck. (I think I had around 13 at the time, and reduced it to 11.)

Not long after that, I finally captured an academy engineer, and the research tree opened up like a flower. Fortunately my financial situation improved a lot as well. I pretty quickly expanded my research team to 18, then started a new research base... Now I'm close to the end of the game, and I've been going along comfortably with ~29 brainers for awhile. I certainly won't need any more, because I'm running out of research topics.


In any case, I do think the high cost of brainers is a bit of a trap. But I don't think it should needs to be changed (I don't mind either way). If a player runs out of money, they can sack their brainers. No big deal.

212

XPiratez / Re: Piratez Difficulty Curve

« on: May 15, 2016, 01:11:25 pm »

One thing the player could do to influence it is to not attack dangerous factions multiple times in a row. And if you do pick on a particular faction, then that faction would be more likely to attack you (the probability vs shipping shot down would be super-linear).

Shooting down a single ship might be enough to warrant a crackdown; but you can imagine that they might only feel the need to devote those kind of resources if they feel that the problem is going to be ongoing rather than isolated. Also, they might not even know who you are if they've only been attacked by you once.


In any case, I don't really mind what the system is. If you don't like the idea, that's fine by me. I only suggested it as an alternative to having fix number of months of crackdown immunity at the start of the game. I generally prefer dynamic systems rather than hard-line immunity like that.

213

XPiratez / Re: Piratez Difficulty Curve

« on: May 15, 2016, 12:45:31 am »

Having a couple of months of immunity from retaliations would be alright; but it seems like a bit of a kludge. I think it would be better if there was a 'retaliation-o-meter' which built up in a similar way to how reputation builds up. Shooting down shipping and/or killing ground forces would build up the enemy's desire to want to retaliate. And rather than having a flat random chance of retaliation for each shipping shot down, they could have a probability of retaliation which grows with each shipping that is destroyed; has a threshold so that the probability is zero for the first few events; and reduces naturally a little bit each day.

Of course, that's probably not super easy to implement; and in most cases player's wouldn't be able to tell the difference between something like that and a flat percentage chance anyway. ... but I still think it's worth suggesting.

214

XPiratez / Re: Confused by XG weapon requirements

« on: May 15, 2016, 12:30:50 am »

Fair enough. An update to the 'pedia would solve the issue for me. The only problem was that I didn't know what was required to build the weapons. So if that's now shown in the 'pedia entry for those weapons, then that's the end of the problem.

Thanks.

215

XPiratez / Confused by XG weapon requirements

« on: May 14, 2016, 10:34:21 am »

I've just researched XG assault, and XG rifle. I can now build the ammo, but I cannot build the weapons themselves. The game hasn't given my any hints as to why I can't build them.

I just checked the wiki to find out what's going on, and I discovered that I need Gauss Defences in order to build the XG weapons. That seems strange to me, because I can't yet build gauss defences; in fact, I can't even research them yet.

Why can I research XG weapons without this prereq. even being mentioned? Have I done something weird?

(By the way, I'm still on 0.98B. So if this has already been changed, then I'm sorry for bringing it up. I didn't see anything about it mentioned in the changelog; other than maybe "Research & manufacture updates & fixes".)

216

XPiratez / Re: Piratez Difficulty Curve

« on: May 12, 2016, 11:58:33 am »

... going after low-ranking enemies is quite pointless in the late game...

I'm still in my first playthrough. I'm currently at a stage where most of my troops are wearing either Assault armour or Brute armour. My weapons aren't great, but they are easily good enough for most of enemies I face - and so I usually use my cheaper weapons (such as commando rifle and advanced lasgun) rather than my more expensive more powerful weapons.

So, that's the stage of the game I'm at. I figure it's getting into "late game", but I can't really know until I've finished! In any case, what I can say is that I'm still going after lots of low-ranking enemies just because it's easy money, and I'm still spending all the money I can get. Most of the missions I go on are super-easy to the point where I can just move all my troops blindly forward and stun the enemy with whatever, because the enemies don't have enough firepower to get through my armour anyway.

There are still difficult missions; and I'm happy with the number of difficult missions per in-game month. But I can say that the game feels easier than it did in the early game, because a lot of my playing time is on easy missions (which I choose to go on because I need the cash).

217

XPiratez / Re: No Donation - No Salvation! Also: Future Plans!

« on: May 08, 2016, 10:18:38 am »

I just realised that my donation probably has my real name from my paypal account. If you're going to keep a list of donors, I'd prefer to just be 'karadoc'.  (I tend not to use my physical-world name on the internet.)

Thanks again for the game.

218

XPiratez / Re: Bonaventura Variants discussion

« on: May 06, 2016, 11:23:30 am »

I'm curious as to how these ships will be made consistent with the story. The current situation is that we start with a Bonaventura. I just assume that we found it, or found the parts for it or something like that in the same way we found the starting base and lab. However, if the game is changed so that we somehow gain one of these ships after the start, there will need to be an explanation for why we can't just get more of them. (eg. if we build one, then why can't we build more? If we buy one, why can't we buy more? etc.) I've got some ideas for how that could be explained - but the ideas I have are a bit contrived.

That's a relatively minor issue... but the Dorado sounds like it might have a more serious implausibility problem. There will need to be an explanation for how the gold is produced, any why we can't just manipulate the ship to make gold whenever we want. (It's clear that the game mechanics don't allow us to land and take off repeatedly without a mission; but in the in-game universe I presume the girls could do that if they wanted to - so the game will need to explain why that wouldn't produce gold.)


From a balance point of view, the general concepts sound decent; and I suppose it's mostly about balancing them through their numbers and layout. But I wonder if we really need 5 options.
As you say, the Fortuna specialises in going after landed ufos and scouting. That sounds valuable, but it's a job that the Deliverator can do pretty well.

El Fuego would go after courier ships and other fast but weak-ish ships. Presumably it will carry a decent number of hands, and so it would be pretty powerful general purpose ship.
Compared to El Fuego, the Bonaventura would be slower, but carry more hands. I guess that means that the layout and capacity of El Fuego would need to be made a limiting factor, so that it isn't an obvious pick over the Bonavenura. ... Which again makes me think of the Deliverator. (For much of the game, I tend to use the Bonavenura when I need a lot of hands or auxiliaries; but use the Deliverator when I need speed.)

Metallo would specialise in being able fight slightly bigger ships more comfortably than the others... like the Kraken or something, but with enough hands to be useable. That sounds good.

Dorado is unique, but weird.


What I'm thinking is that there are essentially 3 key types of challenges for the ships:

• Fast ships / landings
• Big ships
• Big ground missions

These three challenges match up with three key ship properties:

• Speed
• Air strength
• Capacity

To have 5 different ships means that they can't just focus on one of those things with each ship; and so that makes it a lot more difficult for ships to have a unique feel. That's why El Fuego and Fortuna both make me think of the Deliverator. Clearly the ships can be different, but I wonder if there would be a stronger sense of uniqueness if there were fewer options. The Dorado doesn't fit into my categories, so that's nice from a uniqueness point of view, but I'm worried about it creating an implausibility scar on the otherwise nicely crafted universe.


Those are all my thoughts for now.

219

XPiratez / Re: Dojo mechanic question

« on: May 02, 2016, 11:49:18 am »

The game progresses from savage to civilized. Dojo is important in that aspect.

First, you send to battle assorted riff-raff. Decisions at this stage are, who can make an use of what weapon, who is a champion that is to be trained, and who is useless & to be given suicide-style weapons.

In time, you can allow yourself to send well-trained warriors to battle. Decisions at this stage change. You optimize loadouts based on general strategy and effectivity of weapons, and minimization of casaulties. No more champions and hobos, all are professional soldiers. But, different as decisions might be at this stage, they're still decisions. Also, people become much less cheap at this stage, since each death is not only $25k, but several months of training (which is a logistical effort).

Also, dojos certainly cut back on XP grinding, which is fun in the early game, but IMO gets really tedious at some point.

Well said. That's some solid game-design.

220

XPiratez / Re: Dealing with Mercs ?

« on: May 02, 2016, 11:45:42 am »

One of my favourite ways to kill a merc is a point-blank blunderbuss auto-fire with chem rounds. There's always a sense of tension when they survive the third shot, then relief when they die to the forth.

221

XPiratez / Re: Smugglers. Invisible melee attacker and unpassable obstacle?

« on: May 01, 2016, 01:38:00 am »

Congratulations you have found a "public enemy" a exiled stargod. They are invisible and this particular stargod has a force blade. If you don't have aye-phones so you can pinpoint his movements run away. Also only aoe weapons like grenade will have any effect. The mechanic that makes them invisible also renders there surfaces unhitable.

As to get to the rest of the ship there are lots of visually hidden lifts in the smuggler ship. They function the same as any other lift just you can't see the red floor tiles due to walls.

You know what? I've successfully killed a bunch of these guys, and it never once occurred to me to use an aye phone to find them. That makes me feel stupid. (I also didn't use grenades.)

As it turns out, there is one angle from which you can see & attack the stargods. If you can work out where they are (eg, blocked terrain), then walk around that spot until you find the right angle - then kill it! (Note: you have to be on that same angle to actually shoot it too. Knowing where it is isn't enough. You can't hit it from the wrong angle.)

--

[edit]
I guess part of the reason I didn't think to use the aye phone is that I didn't have on the first time I met a stargod, and so I suppose I just worked out how to beat it without the sensors and then stuck with what I knew.

222

XPiratez / Re: Dojo mechanic question

« on: April 30, 2016, 12:14:57 am »

Like you said yourself, it depends on the player I have nothing against having fully-trained rookies, as long as game challenges are balanced with that in mind.

I don't think there is anything wrong with full-trained rookies from a game difficulty point of view; but I do think it could potentially take away some interesting decisions and planning from the game.

When my roster has a mixture of experience levels, I make a a lot of decisions based on their differences. Here are a few examples which come to mind:

• I think about how difficult I expect a mission to be, and decide whether or not to bring my best team or a less experienced team.
• I choose armour and weapons based on their abilities. Some armours are too heavy for rookies; some armours have certain advantages for training in. Similarly for weapons. So I make decisions about building, fencing, and equipping stuff based on the experience and abilities of my hands.
• In battle, I sometimes make a conscious choice between quickly killing some enemies, or taking a risk to get some valuable training on less experienced hands.

I'm sure there are other things too.

My point is that if the Dojo is powerful enough to give us fully-trained rookies whenever we need them, then some potentially interesting parts of the game are, in some sense, removed.

I'm not trying to say that the Dojo is too powerful, or that it should have some particular limits or anything like that. I'm just trying to say it would be a good idea to keep these player decisions in mind when balancing. Because ultimately the fun of games is not just in the raw difficulty, but in the types of decisions we make as players. If the Dojo is going to remove some decision making, it should be to replace it with a different kind of decision, or something like that.

223

XPiratez / Re: Cyclops corpse more valuable than prisoner?

« on: April 28, 2016, 02:50:18 pm »

Cyclops corpse dependency will be removed completely in the next version.

Interesting.

From what I've seen, all fairly strong armours in the game require scarce resources, so that it's not easy to get high-quality armour for everyone. If full plate mail armour didn't require anything special, it would become a pretty powerful 'default' armour, I think.

Incidentally, I've been unable to build any Xeno armour at all, due to lack of chrysalids. At this point I probably wouldn't use that armour anyway, because I've got a heap of synthmuscle suits. I figure that synthmuscle is similar to Xeno, and probably better for most situations. This is my first and only play-through of the game, so I'm assuming that it's mostly just luck causing me to miss Xeno armour.

224

XPiratez / Cyclops corpse more valuable than prisoner?

« on: April 27, 2016, 02:07:42 am »

I recently encountered cyclopses for the first time; and since it was relatively easy to capture them alive, I brought home 6 live ones.

For every other species I've encountered, it has been more valuable to bring them back alive rather than dead; and so I was surprised and disappointed do find that I can't seem to do anything useful with my live cyclopses. I can't butcher them, or rob them, or enslave them; and I could only research them once. The random payment is small. At the same time, the corpses are actually quite useful for producing high-quality armour. So I'm wishing that my 5 remaining cyclopses were actually corpses!

Am I missing something? It seems a bit silly to me that I can't use my live cyclopses to produce the same stuff I could with the corpses.

225

XPiratez / Re: How does 'choking' damage work?

« on: April 26, 2016, 01:22:46 pm »

I don't feel like there is any particular description lacking, but I do think that inconsistency between descriptions leads to uncertainty in the player (for me at least). Some items explicitly talk about how much health they'll take off, and some don't. The smoke bomb and the grenade launcher both have choking type damage, and neither description explicitly mentions how much health damage that will translate to; but I presume that the smoke bomb does zero and the grenade launcher does roughly 50 minus armour.

I didn't know that damage type is what determines the smoke radius. That explains why some of the numbers are weird and inconsistent.

For me I think the ideal situation would be that any weapon which doesn't simply do 100% health damage should automatically list it's damage breakdown. (eg. spike mace does 100% health, 50% stun. Rope does 100% stun, 20% health, or whatever it is.)   -- However, that's probably too much stuff to type manually; and having it in the description text would probably get a bit messy. So I suppose the best option would be to further modify the game code itself to automatically include that stuff in the Bootypedia. I'm not sure how much work that would be. (I'd volunteer to look into it, but I don't expect to have enough time for that in the foreseeable future; and I'm not sure it's even something people would want.) Of course, if we're changing code it would probably be even easier to change what determines the gas radius...