Underrail Forum
Underrail => Suggestions => Topic started by: ShoggothWhisperer on July 20, 2021, 05:29:40 am
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I've been playing a lot of Dominating recently, and was struck by a bit of a revelation; the hardest part of Dominating is the early game (pre Depot-A). In the early game, your options are limited for gear and experience, and many of the enemies have been replaced with significantly harder versions of themselves, such as in Silent Isle. Once you get past Depot A you are presented with a plethora of experience and easily obtainable high quality gear, which makes the rest of the game a breeze. I've compiled a list of changes that would make the later stages of the game more interesting than just rush Constantine and buy cool stuff.
Hard Specific Changes
NPCs have a 125% health modifier and 115% skill modifier-Right now there is a huge gap between Hard and Dominating, in large part thanks to the health and skill modifier. This provides more of a gradual transition to make combat more challenging, sine otherwise the main difference between Normal and hard is extra enemies and the stealth and EMP changes.
Dominating Changes
Mechanic Changes
This section is mainly focused around various methods that can be used to cheese combat encounters.
- No Zone Transitions during combat-Any area with multiple exits makes combat fairly easy, since you can camp out near an exit, retreat when health is low, and reenter from a different exit without having a swarm of enemies immediately attack you. This is most noticeable in the native villages, where you can pull all the melee enemies to one side of the map, circle around, and then kill all the ranged enemies. You can also cheese the Praetorian security warehouse mission this way by throwing a gas grenade next to the window, leaving the zone, and then entering the walkway outside the area to pull the enemies into the gas grenade, or to pull them away from the entrance.
- Enemies gain temporary resolve after each incapacitation- Right now it is very easy for melee builds to stunlock enemies with cheap shots, mental breakdown, flashbangs, and stuns, which can allow players to access endgame areas right after depot A with a little luck (example: stunlocking arena gladiators or stunlocking the greater coil spiders in Hecate labs for an early power fist, stunlocking the three masters with the powerfist and cheap shots). Giving enemies a 30 resolve buff after each incapacitation would make it a lot more difficult to chain incaps and cheese enemies.
- Have Merchants only sell items above a certain quality after certain story checkpoints- Most experienced players rush Constantine immediately after depot A to get high quality items very quickly such as knives, energy shields, ect. Merchants should only sell up to a maximum of q120 before helping rail crossing, q140 before the coretech research facility, and have no modifier after the research facility.
- Eye of Tchort is permanently active near the gate leading to Tchort and the areas behind it-Most Tchortling encounters can be easily skipped, even on dominating, and this would make it feel more climactic as you approach Tchort.
Enemy Changes
This section is mainly focused around making some mid and late game enemies more threatening.
- Azuridae Goliathus Int raided to 6, gain premediataion- This is mainly to let them cast PSP without expending action points, which in turn gives them a bit more movement on the first turn to increase their chances of landing a disruptive field or psionic inhibition.
- Alpha Rathounds are no longer afraid of fire- Alpha Rathounds are fairly rare early game, but become much more common late game. Giving them fire fear immunity makes their encounters a bit more challenging, so they can actually pose a threat to weaker characters.
- Ancient Rathounds gain the Taste for Blood Feat- This makes encounters with these enemies much more tactical, as preventing bleeds from alpha rathounds becomes much more important.
- Burrower Warriors gain Charge-Burrower Warriors currently suffer greatly from a lack of movement, and giving them charge would let them temporarily overcome this weakness and let them threaten faster characters
- Greater Coil Spiders gain tranquility-This lets the spiders shoot off 2 electrokinesis instead of 1 when at full health. This also makes combat more tactical by encouraging the use of crowd control such as grenades to lower the damage capabilities of these enemies.
- Cuttlesnails leave behind a trail of toxic gas and acid puddles- This would work similar to the zoner from that one core city sewer fragment, and make it harder to move around snails without proper protective gear.
- Plasma Sentries change into their turret form after attacking, changing form costs 0 ap- This would increase the damage output of these robots, and prevent easy escapes from the bots while they waste their turn entering and leaving the turret form.
- Melee Bandit gang members (Ironheads, Lurkers, and Lunatics) spawn with rathound or pig leather tabis- This lets these enemies more easily reach characters, and increases the attacks that knife bandits can make.
- Give Knife Bandits (Lurkers, Lunatics) Expose Weakness- Knife bandits currently struggle to damage any enemy with decent tactical vests or stronger armor, and this change would make them a lot more dangerous to fight.
Boss Changes
These changes aim to make some boss encounters a bit more challenging.
- Carnifex and Balor gain Thick Skull-These bosses currently can easily be defeated with dirty kick, cut-throat, and even a taser, and this would make it a lot harder to do that
- Vanga, Frost, and Firecracker gain the Dominating boss modifiers, remove several of the lunatics on the upper level of the mall-These are the leaders of the Lunatics, but are currently just a slightly special lunatic Nuker, Freezer, and TCer. Giving them the boss health modifier makes them a bit scarier, but is slightly counterbalanced by removing a couple of lunatics from the horde on the second floor.
- Balor Gains Truesight-He has a mechanical eye, so this makes sense.
- Tchort Gets the Dominating Boss HP modifier, regens 200 hp per Mutagen Tank- A lot of builds can Take Tchort down in 1-2 turns, and he currently barely has more heath that Gubbins or Fatso at this difficulty, and even has less health than Jet Eater on Dominating. Now, instead of just rushing him down, players have to destroy the tanks and prepare for a long fight, which would also cause a lot more people to do the mutagen puzzle.
Native Raid Changes
This could have been a separate topic but it fits well enough here. After Defend the Island, each subsequent native raid should receive buffs based on each of the native chieftains. The buff can be prevented for future raids by killing the corresponding chieftain.
Raid 2- If Eldran is alive, in this raid and all subsequent raids enemies permanently gain 4 stacks of Warmed Up, which increases movement speed, healing recieved, and cold threshold, as well as providing immunity to chill.
Raid 3-If Baenkraster is alive, in this raid and all subsequent raids enemies gain bone armor, a buff that gives 10 bonus mechanical dt and 20% mechanical resistance.
Raid 4-If Oyensorm is alive, in this raid and all subsequent raids enemies gain Battle Trance, which increases all offensive and psionic skills by 50%, similar to buff that the faceless receive when attacking the Institute.
Final Raid-If Magnar is alive, all non-boss enemies receive a permanent Vitality Powder effect. Additionally, at the end of the battle an additional wave will spawn for each chieftain still alive, with Eldran leading a wave of 6 random krisfargers, Baenkraster leading a wave of 6 random Skaaders, Oyensorm leading a wave of 3 spaaters and 3 Oyetspaaters, and Magnar leading a wave of 3 Krisfarger, 3 Skaaders, and 3 Oyetspaaters.
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ultra super carnifex ironman dominating
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Even if I haven't touched Dominating I can dig some of these changes like Ancient Rathounds gaining Taste of Blood, but you gotta realize that most of the encounters are already tougher by virtue of a lot more enemies or the bosses having tons of health + the already-existing stat buffs, so giving them additional buffs on top of that would make for exponential difficulty compared to lower difficulties even with the suggested change to Hard because there are not only more enemies but they are also individually stronger
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Dude. You start giving enemies (numerous usually) way to penetrate armor or even impose an armor reducing debuff on you, you just removed any reason to play any heavy armor. Same for why only a few enemies currently use W2C.
How I can see your problems with DOMINATING removed? Stop reloading as often or play Iron Man. If you play the Glassy Glass cannon, that can wipe everything in a turn, but gets 1-tapped and think enemies need more ways to survive - that will be a solution. You will play survival builds, which will drop your damage, which will in turn make enemy abilities actually get used.
1 thing Styg could do to REALLY throw people off who have META knowledge of the game (as in knowing every single location and enemy) is to actually offer a Randomizer tick-box at the start of the game, to shuffle up encounters (when lore friendly). That way you won't be able to cheese, by knowing the right tile to stand on and not being seen by enemy you have no way in detecting, but you know to be there already from previous runs.
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APEX HARDCORE
I like most of these ideas.
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most of the changes are retarded, like alpha rathounds not afraid of flares or premed beatles.Very cool now my level 3 character cant walk to gms because i cant physically deal with rathounds anymore, or beatles casting psp out of sight or maybe worse they will start cast doppels because everything costs zero.Resolve has nothing with cheap shots, they are unresistible.I can continue debunk most suggestions, but you got my point:there are no second thought to your suggestion and those make sense only for guys who have more than 1k hours into the game.
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most of the changes are retarded, like alpha rathounds not afraid of flares or premed beatles.Very cool now my level 3 character cant walk to gms because i cant physically deal with rathounds anymore, or beatles casting psp out of sight or maybe worse they will start cast doppels because everything costs zero.Resolve has nothing with cheap shots, they are unresistible.I can continue debunk most suggestions, but you got my point:there are no second thought to your suggestion and those make sense only for guys who have more than 1k hours into the game.
I swear I’ve had master skull smasher resist cheap shots incapacitation before, and things like pneumatic hammer incapacitation can be resisted, so I assume that cheap shots can also be resisted. I couldn’t find any info on the wiki or from the discord that cheap shots always incapacitates, but you could be right. If you can deal with dominating Find Newton, I’m sure your build can deal with early alphas by using choke points and doorways to prevent alphas from attacking you, or you can use Molotovs to disrupt their path finding and scare away their lesser companions. For beetles, their AI makes them always cast PSP as their first action, using up premed, and they will typically follow that up with psi interruption and/or disruptive field. Bilocation requires 2 other goliathus beetles with open brains, has a range of 7, and costs 35 ap, so unless you get detected in stealth Goliathus won’t cast dopples on you on the first turn. Premed also has a 5 turn cooldown, but if you manage to survive 5 turns against 3+ goliathus without killing them all, your build needs to focus more on damage.
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you can surely do this, but what if i want do it other way, or my build dont want use utility name, all you suggest will be fit only for few builds and just reduce options in building character
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You could just start playing on normal or hard.
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you can surely do this, but what if i want do it other way, or my build dont want use utility name, all you suggest will be fit only for few builds and just reduce options in building character
When you say stuff like that you sound like a bigger wussy than Newton.
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I’d play this and a version that takes it a step or two further but it probably should be an additional difficult choice. People bitch about dominating as it is already
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dom still has huge variability in builds and you just cut it.Sure lets get stealth, tm, throwing on any build
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I’d play this and a version that takes it a step or two further but it probably should be an additional difficult choice. People bitch about dominating as it is already
then why they play it tho
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I’d play this and a version that takes it a step or two further but it probably should be an additional difficult choice. People bitch about dominating as it is already
then why they play it tho
Would have to ask them but the things I hear is people like certain aspects of dominating but not so much others. That and hard is too easy
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If anything that came out of these suggestions above I think the random tick box to make encounters even more unpredictable be nice to see in a update/infusion whenever that comes out.
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Styg should look at Rimworld - game settings can be change individually with difficulty preset. I strongly hope this will be the case for Underrail two.
As for the original suggestions from Shoggoth - I would agree w/ Tytyger that most of them would kill build diversity if they are all hard and fast dom-specific. Also, incap is determined by Fortitude, not Resolve. I disagree w/ Shoggoth's suggested approach and would lean way more into randomizing encounter both in terms of enemies compositions, and trap locations. Some maps could even have destructible environment breaking and creating different choke points and cover blocking line of sight.
Anyway imho the ROI in updating Underrail further is just not there - everything I said here should be considered for Underrail two.