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1

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / Re: [Beta 10.2] RIF Signal Jamming still doesn't block Engineer reinforcement calls

« on: January 12, 2021, 05:42:24 PM »

They don't under normal circumstances, but they will still do this if for example they were already in the process of rebuilding something (or heading to rebuild something) and they get attacked after being hacked but before they get to take another turn since at that point ignore_repairs has not yet had a chance to clear their queue yet. They check for hostile activity before their chance to do job updates.

Ah, well if this only occurs during a "single action" window, then it's fine.  I thought it was happening even later but I've only noted that it does happen and not when it happens 

2

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / [Beta 10.2] RIF Signal Jamming still doesn't block Engineer reinforcement calls

« on: January 10, 2021, 05:19:53 PM »

The RIF Signal Jamming ability (with NC coupler attached) still doesn't appear to block Engineers from calling reinforcements when attacked.  There's an item in the Beta 10.2 changelog that indicates this should be the case.  I think RIF Signal Jamming + transport network coupler also fails to block hauler reinforcement calls, if that's supposed to occur (I'm pretty sure this happened earlier, but I haven't re-verified since learning that these jamming issues were added/fixed).  Additionally, should Engineers who are "ignoring repairs" due to the RIF-required hack still call reinforcements?  (They currently do.)

Changelog reference: * NEW: Relay Coupler [NC] combined with Signal Jamming RIF ability also blocks busy Engineer calls for reinforcements

3

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 20, 2020, 10:08:43 AM »

All special-purpose terminals, including any door terminals, will no longer be hackable except to open the door or do specifically what they were meant for. They're all level 1 terminals, after all, and having access to that many, especially in certain areas, always made it way too easy. I always liked the thematic concept of using door terminals to hack unrelated systems, but it's OP and not really necessary. In any case, we'll see what kind of effect this has.

This sounds like a fair change, is fitting in theme (the terminals may be locked out of the wider terminal network), and adds an appropriate difficulty to some of the research branches in particular where these are most common.  How would this look on prefabs where the door is already open, like the Extension and Quarantine entrance variants?

4

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 16, 2020, 10:28:02 AM »

S7

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'd like to see a few more people beat extended without going to S7 before I'm convinced that S7 artifacts aren't necessary for it though. GJ no offense but you are kind of an exceptionally good player.

Valguris has done at least one entirely branchless (no S7 included) run recently, although they are also an exceptionally good player.  I'm not sure why anyone would think that S7 is actually necessary, but there's almost no reason not to go there usually.  It's low risk (assuming you aren't entering at very high alert) and potentially very high reward.  The map is small enough that you can leave quickly (via predictably placed exits) if you run into any trouble, and you are given plenty of DNIs and teleporters if you want to have an actual near-zero-risk panic button.  It's trivial on flight builds and on combat I'd much rather be in S7 than on a standard Research floor.  I do have a run planned soon for recording/streaming that would be skipping S7 for ++ but that isn't the intended focus 

5

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 14, 2020, 06:34:02 PM »

Also I can imagine the cheese now where people just run the imprinter all around ZDC till she burns out her prop and they get a free kill... why do I get the feeling there insidious cheese strats behind the proposal of this nerf?

Come on man, don't imply that I'm trying to deceive the developer into changing game mechanics just so I can exploit them.  Anything that I post here is only because I think it could potentially improve the overall game experience.  Finding cheese can be fun but most of us only do it so that the game can be updated and improved, the same as with finding bugs.  And poking holes in unimplemented mechanics and ideas is important so it's good to bring up considerations and concerns like yours; that's part of the purpose of this thread.  In this case, the damaging parts idea was one of several that I proposed, and the rationale is that it would be similar to cooled propulsion in both function and theme.

I guess it didn't come off that way, but I was just playing around =P Def don't mean any disrespect, tbh I didn't read closely enough and I thought zxc had proposed it and I was poking fun at him since he always has insidious cheese strats in mind. I don't think anybody here is trying to ruin other people's fun and I truly believe we all have the best intentions for this game, so sorry if that came off like I was disgusted by your proposal or something lol

All good man!  I know you too well to seriously think otherwise, but felt the need to reply in case anyone was reading out of context.  Sorry if I sounded overly defensive in my reply 

6

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 14, 2020, 03:52:10 PM »

Also I can imagine the cheese now where people just run the imprinter all around ZDC till she burns out her prop and they get a free kill... why do I get the feeling there insidious cheese strats behind the proposal of this nerf?

Come on man, don't imply that I'm trying to deceive the developer into changing game mechanics just so I can exploit them.  Anything that I post here is only because I think it could potentially improve the overall game experience.  Finding cheese can be fun but most of us only do it so that the game can be updated and improved, the same as with finding bugs.  And poking holes in unimplemented mechanics and ideas is important so it's good to bring up considerations and concerns like yours; that's part of the purpose of this thread.  In this case, the damaging parts idea was one of several that I proposed, and the rationale is that it would be similar to cooled propulsion in both function and theme.

7

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 12, 2020, 03:41:24 PM »

I think it would be worthwhile to review some of the more powerful alien artifacts and how AAs in general fit into Cogmind's endgame meta.  I don't know what the spoiler policy is here so I'll just put the rest of this post in a spoiler block (S7 spoilers).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The energy and cooling AAs are too common in S7.  Many games leave S7 with lots of free energy generation and heat dissipation, to the extent that at worst you gain several free slots worth of energy/cooling, and at best you can sustain a very energy-hungry build without even equipping an engine (yes, I've done this). 

Proposal #1.  Make all of the energy and heat artifacts less common.  I'm picturing a scenario where you get either (not both, just one selected at random) the integrated singularity reactor or the integrated heat negator *guaranteed*, probably located in the top-right AA shell of the LRC lab? (The one with a tile for a single AA that is sometimes empty.)  In addition to this, the lesser integrated reactor and integrated dissipator would be elevated to the status of artifacts that are protected by S7 guard (in place of the integrated singularity reactors and heat negators which would no longer spawn in these prefabs).  The net effect is that players get less free energy/cooling on average.  The benefits of this are more careful consideration of overall build composition, energy use, and heat upkeep; evolving a third power slot becomes more appealing and an interesting build option; Zhirov's AA increases in value, as does Lab's.  Players with the subatomic replicator could still replicate the AAs that they do find.  That is, unless...

Proposal #2.  Subatomic replicators aren't as effective at replicating integrated singularity reactors and integrated heat negators.  I don't know if replication of these should be blocked entirely, upgraded to a supercharged variant that has less overall value than two full AAs, or maybe the duplicate comes out as their lesser counterpart (either a plain integrated reactor or dissipator).  This would be much less extreme and wouldn't change the current meta *too* much, while also putting a small limit on the slotless energy and cooling numbers currently possible.

I think these AAs are very interesting and that they *should* be powerful.  These items break the rules of the game in a really compelling way, and seeing one for the first time is one of those novel unforgettable player experiences.  I think it's really awesome that we can take on a somewhat challenging branch to gain what are essentially additional build slots.  But S7 has a tendency to give the player so many of these that they no longer feel special, and that you gain far too much of an otherwise scarce resource for free (mostly looking at energy generation but the cooling is very powerful on certain builds as well).

To make some practical comparisons, the integrated singularity reactor gives the same energy generation as a rating 9 quantum reactor, with no mass, heat, or *build slots*  associated with it (or storage, if we're being fair).  The integrated heat negator gives 50% more heat dissipation than an exp. heat sink, and just slightly (5%) more than an exp. cooling system.

I prefer something closer to Proposal #1, which lends itself to more interesting build planning and less absurd levels of free energy and cooling.  A lot of players use these AAs as a crutch and it allows players to coast through the extended endgame without having to give any real consideration to two of the game's primary resources.  Bringing down the S7 power boost will make endgame build considerations more interesting and promote build diversity.

8

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 07, 2020, 02:36:06 PM »

Have we talked about Zio. Metafield Generator in this thread yet?  Its effect is extremely powerful -- quite possibly the strongest item in the game for certain builds? -- especially for how early you get it and how easy it is to protect for the entire game.  It's strength combined with its longevity is very out of place alongside the balanced design of most other utilities. It takes the fastest propulsion in the game, and makes it twice as fast.  I propose to either nerf the speed bonus or to increase the coverage, mass, energy/heat cost to make it more difficult to use.  I wonder if having it double the energy and heat costs of your propulsion along with its speed would feel more balanced; it would still be incredibly strong but the downsides would be more in line with the upsides.  Maybe its coverage should be increased to 50-80 to bring it into the range of other powerful utilities like force fields and phase shifters (note that it still has more integrity than these utilities and isn't a combat utility so it would still last far longer overall).  Or keep the coverage lowish but also reduce the integrity so it wouldn't survive so many hits (putting pressure on the build to use armor or shielding), similar to some of the other zio. parts like their weapons.

For reference, zio. metafield generator doubles flight and hover speed, and has 3 mass, 100 integrity, 8 coverage, 20 energy upkeep, 0 heat upkeep.  The only other devices that come close to its integrity/coverage ratio are coolant injectors (which deplete their own integrity on use). 
(Actually, *that's* and interesting idea: what if the ZMG essentially "overloaded" your propulsion, and either your propulsion or the ZMG itself took damage over time similar to current overload effects?)

9

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 28, 2020, 05:08:05 PM »

Some thoughts on storage overhaul proposals:

Why I'm not in favor of no_stack proposals: This removes almost all of the current nuance to storage utility decisions, and reduces it down to a few simple options.  As much as we think people are using too much storage currently, when people share their builds I actually see a lot of build variety between speed, propulsion slots, storage slots, and inventory capacity.  With no_stack we will be limited to only a few options with little flexibility.  With no_stack you lose the ability to add storage temporarily in cases where you might want a few additional inventory slots at the cost of equipping armor or such, for maybe half a floor until it is no longer needed.  With limited inventory you lose some ability to make a planned future transition, perhaps by carrying some alternate propulsion until the time is right.  And as already mentioned, the no_stack proposal removes the balance between utility slots spent on storage vs utilities (which is something that doesn't only apply to storage, all of the utilities you find are always competing for your slots).

For any proposals that increase mass or decrease inventory capacity, keep in mind that most players seem to use multiple storage units, so any changes will have a cumulative impact.  Small changes will be multiplied by two or three on most builds.  Doubling storage mass feels a bit too far to me.  A 64 mass hcp storage unit for +8 inventory slots seems like something people should never use.  If we want to increase storage mass I'd start at 25-50% max, depending on how harshly we want to penalize it. For sml/med/lrg/hcp storage units, this yields values of 5/10/20/40 or 6/12/24/48 mass at 25% and 50% respectively.

If you don't double the masses, I'm not sure combat even notices.

I personally already feel pressure from current storage masses and they influence my decisions.  I currently don't like running hcp storage on legs.  I was playing a wheel build yesterday and was using lrg instead of hcp because it represented a worthwhile increase in speed.  Not everyone plays extremely slow high-storage builds, and doing so comes with downsides. 
One of the issues causing this storage perception is how it factors into the treads meta, where you effectively double your mass for a relatively small decrease in speed.  Consider this: If you have two pairs of hvy. treads equipped for 140 total support (a very common treads build), and you go overweight by some amount, let's say 150/140 -- you now have 130 additional support to use at no cost.  Of course you'll want to upgrade all of your lrg storage to hcp.  The actual mass/support numbers here aren't important, the fact is that once you get to the point where you need to go overweight or are comfortable with it, you suddenly gain *a lot* of additional support to spend.  Other propulsion types feel changes in mass at much more gradual intervals and often at steeper penalties.  This is why I'd like to see how an increased treads overweight penalty would impact gameplay.  Other propulsion types already have a lot more to consider when changing mass (and storage), but when treads hit OX1 there is suddenly a wealth of additional support to fill.

With this in mind, the proposal to make overweight bonuses apply at smaller intervals is an interesting one (although perhaps a complicated one).  I'm starting to like more and more the idea of further incentives to staying at Ox0, through changes like the increased overweight penalties on treads and the Ox0 leg perks that have been discussed.  Overweight penalties on legs may also need a look.  Maybe even increase support values of some prop but also increasing overweight penalties to achieve this.  Wheels' niche could remain being a prop with small overweight penalty.  Flight and hover are already heavily penalized for being overweight, with large speed penalties, loss of evasion bonuses, and -- in flight's case -- the loss of the hopping special ability.

At a glance, underweight bonuses feel a bit awkward to me, assuming they are consistent with how current overweight level is tracked.  Currently while underweight you gain speed, trap avoidance, and stasis resistance.  To gain additional underweight bonuses you'd have to evolve more prop slots compared to current builds.  And wheels will never be underweight if you are playing seriously.  This might also behave oddly at extremely low mass, or on core hover.  I guess I'm open to ideas but it doesn't seem needed -- we can't even get most people to stay at Ox0 currently

By the way, I find wheels to be most effective when you use them in the ~120-150 speed range.  You don't have to run them at 250+ speed and 300 mass; and being massively overweight is not their niche, it's just one thing they happen to be capable of.

And a final closing thought based on some of the storage and hacking propsoals I've seen on here and on discord:  I don't know how others feel about this, but I think Cogmind -- overall -- is for the most part reasonably balanced and quite fun.  I'd be very careful about making any large overhauls to fundamental parts of the gameplay experience. 


The shroud of balance has fallen... Begun, the nerf wars, have.

10

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 24, 2020, 05:48:30 PM »

I don't know where I fall on all this yet, mostly sharing general thoughts and playing a bit of devil's advocate.

Cave-ins

Simplify to two rules: walls don't cave-in, and dirt can cave-in at any time (checked per turn and per move)
Mostly a player nerf because digging is extremely strong, but some flexibility is offered regarding walls

This would be a major nerf to current stealth builds and one that creates a risk that players should probably never take, given that these stealth builds often have several essential but weak parts (flight units, sensors, processors, etc) and little storage for backups or temporary removal, and losing one of these pieces can be detrimental to a run.  This kind of risk already occurs when put in a position where you have to take shots from enemies, but is much worse in the case of a cave-in, which I believe does not respect part coverage.  Combat builds likely to not care about this risk, so this continues down the path of nerfing flight builds (the primary users of stealth tactics and digging); but feels like a step too far, as it is likely to remove the "digging through dirt" option for many players (which is fine if this is the goal, but it seems like the current game design wants multi-tile digging to be an option).

On the other hand, this restores one of the larger impacts of the recent melee-digging nerf, which made it very difficult to destroy reinforced barriers in common prefabs where the reinforced barriers are surrounded by walls.  Melee weapons are one of the best ways for destroying reinforced barriers (especially for faster bots with momentum bonuses) -- towards the end of the game, very few ranged weapons are capable.  The melee-digging nerf has made it so that in many of these prefabs you now have to risk a cave-in as you are melee-attacking from one of the adjacent wall tiles.  If walls never caved in then you could still attack from them.

Additionally, having walls never cave-in would restore the killhole tactics that were the source of the melee-digging nerf, albeit in much more limited locations.   Another option would be to make both walls and dirt always be unstable, which would eliminate this.

We just got a digging nerf that many players are opposed to (I am not one of them, I think it is a fair nerf and probably makes these situations more interesting overall).  We should wait and see how the most recent digging nerf plays out before further nerfing it, but these discussions are good to have.

Makes digging in caves much worse, probably a good thing as it trivialises caves

Digging in caves makes them much easier for experienced players who are taking advantage of sensors, optical arays, drones, or other data; allowing them to potentially dig around known threats.  But this is actually not such a simple thing for newer players (many find the caves maps difficult based on what I see on discord) and rewards players in general for developing map sense (something that the caves reward in general, which very specific and predictable layouts for those who understand the maps).  If we were only balancing for the top percentile of players then nerfing this aspect would be fine, but I think this is a good feature for the game overall.

Legs

10% accuracy malus and evasion bonus per point of momentum (caps at 30% or 40% with reaction control)
Accuracy malus uses movement acc malus, so it doesn't affect melee attacks
Only relevant when moving with non-overweight legs
Moving with legs on previous turn locks in malus for current turn
Bonus only takes effect during enemy actions when previous turn you moved with legs

I really like the general idea behind this and there are a number of ways it could be implemented.  I like the relationship with momentum because it makes reaction control systems have more synergy with legs, which were already decent with legs but this improves that in a good way.  Plus a lot of the leg ideas I've heard have seemed out of Cogmind's style, too similar to other game features ("siege mode, but legs!"), or somewhat ridiculous.  This feels reasonable and fits the game nicely.

Overweight penalty

Increase somewhat for treads (maybe wheels too?)
Support should be relevant in every build, and treads are a bit strong right now

I would at least double the penalty from treads (20 -> 40), possibly more but 40 is probably a good starting point.  Current overweight penalty for "basic" treads is 160 speed to 180 speed, which is only a 12.5% increase in time/move to gain *double* the mass support, which is significant on treads.  Perhaps adv. treads should have a lesser penalty (30?) since being a little faster is their niche and this seems to hurt them more than other treads, although I think them being fast while not overweight looks pretty good already. 

I'm not sure that wheels need a nerf in general, they can be quite fast if you limit your mass and evolve enough slots, but that's about all they have going for them (low coverage is a nice but is also a downside).  Centrium wheels could possibly be nerfed as they are quite good and relatively common, but I'm not sure if it's necessary.  If we are looking to nerf wheels then maybe tweaking the rating or rarity of centrium wheels could be a starting point?

Matter and energy storage utilities

Make it increase maximum capacity when equipped but not store anything when unequipped or dropped
'Drop on floor' strategy is extremely strong

I think there's some good merit to this idea, as sapping energy off the ground *is* quite strong, although it does come with some side-effects vs equipping (you need to have space to drop it, it only restores when the turn increments so you may have to wait to refill, etc.).  There's also some awkward behavior if you have empty storage in your inventory, because you will sap matter/energy from storage on the ground into storage in your inventory, and not always gain any benefit to your useable active resources. 

Another option may be to put a cap how much you can pull from the ground, maybe to something like 100/turn.  I'm actually not sure that matter is quite as exploitable as energy, which could make balancing them both but maintaining some level of consistency difficult.

I do like the idea of being able to store energy/matter in your inventory still.  Another option could be to halve the storage while in inventory, so they are more effective while equipped.
Does energy/matter storage share the property of inventory storage units where they can't be dropped due to corruption or severed by slashing damage?  That would be necessary for this change, otherwise losing an equipped energy/matter storage part and watching as potentially 1000 energy or 500 matter vanishes could be devastating in a way that isn't very fun.  This could be very nasty in

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A0 where you are repeatedly ambushed by slashing attacks.

This also exacerbates an issue that many kinetic builds have in

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A0, where matter can be difficult to come by (especially when the Architect constantly consumes resources without dropping matter).  It's an issue I've run into a handful of times and essentially losing at this point in the game because you don't have enough matter isn't very fun.  Perhaps I should just "get good" 

If energy storage were to always consume a slot regardless, there is going to be a breakpoint here where evolving more power slots or using power amplifiers is better than having energy storage equipped.  I haven't looked at numbers on this but depending on where this lands, energy storage could become somewhat irrelevant to a lot of builds that used to use it.  This could also make endgame builds more interesting where you can't rely on large stockpiles of energy storage in your inventory.  Any potential Storage nerfs will also affect this by putting more stress on inventory slots that could be dedicated to energy/matter storage.

Cave walls

All cave walls are earth
Fixes the advantage tiles has over ascii

This has always been an awkward problem since it is one of the few (if not the only) places where tiles have a distinct advantage over ASCII.  Tiles revealing more information than ASCII is common in roguelikes, for obvious reasons (that isn't to say it should also be the case in Cogmind).  Removing cave walls would make digging easier (especially from stray shots, which I assume is one of the reasons the walls exist to begin with).  It also makes sense that walls would be harder and more compacted than looser dirt inside.  I do wonder how caves might look if segments of the current wall tiles were made into dirt, so there was a mix while you explored, and it would also make the walls less reliable for guiding digging routes.  If cave walls became earth it would push players to spend more time digging (essentially digging out every tile in a 3-tile radius to find an opening, instead of just 2), which would cost more time (not always a critical resource in the caves) but be a potentially tedious behavior. 

11

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / [Beta 8.1] Terminal text display sound effect never stops

« on: May 29, 2019, 08:28:12 PM »

Terminal text display sound effect never stops if many Record entries are opened in quick succession.  Tested on a few guaranteed terminals that have many available lore entries (the Exiles message board is a good example).  Tried opening entries with both keyboard and mouse and both cause it.  I've encountered this before and had always assumed that the sound effects were just "catching up", but on further inspection they seem to go on for much longer than they should, and I've never heard them stop.

This seems like it would be a common issue so I hope I'm not re-reporting a known issue, but I tried searching a few times and didn't see any past reports.

12

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / [Beta 8] Guided Weapon Range

« on: March 10, 2019, 05:31:25 PM »

The full trajectory path of a guided weapon can be much further than the weapon's range.  A guided weapon's total path distance for setting waypoints is restricted to its range, but the projectile will continue to travel beyond that path until it is interrupted or hits the "boundary" which is a circle centered on Cogmind with a radius equal to the weapon range.  This creates some interesting possibilities for firing guided weapons a long distance around corners, walls, or other obstacles.

To recreate:  Fire a guided weapon and set the waypoint one tile short of its max range, then for the second direction select the tile one space back in the opposite direction.  The projectile will reach it's "max range", turn around, travel it's "range" again as it passes Cogmind, and continue past until it reaches its "max range" in the opposite direction -- which results with a total projectile travel distance of approximately three-times the weapon's range.

This may be intended behavior (or even a bug-turned-feature ), but it is unexpected and not very intuitive so I've decided to submit it.

13

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / Re: [Beta 8] Various Chronowheel bugs

« on: March 10, 2019, 04:20:00 PM »

Ah good, I see you already know about the other Chronowheel bugs.  I had encountered most of these but it was getting late so I only posted the one.  It seems that messing with space-time does not come without its consequences 

Some extra detail for the last item:  If you equip two Chronowheels, then remove one of them while both are still equipped (it doesn't matter which one), the remaining Chronowheel will deplete to 1 integrity but the decay stops there and it is never destroyed naturally.  If you equip *another* Chronowheel at this point, then the game will crash, similar to equipping two and leaving them on.

14

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / [Beta 8] Various Chronowheel bugs

« on: March 09, 2019, 11:31:53 PM »

If the chronowheel is used and allowed to deplete naturally, then once the game is restored to the previous state (via the chronowheel's effect), the L/A/I/C options from the top-center window disappear and the player can no longer toggle between these displays.

To reproduce: equip the chronowheel, allow it to deplete naturally, observe top-center window.