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1

Strategies / Re: Win After Limping into Command?

« on: December 04, 2020, 12:03:30 PM »

In terms of what is merely possible rather than likely, you can do a whole lot more than just survive to the Surface if you reach Command naked, with no inventory, excellent core integrity, low alert and get a bit lucky with initial patrols and floor items. If there's a 2-slot tread and weapons on the floor you can use those to fight Exterminations, get more powerful fighting a couple Exterms/Patrols, take on the exit guards and get even stronger with their items, and this is roughly the point where you'll start getting assaults if you entered at low alert.  You'll have lost around 400 core integrity fighting these enemies with a suboptimal build, but in theory you can proceed to do Ascended++ from this point.

This is something I've experimented with long ago and on the seed I was playing, getting Ascended+ with those conditions ended up being relatively easy. If you're immediately ambushed by Hunters/Swarmers and there aren't any good items around you'll have a rough time, though.

2

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: November 19, 2020, 08:08:02 AM »

I suspect you'd have to add quite a lot of encounters for that alone to make its frequency to feel good. Maybe that's the plan and maybe there'll be some more branch competition with Mines eventually --- currently Storage only rarely competes with Mines and -9 happens to be the good depth for doing Exiles, so you tend to plan for doing Mines on -9 and might not even double-check if the floor has Storage before going in.

If we assume Exp. Sensor shows up like this in 50% of seeds then good players with no branch preference will find it in perhaps 39% of runs. I think you'd want this number to be closer to... 25%? Currently the main stuff that pushes you to play sensors regardless of preference is this event, sensor drone bay, Mak. Sensor in Caves scrap or Derelict maps, and Exp. Sensor schematic from DM. The bay is quite rare, and relative to the other ones that give you an actual sensor util... this is easily the best one 'cause fabbing is cheapest on -7, in fact you probably end up with 2 exp. sensors on -7 and that has a tendency to last forever. Having that happen at anything close to coinflip-odds feels kinda oppressive, it's not just a high frequency of easy runs it's easy runs that play out in a very similar pattern.

3

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: November 18, 2020, 02:54:43 PM »

Suggestion: nerf the frequency of Exp. Sensor event in Mines.

I think I've played enough since it got attached to a scrap pile to claim that it's very common, and the encounter seed catalog for 10.1 seems to suggest it's about coinflip odds to be present in a run. The issue here is that even though I have no preference for sensors, wouldn't go out of my way to acquire them, it feels like the majority of my runs still end up building around a sensor-effect. Partially because Farcom is occasionally attractive/optimal, but mostly because you're not gonna ignore the best sensor array in the game when you find it in a scrap pile.

4

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: November 08, 2020, 02:18:57 AM »

EMDS

Got nerfed already, still busted. Busted aspects are:
- 80 coverage per slot (and standard integrity) for an item you can acquire multiple of or weapon shield
- 22 range penetrating EM with moderate accuracy boost (unique identity that's unlikely to change?)
- Notably more EM damage than other weapons you are likely to have access to

If you compare it to Linked Autogun, you can see that that weapon while still good has some awkwardness to it that makes it less obvious to farm for it or jam it in your inventory. Linkies are below-average integrity/slot and don't strongly synergize with firing one weapon at a time, protecting your offense with shieldings thus becomes harder and you have reason to prefer other alternatives, like stacking Helicals/Multirails for integrity. Range is another reason to do that.

Is the combat too launcher-focused?

In the sense of launchers being necessary, no. You have real alternatives, e.g. gunsling can just miss into swarmers until it enters siege mode and picks off whatever remains. Launchers do happen to be extremely efficient, their matter costs feel sort-of balanced around bad-RNG scenarios where you launch 3-5 times to kill the whole group rather than efficient 1-3 launches then cleaning up with other weapons. Their alert gain doesn't seem significant with the methods there are to manage that, and I think early walls don't even boost alert much --- and they're good for sterilization so this is less of an outright issue nowadays. You do have good reasons not to go launcher-mad in R branches, unless you're explicitly playing for sterilization and discarding the alert management option.

Mni. Smartbomb seems like it has a damage-roll capable of sterilizing w/ launcher-loader, it's a bit weird that that launcher does everything you'd ever want an EX-launcher to do, assuming you fulfill the general criteria of having some matter utils. Maybe the 2 waypoints, range or the ceiling on its damage roll should go down, currently it feels like you can guide it to point-blank explode on just about anything from anywhere, and it kills very fast.

Launchers are seemingly maximum efficiency for high-sec arcs, Executioners and Strikers have nerfed penetration strats somewhat with opening up walls and more aggressive ARC dispatches likely to get you surrounded a bit, that's more effective at counterbalancing penetration than Programmers and Archangels are at counterbalancing launcher abuse: you can still corrupt through the Progs and you might engine-explode them into the next world, with Archangels you just shoot at the right spot to avoid interception. It's also notable that ARCs popping gives you good matter for launcher-abuse.

Being able to trigger multiple investigation squads from the same alarm trap array via AOE seems dodgy

Only happens with AoE EM, which is kinda busted in general and it's a flavorful & unique interaction.

Cmb linears need to be prototype (and possibly other/all cmb hovers)

The absolute highest-end cmb. hover that's better than antigravs which were already very good and common... yeah, I could see it being prototype. With the other ones it comes down to whether you want to incentivize players to e.g. go imprint and fab cmb. hover because they got a cmb. airjet in Mines, that seems fine as far as branch interactions/incentives go. Having some reason to potentially value hackware or Hubs on imprint is good.

Something about siege mode giving a substantial flat accuracy buff seems off to me, like it's too easy to obtain the full benefit without a build dedicated to it. Might prefer if it upped the acc % buff per tread slot.

Yeah, players are carrying 1x. siege tread on flight/hover these days to fight things like Intercepts. Having at least the accuracy boost scale from the amount of treads sieged would be nice. At the moment it's very powerful to the point of de-emphasizing targeting computers (with some exceptions), so redoing the numbers to nerf 2-prop treads and even slightly nerf 4-prop treads would be fine.

Don't let us find 2+ of hyp EM gauss / tachyon in lab... it really sucks

There aren't that many possible rolls for the L weapon combo, and getting even one PC is very, very good. PCs are currently strangely common*, they really shouldn't be even more common.

*

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Lab, Testing, Command

5

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: November 05, 2020, 04:12:33 AM »

Further analysis of magnified core exposure...

Upsides:
- Relative nerf to corruption. While corruption and overheating will still solve an encounter where you don't get your core hits, it'll be less outright preferable to a damage approach. There are currently some enemies with significant EM resistances that are still notably easier to corrupt with a single HERF Cannon than they would be to kill with a typical damage-based loadout.

- Increased difficulty to so-called "greedy" strats, where you kill Exiles, Zion, etc., or go for the longest and most dangerous/rewarding approach to ZDC. These are not all that greedy in the average seed, by which I mean they are quite doable without any special variance, e.g. you don't need to find rarer items that are good for them. Shifting these further away from being "meta strats" towards "seed-opportunistic alternatives" is likely good.

Downsides:
- Significant and unnecessary buff to crits, penetration, guided weapons and explosive launchers in general. Significant nerf to melee enemies. There's already rather many encounters that are resolvable with ~zero damage taken, so some of the benefits zxc lists seem more like downsides to me.

Potential downsides:
- Fights with allies become more volatile/swingy. Less wait-time from large-scale battles could be good, but it'll affect the reliability of allies.

Regarding core attrition in general, I do think a bit more of it would be welcome, but also suspect it's close enough to where one wants it to be that 3x core coverage would be devastating, not to flight/hover but to other stuff.

2x might be manageable, it would result in changes to how you approach combat. Some of those changes would be nice, like the relative increase to the value of core shielding: they currently have a bad comparison to the expected value of alternate utils you could equip instead, this is somewhat true even when you're explicitly concerned about core attrition --- more than anything the difference in Equip Core Shielding vs Equip More Coverage is the sort of thing that matters here.

The main negative change is... this is the sort of thing that could tilt gameplay too much in favor of offense and cleaning things up before you really get hit. DPS vs Tank considerations for combat are in a decent spot at the moment, though with a clear and slightly excessive bias for "loads of integrity", arising mainly from excessive storage. It's probably maximum fun for 'tank' to be the main approach by a slight margin, such that positioning and clean kills do matter, and tankiness isn't so good that there's no significant swinginess/variance to what breaks. When offense is the main approach you get rather swingy and hectic gameplay that might not be a good fit for Cogmind's length and the amount of enemies you fight, it's very heavy on combat micromanagement for a game where tactics will still always matter even when tankier strats are meta.

6

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 26, 2020, 02:44:28 AM »

It's a bit inherently "unclean", but I'll say it out loud in case it has some merit: how about two_stack instead of no_stack? As in your third storage unit does nothing, your second one does. For now let's ignore the question of whether this would allow you to equip 2 humpbacks, that's not too important and the "real" storage units matter more. There's a few things this specific middle-of-the-road aims to achieve:

• As with no_stack, it solves the issue of lots-of-storage feeling almost mandatory by putting a cap on it. In a game of attrition it's almost inevitable that you want as much storage as reasonable: your build-type will have some extremely high-value utils that it wouldn't drop for extra storage, and anything below that line it willingly replaces with storage(=additional backups). This results in same-archetype builds looking very similar across runs with no small optimizations of less-obvious utils to fit the specific situation, they just run the same-ish great-value utils and storage.
  
  In practice most builds run lots of inventory spaces and the ones that don't can't fit that much mass. It's a bit difficult for mass alone to balance the question of storage, often you should downgrade to lower-mass parts, more support or overweight in order to run more storage and carry the world, resulting in quite a bit more inventory management than the game needs to feel good. There is some nuance and build-variety to the mass-equation, but I feel loads-a-backups is at least a bit too oppressive for mass considerations to truly deal with it in a way that's satisfying. To some extent the "unlimited" flexibility you have to go for additional storage warps the evolutions players are willing to go for in favor of an even greater utility focus than they would otherwise have, this is another issue.
  
  
• A potential issue with no_stack is a too great loss of flexibility. It's more flexible than storage units not existing and simply giving Cogmind more inherent inventory slots, but you run into issues like... carrying a storage unit you plan to upgrade to feels bad when you can only equip one at a time. Two storage units allows you the nuance of something like Lrg. with another Lrg. in inventory, eventually putting on the second one. Or Lrg+Med with a Lrg. in inventory to eventually go Lrg. x2.
  
  
• It may well be reasonable at current numbers. You could interpret humpback as 2x storage units, or you could allow players to equip two if they really want to carry tons and then they have to deal with the unusual mass and coverage of double humpback. You might play a wheels build like that. 2x Hcp. for 20-inventory slots seems a reasonable size that isn't annoying to use, you can genuinely carry stuff but it's a manageable inventory.

More than anything this is meant to share my perspective on storage, so I will add an anecdote about the evolution of storage on combat builds. In late Alpha average combat capacity was around 20, it didn't feel like an unusual amount of inventory-paralysis relative to the average RL, though maybe by just a little bit, possibly that's just inherent to Cogmind where you have to think more about your inventory items than you would about potions. Since then both support and inventory-per-util-slot have gone up, relatively often I find it a no-brainer in terms of winning or playing the build well to go for an inventory size where scrolling through it annoys me. I don't have a strong grasp of what the average capacity is nowadays, it might even be around 30, and really large inventories are more common.

7

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 19, 2020, 02:56:44 PM »

I largely agree with Pimski's identification of the issues. Personally I think the main issue with the current system has much more to do with what happens when you're fast or hacky rather than the accessibility of fabbing to slow builds without a hack focus. Partially this is because like Vectis, I dislike wishing mechanics and prefer fabs/repstations to have real variance in their value and occasionally not do much.

A potential downside of making wish-y schematics more accessible to builds across the board is that it will exacerbate balance asymmetries that are not currently an issue. It's a semi-obvious truth that powerlevel variance is not inherently bad, one could argue it's the opposite, and things are only "overpowered" when they somehow warp the game around themselves. This can end up happening by making an item more accessible without changing its powerlevel. There are schematics where if a no-/low-hacking slow combat build could consistently acquire them, they should wish for them every game, this is one of the issues fast builds suffer from right now. Currently there are relatively few value schematics that a slow, not-a-hacker build can consistently acquire, ultimately I think it's much more fun to just either find those items/schematics or not find them in a run.

Let's look at what fabs and scanalyzers actually do for slow builds without an explicit hack focus:

1) You find a high-tier item in e.g. Chutes: faulty, broken, functioning, whatever. You can gain additional value from it by scanning and fabbing it, processors in particular you only need 1-2 functioning instances to have them last about the entire game. Even with zero hackware in Chutes it's not particularly difficult to find floor hackware or grab it from operators to do one scan + fab at some point.

2) OOD preloads in fabs, I believe this is a semi-recent addition. I once got to fab an Exp. Force Field in Factory, this sort of variance as an alternative to just slapping a trojan(hauler) on the fab seems fun. Fabbing the preload is potentially easier than fabbing a schematic you already have, which is an interesting nuance. You might also want to fight an investigation to get the fab off, given you don't have the schematic, and there is that one force hack to consider too.

3) Non-core shieldings are low-ish ratings. This means Imp. shows up early, and can be scan+fabbed with some ease. This is a main way for combat to find value in fabs/scans. Instead of having to find multiple backups of some item that's valuable to your build, you can extend its life with shieldings. As is evident from my call to nerf these, I actually think these are a little bit too good across all builds and even just finding imp. shieldings on the floor is quite powerful.

4) You can get a fab to make you one of the schematics you got from DM/Zh.

8

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 19, 2020, 01:41:21 AM »

I'd like to suggest an integrity nerf to shieldings/casings. The concept of sacrificing a utility slot to protect a certain type of part from damage/RNG is cool, but their numbers seem high in a way that contributes to the ease of maintaining extremely powerful items and the same build throughout the game, and they often feel more efficient than other defensive utils even when losing such parts to RNG wouldn't be the end of the world. In other words, I think you are a bit too strongly incentivized to fab 200/300 integrity's worth of shielding and repair them for almost 200/150 integrity at stations (exp./imp. numbers). Fab/repair pattern doesn't apply to casings but they are very inventory-efficient at 200 and rather easy to get (even when not imprinted!).

Base shielding maybe doesn't need to change at all, they don't get used. I suspect Imp. still feels good at 100-integrity and Exp./Casing at 150. 66%/90%/100% are still very good numbers and you'll have reason to equip them for that, but you're less invulnerable to attrition and utility shielding doesn't allow you to scoff at cave-in risks as much.

I see core shieldings have 50/100/200, perhaps all the shieldings could be standardized at 50/100/150? This is an unnecessary nerf to Exp. Core Shielding, could make up for that by reducing its rating from 9*, builds on a core clock have a difficult time interacting with 9* parts. I get that this is the rating that disables them from repairs, but it's not powerful enough that blocking that prevents any real abuse. Sterilization is much more effective at preventing the sort of abuse that I assume the repair-block is intended for.

9

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 16, 2020, 02:20:40 PM »

Because it's rare for the community to display even a rough consensus on things, I'd like to summarize two discussions here, the links should work if you have access to #cogmind-spoilers and #cogmind-redacted.

Discussion #1: https://discord.com/channels/205277826788622337/453076153817759765/766735551364726814

There's a rough consensus here that pulling schematics should or could reasonably be more difficult than currently, but no significant agreement on what the solution should be. The solutions discussed are roughly similar to what has already been brought up in this thread.

Discussion #2: https://discord.com/channels/205277826788622337/338852785154162688/766750651669020672

Strong consensus that S7 sec-1 terminals are abusable. Presumably they're sec-1 so that 'Open' hack would have its current success-%. Now that imprinting can't interact with that hack and force-ram exists, there's less need for a strong likelihood that you succeed the hack even without hackware. S7's guaranteed AAs are also capable of opening these, just gotta get inside one of them first.

10

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 15, 2020, 04:13:39 PM »

Burnout rate on cld. prop is still probably closer to being on the lower-end of balance than on the higher-end, 400 moves of speed boost is nothing to scoff at when you get to choose the moves you're boosted on and how much cld. prop you want to overload. It's very powerful on practically every map in the game.

A metafield that overloads or damages prop is a somewhat different mechanic. The integrity math is no longer about having enough cld. prop, you can discard flight units and pick up arrays, you can probably comfortably switch back and forth between hover and flight while maintaining a speedy build. This sounds a lot more interesting to me than current metafield and is more along the lines of the powerlevel you want early strong items to have, where it's fun to play and good but you don't feel like you're giving up the world by having your flight/hover build not do ZDC. The fact that cld. prop is a viable alternative to such a metafield is a good thing, ZDC is not a map that'll stop being visited because you have other options, some runs you'll have a particularly favorable seed for ZDC and so on.

11

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 15, 2020, 04:36:58 AM »

As Pimski says flight has an easy time pulling schematics to fab a perfect build. One of the best anecdotes I have for this is a recent hover run I played that managed to lose all of its protohackware before -1. Even so, through the power of botnet, operator networks and picking up hackware from the floor, it had an easy time pulling & fabbing Femtoactuators in Access, ending as an Ascended++ with no R branches. Flight has an even easier time avoiding enemies and assimilating operators. Arguably items like Femto, Exp. Armor Analysis, should not be pullable with ease on what isn't even an impressive hackbuild.

More than one recent-ish change to Central Database Lockout mechanics had made pulling schematics easier, and while it is perhaps reasonable for CDBL to work according to these rules... it would be nice to see manual hacking for schematics become less viable, not more. There are more interesting and varied ways to acquire powerful items than typing the same-ish schematics into terminals. Here's a rough list of potential nerfs:

1) Nerf botnet values, as 6% is rather high.

2) Nerf operator network values, this is much more likely to have a relatively larger impact on faster builds.

3) Manual hacks currently have an offensive penalty to them, what is it, -15% per security level? Perhaps they could have a defensive penalty too.

4) Nerf the offensive and defensive values on hackware. 10 is a nice and round starting value but probably not the smallest viable value for being desirable, the fact that you can kill an Operator for a regular hacking suite feels very powerful for stacking hackware equipped or in inventory.

5) Magnify the penalty for pulling schematics that are prototypes, and possibly be more strict about making high-value items prototypes, lrn. sensor array comes to mind.

To some extent nerfs in this vein will make things harder on so-called combat builds too, though it is currently optimal for those builds to fill their hcp. storage units with some amount of hackware: I believe this is much better on average than perma-equipping a signal interpreter or terscan processor and is thus the main & best infowar approach for combat builds, mainly due to being cheap as you can comfortably discard hackware. Combat builds also do not truly need manual hacking all that much, except maybe access(branch) and that one does pop up naturally in terminals too in addition to the exit being naturally findable. Schematics are not an issue for combat, can always scan something like armor or a hvy. tread and print integrity, scanning an imp./adv. weapon cycler is always fine as they do eventually get shot on combat and thus end up being high-value fabs. And then you have DM/Zh stuff, won't be looking at nothing-valuable-to-fab even when you want to risk the +influence from fab lockout.

Metafield takes significant effort and skill to obtain, and again significant effort and skill to succesfully use in a build. If it is not at least as good in-slot as the tier 8* and tier 9* stuff flighthack builds fabricate with significantly more ease, then it will not see play in lategame builds.

The overloading nerf puts metafield on par with triangulator and heat shielding.

Having to overload propulsion is the sign of a weak build that is already doomed to die.

The very fact that this is even being considered as a nerf makes me feel like the people who have agreed to this suggestion have never played this sort of build.

This seems excessive even assuming intentional hyperbole, and you should know it as a likely truth that the people suggesting these nerfs have played these builds. As we recently concluded in Discord, you were there, speed is one of the best forms of damage reduction. The damage you take from burnout can easily represent much, much more damage avoided. Changes to metafield could easily call for changes to its energy upkeep, especially if it outright overloads prop and the energy cost of that prop becomes magnified. The spirit of the suggestion seems to be to change metafield from a mainly energy dilemma to an integrity dilemma.

12

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 14, 2020, 12:04:59 PM »

I really don't see how nerfing the energy / heat AA's makes the game any more interesting. I personally don't consider evolving extra engine slots interesting gameplay, they don't *do* anything other than provider power.

More engines or Power Amps or Fusion Compressors or Thermal Generators or MD is more interesting than builds just having enough energy for their plan because they replicated a singularity reactor. The latter being good enough for your energy at 1-2 power slots and no other energy generation is maybe a bit too common at the moment.

if I want to go for a very energy hungry build, I should probably go to s7 to get some energy AA's. If I want to focus more on offense (and maybe don't want to run a force field), or maybe have issues with alert management, I could instead go to Lab or T and otherwise skip s7.

Yep, sounds good to me. Another balance issue with S7 is that there's so many sec-1 terminals to botnet and purge/recall at, you can exit the map at low-sec/sec-1 without playing an actual hacking build, by just killing operators for a hacking suite or entering the level with ~2 offensive hackware in inventory. If you play combat your build can't die when it has hvy. regen and exp. biometal, so there is no challenge, often just a big & boring map. Currently S7 is an interesting decision/map exclusively for imprinting and I guess if you have intercepts.

2-prop flight, metafield

2-prop is slower than multi-prop flight, that is supposed to be the downside of mass support utils there. I think some of the proposed metafield changes are interesting, but I also think metafield isn't inherently busted relative to imprinting, it seems a real choice. I think more than the metafield the fast+stealth builds people play it with still seem far too easy, it's also why the speed of 2-prop flight is inherently sufficient and you never feel like being even faster. Would be nice if this paradigm was somehow solvable with sensor/dig changes. Although metafield with 2x. Exp. flight is very fast, so maybe a lesser speed boost than halving base speed is reasonable too, seems a good item even at worse numbers. I've had runs where the effect was excessive and I could've reached roughly speed-cap even with a worse metafield, those weren't 2-prop builds of course.

13

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 14, 2020, 12:26:33 AM »

As it is of some relevance to the recent discussion, I will highlight a run I just played: https://cogmind-api.gridsagegames.com/scoresheets/zdEEsud7mfcDK3ud7.txt

This is a slow-combat (treads) ++ win,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

utilizing Alpha Cannon and EMDS for A0

with no S7. I've also previously done ++ without S7 using a treads-multirails type of build. What this demonstrates is that energy-greedy strats are not that necessary for doing extended endgame, at least for combat. Something like flight could possibly need a lot of energy supply, I've done a hover++ without R branches that managed to support its energy costs with a VCR, Imp. Fusion Compressor and energy wells. There are alternatives to beating the endgame than just having a ton of AA support from S7, so maybe it's not necessary for those to be as good/frequent as they are, though you do want S7 to feel somewhat satisfying in terms of what you get, and having it occasionally enable certain types of energy-greedy builds is good.

14

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 12, 2020, 10:22:47 PM »

My own experience with S7:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Currently it just feels high variance, with I presume a % chance that an AA will be one thing from the pool, CRM included. Sometimes you get enough energy to dissuade you from evolving further power slots, sometimes you get no energy at all which can feel really bad if you also miss IR, tends to mean you saw a bunch of CRMs. Main issue with making energy/heat AAs less common is you really don't want the game to show you even more CRMs, probably don't want it showing more IRs either --- current IR frequency feels fine with most runs getting either 0 or 1, the occasional run with 2 or more, but they're likely a bit too frequent than they are infrequent.

Disregarding whether it would seem weird, purely in terms of gameplay SR on Singularity giving a standard variant instead would be good, currently SR is a "hold in case or until Singularity is identified" item because that's the best use for it, and it can have much more interesting applications than that, but you don't usually want to go for them over +20 energy.

Heat/energy AA values are possibly fine as is? I don't think they're egregious. It can definitely feel excessive through variance, though escaping a second power slot or dissipation/injector usage entirely is not easy in my experience, maybe I just use very high heat weapon-loadouts.  Less heat/energy help from the average S7... probably makes the game more interesting, though it'll also breed more Matter Drive builds and those are already very good.

Personally I think Hvy. Regen and Matter Drive vault are bigger balance issues than the AAs, those are extremely good for guaranteed items. Heat AAs sorta don't feel like a problem to me, probably a direct result of exp. injectors still feeling too strong, I don't ever struggle with heat on the builds I play (though you do need the 1x injector) and would almost never consider replicating a negator or equipping an Exp. Cooling System or Coolant Network.

15

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 08, 2020, 10:38:38 PM »

gunslinging does need a decent store of backups due to its levels of attrition

One of the optimal ways to play 4 weapon slots is to equip 4x kinetic guns and have melee+launcher+kincannon in inventory because they are low coverage, highly efficient, high integrity whereas your active loadout is common items getting shot and replaced. Could play most of the game with just 3 weapons in inventory if you wanna stick to low inventory (would mean equipping the occasional TH/EM gun), don't really need the kingun backups because you don't need to be all-in on gunslinging 100% of the time instead of 90%. The identity that the different weapon categories have here is at least pretty good.

16

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 08, 2020, 02:44:03 PM »

The notion of what score is supposed to represent has always seemed somewhat wishy-washy, I'd like to put out a half-serious suggestion that the condition of the first and second + should be worth 100k and a million in bonus score, with the latter having such extremely difficult design as to be nigh impossible, ideally ++ wins would occur 0-1 times per version of Beta, emphasis on the zero. Competing for score would be a whole lot more interesting and fun than it currently is. This would also reduce the average length of a run, extended endgame feels relatively worse if a player has to go through the full gamut all the time due to failure being highly unlikely (see my ~9 ++ wins in 10.1 already, with a few runs intentionally discarding ++ to look at the new endings). Ultimately dying is the best thing that can happen to players of roguelikes, maximum fun and all that, winning sucks a bit when it's common.

metafield

To an extent metafield feels fine to me because it's prop overloading without the nuisance, you kinda get what you would "otherwise" except the way it plays out is more fun, including the part where you kill Z-Imprinter. And in general fast feels more inherently broken than faster. The suggestions here are potentially interesting though, the one about doubling both downsides and upsides, and how it could be a util that e.g. turns cmb. hover (what you would use, i.e. max integrity) into overloaded prop, would change the identity of the item and how you want to play it.

  - Machines that cause corruption

This is probably bad because of the possibility of not carrying backup modules because you expect to stay at 0% corruption (at least for a while), getting bumped to 1% because you got close to a machine probably doesn't feel good, neither does equipping something before going past the machine.

- Alternative sensor change
  - Sensors merged with signal interpreters as a processor
  - Sensors made short range like Imp Sensor Array
  - Nerfs sensor range, stops swap tedium, protects sensors via low coverage

Sensors having a close-to-medium-range identity is something I like, optics for longer hallways. It's currently a bit silly how Exp. Sensors (26) are how you want to leverage Helical Railguns (26), not Spectral Analyzers (16+8 = 24).

- Mass support utils
  - Subvert disadvantages of fastest prop types
  - Tread on the purpose of prop slots
  - Probably could be safely removed

but muh core hover with mass utils strats, they don't tread on the purpose of prop slots when your prop slots are treads for armor
They are also somewhat nice in-inventory items in general, when you need more support than your prop slots afford. And very relevant on wheels at the moment.

- Guns
  - Lower coverage to make them less like 'cannons but bad'
  - Lower resource costs as well?
  - Promotes more weapon slots and gunslinging, especially non-KI crit

While I kinda miss Com. Railguns and Coilguns, and they were more satisfying than Com. Mass Drivers are... a general change to guns probably isn't warranted. Gunslinging with 3-5 weapons at once is already enabled by the frequency of kinetic guns (Sentries, Hunters, etc.) and while the coverage is a part of what blocks even more weapons than that from being a great build, the idea of 3-5w gunsling is partially to have your weapons serve as integrity that you pick up from the ground. You want some distribution between engines, treads, and guns getting shot or you're wasting all of those items when they drop. Thermal gunsling is not competitive due to a combination of thermal gun integrity, heat, and qcap being good on the better thermal guns like Dispersion Rifle. It's fairly satisfying that grunts actually lose their weapons quickly if you keep missing core, means you don't always need to EM them.

17

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 04, 2020, 07:43:32 PM »

I watched practically all of MTF's run, and would like to state two conclusions:

1) Safe 1-tile digs seem somewhat necessary for stealth runs to feel fun, at least in the current state of the game. I know MTF enjoyed their run a lot, some of that fun probably comes from doing a unique challenge for the first time... while the run had a ton of interesting moments it was also clear that at times the lack of 1-tile digs specifically was crippling to the stealth approach, tilting play unusually much towards killing squads or tanking damage as you run past them. A bit of that is very welcome, I don't think stealth builds should consistently avoid getting shot at all, arguably items like Phase Shifter and Rocket Array are to some extent stealth items too, in that their resource cost is much easier to manage if you only interact with squads occasionally. But if that's too frequent then it reduces variety and gets old.

2) 3-tile digs are not necessary for stealth strats to consistently achieve ++, they are probably not necessary for such strats to feel fun, and if they are a gamble then that is already sufficient to introduce some of the variety and fun that was seen in the digless run. In terms of micromanagment multi-tile digs are also a lot more annoying than single-tile ones, so while I enjoy how the current dig nerf works I am ever more in favor of W-E-W not being safe whether you do it with a cannon or melee weapon.

A brief comment on storage: I like no_stack more than other solutions, I like changes to overweight status much more than increasing storage unit mass across the board. Some increase to mass is perhaps warranted given the extent to which average support for hover and treads has skyrocketed, staying 0x0 on hover is very easy, but you could also target that prop directly rather than messing with the balance of low-support builds and their ability to satisfyingly utilize storage units from haulers.

18

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: October 01, 2020, 05:19:06 PM »

instantly game-losing scenario

Pimski, I know you've played Infra Arcana. When the White Spider gives you the bad touch and rolls its 50% paralysis proc for 2 turns and keeps chaining paralysis until you're dead, that's an insta-loss interaction. Even that extreme of an interaction happens to be fair due to various additional nuances, like the fact that there's tells for a spider/summon being in the vicinity, the fact that you tend to have a dynamite/molotov/debuff in inventory... IA is largely a fair game because it only forces you to gamble on "and then you died" interactions once you've burned through your resources, and good play can preserve those. It is somewhat more extreme about such things than the average RL, but that also makes it exciting.

Cogmind is explicitly designed for even horrendous part loss and misplay to be recoverable into a win, which for a roguelike is probably too forgiving, but certainly runs should still be loseable. You should not only be capable of failing to get past w0, it should be possible for you to outright die. Cogmind does not force you to gamble on tunnels from turn 0, and you tend to have more time to modify your inventory & equipped (cave-in-able) items prior to tunneling than when a White Spider is rushing you. If a flight build aggroes everything on the map and can't cleanly and with certainty get to an exit due to lack of perfect play, then the exciting gamble on a potentially devastating dig actually losing you the run is to be welcomed. Losing runs due to a sequence of decisions made relative to RNG is I think the point of roguelikes.

Scans being extremely terrible for ++ is not equivalent to instant loss and still seems like an exaggeration with the former phrasing, the scan inherently happens in a place with very powerful items. I've failed to kill a Researcher on a flight build and still got ++, I believe reconstructors were involved. Intercepts are inherently low on the scariness-scale in a game with TRs, unless you see tons of them before making it into the endgame, which is also rather unlikely, you'd have to lowroll both on where the exit is and where you end up post-TR.

A part of your argument is that the likelihood of a cave-in should be higher, which I would agree with, it's probably inherently more satisfying when you're gambling on a 20% than a 4% or whatever. At some point you call the bluff of cave-ins and currently your walk-of-faiths just keep succeeding run after run. However I don't agree that cave-in damage should be even more tankable than it currently is, the game does have force fields and shieldings after all. I suspect maximum fun is achieved when a walk-of-faith has a ~28% chance to do anything to you, and a cave-in does on average 4x more damage than currently. Cave-in damage has sort of fallen behind with increased integrity on prop and all sorts of additional help in the early game, maybe it would be a bit extreme for flight, but you can always equip one of your better flight units and an engine from inventory after a cave-in, and flight is sort of a niche, extreme-end build that shouldn't hold back the balance of the game in general. Flight will always find some way to win that's annoyingly clean and beautiful, you don't need to design the game around it.

19

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 30, 2020, 04:14:38 AM »

I think it's important that you do get scanned occasionally, and a delay would mean that it kinda can't happen while you have a reconstructor in inventory. So you'd need to get hit by a stasis projector twice, which I think would make the scan much rarer than currently. I guess it would mean you get one free aggro at the cost of being forced to tele, then you have to play as you would currently.

20

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 29, 2020, 04:00:29 PM »

We discussed the viability and numbers of this in Discord, but I'll summarize here too for consistency.

Because of max accuracy cap on ranged attacks, you definitely want more than one weapon or perhaps even EM launchers. It's an instance where despite FLK being very powerful it's not good for that specifically. If 5% was the lowest failure rate you could get then maybe that feels bad, though probably fine for SHELL specifically even at that number, ultimately the %s aren't that bad though, and the sort of RNG where you have to roll for it or avoid the risk entirely after failing a door hack is quite fine I think. I suspect Researchers are right around as killable as they should be.

21

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 29, 2020, 12:26:35 PM »

That just sounds like fun variance & nuance rather than EZ PZ cheezy perfect gameplay. It's fine for flight and stealth builds to get shot at times, the infowar etc. still prevents a ton of that and doesn't need to be omnipotent. It's fine for you to rarely lose stuff and need to reacquire them or rebuild, let it happen, don't latch on to a familiarity for OP builds as how Cogmind runs are supposed to go. Your build doesn't need to be a VCR-brick even once stealth strats become actually fun, zxc and I have run all sorts of fragile stuff that isn't actually reliant on digs being (strongly/often) possible.

You probably aren't aware of how easily Researchers die (or lose their scanner) because you've never had to roll for those kills. Sneak attacks with 1 melee weapon, a full volley of EM... not all melee/EM setups can do it consistently but it's an easy-ish threshold to meet and it's not like getting scanned ends your run. Again, fun variance, it's fine if it's rare. I have several runs with 7+ dead Researchers and no scan. The SHELL Lab is a rather easy event in that the door terminal has like a sec-1 Open on it, and in addition to that terminal there's another one right there with regen schematics. You can use either for recall(reinforcements) on the squad that immediately gets called for opening the door.

22

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 29, 2020, 10:53:18 AM »

Yeah, I think the purpose of even small cave-in risks is so that players won't take those risks with any strong consistency, it's an emergency maneuver. Of course there is the exception where tanky builds without extremely valuable low-integrity processors don't mind cave-in damage.

dodging behemoths in caves on a flight build, getting SHELL from the SHELL lab, digging into the Q exit prefab, etcetera.

But there's various ways for flight to deal with cave Behemoths and SHELL Lab without any digging. I know a good variety of them from experience, because sometimes I like to pretend that the games I play are already good instead of devolving to simple play patterns that shouldn't be possible/reasonable. To me this sound like you don't know those methods and have not thought much about them because of how easy and straightforward the tunnel strat is. I should be concrete here, so some off the top of my head are off-turn spotting, gui./hyp. baiting, drones/allies, ECM, recall(reinforcements), sheer ridiculous speed.

23

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 29, 2020, 02:13:11 AM »

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.

Far as I can tell Cogmind has never been a well-balanced game, which of course is something you can say about the vast majority of them. Getting the balance right is inevitably a grind for more complex games. On the whole Cogmind's balance and nuance has improved over time, and players urging the dev to be careful as a general rule seems counterproductive, devs of a proper game that they've put a ton of effort into are already predisposed to that bias. This is merely my own interpretation, but there's already precedence of that attitude from the playerbase slowing down work on the game that ended up happening anyway, mainly relating to nerfs that happened to flight and hackware stacking. Some of those changes are fairly old at this point, and the retrospective on them does not tell a tale of the game's build variety shattering without proper recompense, even if you can no longer assimilate bots via what's now known as machine-hackware. That used to be a fundamental aspect of the game and of build flexibility, even treads builds could put on a bit of temporary hackware to assimilate/reboot a sentry in addition to hitting up access(branch) on terminals, perhaps to safely plasma cut them for hvy. armor plating.

24

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 28, 2020, 01:35:04 PM »

Underweight bonuses are probably kinda ugly in terms of gameplay incentives. It works nicely with stasis traps because of flavor and how specific that interaction is, but you don't really want the mass stat to be so expensive that you have to constantly do the math on not just whether you'll end up 0x1 but also whether you want to discard an underweight multiplier.

A brief comment on multi-slot items: neither SB, Perforator nor Storm Laser require big inventories for viability and fun. Wardrone is potentially fine as an item you can't realistically carry and have to transition into using immediately if you wanna play with it, but the item is too new to comment on. BFG ideally gets deleted from the game, but my dislike of its design is at least a bit irrelevant to this discussion.

I think there's been more than one mention of weird 0x3 memery at this point with the implication that they're not great so all's fine, so I think it's worth reaffirming that one of the main balance issues with current storage & weight is that e.g. 0x1 treads is oppressively good, with Hcp. you are almost forced into playing with BIG inventories and slower treads because of how good its interaction with 0x1 is.

If the support cost is too great, the player can use something other than HCP. Such as large storage units. For the same mass, you can store 50% more items. But at a greater cost in slots (33% more).

The inventory-per-util-slot efficiency that you can currently retain on 0x0 legs or treads probably isn't any notable balance issue, though. You want to avoid nerfs where players resign themselves to always playing overweight because it's gonna happen anyway for a good build. Builds that were already overweight care relatively less about mass increases, and whatever issues there are with storage stacking it's those builds that manifest them the most.

25

Ideas / Re: Balance Overhaul

« on: September 28, 2020, 06:28:29 AM »

reducing overall storage capacity should be a goal

Right, reducing the inventory sizes you can play at or reasonably would.

Well I don't know about the 2x values, since that's zxc's suggestion and I haven't looked at any math myself, but regardless of mass increase details, technically there's always the option to add more propulsion/support if necessary, no?

The main potential complication is if currently 0x0 builds transition into 0x1 because 0x0 doesn't seem affordable. 0x1 is double mass support, after all --- can't really add +5 prop to a 5-prop build, and then where's my option to potentially equip reaction control on legs. That's not exactly how it would work out in practice, but you get the point. It is currently "necessary" to run some amount of storage unit(s), and 0x0 would become harder. The builds with too much inventory already run overweight and care relatively less about extra mass.