Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Place to discuss the game balance, recipes, health, enemies mining etc.
BlakeMW
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 950
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2016 9:29 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by BlakeMW »

thereaverofdarkness wrote: It's stupid and frustrating being forced to cheese the enemies by out-driving them, having to re-load every time I crash into a pile of rocks (which happens way too often for fun) because I get instantly swarmed by biters, and basically having a narrow sliver of un-fun gameplay options for dealing with the spawners that cover so much of the map that I can't possibly not kill them and expect to advance out past the starting area.
In fairness, it sounds like you're not abusing poison capsules which is by far the best scaling weapon with number of enemies. Firstly it eliminates all worms from far out of their spitting range (3 poison capsules will reliably kill Big Worms), additionally, when using the Tank you can just throw down a half dozen poison capsules and park in the cloud while the biters (smaller than Behemoths) die in seconds. Tank and poison capsules are the basis of my Marathon Deathworld w/ enhanced biter anti-nest assaults, I just slowly cruise around (slowly: to avoid collision damage and let the bots keep up), and throw lots of poison capsules around while machine gunning the things that don't die to poison (spawners). Poison is arguably grossly overpowered against large nests, though another way of looking at it is it levels the playing field.

It's only when somewhat into the Behemoth Biter era that I have to start resorting to out-maneuvering the biters and killing their nests while they are chasing me. Tip: drive through spawners, spawner barely slow the tank, while hitting a behemoth greatly slows the tank, so spawners become the ideal thing to drive through, there are definitely no behemoths under a spawner. So my behemoth era strategy is to first drive around poisoning to clear out the worms, then drive through the now de-wormed nest machine gunning and plowing through all the spawners. Once everything is destroyed I get out of my tank and flamethrower my behemoth biter fan club.


Anyway, back on the topic of the thread. The super tough enemies and super weak spawners is kind of a strange interaction. Part of mastering combat involves learning to simply ignore the biters while focusing on destroying the spawners (possibly suppressing biters with flamethrower or poison, which are basically free actions), then once the spawners are gone kill the biters. There is just no incentive at all to kill the defenders of a nest until the spawners are gone, being able to outrun the biters (exos or tank) or tank the damage (shields or tank+repair bots) is critical to clearing out large nests - and it's by no means impossible, I have very workable strategies both in the Tank (Poison Tank) and on foot (2x Exos, lots of shields and batteries, flamethrower) against even the toughest biter settings, it's just a bit of a weird way to play.

I don't really know what the solution would be. One possibility might be to have spawners gain hitpoints as the game progresses (either continually with evolution factor, or upgrading spawners to advanced versions along the same lines as biter evolution), once the spawners are tougher, the spawn rate could be lowered (doesn't have to be anything fancy). If you have to stay put for a few moments while killing spawners (at the moment they die about as fast as you can move the mouse, with respectable weapons), then you would be incentivized to clear out the defenders before destroying the nests. Note that for a "pro" player the rate of respawning is totally irrelevant because the optimal strategy is to ignore the defenders and obliterate the spawners either with hand held weapons, mounted weapons, artillery or nukes. Since the defenders are being ignored anyway it makes literally no difference if they respawn in 1s or 100s, by the time they are dead there will be nothing left standing to spawn replacements.

Maybe a high evolution nest guardian unit could be added that has the special ability of what is equivalent to throwing a slowdown capsule, snaring the player or vehicle and causing a -50% movement penalty. Not being able to leave the biters in your dust would incentivize killing them, of course this is meant to be combined with lowered spawn rates so it's actually feasible to kill the defenders then the spawners. Nest guardians wouldn't come attack, so you'd only get the annoying slow debuff if you go out and bother the biters. It could also have pretty good resists, especially laser, fire and small arms, flat resists good enough to provide serious incentive to take them down with weapons like Tank Cannon or Rocket Launcher.

bobucles
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1669
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2015 10:37 pm
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by bobucles »

Nades and such can speed things up early but when the mk2 armor/shields show up gunfire alone, shotgun+smg+turrets, can keep you in roflstomp territory until arty ends it
The gap between low tech grenades and Mk2 armor is pretty large, even if experts know how to rush it. Players still need to assault nests even if they don't have the best tech, but in my experience it mostly boils down to turret creep or rush tank. The standard weapons struggle against more than a handful of spawn rates and the supporting bots/grenades aren't quite there.

quyxkh
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1027
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 9:01 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by quyxkh »

bobucles wrote:
Nades and such can speed things up early but when the mk2 armor/shields show up gunfire alone, shotgun+smg+turrets, can keep you in roflstomp territory until arty ends it
The gap between low tech grenades and Mk2 armor is pretty large, even if experts know how to rush it. Players still need to assault nests even if they don't have the best tech, but in my experience it mostly boils down to turret creep or rush tank. The standard weapons struggle against more than a handful of spawn rates and the supporting bots/grenades aren't quite there.
Isn't that just "it's hard until you learn how to get the most out of what's available, then you can rush the high-payoff bits"? Not letting the enemy consolidate an early grip on territory you intend to claim doesn't strike me as expert-level reasoning, it's just "quick, kill it before it multiplies!" all dressed up in lingo.
BlakeMW wrote:Part of mastering combat involves learning to simply ignore the biters while focusing on destroying the spawners (possibly suppressing biters with flamethrower or poison, which are basically free actions), then once the spawners are gone kill the biters. There is just no incentive at all to kill the defenders of a nest until the spawners are gone, being able to outrun the biters (exos or tank) or tank the damage (shields or tank+repair bots) is critical to clearing out large nests - and it's by no means impossible,
Hear, hear!

bobucles
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1669
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2015 10:37 pm
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by bobucles »

The most important part of winning combat is avoiding combat entirely!
I mean. Isn't that a bit strange?

quyxkh
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1027
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 9:01 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by quyxkh »

bobucles wrote:
The most important part of winning combat is avoiding combat entirely!
I mean. Isn't that a bit strange?
It's pretty much straight out of The Art of War, written 2500 years ago and still part of every military officer's training.

User avatar
eradicator
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 5206
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2016 9:03 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by eradicator »

quyxkh wrote:Where is it hard to wipe camps and the obvious solution (research military until it's not hard) is unreasonable?
Just for the record my argument isn't that fighting biters is hard or easy or whatever. It's (supposed to be) that i personally find fighting biters boring, so much that i had to disable them because they felt too much like a menial job, a waste of time, to keep enjoying the game. This is certainly part because i'm a min-maxing person, and enjoy the puzzle aspect so much. Once i find a reasonably fast way to get rid of them (flamthrowers, tank ramming spawners) etc, there's no reason at all for me to try anything else. There's no fire-immune biters that need different tactics. There's no high-armored spawners that crush your tank instead. There's no(t enough) variation on the biter side of combat, only on the player side. Maybe i've simply done enough combat after all the hours i put into the game, but where the puzzle part is complex enough to never give me a feeling of having a perfect solution, the biter part feels simple,. Ok, enough words, clearly haven't had enough sleep :P.
thereaverofdarkness wrote: I like this also. One group of spawners could be connected together as one "colony" and share a resource. In addition to spawners which spend the resource, they could have other types of buildings:
Not bad ideas. I kept my initial proposal simple, without too many different buildings. For one because i'm not sure if it really fits factorio, if it doesn't shift the focus too much towards combat. And because i'm not sure how realistic such large scale changes are at this point in development.

User avatar
thereaverofdarkness
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 558
Joined: Wed Jun 01, 2016 5:07 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by thereaverofdarkness »

quyxkh wrote:
thereaverofdarkness wrote:That tactic doesn't even work on big camps.
You sure you don't want to inject a dose of uncertainty into that claim?
Quite certain. Reading your posts, I have to assume you've never played on very low frequency enemies. I don't think you've ever seen a big camp. I've encountered camps the size of the radar's active vision area. In fact these aren't particularly uncommon on very low frequency. If you go inside the camp, you will get so many enemies piling and swarming over you that you cannot move if you cannot produce a few hundred DPS worth of constant area damage in front of you. I'll say it is possible to combat these on foot but it isn't easy even with top tier handheld weapons and equipment. The only handheld weapons that can keep you mobile while inside the camp are the rocket launcher and cluster grenades, and they will also kill you if you're not aiming them perfectly, as if that many worms, big biters, and big spitters won't kill you first. Capsule bots get stomped in hilarious fashion.

I think you're talking about "big" camps on normal frequency setting.

There's another major problem with the enormous disparity between camp size on these different settings, and the fact that I'm forced to get enormous camps just to get an unrelated facet of gameplay that I want: clearings between camps.

Here's a video of me fighting a big camp (one of the medium ones, anyway) in 0.15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ZQ1dlJq6U

BlakeMW
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 950
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2016 9:29 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by BlakeMW »

thereaverofdarkness wrote: The only handheld weapons that can keep you mobile while inside the camp are the rocket launcher and cluster grenades
And Flamethrower. Unfortunately, the flamethrower is not a very good weapon when used realistically. But when min-maxed it's walking godmode. A biter which has been splashed by a fireball is set on fire which inflicts 100dps (+upgrades) for 30s and slows by 20%. That's a 3000 damage debuff, enough to kill any unit in the game except Behemoth Biters, for them 4 damage upgrades are needed. Critically biters don't get any more on fire by hitting them with a second fireball, since the fireball splash radius is pretty big a single microsecond spurt of fire can apply a death sentence to a whole mob of biters.

What goes even better with this, is that the flamethrower has a much lower effective movement penalty than other weapons. My understanding is that a weapon slows you while it is reloading, so the (basic) shotgun and rocket launcher slow you for a significant time, even if you aren't firing continuously. The flamethrower reloads in 1 tick, it basically stops slowing you the instant you stop firing. Combine that with the above, and you can spend 1 tick setting a bunch of biters on fire and next tick you're back to full speed and the biters are sentenced to death, and slowed, if you have 2 exos they can't even keep up with you when you're firing continuously.

The flamethrower is also moderately effective at torching spawners, with the effectiveness greatly improving with upgrades. Again the trick is to not use it like a firehose, but instead, to rapidly spin around (what I affectionally call the "prancing fire faerie"), creating as many fire patches as possible, more fire patches is better than intensified fire patches. Fortunately, Factrio Engineer is perfectly capable of running in one direction while firing in all directions, so you can run through a nest leaving a swathe of destruction. Arguably cluster grenades are more effective at pure spawner destruction, though the flamethrower is one of the few weapons that suffices to take on massive Behemoth era nests with no support from capsules or other weapons.

bobucles
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1669
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2015 10:37 pm
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by bobucles »

It's pretty much straight out of The Art of War, written 2500 years ago and still part of every military officer's training.
But we're not playing the art of war. We're playing Factorio. Games change to satisfy the players, not the other way around. In the very early stages of the game it makes sense to clear out biters first, because biters are super squishy and nests are pretty tough. This dynamic very quickly changes as biters get harder but nests stay exactly the same. Eventually biters have an order of magnitude more health than nests so pushing directly up the front becomes a colossal waste. You can simply outrun everything and 1-shot nests left and right while it becomes over 10x the effort to try a direct push. Combat turns into a series of strafing runs where you are better off not engaging at all. It's a silly balance and I don't like it.

So no. The reason it is a good strategy is because the game's combat mechanics were always very simple and couldn't deal with it. The most damning thing is that it rewards your ability to abuse those combat mechanics, and not your ability to build a factory or better things.
Poison/Slowdown Capsules
Ugh. Don't get me started on capsules. First off, slowdown capsules don't even have a splash effect. That's how alpha version they are. Second, vehicles don't have stickers so you can't actually slow them down or stun them, which ruins capsules in PvP. Thirdly, the balance on them is completely wack. The poison capsule is military 3 science and hits nearly TEN times as hard as grenades. That's stronger than cluster grenades, which are a military 4 item! Then for some reason they have SNIPER range so you can strafe down nests without ever placing yourself in danger. Why even use guns at that point.

Poison capsules throw further than grenades, hit harder than grenades and are cheaper than grenades. That is not good balance.

Thematically, they don't make much sense either. I don't know how you gunk something down with coal, and I don't know why you have this ONE poison item when no other player asset is a poison weapon. Grenades already do the job of clearing trees and we already have FIRE as a more satisfying method of dealing damage over time. IMO poison capsules only ruin game balance and should be removed completely.

Slowdown capsules deal 50% slowdown for 30 seconds. They are a combination of grossly overpowered and not very effective because once you hit the biters in front, all the biters in back charge in anyway. You need to keep burning capsules to tag new biters while hit biters have no hope of ever escaping. In PvP the effect is absurdly overpowered since you tag a player once and they're completely dead. No counterplay is possible. IMO the slowdown capsule should affect terrain run speed/friction and not be a sticker debuff. This will reduce the number of capsules you need to be effective in PvE and make the effect less broken in a PvP environment.

Combat capsules struggle because they're simply too expensive and poison already kills everything. They're not bad, but they are too expensive. They could use some recipe tweaks to be more reasonable to put on the field.

quyxkh
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1027
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 9:01 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by quyxkh »

thereaverofdarkness wrote:
quyxkh wrote:
thereaverofdarkness wrote:That tactic doesn't even work on big camps.
You sure you don't want to inject a dose of uncertainty into that claim?
Quite certain. [...]
Here's a video of me fighting a big camp (one of the medium ones, anyway) in 0.15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ZQ1dlJq6U
When I boot up a prespace vlf deathworld, set evo to .85 and teleport to {1e5,0} I get camps that kill the inattentive very fast but they're manageable with just guns. Might want to check that link, it doesn't show anything like what you say it does.
thereaverofdarkness wrote: It's stupid and frustrating being forced to cheese the enemies by out-driving them, having to re-load every time I crash into a pile of rocks (which happens way too often for fun) because I get instantly swarmed by biters, and basically having a narrow sliver of un-fun gameplay options for dealing with the spawners that cover so much of the map that I can't possibly not kill them and expect to advance out past the starting area.
I'd say you're not being "forced" to do anything, you're shoving the engine's enemy settings as far from the defaults as they'll go and your tactics can't handle the result.

Here's what it looks like when I do it.

User avatar
eradicator
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 5206
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2016 9:03 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by eradicator »

quyxkh wrote:I'd say you're not being "forced" to do anything, you're shoving the engine's enemy settings as far from the defaults as they'll go and your tactics can't handle the result.
Here's what it looks like when I do it.
That's a perfect demonstration of how wrong combat is. You spend 10 minutes on clearing a tiny area barely enough for a small chip production. And you do it by repeating the exact same moves again and again and again: Run into the nest and shoot as many spawners as you can, completely ignoring the biters. Then when there's too many biters for you to handle use turrents instead. (Btw personally i really don't like using turrents like they're hand-carry weapons. Might as well turrent creep at that point). The nest also has ample cliffs and trees to bottleneck the stream of biters. You even die once during the attempt, demonstrating that this is not a tactic suitable for novice or intermediate players. And lastly you choose a very nice sweet spot in the evolution, a point where you have all pre-rocket research done, but the biters don't have behemoth or big worms yet. I don't think i've ever had that situation.

User avatar
thereaverofdarkness
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 558
Joined: Wed Jun 01, 2016 5:07 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by thereaverofdarkness »

BlakeMW wrote:And Flamethrower.
Not really, when you have to kill spawners to get them out of your way so you can move. Maybe it works better with upgrades, I don't know. I always avoid flamethrower damage upgrades because the base flamethrower damage kills big biters really fast yet the tank is almost impervious to it so I can pull that trick I demonstrate in the video. The first damage upgrade more than doubles the damage it does to the tank.

Does it actually kill spawners and worms at a decent rate? I know spawners aren't too hard to kill with fire: they resist it but are big so you can spend time laying down fire over the whole thing to get it to die kind of fast. But worms are small and even more resistant. I can't even kill medium worms very well with fire.
bobucles wrote:Combat capsules struggle because they're simply too expensive and poison already kills everything.
Poison capsules are good when you're fighting mediums and down. Nothing else dies well to poison. I sometimes use it to thin out the hordes chasing me, but I find no matter how much poison I lay down, most kills are done with fire or explosives after all. The best thing about poison is how easily I can cover a large area with it. I think poison capsules are great yet not even close to overpowered.
eradicator wrote:That's a perfect demonstration of how wrong combat is.
I disagree. He might have got a bit lucky in that spot but he was doing pretty well. I'll admit I never thought the shotgun could be that strong. But the thing that I didn't understand was that he was using the shotgun when he had uranium ammo. The submachinegun would have been stronger at that point and he might not have needed to lay down turrets. Or he could have just put turrets everywhere. The shotgun can work if you force it to, but it's never better than your other options. And I don't think big worms would have been a major game changer. They're very tough but medium worms do the same amount of damage.

All that said, however, I can take out a base that size in less time at lower tech and a higher evolution factor with my tank, and my tank is not nearly as durable as that power armor Mk 2 with that many red shields and 3 fusion cells.

BlakeMW
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 950
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2016 9:29 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by BlakeMW »

thereaverofdarkness wrote:
BlakeMW wrote:And Flamethrower.
Not really, when you have to kill spawners to get them out of your way so you can move. Maybe it works better with upgrades, I don't know. I always avoid flamethrower damage upgrades because the base flamethrower damage kills big biters really fast yet the tank is almost impervious to it so I can pull that trick I demonstrate in the video. The first damage upgrade more than doubles the damage it does to the tank.
The Tank has a flat fire reduction of 15 points, since fire is dealt in many small chunks it's never going to come close to overcoming that resist.

The in-game numbers for flamethrower damage are all over the place, because they seem to be normalized by second. Here is how it actually works:
  • A fire patch deals up to 1.3 damage/tick when fully intensified (this means a Tank's fire resists are not going to be overcome until you have around +1000% fire damage)
  • A flamethrower turret fireball deals 3 damage (this means you need +400% fire damage before it can overcome the flat resist of a tank)
  • A handheld flamethrower fireball deals 2 damage
  • A fire sticker (being on fire) inflicts 1.6666 damage/tick and lasts for 30s (Tanks are not set on fire so do not take this damage)
  • (For completeness the Tank flamethrower deals 7 damage/tick, but has no other interesting effects)
So that means that until you reach +400% fire damage the Tank is only suffering a linear increase in damage.

A for enemies, Spawners and Big Worms have flat fire damage resist of 3, so once you have +130% fire damage the flat resist is overcome and you get a non-linear increase in damage. Medium worms have a flat resist of only 2, which is exceeded with relatively less investment. Getting all the pre- high tech upgrades brings you to +100% damage, which is enough to kill Behemoth Biters through the fire sticker alone, to actually convincingly overcome the flat resists of structures you need the high tech upgrades, although intensified fire patches deal such an extreme amount of raw damage (2340, for a fully intensified fire patch, before upgrades) that they can kill through resists just fine.
Does it actually kill spawners and worms at a decent rate? I know spawners aren't too hard to kill with fire: they resist it but are big so you can spend time laying down fire over the whole thing to get it to die kind of fast. But worms are small and even more resistant. I can't even kill medium worms very well with fire.
Upgrades help as per above. For spawners you have to do a double-sweep, you first sweep them then sweep again a fraction of a second later to intensify all the fire patches, a triple sweep might be needed early on - fire patches basically have a near-quadratic increase in damage with intensification because they both deal more damage and last longer with each intensification. With worms you need to scatter a circle of fire around them then intensify it a couple of times. Smalls are trivial to kill, mediums go down pretty easy, Bigs are pretty tough but still go down quickly to proper technique. The flamethrower is far from the worst weapon to kill Big Worms with and it is one of two options which is effective in the early game (besides turrets), even an unupgraded flamethrower can torch a Big Worm because thoroughly intensified fire patches last so long and burn the thing down in spite of the resists. The other option is grenades, which also pack enough punch to overcome a Big Worm's resists - the issue with using grenades is early game you need to eat fish to not die, so you have to rapidly swap between grenades and fish to grenade a big worm, with the flamethrower you can just torch it while scoffing down fish.
Last edited by BlakeMW on Sat Jun 16, 2018 12:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.

bobucles
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1669
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2015 10:37 pm
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by bobucles »

I always avoid flamethrower damage upgrades because the base flamethrower damage kills big biters really fast
Well of course. The burning debuff from getting tagged by the flamethrower deals 3000 damage! It kills absolutely everything except behemoths (who regenerate to survive at low health) and structures (which are immune). The fire debuff is the most absurdly overpowered part of the flame thrower and in terms of balance is broken. It needs major changes to make the flamer more comparable to other weapons.
I think poison capsules are great yet not even close to overpowered.
I think a grenade weapon that is stronger, faster, and cheaper than grenades is the very definition of overpowered. None of the poison capsule feats are possible with grenades or even cluster grenades, which are supposed to be devastating weapons. Poison capsules are dumb.

User avatar
thereaverofdarkness
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 558
Joined: Wed Jun 01, 2016 5:07 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by thereaverofdarkness »

BlakeMW wrote:The Tank has a flat fire reduction of 15 points, since fire is dealt in many small chunks it's never going to come close to overcoming that resist.

[*]A flamethrower turret fireball deals 3 damage (this means you need +400% fire damage before it can overcome the flat resist of a tank)
Please play-test your numbers before you assume I am wrong. I tested this in 0.15 but I don't think it has changed since. Getting flame damage upgrades very quickly wrecks your tank, much more quickly than it adds to the destruction of anything else.

bobucles wrote:
I always avoid flamethrower damage upgrades because the base flamethrower damage kills big biters really fast
Well of course. The burning debuff from getting tagged by the flamethrower deals 3000 damage! It kills absolutely everything except behemoths (who regenerate to survive at low health) and structures (which are immune). The fire debuff is the most absurdly overpowered part of the flame thrower and in terms of balance is broken.
I disagree. The fire debuff is great for spitters but it's a painfully slow way to kill big biters. They die many times as fast when hit with a continuous spray of flame. When the ground fire gets strong enough, it kills them as they run to you. Also, I'm not convinced it actually does 3000 damage before wearing off. I feel like I've seen it wear off of big biters and fail to kill them, but I'm not certain.

I'd say if anything the direct damage is the most overpowered part of the fire. The ground flames are very strong but only after you've spent time layering them up, and that makes sense and is good. The flame debuff may do a large amount of damage before wearing off, but it's slow like the poison capsule (well not quite that slow). Both of those have a tremendous amount of damage for the time you spend dropping it, but it is countered by taking time to finish applying the damage.

User avatar
eradicator
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 5206
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2016 9:03 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by eradicator »

thereaverofdarkness wrote: I tested this in 0.15 but I don't think it has changed since.
jiFfM.jpg
jiFfM.jpg (66.63 KiB) Viewed 5147 times

bobucles
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1669
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2015 10:37 pm
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by bobucles »

Also, I'm not convinced it actually does 3000 damage before wearing off. I feel like I've seen it wear off of big biters and fail to kill them, but I'm not certain.
Biters have health regeneration so the biggest ones survive with about 200 health. The first flamethrower upgrade seals the deal.

You can't balance an early to mid game debuff around the strongest enemy in the game. Blue biters have only 375 health, and everything else has even less health than that. The fire debuff kills them all in seconds. It's pretty ridiculous.

BlakeMW
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 950
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2016 9:29 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by BlakeMW »

thereaverofdarkness wrote: Please play-test your numbers before you assume I am wrong. I tested this in 0.15 but I don't think it has changed since. Getting flame damage upgrades very quickly wrecks your tank, much more quickly than it adds to the destruction of anything else.

I stand corrected. From frame-by-frame analysis it turns out fire-patches deal their damage every 10 ticks, which means they deal 13 damage a proc when fully upgraded - also confirmed in frame-by-frame analysis, they definitely deal (a maximum of) 13 damage every 10 ticks. The first flamethrower upgrade does indeed increase this to over a Tank's flat resist. This also means Big Worm first resist does very little to reduce the damage from a fully intensified fire patch even with no upgrades whatsoever. The increase in incineration power comes from %age increase and to a smaller degree direct splash (any weapon firing 60 times/s can deal meaningful damage to spawners)

Also from frame by frame analysis:
A fire patch deals 2 or 3 more damage per "charge", raws say it should be 2.1. According to the raws a personal flamethrower patch should start with 2 charges yet it is definitely possible to create 1-charge patches (these deal 26 damage - really puny), but it's also possible for the first proc to deal 5 damage (I tested this by setting the flamethrower splash damage to 0 so I could observe exactly what damage the fire patch was dealing), perhaps the meaning of the raw is a fire patch can be intensified once immediately.
The damage cannot be intensified more often than every 10 ticks - damage always increments by 2 or 3 until it caps at 13. This means it takes about a second to produce a fully intensified fire patch.
The flamethrower seems to fire in minimum bursts of two fireballs: each has a distinct round shadow. You can make them go to different places by moving the mouse rapidly.


I've still never found fire patches from upgraded flamethrowers to be particularly threatening to the Tank, but then again I'm the kind who prefers to just pass through fire patches and not hang out in them (because I always use the tank with personal construction bots for repairs, and don't want the bots getting incinerated).

User avatar
thereaverofdarkness
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 558
Joined: Wed Jun 01, 2016 5:07 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by thereaverofdarkness »

Thanks for the testing! You've yielded some valuable data!
BlakeMW wrote:I've still never found fire patches from upgraded flamethrowers to be particularly threatening to the Tank, but then again I'm the kind who prefers to just pass through fire patches and not hang out in them (because I always use the tank with personal construction bots for repairs, and don't want the bots getting incinerated).
I was throwing flames directly on the tank, as is shown in the video I linked. I had already been doing it just fine without flamethrower upgrades, then I made the video right as I researched some, and discovered afterward (you can see in the video the tank almost died) that it doesn't work so well anymore. Recently I was doing the same trick again in 0.16 and it still works like before. The tank takes some damage from the fire but it's a lot less than the enemies will do to it if I don't kill them with fire.

eradicator wrote:
thereaverofdarkness wrote: I tested this in 0.15 but I don't think it has changed since.
DOUBLE FACEPALM
for when one facepalm doesn't cut it
I've been vindicated!

quyxkh
Smart Inserter
Smart Inserter
Posts: 1027
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 9:01 am
Contact:

Re: Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Post by quyxkh »

I shouldn't have taken the green ammo, it makes no real difference until the behemoths show up, you can try it.
thereaverofdarkness wrote:The submachinegun would have been stronger at that point
Thing is, the submachine gun _isn't_ as strong at that point. Even with uranium ammo it does about 20% less DPS vs spawners than the shotgun, and it eats ammo like candy, 4-5 times faster, 15×(24-2+28.8)/(3.2×(8-2+9.6)×1.2×16)~.79 and that's before you factor in the interference from its autotargeting. You want turrets killing bugs, they're vastly more efficient at it. The smg's a convenience/light-duty weapon.

But turrets die when there's worms around. I got sloppy and lost one there even with just a few left. It's usually most convenient to just do a SMG-autotarget cleanup pass at the end rather than bother dropping turrets, by that time the extra ammo it takes is negligible.

The point of the video, which I rather criminally failed to bother just saying, my apologies, was simply that you don't have to do any of the things you complain of being forced to do.

Post Reply

Return to “Balancing”