Combat Balance Twinsen here. As you might have read in Friday Facts #166, we wanted to do some combat balancing. First, to not bring the hopes of everyone up too much, this did not mean a combat overhaul. It means mostly tweaking numbers to make the game more fun and make some of the the weapons more viable. No new entities or new mechanics. As I was doing the combat balance, it was clear the everyone has their own different opinion of how combat is, how it should be and how to make it "better". It's hard to please everyone, especially when you are just tweaking numbers. To try to objectively evaluate combat I used the following methodology. As the game progresses, the player's power increases through research, but so do the biters(mainly due to evolution factor). So I split the game in 7 sections based on research progress. Each section also has the evolution factor I tested biters will approximately have in an average game. Initial - 0 evolution Red - 0.1 evolution Red+Green - 0.3 evolution Red+Green+Military - 0.4 evolution Red+Green+Blue+Military - 0.7 evolution Red+Green+Blue+Military+High Tech - 0.9 evolution Red+Green+Blue+Military+High Tech+Production - 0.99 evolution Then for each section I tested both offensive combat and defensive combat using the available guns and turrets and tweaked the numbers accordingly. While tweaking the numbers, I keep this in mind (this is not a complete list): Fun always wins: I prefer changes that are more fun and less annoying even if it means it could be slightly unbalanced. New weapons should be slightly more powerful than old weapons, to incentivize you to experiment. So near the end game, a rocket launcher will be better than the machine gun. Destroying biter bases is hard in the beginning and significantly easier toward the end game, to give the sense of combat power progression. Defending is not too hard in the beginning. I try not to put a new player in the situation of "you didn't prepare properly, you have to start a new game, because no matter what you do you will get killed". Then throughout the game you have to upgrade your defenses as the biters evolve. So far, the changelog looks like this. There are many numbers that were tweaked and are not included in this list. Player regains health at a much higher rate, but only after being out of combat for 10 seconds. Discharge defense equipment pushes back, stuns and damages nearby enemies when activated by the remote. Decreased the size of Discharge defense equipment from 3x3 to 2x2. Greatly increased the damage of Personal Laser Defense Equipment. Flamthrower gun has a minimum range of 3. The flames created on ground from the flamethrower significantly increase in duration and damage when more fuel is added to them by firing at the same spot. Increased fire resistance of biter bases. Increased the health of player non-combat buildings. Increased player health from 100 to 250. Increased collected amount and effectiveness of Raw Fish. Increased the damage, range and health of biters worms. Decreased health and resistance of Behemoth biters. Doubled the stack size of all ammos. Tweaked the cost and crafting time of some ammos. Increased the damage of most player ammos. Greatly increased the damage and fire rate of Rockets and Cannon Shells. Increased the collision box of Cannon Shells. Increased Tank health and resistances. Added research for Tank Cannon Shells damage and shooting speed. Tweaked research bonuses and added more end-game research for military upgrades. Greatly increased the damage of Mines. They also stun nearby enemies when they explode. Biters stop following player after 10 sec of not giving or receiving damage if the player is more than 50 tiles away. Other minor changes. As usual, these changes are not final and will probably change to some degree as we playtest more. There are still many things to be done. We are always talking about more end-game weapons, so don't worry, the combat in the late-game will be even more worry-free. There is also one thing that we always talked about trying to remove: turret-creep (destroying biters base building turrets closer and closer). This method is very powerful and usually doesn't cost anything. So far I believe that we did not find a simple, fun and fair solution. Ideas include: large power-up times(annoying and also weakens base defense); simply not allowing turrets to be build near biter bases (makes the player feel cheated); underground anti-turret worms (sugar-coated version of the previous idea). With the combat changes that were done I believe there is almost always an option to destroy bases without being forced to use turret-creep.In the end maybe your ingenuity and effort of building all those electric poles should be rewarded; If the player wants to do it that way, why not let him? Let us know what you think.
Nightvision nightmare As Twinsen continues tweaking the combat, he started to complain about the “green fog” effect that is applied during night when the player’s character has nightvision goggles equipped. Nightvison in 0.14 works in a way that it reduces the darkness of night, and then draws a transparent green overlay. This washes out the colors, reduces contrast, and makes the picture pretty unpleasant to look at. The first idea was to just make the green overlay be rendered around light sources, to reward players who put lights into their bases, by not making the base look worse with nightvision on. This didn’t look too good, and as we were trying to figure out how to improve it, other developers, especially artists, caught on to what we were doing, and started to provide their own ideas. Next we tried to darken only the red and blue channels when nightvision is on. This will make the picture green without losing contrast and we can drop the green overlay. We kept “not applying effect onto lighted area” logic and it started to look interesting. Albert wasn’t happy with the result though, so we continued experimenting. We added a soft green tint to lighted areas, and a bright green glow onto the transition between light and darkness. Then we added white highlights to light sources and it finally started to pleasant to look at. We will stick with this version for time being, but plan to work on it more. We can’t agree if this change is for better or worse even inside the team. It seems everybody has their own idea about how nightvision effect should look like and what benefits it should provide to players. For example it would be nice to have goggles with greyscale effect that would highlight biters. So maybe heat vision?
Hello, Denis has joined us for another month here in the office, a small overlap with Rseding who is flying back to the USA next week. With the festive season upon us, Tomas and Kovarex have both taken some time off for a vacation.
Hello,the hopefully final 0.14 version was recently released, meanwhile most of the team have been assigned their major tasks for 0.15.
Mod settings Right now when you want to customize a particular mod you have to: Know what folder the mods are stored on your computer Unzip the mod Figure out what line of which file has the thing you want to change Save and optionally re-zip the mod Hope what you changed is compatible with the way the rest of the mod works The game also forces everyone playing on the same multiplayer session to have identical mod files so any changes you've made make it impossible for you to join others unless they also have made those changes. This also makes it difficult for mod developers to troubleshoot bug reports because they don't know what you might have changed. This is obviously not so great and I want to address the main problem: there's no good way for mod developers to give users any portable way to configure their mods. To fix this we're going to add the ability for mods to define settings that will be presented like our in-game options menu now under a new section "options -> mods". This will let mods give some basic information about what kind of setting they have and we can present it to the player in a (hopefully) nice GUI with verification and feedback about why what they've entered isn't valid (if it's not valid) as well as the ability to change them runtime should the particular setting allow it. We can then sync these settings on joining multiplayer sessions (or not should you not want your settings to carry between games) and everything will just work.
Hello, Rseding has just arrived for another 6 week visit here at the office, and his timing is pretty great as we start shifting the focus onto 0.15, of which our to-do list is extremely long.
Hello, the 0.14 stabilization is still ongoing, we are in the final stretch now and hope our latest release might be declared stable soon, along with a marketing push on steam. Until then here is some news about ongoing developments this week:
Hello, Pretty much half of the office has been sick in the past week, but that still hasn't stopped us from progressing in the development of your favourite pollution-generating game (though I have been playing some Cities skyline recently and there you can screw the nature around quite creatively as well).
Hello, once I changed the science packs for 0.15 , I had to do a playtest to have a feel of how the changes affect the game. I finished it just before writing this post: This was the first single player playthrough in a long time, so there was a lot of new findings. I also enjoyed all the new features, like blueprint book, auto trash, train conditions etc. These were little things but they helped a lot.
