Dev Log #67: Version 1.1.2.0 - Waterways and Psi Update

[Elite]

Congrats killing PSI characters. Even if it's experimental branch, for even considering these nerfs as credible, be sure i'll pirate all your future games.

RIP UnderRail.

I sincerly hope you'll suffer a painful, slow, agonizing death which will bring you alot of psychological and physical pain Styg. I fucking sincerly hope so.

Its a video game, you'll live.

[Tamior]

Changes look very good in general, will comment more after I play-test them.

[harperfan7]

Critical power was way overpowered.  Its still very strong; this nerf wasnt that much.  And swords are plenty strong, especially with crit power. 

[Meladonimi]

New psi bar (reserves) - good, VERY good, now it is rly feel like self power, not bottomless well of some magick power. But no natural recover - is bad. It is just not logical, u can add some minor regen like 1-5 and it is will be enouth. Ppl will still use inhalant, but will be happy see some natural regen. Maybe even done some perks on it (with some mad story in Dude style).
Psi innarvate - not bad idea, but it is give benefits only to some build,where psi is support, not a main instument. But for pure psi it is rly bad, was fun use good amounth of skills for different situation. Pure psi was not best at start, now it is also veeeeery expensive, cost of inhalant is insane for novice, but good for midgame. Also now some psi skills like disruptive field become total ussles, just becouse you dont have slot for it.
Was better if you add some CD between psi schools - like neural swaping or wateaver. Anyway 6 slots is to low for pure builds, there ALOT of of ways to give ppls more freedom - like perks what trade hp for slot, or some other way.
Hope you will listen and done game even more great.
Cheers

[`louse`]

Interesting approach. Now we will hardly see a pure psionic. Psi disciplines are becoming an additional weapon, and not the main one as before, and the use of skills from different schools becomes problematic.
Pure psionics will certainly raise a controversy over this. Maybe it would be worthwhile to reduce the psi discipline easier: by introducing long cooldowns, chances of hitting and some damage reduction?

[Turbodevil]

• Psi gives you too many utilities. Due to how the psi functions now (prior to this update) it's almost impossible to add new stuff to psi without extending the already bloated spectrum of combat utilities of any given psi generalist (which most psi builds are) even further, since, unlike with combat utilities, there are no limits to what a psi invoker can access during combat.

That's the point of magic though, to have spellbook full of varied spells and cast them on a whim. Sure, it's OP but how can wizard not be OP? Limitting amount of psi abilities that can be cast is disastrous change and I hope you reconsider.

I fully agree PSI needed nerf and making people focus on their spellbook is ok concept. Just the execution is bad because it prohibits casting spells, opposite of what is fun.

Maybe allow casting not-innervated spells with significant psi cost/ap penalty?

[Tamior]

Also, "balance is not important in SP game" kind of reasoning is absolutely incorrect.

For turn-based games, good balance is EXACTLY what sets good games (i.e. XCOM 1/2) from bad games (gazillion of XCOM clones).

[fireaura08]

Congrats killing PSI characters. Even if it's experimental branch, for even considering these nerfs as credible, be sure i'll pirate all your future games.

RIP UnderRail.

I sincerly hope you'll suffer a painful, slow, agonizing death which will bring you alot of psychological and physical pain Styg. I fucking sincerly hope so.

Wow. This is totally uncalled for. It's a video game, you don't need to wish horrible pain and death over it.

More to the point, I agree with TheAverageGortsby in that some of the psi changes (particularly the innervate mechanic) will gimp pure psi and overall build variety and leave players with nothing but one-trick pony psi hybrid builds. I sincerely hope that this mechanic will be tweaked, as it seems flat out unfun in its current implementation.

[harperfan7]

You can switch up your spells anytime you want, depending on the situation you're in.  I haven't found the inhaler blueprint but I get the feeling it won't be anything expensive or rare.

[Tamior]

Ok, so after some (admittingly, rather preliminary) tests of the new innervate mechanic (the way it's currently implemented) I've come to the following conclusion:
It seems to heavily encouraged savescumming for no good reason.

While "spells slots" in classic P&P games (D&D and the like) are time-honored mechanic, this simply does NOT translate well into a video game format (that, unlike P&P, has an option to re-load a save on demand).

What ends up happening is, effectively, any player CAN, in fact, change innervated abilities even after the combat has started -- by simply reloading.

So why not "cut out the middle man" and simply make it so abilities only "lock up" into "innervation slots" after you've used them once? While using psi inhalant would simply "free up" all the slots again. Effectively this will achieve very similar result (limit the number of abilities you can use in a given combat to your number of innervation slots), but it will encourage substantially less reloading.

[Xothic]

Individually, these PSI changes are an interesting way to bring PSI a bit more in line with the rest of the build archetypes.

The biggest problem that I can see is that you've taken several substantial nerfs to PSI and applied ALL of them at once.

The nerfs to the biggest overpowered/overused PSI abilities (P-TC, wall, thermo destab etc) would have been one substantial nerf, the %psi cost increase for using spells from multiple schools would've been another, and then the imbue limit would've been a third. I think it would've been much more reasonable to launch an experimental branch with one or two of these nerfs instead of all three at once.

IMO - you should keep the individual op ability nerf as well as the %psi cost nerf. Make it function like a debuff, if you cast a thermodynamic skill, grant a 15% debuff to the cost of all your other psi school spells for ten turns or something and then just have one for each discipline that applies in turn. This also has strategy implications, as you might want to think about when the most appropriate time to activate that TK skill you want might be, knowing that it'd have consequences on the rest of your abilities.

The imbue limit in my opinion is just outright over the top and should be fully reverted or given a MUCH higher base limit (base of 4, +1 per 3 int sounds far more reasonable if you are really invested in the concept). As it stands, a medium investment psi character (i'd consider 6 int to be medium investment) can use THREE psi abilities. three. Its just too much.

[Stavrophore]

Congrats killing PSI characters. Even if it's experimental branch, for even considering these nerfs as credible, be sure i'll pirate all your future games.

RIP UnderRail.

I sincerly hope you'll suffer a painful, slow, agonizing death which will bring you alot of psychological and physical pain Styg. I fucking sincerly hope so.

What the fuck is wrong with you xD

[BiocorpShill]

Also, "balance is not important in SP game" kind of reasoning is absolutely incorrect.

For turn-based games, good balance is EXACTLY what sets good games (i.e. XCOM 1/2) from bad games (gazillion of XCOM clones).

The individual tweaks to skills altering cooldown, stat bonuses, etc are fine. This is an overhaul of basic game mechanics that makes it more difficult for any character to use psi. Pure builds suffer from being restricted to a whopping 6 skills max and greatly increased psi cost and hybrid builds that don't invest much in INT will only get 2 on top of everything else and thus not much reason to invest in psi. This can all be fixed with two things.

1. Increase the slots for available spells with the MINIMUM being six.

2. Remove the increased psi cost for having spells from different schools.

There's a few minor tweaks I'd make like how force field should have reduced health but it doesn't dissipate if one column is destroyed but those two points need to be implemented otherwise a lot of potential builds end up in the trash. And I can't believe I have to say this:  If you don't like pure psi THEN DON'T FUCKING PLAY PURE PSI. Again, you are NOT FORCED to play one specific way. Pick one of the dozens of other builds that you enjoy and let people have fun being a meth huffing cave wizard.

[Pruvan]

You need 8 slots to be the reasonably attainable max, not 6.  You've got 8 skills per psi school, and it isn't even thematically consistent to restrict beyond that.  I get the mechanics for how you're limiting psi generalists - and who knows, maybe it'll end up being a fun new way to go instead of the mistake it looks like right now - but you aren't just controlling psi options with 6 innervated slots, you're limiting beyond mere single-school specialization.

New psi bar (reserves) - good, VERY good, now it is rly feel like self power, not bottomless well of some magick power. But no natural recover - is bad. It is just not logical, u can add some minor regen like 1-5 and it is will be enouth. Ppl will still use inhalant, but will be happy see some natural regen.

I'd say these two ideas are the best in the thread so far, and would go a long way in relaxing the extreme ruleset in its current implementation. I would definitely recommend implementing these two changes in a hotfix patch for experimentation.

[kamax3]

15% increase psi cost modifier for each cross-discipline spell is wayyy too harsh. If you're using 3 psi disciplines psycho temporal contraction literally costs too much to even cast.

I don't mind the idea (there should be some efficiency or synergy when specializing in a discipline), but if you're going to do that you should lower the base cost of all psi spells. Otherwise it just too much to bear with only 100 psi points.

Also I cast my vote with the others. The base psi ability slots is too low. Should be 4 minimum + int/3 seems good.

On a lighter note. Thanks for making this amazing game 

[Edit]
On second thought - 2 slot minimum + int or will(whichever is higher)/2.  This gives more variance, and 4 is too high for someone who isn't specialized.