Part Stats Balance/Polish, Round 3

[Histidine]

Trap skill is currently rather excessive; in my most recent Expert game I have 20 days left on the clock, I'm almost entirely ignoring the trap skill stat, yet my lowest trap skill is 34 (when traps are currently level 10). Aside from the numbers being generally high, too many things seem to carry it as a bonus.

Probability based traps might be a good way to introduce variance, although enemy traps aren't very common in general to begin with.

[Tridus]

That would be good for an expansion, but for 1.0 I'm done adding stats unless there's a pretty critical need.  3 for propulsion, 3 for shields, and 5 for computer lines up nicely with the max number of slots per system

Understood.

Anyway, yea, not all loot has to be equally valuable.  I'm certainly not going for some kind of knife's-edge balance.  But if +%Propulsion is slacking off, just boosting the numbers a bit will make it slack off a bit less, and I think that would be a good thing   What I'm looking for is what numbers would be better?

I don't think just more of it will really solve it. If you need attack to actually kill stuff, more propulsion doesn't make you not need attack. At the end of the day more stealth < killing things faster (which makes you need less stealth). Since it's really easy right now to get enough trap avoidance to ignore traps, that's not a big deal either unless you're using mines & sentries, and I don't think those go up fast enough to make you pick that over attack if that's your choice.

[windgen]

> +Power-generation

I think the probability of rolling slave reactors / auxiliary reactors is a little on the low side.  In other words, those equipment types should be made a little more likely to occur as loot or store items.  I think having them occur twice as often as they currently do would go too far, bumping to 1.2-1.5 times as often would be better.

> -Power Cost of other parts in same system

I think the numbers being rolled for this stat are way too low, current values should be multiplied by 5 or even 10.

[Winge]

> +Power-generation

I think the probability of rolling slave reactors / auxiliary reactors is a little on the low side.  In other words, those equipment types should be made a little more likely to occur as loot or store items.  I think having them occur twice as often as they currently do would go too far, bumping to 1.2-1.5 times as often would be better.

Agreed, sometimes the only way for me to get one is to go to the store and hope I get lucky.  Even the Reactor Missions don't seem to grant them often.

> -Power Cost of other parts in same system

I think the numbers being rolled for this stat are way too low, current values should be multiplied by 5 or even 10.

I'm not sure about 5x to 10x; that would probably be too high.  I've seen -14 power to all parts on the same system...boosting it like that would make all other parts in the same system energy-free.

[Histidine]

Bulletproof exo is bulletproof

The damage reduction stat bonuses on Hard and Expert might need toning down, though my Assault Exo is the only one with this kind of "immune to 80% of bot attacks" power by far...

[Misery]

Bulletproof exo is bulletproof
The damage reduction stat bonuses on Hard and Expert might need toning down, though my Assault Exo is the only one with this kind of "immune to 80% of bot attacks" power by far...

I'm thinking that both reduction and regen need toning down.

They dont need to go down really super far, dropping both by half might do it, particularly since the player is likely to combine both when trying to go for a tanky build.

You also have a ton of shields there, too.  Enemy attack scaling changed if I recall correctly, what kind of damage are most foes doing? 

My own current Expert game is still early on, so I havent fully seen how they grow over time and how far it goes exactly.

Though, also, the Assault Exo's +50% to shield stats may need a bit of a nerf as well.

[Histidine]

what kind of damage are most foes doing? 

Very few do enough to overcome that Assault's damage resistance, although most can still hurt my other exos (second highest stat in that attached savegame is 143, on the Sniper; my Science has a pitiful 36). At a guess, 50-200 are the most typical values, with things like BlasterMaster, CannonBot and WyvernBot doing about 400-800. Note that this is with a rather wide level variance among the bots; WyvernBot is only level 7 while some are level >20.

About the only bots I've encountered (or have numbers for) that do appreciably more damage than my Assault has resistance are: RazorBot (level 15, 1469 damage), TigerBot (level 20, 1263 damage), TethysBot (level 23, 1332 damage), TreadBot (level 23, 3753 damage), PantherBot and GaffeBot. Of those, Tethys is a boss, and the others all have weaknesses that largely negate their firepower advantage (except TreadBot; that thing isn't a bot, it's an unstoppable force of nature).

Considering the player's defense seems to go up much faster than their firepower, it may be that the bot's HP and attack growth should have separate exponents (possibly replacing the boss/non-boss distinction; it's not really big enough to matter, and bosses should be scary anyway).

Though it should be noted again that the problem may well be entirely specific to the Assault Exo. Hell, it may be specific to this Assault Exo; that thing has two legendary and one epic shield item.
(although I have an older screenshot of getting it up to 388 damage resistance with no legendary items)

[Misery]

Hm, I think you're right about the bot exponents, attack power and health should probably be seperate.   It does seem like their attack power is rising slowish, and that's on Expert; it's probably more of a problem on the lower difficulties.

Heck, in my game even my science bot can negate many attacks and actually has higher resistance than my Assault, AND it has good regen..  I dont think it's just the Assault being the problem.

If they're split, the attack exponent might do well to be put up near where it was before, perhaps.

[Tridus]

In the recent patch the exponents came down, AND damage reduction & regen numbers went up tremendously.

That's just too many things changing at once. The reduction and regen numbers coming back down some would help significantly.

[Misery]

Yeah, the difficulty definitely got a little warped with these changes.

Expert mode, Lion's Den missions should be very dangerous.  Particularly when they contain like 18 DoomBots, 20 zillion TreadBots (who are quite leveled up), and LeaderBots, among others.  SHOULD be dangerous.  Instead, they didn't have a chance.  Now granted, I also didn't allow myself to actually get hit by any of the Treads or Doombots.  Had a Treadbot shot one of my Exos, it'd have killed it instantly.  But still.  I only virused one thing, too, a DoomBot, which mostly ran around shooting HideBots until it ran out of ammo.  Absolutely tore through that mission.

Shield levels of enemies are doing decently.   Most, if not all, of the enemies in that mission required multiple shots from powerful weapons to take down quickly, so dealing with hordes fast enough to keep things from firing at me took careful use of all weapons.  Completely drained my Sniper and most of the Assault and Sniper's weapons as well.   Enemies that did get close enough, generally HideBots, Leaders, and Hunters, did 1 damage with each shot.... against any of the 4 Exos. 

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, thanks, helpful info   I don't have time to get into the code at this moment but here are my plans, do these sound reasonable?

- Bring the exponents for bot attack power back up to what they were, leaving the shields alone.

- Bring the damage-reduction-multiplier on hard/expert from 2x/3x => 1.5x/2x.

- Bring the regen stat range down from 15/330 => 10/220 (had been 5/110 before).

Anything else to address that particular balance issue?

[keith.lamothe]

And that Assault exo is totally insane

[Histidine]

Ok, thanks, helpful info   I don't have time to get into the code at this moment but here are my plans, do these sound reasonable?

- Bring the exponents for bot attack power back up to what they were, leaving the shields alone.

- Bring the damage-reduction-multiplier on hard/expert from 2x/3x => 1.5x/2x.

- Bring the regen stat range down from 15/330 => 10/220 (had been 5/110 before).

Anything else to address that particular balance issue?

I dunno if I'd bump the exponents up that high again, especially if the other two changes are implemented as well. Just a little bit lower. (On the other hand, we can probably afford to err on the side of challenge here.)

Okay, so current Hard/Expert non-boss exponents are 1.12/1.13; old ones were 1.16/1.19. On Expert, a level 20 bot would get the following multipliers:
^1.13: 11.5x
^1.19: 32.4x (2.81x current)
^1.16: 19.4x (1.69x current)
^1.17: 23.1 (2.01x current)

And for Hard:
^1.12: 9.64x
^1.16: 19.4x (2.01x current)
^1.15: 16.4x (1.69x current)

So yeah, a 69-100% increase to damage dealt coupled with a 25-33% decrease in the damage reduction stat should deal with the problem quite nicely.

With the change to damage resistance alone, the pictured Assault Exo's damage resistance will drop to 517, which is still rather higher than is healthy but quite a few more things will mess it up. I think a tank exo that ignores small arms fire should still be a viable build, as long as the pool of available anti-tank weapons isn't too small .

Another possibility is not letting damage reduction reduce incoming damage below a certain amount, say 10% of original damage (like AI War and many other games do). But that still has to work against massive, massive HP pools and regen.

[Misery]

With the change to damage resistance alone, the pictured Assault Exo's damage resistance will drop to 517, which is still rather higher than is healthy but quite a few more things will mess it up. I think a tank exo that ignores small arms fire should still be a viable build, as long as the pool of available anti-tank weapons isn't too small .

I think the one problem with this is that number is still pretty darn high, and quite a number of enemies simply dont do that level of damage even when leveled up, even before the patch that changed their attack multiplier.  Missions that the RNG fills with that type of enemy, as it does sometimes, will be extremely trivial.  In some cases you could have a mission where you dont really HAVE to shoot anything at all, and can simply waddle past them to the exit.


One other problem that occurs to me is the regen itself.   The whole mechanic with the regen getting cancelled by more attacks almost never does anything.   Either you do get hit with something, but the regen remains overly strong and the thing you got hit with does little damage, or you just walk away from enemies for 5 turns, which isnt too hard to do in most situations.  So it's pretty darn easy to keep the regen going at maximum effectiveness.   As for what a solution to this might be.... I have no idea.   But it's something I've noticed pretty often and it can lower the difficulty quite a bit.  Particularly when the one getting hit also has a ton of shielding.


And as for all those numbers there.... yeah, I've got nothing for that.   Math of any sort is not my friend.

[Pepisolo]

I'm not sure about 5x to 10x; that would probably be too high.  I've seen -14 power to all parts on the same system...boosting it like that would make all other parts in the same system energy-free.

I agree, I'd like to see a buff, though. Maybe 2x to get the ball rolling? When you've got a 150 power consumption part, a -10 or less reduction in power seems a bit weak.