View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0010502 | Valley 2 | Gameplay - Balance Issue | Jan 27, 2013 12:55 pm | Jan 30, 2013 8:10 pm | |
| Reporter | Acetyl | Assigned To | keith.lamothe | ||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 0.721 | ||||
| Fixed in Version | 0.722 | ||||
| Summary | 0010502: Morale / Infighting cascade | ||||
| Description | Now, I'll start by saying, I am extremely biased on this part. The entire premise of infighting is practically the embodiment of everything self destructive in humanity. After playing for 4 hours straight and proceeding with what was, and should have remained a solid strategy, yet again infighting struck. Irritation aside, here's the more rational assessment. Infighting is a gameplay element intended to add repercussion and negative outcomes for food shortage, thus necessitating planning ahead for proper food production (which by extrapolation branches out to effect almost all your progression, tile choices, scrap production). I like that, but it has a few issues from both a balance and realism perspective. Often times, you'll move people to tiles that are adequate for food production, and then infighting will injury them when the term ends, so they can no longer gather food. This doesn't make sense, when people are pushed to the brink, and especially starving, they get tunnel vision. The farm, the gathering of food, and the capacity to do so being right under their nose, would take precedence above even interacting with any other being. I can't see them fighting each other over food and both staying starving either, especially if they're on a farm tile. Short version. It starts a cascade the player literally -cannot- recover from. For example, I just moved two resistance members onto grasslands, and one onto a farm. Turn passes, the one on the farm is injured. He's now in the way, and I haven't a viable tile for a clinic. That's partially the fault of the player, as I should have planned ahead knowing the prior clinic would be destroyed soon. Then furthering that, I should have planned ahead and gathered scrap. But the NPC risk was too high, and the clinic's imminent destruction made it non-viable to risk them. So looking back, there weren't many other avenues I could have taken. Next turn, the two on the grasslands are injured. Moral drops further. Next turn, the one who (finally) had the scrap to build a clinic, is injured as well, despite being several tiles away. And it all keeps tumbling down in an unsalvageable cascade. I suppose the main point is, the morale system needs an overhaul. This has happened almost any playthrough or variation of playstyle I've tried. Whether its sooner, or later, it does eventually happen. The first suggestion that comes to mind is compartmentalization. Have morale be non-uniform and how it changes overall be weighed by how clustered resistance members are. The second suggestion is only allowing resistance members within 2 tiles to injure each other. I think infighting needs to be less of a focal point though, and more of a side thing. Morale loss should perhaps cripple certain actions like scrap gathering, and raise NPC risk slightly in tiles. But positive moral shouldn't reduce it unless there is another member adjacent. Just seems incredibly unbalanced to have infighting the only downside of starvation and loss of morale. That's my take in any case. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
|
|
I've thought of renaming infighting to something like health (as in how healthy they are, not how many HP they have) or just rolling the morale penalty into the shelter/cover checks. In general if you run out of food you have a good chance of losing the game, that's intentional. It's recoverable if you have what's needed available and the random rolls work decently in your favor (basically meaning that the situation is no longer fully under your control; you may win or lose by the die at that point), but it can be the end. The spiral nature of it is quite intentional. The reference to "tantrum spirals" (more a commentary on dwarven nature than human nature, but that just makes it indirectly the same thing largely) is also intentional but not essential. In my playtesting food has been moderately tricky early on but usually it didn't take long to get to a situation where I had 2 or 3 farm tiles cranking out the stockpiled food for a few turns before I had to abandon them; from there it's a matter of not recruiting _too_ many survivors and not letting too many turns go between some food production. That said, I can make the food balance more forgiving on the default and lower difficulties and see what happens. |
|
|
For 0.722: * The "Infighting" mechanic where low morale could directly cause damage to resistance members has been removed, and morale now affects cover rolls fairly substantially. At morale=50 it's basically the way it was before; at morale=100 all npc-danger levels now have 50% subtracted from them, etc. Very low morale is still a pretty quick way to lose, but this way is easier to understand and allows more nuance in how you respond to it (as well as giving an additional bonus to having high morale). ** Cover rolls can now do more than 2 damage; previously it would roll once and if you failed you'd take 1 damage and it'd roll again and if that failed two you took 2 total damage. Now each failure does one damage and subtracts 5 from the failure chance before rerolling. So extremely bad danger levels could do a lot of damage. Thanks :) |
|
|
One of the things I liked most about AVWW 1, was that victory, or a clear path of events leading to positive outcomes, wasn't ever an "entitlement" of the player. So rather than hand holding, it more was up to people to forge their own way. In any case, I like that this is still a major element, I just thought it needed refinement. Thanks. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 27, 2013 12:55 pm | Acetyl | New Issue | |
| Jan 28, 2013 2:31 pm | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Jan 28, 2013 2:31 pm | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Jan 28, 2013 2:40 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0030376 | |
| Jan 30, 2013 7:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0030397 | |
| Jan 30, 2013 7:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Status | considering => resolved |
| Jan 30, 2013 7:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Fixed in Version | => 0.722 |
| Jan 30, 2013 7:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Jan 30, 2013 7:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Assigned To | => keith.lamothe |
| Jan 30, 2013 8:10 pm | Acetyl | Note Added: 0030399 |
