Friday Facts #427 - Combat Balancing & Space Age LAN

[conn11]

A major drawback of combat robots is the necessity to „spawn“ them in small batches. With higher personal bot limit, preparing for an attack becomes rather tedious.
Shift clicking (e.g.) to place all destroyers up to the personal limit or alternatively in batches of 50-100 would be beneficial.

[conn11]

Speaking of Combat, I really wish Spidertron could do more than just Rockets.

A Machine Gun Spidertron would be neat (I know there is a Mod for that, I used it in the past).

Or simply being able to equip weapons to Spidertron, like a Flamethrower or if you really wanna be funny, Shotguns!



(random note to devs: I hope you also buffed the piercing shotgun ammo, not that that has been forgotten about lol)

Edit: I kinda expected someone else to post something inbetween, oops.

Like Atillery Spidertron Credit: JohnTheCoolingFan

[GregoriusT]

A major drawback of combat robots is the necessity to „spawn“ them in small batches. With higher personal bot limit, preparing for an attack becomes rather tedious.
Shift clicking (e.g.) to place all destroyers up to the personal limit or alternatively in batches of 50-100 would be beneficial.

they do have a throwing cooldown to prevent exactly that sort of OP behavior though.

What i would like is a warning that the Limit has been reached that is near the Cursor so that i can actually frikkin see it, as opposed to next to the Quickbar alerts.

[malecord]

Have fun at the LAN party! Leave some pentapods alive for day1.

[husnikadam]

I am looking foward to the launch party! I will be there 100%! There will be one, right? Right?

[Tertius]

I remember how surprised I was when I first found a station with a train never leaving after 20 hours, and it was because of a single stone in its inventory. Where did the stone get into it? Was it a bug? I dismissed the first one as some kind of glitch. However, after the second one appeared, I investigated further and found out about these stones on the ground.

From this experience, I created a deconstruction planner that takes care of everything to get rid of to get a clean field for construction but still keeps existing buildings:

09-06-2024, 14-04-53.png (104.8 KiB) Viewed 3063 times

0eNp1k91ugyAYhm9l4ViSaq2iyW5i2VnTNFa+WlKEBrBd03jvg/4MlO7EqM/DB77xvSEKrRTaqKE1TIrtiTdCgEL1DWkwholOu3sQhpnrds+4AWXfrG9IND2gGrWc7fcoQUxQ+EH1Ykz+kFEAeJF6mEYw8zCL4NLDZQRzD/MIrjxcRbDysIgPhBVQL5SRUHpIIlh4WMUQ75S8iCCOOKwqctI3zuSIaRwcCWicH2yN840z3CFCk0FFN1xYeG2atbEJjF3OwUOGkQx8Aq59Z9WwoalAm0MOF/d6xm0hRnYci6ERQr2R7xjnWBE4Z8x4ehC2dkcz5dHmbMDPRYCvvZchBBhFk+bhJkGIetBg6PtvWS2jWZlVwJ77XSrBMNd50z19NroB3zHH+RkqIxaNTGPTilnlUZv6qcIN7swI5E60eNP58l2XxBL8/w8W0ftdXOttp2oT0QSfOyykpCSFHZ/2v8BbMAVPE=

Copy blueprint

[Agamemnon]

Nothing groundbreaking... just casually nerfing PLD into the ground.

Yes, I get it - it was too powerful for the investment of time and ressources, being used more as an annihilation bubble centered around the player.
But slashing it to a third, while _also_ buffing the enemies? That's harsh...

I would have expected (and hereby propose) a different approach: Make it live up more to the P and D part of the acronym.

- Reduce range to actually just the players' personal space.
- But keep the original damage and effectiveness at disposing melee attackers.
- Have it not (auto)target structures.
- Balance by adjusting power consumption and/or resource cost instead.

they do have a throwing cooldown to prevent exactly that sort of OP behavior though.

How about a deployment time instead? (a fixed delay from placing a batch on the ground to the robots becoming operational)

[nathan67003]

>66% laser nerf
In other words: resource-agnostic combat sucks balls now, enjoy!

[scarhoof]

A major drawback of combat robots is the necessity to „spawn“ them in small batches.

I completely agree. Let us deploy them faster so we don’t spend so much of the robots life/combat time just spam-clicking redeploying them. Also, research to extend their lifespan would be cool. Maybe quality can affect range as well?

And the ability to deploy them via a mortar at our walls would be awesome, or allow spidertrons to deploy them to a set limit when enemies are nearby? Capsules in general (including the combat bots) could be put into a mortar and deployed automatically. Imagine firing slowdown capsules at your walls to assist with your defenses.

[JonasxJG]

Do spawners change appearance as they evolve? I think it would be nice if you see their strength and the larger number of lifepoints may feel more realistic. Thus, this leaves you with a better imagination about your own power and strength.

Another idea is that spawners evolve to different degrees which means they can withstand a different amount of damage. Just as medium-sized biters continue to exist at the highest level of evolution.

[KuuLightwing]

As I said on reddit, I'm not super excited about it. I already find clearing large areas tedious in the endgame - not hard, but tedious. Artillery helps a bit, but artillery creep is also rather slow, regardless of whether you use a train or turrets, until you have a megabase to research a lot of artillery range upgrades. So making it even more tedious by inflating the nest HP.

Also, artillery now doesn't one-shot nests in endgame, which would make it even more annoying, especially if you are doing manual targeting.

[untra]

Looking at the PCs in the LAN party I see Intel stickers.

Are all the machines in the party similarly spec'd, or is it a variety? Are there ARM architectures being tested alongside x86 machines in the same testing group? Is the testing all on the same Windows OS, or are there some Macbooks testing as well.

Can you share the machine specs for the party?

[GregoriusT]

Also, artillery now doesn't one-shot nests in endgame, which would make it even more annoying, especially if you are doing manual targeting.

Did they not say they doubled Artillery Shell Damage and removed Explosion Resistance from Nests?

And yeah if Artillery does not One-Shot Nests, there is a big Issue with their Auto-Targetting and Nests Out-Healing the Damage over time.

However if Explosives Damage Research increases Artillery Shell Damage too, then you know exactly how to fix THAT issue

[GregoriusT]

Looking at the PCs in the LAN party I see Intel stickers.

Are all the machines in the party similarly spec'd, or is it a variety? Are there ARM architectures being tested alongside x86 machines in the same testing group? Is the testing all on the same Windows OS, or are there some Macbooks testing as well.

Can you share the machine specs for the party?

Those are Alienware Cases, meaning they are Dell Machines, meaning you cannot use the Cases for anything but the original Motherboard, meaning it is all Intel at that LAN Party.

[hecktarzuli]

I'm a bit sad at the fact personal lasers damage was changed (whatever "nerfed by 66% means), along with the fact the bug bases got stronger over time.. That's quite a double whammy. P-lasers are my go to for clearing areas vs artillery.

[KuuLightwing]

Did they not say they doubled Artillery Shell Damage and removed Explosion Resistance from Nests?

And yeah if Artillery does not One-Shot Nests, there is a big Issue with their Auto-Targetting and Nests Out-Healing the Damage over time.

However if Explosives Damage Research increases Artillery Shell Damage too, then you know exactly how to fix THAT issue

Doubling means that it's going to do 1000 physical and 1000 explosion damage, so starting from around 75% evo according to their graph, it won't be enough.

[Thorgeous]

Oh No! This is the first time I was worried about a direction taken in FFF. I was on the Dev's side for every controversy (even spoilage) but this has me worried. Nerfing PLD is a big deal but nest health is bigger. Most people see the bitters as a "pressure mechanic" to keep you progressing and create defenses which are another avenue of automation - build walls, supply enough power/ammo/oil type and expand. I have not seen any improvements to expanding your factory through automation. The best we can do is Spidertron through the RTS which also depended on lasers since it will chew through rocket ammo especially with the Nest's health bump. Base rockets do 200 dmg, (explosive rockets do less but with splash damage) this means instead of 2 rockets it will take 18 rockets IF there were no other threats to engage allowing for health regen and this doesn't even consider resistances. I am hoping there are some buffs to the player we just don't know about or better yet new automation that we can use to enhance our base so the player isn't required out in the field. I always viewed it as the player was the big gun, buildings multiply the abilities, You can shoot the best ammo and all the options but multiple guns are better. The same logic is in the factory, you can pocket craft most things but getting it done by dozens of bots is faster. Maybe the Spidertrons could release combat bots?? Can artillery still 1-shot nests? The combat follower count is an unlimited tech but there is a physical deployment cap, could this be removed? Can you still drive through them with the tank? I feel this will push an even higher percent of people to just turn off bitters which makes almost all the military research pointless.

Some Ideas:
Enhance Spidertrons with - Combat drones, RTS style "patrol paths"
Allow tanks & cars to be controlled remotely with the RTS (Maybe a tech tree enhancement)
Add "engaging" to list of possible turret network connection output that would output a symbol (or better yet a read of the enemy being engaged)
Enhance Mines - Currently they can't be automated, they just destroy your construction bots that try to replace them as waves of enemies trigger them.

Either way I'm sure it will end up awesome just nervous.

[redplasticstraw]

i can see every one of the combat tweaks being good EXCEPT personal laser defenses. 66% damage reduction is honestly just insane, especially to the only form of automatic defense for the character.

perhaps a better direction to take it would be a nerfed radius instead?

[Jerrybubbles]

Exterminator played at the lan party and said "there's so much more stuff than what they showed in the friday facts, I can really see how this took them 4 years", very exciting

[jamaicancastle]

One thing to keep in mind about personal laser defense is quality armor/spidertrons have bigger inventories, up to 14x14 for armor and 10x14 for spidertrons. Plus, the "new" fusion reactors are over 3x as strong as the existing one. Instead of one reactor supplying 3 fully upgraded PLDs, it can supply 10.

So in effect, power armor mk 2 goes from 3 fusion reactors supplying 2.25 MW for 9 PLD (with some space left over; you could fit some batteries for a 10th PLD if you didn't mind it running out of power from time to time) to 4 fusion reactors supplying 10 MW for 33 PLD if they're normal quality, or 2 fusion reactors supplying 13.5 MW for 41 PLD if legendary. For spidertrons the effect is even stronger because the inventory bonus is proportionately more.

In other words, even with this nerf, you can still fit more personal lasering on your person than ever before, and that's without considering the potential increased range and/or power from legendary laser defenses themselves.