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[zxc]

'Problems'

I am pretty sure legs and wheels are underused by most players (and perhaps hover too). Wheels being underused I don't see as a problem however.

Right now the combat run meta is to ignore mass entirely and equip whatever you want while using only the two starting slots for treads. This is because adding more treads doesn't really decrease movespeed as the penalty stat is so low.

With legs, by being close to your mass capacity your movement speed slows to 115 or even slower. This reduces the effectiveness of legs since many 100 speed robots start to outpace you. Given that treads also reduce your recoil and have more integrity, you would either prefer to switch to treads or switch to faster propulsion such as hover/flight.

Suggestions

I simply suggest that additional legs/treads don't increase the movespeed delay (slow you down). So, if the legs say movespeed 100, then so long as you are within your support limit, that will be your speed. This is to buff legs in a slightly indirect way and to incentivise tread-users to upgrade some propulsion slots and to stay beneath their mass support limit. To incentivise the latter even further, I also suggest a small increase to tread penalty, say to 25.

Edit: Another way to rebalance treads would be to make each active tread reduce recoil on each weapon in a volley by say 4%, so that two active treads would reduce recoil by 2% less than currently (which is 10% for having ANY active tread). This would incentivise using more treads to reduce recoil further. However, not many weapons have recoil right now, and their recoil values are quite low. Relevant interesting but perhaps major change suggestion: increase across the board both kinetic weapon damage and recoil, so that the tread recoil reduction effect is more relevant while maintaining status quo kinetic weapon balance for other forms of propulsion.

[Kyzrati]

After seeing what you all are loading onto your treads, I can get behind an increase in the overweight penalty on those. The main issue is I felt that runs counter to logic--tanks with more treads can both carry more and move hella fast. But game mechanics are more important so if it needs to be done, it will. Of course, that's also solved if we go as far as to say that multiple treads don't slow you down while remaining within your mass limit. I think this might have too drastic an effect on play though, since you'll be pressed much harder to stay within your limit--as soon as you go over it the change in speed would feel much more pronounced. The current system is more flexible and eases you into the slower speed effect :/. I don't really want the support limits to feel like hard limits, which they don't for now, and that's why everyone's happy to let them go over a bit (but make no mistake, doing so is still detrimental to your chances of survival!).

As for legs, I'm not sure we have enough data to say anything one way or another. I personally prefer legs, even for combat runs, because you can carry a lot and they're still fairly fast. Not for fleeing but for both repositioning during combat and generally getting around. Part of what causes treaded Cogminds to end up in prolonged engagements is sticking around in one area too long, or just taking forever to move around and gather loot, explore rooms, etc. Legs don't have as much of a problem with that, since you can efficiently move to a better area for fighting that is less likely to attract attention, while still supporting all the armament you need to achieve victory in the given battle.

For recoil I wanted to start with a simpler system, but a per-tread effect is probably a good way to go, especially now that they've had the massive integrity boost. Maybe -3% per slot.

[zxc]

The current system is more flexible and eases you into the slower speed effect :/. I don't really want the support limits to feel like hard limits, which they don't for now, and that's why everyone's happy to let them go over a bit (but make no mistake, doing so is still detrimental to your chances of survival!

I agree. However, this new system need not feel like a hard limit. My point is that by making treads be a fixed speed while under support limit and variable while over support limit, you essentially have a choice: carry less stuff but move faster; or carry everything you want but move slower. Right now you pretty much move slowly no matter how much you are carrying when you have treads. If I'm carrying everything I want, it doesn't make much difference whether my move delay is 200 or 250. However, if I'm going to carry according to my support limit, I'd expect something like 150 or 175 move delay.

[Kyzrati]

With two treads as you're using, carrying within your support limit is 165, within the range you cite.

What I mean by the jump is, for example, if you're using three full-loaded treads @ 150 speed, then go overweight by just a tiny bit, suddenly your speed is 195 (or 225 if we raise the mod!), rather than being 150 > 165 > 180 > 195 as you add the extra treads, which give you the ability to carry significantly more.

Treads are too powerful to be faster (or better retain their max speed). And there is a difference between 200 and 250--in my opinion being 25% slower is pretty significant.

If they were going to be any faster, regardless of the circumstances, I'd want to drop their integrity and/or support values, but the intent is for them to be really out there in terms of being on the heavy end of the spectrum.

Legs might be better than you give them credit for...

[zxc]

What I mean by the jump is, for example, if you're using three full-loaded treads @ 150 speed, then go overweight by just a tiny bit, suddenly your speed is 195 (or 225 if we raise the mod!), rather than being 150 > 165 > 180 > 195 as you add the extra treads, which give you the ability to carry significantly more.

What I mean is that unlocking two more propulsion slots for treads in order to just move at 195 speed (IF I stay under the support limit) is really quite pointless when I could keep it at the initial two and move at ~220 speed while gaining the benefits of two more utilities.

Past a certain move delay, moving in combat becomes a bad idea. I think below about 125 is good for repositioning, and below about 300 is decent for critical repositioning. Too much delay above that and then you're usually best off sitting and blasting everything to bits.

Anyway, this is all just stuff to chew on for now. I'd welcome input from others.

[Kyzrati]

Yep, we'll see what other input comes along.

Great point about sticking with fewer treads and taking the penalty to free up slots compared to the speed benefits. I'll pull together a chart and look at the balance from that perspective. A greater penalty would solve that, which would also be an argument for allowing a faster base speed under the current system.

(More tread slots also gives you some good shields as well, though.)

[Happylisk]

I've only ever considered getting a 3rd tread slot as psuedo armor substitute, cause getting treads is slightly easier than getting armor.  However, that was before I realized how easy it is to properly loot sentries.

I agree with K that you're probably undervaluing legs.  In one of my runs I used legs for research and found the ability to reposition without taking 6 shots to the face to be very handy. 

I also want to being experimenting with a melee build.  My napkin theorycrafting makes me think that a melee build needs legs in order to be able to move more at less at pace with grunts and hunters while still being able to wield the melee weapon and wear soem armor.  With a pure melee build you'd save on matter and energy, which gives you more room to play with forcefields, swapping, and fabrication.  Throw on some sensors so you never fight in the open, and you might have something.  Slashing weapons for most enemies to lop off their weapons, piercing weapons for sentries and behemoths to deal with their hides. 

[zxc]

Legs might be better than you give them credit for...

I agree with K that you're probably undervaluing legs.  In one of my runs I used legs for research and found the ability to reposition without taking 6 shots to the face to be very handy. 

Alright you guys. Listen: I don't undervalue legs. I used legs a bunch of times. E.g.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Notice my 205 move delay with legs. As you can see, legs were roughly as slow as treads, except lower integrity and no bonus to recoil reduction. To make any decent use of the speed of legs, you need to unlock several slots for them and you need to carry less stuff. By doing that, you're weakening yourself in multiple ways, and all that just to move at ~150-175 speed. Not to mention how slow you'd move if any legs got blown off (and you'd have less room for spares because you have fewer utilities and need to keep mass low).

I use legs when I first start the game. They're very good on -10. I would continue using legs if you could keep their move delay at about 115 and below.

I also want to being experimenting with a melee build.  My napkin theorycrafting makes me think that a melee build needs legs in order to be able to move more at less at pace with grunts and hunters while still being able to wield the melee weapon and wear soem armor.  With a pure melee build you'd save on matter and energy, which gives you more room to play with forcefields, swapping, and fabrication.  Throw on some sensors so you never fight in the open, and you might have something.  Slashing weapons for most enemies to lop off their weapons, piercing weapons for sentries and behemoths to deal with their hides. 

Surely for a melee build you'd go with flight. I would build it very similar to my stealth builds except without some stealthy utilities and instead more armour + maybe force field + melee analysis suites. Use a piercing weapon and the speed of flight to reach enemies quickly or reposition in narrow hallways for every engagement. I'm going to try it myself. I already use melee weapons for my stealth builds, but the difference is I don't seek out enemies to kill, but instead just prey upon civilian robots.

[Kyzrati]

In that image you've got quite a heavy build, and are way overweight, though, so yeah not an ideal leg situation.

It does seem that towards the end of the game legs become less viable for heavy builds (and you definitely want more than two), but their capabilities benefit a medium-weight play style. Still, I see they can use a reduction in their penalty to make them more viable once you have a ton of slots. I'll review them along with the treads.

[Happylisk]

Surely for a melee build you'd go with flight. I would build it very similar to my stealth builds except without some stealthy utilities and instead more armour + maybe force field + melee analysis suites. Use a piercing weapon and the speed of flight to reach enemies quickly or reposition in narrow hallways for every engagement. I'm going to try it myself. I already use melee weapons for my stealth builds, but the difference is I don't seek out enemies to kill, but instead just prey upon civilian robots.

getting off topic so I'll keep it short.  In theory, flight is probably best for melee.  You could probably still have decent enough armor with weight redistribution utilities.  I guess my thing is, if you're already going flight why go out of your way to kill enemies, when you can fly past/around them? 

It's possible that pure melee is just suboptimal in every situation, and it's meant to be used situationally.

Going back to treads vs. legs: one small positive for legs is that they have less than a 100% chance of triggering traps.  So there's that. 

[zxc]

if you're already going flight why go out of your way to kill enemies, when you can fly past/around them? 

If you're playing Cogmind why go combat at all when you can stealth/speed past things?

It's possible that pure melee is just suboptimal in every situation, and it's meant to be used situationally.

I doubt it but it might require very specific tactics (like treating all combat situations like a SpBe and all enemies like centaurs).

Going back to treads vs. legs: one small positive for legs is that they have less than a 100% chance of triggering traps.  So there's that.

Really stretching for possible benefits I see

[Kyzrati]

Melee was intended as a trusty backup or for situational use, not a pure way to tackle the game (evidence A: no multi-wielding), though I imagine it would be fun with the right parts. I've had some seriously deadly hovering and walking melee builds before, mostly out of necessity at the time.

[Happylisk]

That's what I figured. I know what a good melee guy would look like (fast, 2 improved melee suites, armor, weight distribution, cloaking, thrusters), but it seems like there's no way you could handle part replacement given the necessarily small inventory size.  Unlike a tread fiend, you're not gonna be slapping on 3 Hcp. storage units. 

Even if you could zip right up to units fast enough so they don't shoot you, melee attacks aren't that fast.  You'll be taking damage unless you one shot the target. 

None of this is a problem of course.  In a game with things like black hole launchers, yeah it's not a surprise that running around exclusively hitting people with a stick (even a plasma stick) is not optimal.  It'd be cool all the same to ascend with a melee build as a challenge run.

In conclusion, no need to nerf treads in any shape or form, these are not the droids you're looking for, move along. 

[Kyzrati]

In a game with things like black hole launchers, yeah it's not a surprise that running around exclusively hitting people with a stick (even a plasma stick) is not optimal.

Among the Derelicts there are whispers of objects still held in Quarantine...

[Draco18s]

None of this is a problem of course.  In a game with things like black hole launchers, yeah it's not a surprise that running around exclusively hitting people with a stick (even a plasma stick) is not optimal.  It'd be cool all the same to ascend with a melee build as a challenge run.

Someone hasn't watched SAO2!

[Kyzrati]

When it comes to nuclear-level swordplay, I think Bleach beats SAO2

[Draco18s]

Probably fair, I just haven't seen Bleach, so I'm not terribly familiar.
Still though, Kirito picked a sword as his main weapon in a game fundamentally about guns.  And then proceeded to show everyone how the game is supposed to be played ("You're supposed to anticipate the prediction lines").

[Kyzrati]

To be fair, I haven't really watched much SAO2, hehe. From that angle it's more appropriate here, for sure!

[Draco18s]

I think its in the first ep of GGO.
But yeah, that's pretty much why I referenced it.

[fernsauce]

My 2 cents:

It feels kind of awkward that additional propulsion slots slow you down on the ground. I mean, I kind of get it, but in practice it means weird situations like when you go from 70/40 weight, equip a third treads, end up at 70/60 weight and are slower than when you started. Slots are a pretty huge investment - if your return on that is at best a tenth of a move per turn and at worst a handicap you're going to probably go for utilities instead.

In general speed calculation feels weird on the flight end, too. The marginal benefits of 1/2/3 imp flight units are 3.333 moves per turn (base), then 1.666 moves, and finally a full 5 moves per turn. Maybe it would be better if there just was a base "speed value" and "speed bonus value," and applied the slowest speed value first, then the rest as bonuses? For flight units this would probably mean more modules needing to be equipped for the mythical 10 delay shit, but possibly also 10 delay being more achievable without the 3x prototype build. It would also mean that you could be allowed to stack as many flight units as you wanted, because you wouldn't hit a "0 move delay" point where the game breaks. I have no idea if this would overall work out, but it feels like it would be easier to understand than the current calculations.

Also: wheels seem really worthless, but I can't really tell because there are so few wheels in the game. In general, though, their durability seems far too low to justify them (even on -10), and I think you are literally better off with 1x overweighted hover units than wheels, in almost every possible way. At the very least, I think wheels should have a 0 penalty for additional modules, since they're the middle of the road option.

[Kyzrati]

Thanks for the input! I do want to take a look at a lot of aspects of propulsion, starting first with some smaller adjustments (as opposed to sweeping changes).

The overweight tread situation you describe is sort of a bug I've been planning to address for the next version. It only occurs when overweight--the game already takes into account surplus active propulsion during underweight scenarios (and ignores them), but at the time I didn't realize it would be an issue while overweight as well.

I agree that flight especially has some weird things happening with it, though don't quite understand the system you describe, or how moving two to three times as fast is a "marginal benefit." Maybe I'm misunderstanding something there?

Regarding wheels, their worthlessness is intentional. This is brought up from time to time because it's not necessarily obvious, but from a design standpoint the idea is that wheels are easy to obtain (only maintenance bots use them) and useful only as a last resort. Giving them 0 penalty could be an option, though, depending on what adjustments are made to the rest of the system.

[fernsauce]

I agree that flight especially has some weird things happening with it, though don't quite understand the system you describe, or how moving two to three times as fast is a "marginal benefit." Maybe I'm misunderstanding something there?

I meant marginal as in the benefit for each additional unit. You get 5 extra moves in a turn for a third prototype flight unit, while your second flight unit gives you significantly less. In terms of proportions, a 3rd flight unit doubles your speed while the 2nd flight unit increases it by 50%.

Essentially the number of propulsion units linearly affects your turn delay, which means they interact with how fast you can actually move in a weird way. The graph for moves/turn for imp flight units looks like this, or for the prototype hover units, like this. It would make more sense if these graphs were linear, but that would probably be somewhat difficult to achieve. Also, it would definitely make everything significantly uglier on the numbers side, which would suck.

That said, I still think that even disregarding all that, Imp. Flight Units and some of the other early flight prototypes should be scaled back in terms of their speed in exchange for later flight prototypes getting some of that. Even just changing them to 25 speed / -5 per extra would make them slightly faster at 1 unit, the same at 2, and then requiring 4 units to get the maximum speed. I don't think that the whole blazing fast style should be discouraged, but I do feel like you should have to invest a bit more to get it. Right now, it's just a matter of whether or not you can get those early prototypes, and frankly given that they show up on floor 2, you definitely can.

Regarding wheels, their worthlessness is intentional. This is brought up from time to time because it's not necessarily obvious, but from a design standpoint the idea is that wheels are easy to obtain (only maintenance bots use them) and useful only as a last resort. Giving them 0 penalty could be an option, though, depending on what adjustments are made to the rest of the system.

Ah, okay. I thought from their presence in the scrapyard that they were supposed to be a worthy alternative to your other propulsion choices, but it does make sense for them to kind of suck relative to the other systems. I do think I found prototype wheels once, but I never made use of them.

[zxc]

I like how the current flight units stack right now, though I am open to changes. What I don't like, however, is that the best flight units are actually the lowest rated ones. Imp. Flight Units are the best ones I've seen, with the most energy/heat efficiency and 10 move delay for equipped just three of them. This means that it's actually rather important to get the Imp. Flight Unit schematic early on so you can make more of them later, when more of them become impossible to find.

[Kyzrati]

I do think I found prototype wheels once, but I never made use of them.

Ah that's right, there is one type of prototype wheel that no robot variants actually use. It's just got a lot more integrity than other wheels and supports a good bit more, but is still sub-par compared to other propulsion (it's made of a special material that appears in the late-game).

I'm sure the flight mechanics would have been better to begin with if I was better at math . Keeping the numbers very simple on the player side has definitely been one of the goals, though designing a system that is both flexible and scalable, while behaving the same across all forms of propulsion, proved difficult.

I like the idea of changing prototype flight units to use 25/-5 (and of course increase their limit to 4), thanks. Originally with those I was thinking to make them extra special by allowing you to go extremely fast with even fewer of them than other types, but as you show, and as other players have been using them, they're a bit too good (most notably once combined with Weight Redistributors, which are almost too effective).

I like how the current flight units stack right now, though I am open to changes. What I don't like, however, is that the best flight units are actually the lowest rated ones. Imp. Flight Units are the best ones I've seen, with the most energy/heat efficiency and 10 move delay for equipped just three of them. This means that it's actually rather important to get the Imp. Flight Unit schematic early on so you can make more of them later, when more of them become impossible to find.

Yep, that one has been on the list for the next version update since you brought it up. I'll look into addressing it with the other propulsion tweaks--the changes will be broader than just that one.

[zxc]

What I'd like (and what currently exists, but only sort of) is if the player has the choice of stacking flight units in order to gain insane speed, or the player can equip a minimum number (2) in order to gain a very fast speed in combination with keeping many utility slots open.

By stacking flight units (3-4 or maybe more?) you have energy/heat issues so you must devote even more slots to maintaining it. This would become more of a 'speed' build, outrunning everything.

By using just 2 flight units, you need to use support utilities to carry everything, but you will in general have fewer energy/heat issues and you will have more slots open for cool utilities. This would become more of a 'stealth' build, outrunning some (most) enemies while avoiding/losing others (swarmers, programmers).