Balance + Crafting + QoL Suggestions

[Realreal]

Balance

• Limit the amount of bear traps player can place (per room) w/ their traps skill (3 traps only at 0 traps skill. +1 available trap per 10 effective skill)

No more cheesing encounters by placing a dozen of cheap bear traps and makes skill planning abit rigorous.

• Bear traps pierce mechanical resistance for the sake of applying bleed and poison

Best example would be a giant psi beetle resisting the poison (black dragon poison which applies psi inhibition) because he resisted the damage from the trap itself (yet he's still stuck for 2 turns).

• Utility belts increases throwing knife max stacks from 30 to 60

All the other belts get their own niche. Ask Batman, his utility belt can carry so much shit.

• Universal Psi Cost increased by 5% per school the player has points in

Psi needs a nerf and let's hit them where it hurts them the most.. their psi cost values. A player w/ 4 psi school skills (a Pure Psi) will now get 20% increase to ALL his psi cost. A psi monk who only invested in psychokinesis only gets 5% increase. Psi Cost increase only counts base skill points and not effective.

• More cold damage sources to balance resists

Currently the only sources of cold damage are cryokinesis and cryogas.. which is very rare. This is disappointing. Maybe some sort of cold themed map (maybe in the next stand-alone expansion?) or hazard (like the geothermal vents in the expansion) There's no reason to use insulated clothing otherwise.

Crafting

• Filter by availability to craft based on available components on inventory

so we don't have to go through the entirety of the crafting list just to figure out what we can currently make, also removes the need for a search bar on the crafting ui.

• Crafted Poisoned Throwing Knives amount from 10 to 15

it's weird that regular crafted bear traps get 10 and 5 for unpoisoned and poisoned respectively meanwhile the same rule isn't followed for throwing knives..

• Ability to coat normal throwing knives w/ poison

or better yet, the amount of poison per steel plate during crafting increases the maximum crafted poisoned throwing knife by 10 per poison (Steel Plate + 2 Burrower Poison = 20 burrower poisoned knives). also solves the problem above.

• New recipe = Serrated Throwing Knives

On hit: 50% chance to inflict bleeding wound that deals additional 100% damage over 3 turns. Recipe = Steel Plate + Serrated Steel or Serrated Tungsten or Serrated Tichrome. The reason for this suggestion is because some/most enemies late game or in dlc are immune to poison which makes poisoned throwing knives entirely useless. Also Serrated Bolt already exists so a throwing knife alternative is pretty much an obvious option

• New recipe = Shock Throwing Knives

Recipe = Throwing Knife + SliCell Battery + MicroDischarger. Damage value would be the same as a normal throwing knife except it would deal electric damage instead of mechanical. Unlike the bolt alternative, it doesn't stun organic targets and doesn't jump to nearby targets. Deals more damage to mechanical/robotic targets by 35%.

QoL

• Filter inventory by weight
• Some sort of timer to let you know vendors have restocked
• Giving Bernard 1k charons more when making Super Steel Sheets increases it's base quality to 100+ (no more 70 below)
• Ability to set double click as move option instead of single click to prevent player from wasting ap from accidental clicks

[/list]

[Shredded Cheddar]

I will take this point by point

BALANCE

- hate this, why are we putting an arbitrary limit on player freedom? if i want to carry 100 bear traps with no skill and drop them all over the place, so be it. I dont see any reason that we should put an arbitrary limit on what the player can do. Bear traps require 0 traps for a reason, and are easily spotted by any sentient enemy if used in this way, so I don't see this as gamebreaking. If you want to make a massive field of beartraps go ahead, and pick them up afterwards which will probably take a few minutes. Sounds tedious and unfun, but Im sure somebody does it.

- also disagree, why should bear traps ignore mech threshold? Is it unrealistic to think that an armored giant beetle would have the armor to resist a bear traps damaging effects, but not be able to escape it for 5-10 seconds? these things snap shut using a springloaded mechanisms, I dont see any reason why somebody's armor couldnt block the damage but the bear trap still keep them immobilized simultaneously. And if you weren't pierced by the bear trap why would the poison apply?

-no problem with this

- I like the idea of nerfing psi, but this also doesnt really make sense. so the more I know about how to use my mind to manipulate the world around me, the less effectively I can do it? UGH

- I agree, cold resisntance is basically a dogshit useless state because nothing threatening applies it.

CRAFTING

-I always like QOL shit

-Agreed, I think this is weird also

-People been asking for this for a while, and also to coat your knife in your hand with poison, which while I think it would be a very flavorful addition to the game, doesnt really make a difference because poison is mainly used for humanoid organic targets, which is what knife builds already specialize in killing. I do think it would be cool to be able to apply poison to weapons on the fly instead of while crafting.

- Bump

- Weird thing to ask for, and it makes 0 sense for it to do 100% electrical damage, why didnt you suggest 50/50 mech/elec? OR EVEN BETTER - it does 100% mech damage of a regular throwing knife plus the electric discharge, after all it requires more components and batteries to even make these things, why should the be on par with / not as good as regular throwing knives, they should be better just like 5mm shock bullets are better than 5mm standard.

QOL

- yes pls

- eh, this is QOL but I think it goes against stygs vision for the game. Up to him. Maybe if you keep Old Jonas's watch instead of giving it to him this becomes available?

- Personally I would like this because I hate wasting 20+ minutes grinding super steel when I really just need some decent quality plates in the midgame

- Yeah, the number of times i misclick and get myself killed in combat is absurdly high, and was also extremely frustrating when I was doing Ironman runs in the past, I agree that combat movement could use some slight refinement.

[dddmemaybe]

You made me think of something good when talking about Utility Belts. Imo, I've played my Int/Dex Throwing/Traps/Crafting build that uses throwing knives a lot to finish off enemies from potent grenades and traps. I think a feat to properly empower Throwing Builds would be one that gives bonus Utility Slots specifically for Throwing Knives(probably 2 of them imo, can have your normal and bonus poisons as well as grenades and throwing nets truly making it the utility build it is) alongside some other small buff, simply because feats are big investments. Here's my attempt:

"Menacing Pockets"
You have 2 additional Utility Slots specifically for any types of Throwing Knives. You also ignore 1/3rd of your target's evasion rating when attacking them for the first time with a Thrown weapon or Utility. Requirements: Throwing 20.

Additionally, some new item for Throwing Darts that cost like half ap of knives (corely for applying poison) but deal less damage and also then pierce armor less reliably would be pretty sweet.

[TheAverageGortsby]

Psi needs a nerf and let's hit them where it hurts them the most.. their psi cost values.

This won't in any way change how powerful psi is.  All it will do is make psi less fun to play by pigeonholing characters into a set "rotation".  You need to think this through; a high cost for psi abilities only means psi needs to use fewer abilities before popping a psi booster.  But psi already has efficiencies that overwhelm other mechanics (that's why it's so "OP"), so all psi needs to do is use those.  You make my psi costs go up, and all I have in a tight spot for damage is Premeditation -> ThermoD -> TK Proxy -> TK Punch. That's no problem even with increased psi cost.  Dealing with robots instead, and their high physical+fire DR/DT?  Electrokinetic Imprint -> Entropic Recurrence -> Temporal Distortion.  Still no problem.  And all of that is largely immaterial since with psi costs skyrocketing, all I'll want to do is pull groups to a force field and Premed -> LoC -> Enrage.  All that did is make fights less varied and less fun.  Psychosis in particular feels the pinch, and if any build needs pinched, it's Tranquility.

I get the feeling you don't play psi.  Psi cost isn't what hurts.  Psi boosters literally grow out of the ground.

[dddmemaybe]

Everyone says Psi is broken when they fail to realize that the loss of maximum hp is already incredibly significant. As long as you survive a combat you win. Healing after combat is next to free, every time pretty much, the war of attrition is incredibly easy outside of fighting the entire Grey Army Military Base, which sends in those Spec Ops units and like hoards of soldiers hahaha. (Good source of absolutely extreme looting though!). Just look at how cooldowns of Health Hypos work, and Bandages which are non-combat, these items are genuinely quite easy to amass. The brunt is far, far more threatening than the long haul.

This leads into the only big problem one could see with Psi, that they can use Utility to avoid getting hit in certain combat scenarios.

They can do stuff like do high damage when they want, they can put up a real wall for terrain control, they can aoe enrage a large group of enemies. They just have pretty darn good Utility Potential. It's laughable comparing a psi character to a Str++ Con 10~ build with heavy armor. Even with a high-end energy shield, as long as it's not acid damage, the armor character can survive direct damage for like 10 turns haha. The psionic who plays too aggressively can die easily in 1 turn.

If you want to weaken Psionic characters, you must weaken their ability to control combat encounters. If you do that, small changes will propel off of their lowered hp to be more of a loss than possibly expected.

[Shredded Cheddar]

@dddmemaybe

You start your comment by saying that the health reduction for psi is actually really significant, but end the comment by saying that that in many scenarios psi builds never even get hit because they control the battlefield.

I agree that psi has way too many methods of control, but the health reduction is really not significant at all. Good psi players usually end every encounter without even taking a hit.