Reapers are pretty nasty right now, I'm planning on having them be a lot rarer than the other kinds (perhaps obviously). They never run away, they're hard as anything to kill, and they're faster than you. Admittedly I find that pretty cool.
Bear in mind that you can stop the bleeding with a dead reaper (red plant will also stop bleeding next version). As for killing them, I found the best thing to use was a spear, hands down. Either of you make one yet? In my opinion it's probably the best weapon in the game right now, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Also it occurs to me you haven't mentioned the targetting beam, have you not used it yet?
Pebble Shotgun equips fine. I assume you're holding the autoloader though, you won't be able to equip a two handed weapon until both hands are clear (engine problem, this has to be manually remedied like the flashlight). I've also corrected the Double Barrel Shotgun to use slots.
Punch is working correctly, and is dealing damage. The problem is hitting them; if you fail to hit them quickly, in their current state aliens will regenerate enough damage to survive your next hit. It's really only good for taking out small blues at its basic level, and even fully upgraded, you'd want a good strength stat to get any real use out of it.
The autoloader - My bad. It only currently works with the regular pistol, not the Gauss Pistol, I forgot to set the script to run. I've assigned the scripts (add "effect 29, run-script: 69 with conditions" to script #66 if you want to do this for the current version) will now work correctly with all pistol related weapons. It does use single bullets.
Grenades are not implemented, so they're probably size 0 items that are invisible in the map screen. Neither are scanners currently (when they are, machine module + computer unit will be the first step along the way), and neither are tools. I never got around to making bows and their related ammunition so tools remained unnecessary.
As an attempted balance tweak, I've added a random chance to alien regeneration, functionally halving its speed; reaper regeneration has been further reduced to 1/3 speed. This should make all aliens weaker without preventing them from recovering out of Retreat behaviour. If Reapers stop being lethal threats, I'll up their regeneration again.
I've also tweaked the spear to deal less damage and knock back less.
For weapons.... It's a tough one. I want some weapons to be good against certain enemies; for Reapers, I've not only made them regenerate, I've made them harder to see (that's one reason for the terrain being so much more detailed than default). This makes it hard to finish them off at range, and most of the ranged weapons will knock them back far enough they'll regenerate most of the damage before they get close enough to spot them again.
You're either dealing 3 more (direct hit), 3 damage less (2/3 hit) or 9 less (single blade hit) damage with the blade, it's definitely not because it's outdamaging the pistol - with the targetting beam, the pistol deals 17 damage per hit. The gauss deals 20 damage per hit, it always deals as much or more damage than the blade does.
I will be testing upping bullet damage to around 20, laser damage will up to 15, but don't get used to it, lasers do not function well against biological targets, so this will probably drop back down versus biologicals in later versions.
"Endymion" said: Did it always take like 20-40 shots to kill a single alien? I believe not, in Default, upon finding a diode, a fuel cell and a converter two laser blasts killed every enemy in the game. There's currently some disparity between this and a final balance, which will try to make larger sizes of alien more credible threats without making killing them a chore.
There's also the fact that aliens will now retreat, rather than fight to the death. This will make driving them off a viable possibility.
Bear in mind also that the currently available selection of weapons are tier 2 or tier 1. Tier 3+ weapons will take accordingly fewer shots. If I made tier 2 weapons perfectly adequate, why would you upgrade?
Why remove x opening inventory? Actually, I've created every entry from scratch, so I've "removed" everything from the game, I just haven't "added it".
As to why, honestly? X never even worked for me, so I figured I'd leave it out to save on item entry time unless someone wanted it. I've now added it in for the next version for you, it's all contained in the same inventory open item. As a bonus, it now actually works for me.
How about low fatigue increasing food or water consumption to improve fatigue? Well-fed boost sounds good too but doesn't feel as "self-regulated". This already happens, but it's not obvious. If your fatigue is below 10%, you will lose food and water and recover fatigue accordingly (I believe without a message beyond You're Exhausted! however), likewise, most illnesses will also cause fatigue loss, including low food/thirst.
This isn't going to come up much since the maps are incredibly food rich right now, and because the captain can't lose much fatigue (I'll update deep water to drain fatigue at 1 per second). Would you prefer it to be higher? I could set it less than 50%?
When I ran out of fatigue while having hypothermia and being in the middle of water my max health became 1 somehow, I'm guessing it isn't meant to happen. 1: How the heck are so many people getting hypothermia? I'm trying to get it and failing miserably. 2: Hm. The lowered maximum health should actually kill you, so this is indeed a bug, thanks; I've made it so that you should now die appropriately. In future, this may get its own death screen of you having a final, fatal, heart attack due to your sickness. 3: If it's cured before it kills you however, it will recover naturally on its own, this behaviour at least is fully intentional.
Does temperature have any effect on bleeding? Not saying it should but it could make some sense...or not. I really like this idea and it's really easy to do (seriously, it's a three second cut and paste job to implement and it's a great idea). What do you suggest? Lower than -20 Temp halve blood loss, lower than 40 quarter it? Higher temperatures increase blood loss? Suggest some figures and I'll implement it.
Also something a bit more playable would be nice instead of just here are the enemies and here the items. Well mainly instead of all covering rain some small insta-heal location and some way to adjust the amount of enemies would be plenty better already. .... I'll try not to take this one personally. *sniff*
Seriously though, don't worry, the current version is essentially a technical demo. It has very, very specific goals: * Let people see that the mod is actually getting worked on. * Let people see the creature behaviour in action - in a very small, densely populated map for a real test to make sure it's robust. * Let people see item spawning - hence the need for constant recovery, this takes 24 hours per spawn. * Showcase all the new scripting, items, graphics, and game mechanics. * Get others to help me out by bug testing and encourage ideas to form - the best way to go about it, and it's definitely paid off already. * Bragging about all the awesome stuff I made.
Version 0.2 will be dropping healing rain and the item spawn map entirely, I'm currently planning on extending to cover one area per version at least, so this means the four squares of the starting jungle area for version 0.2, each with a "sensible" spawn type and a larger size, along with more items created.
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