Arcanum: Balance Issues

[Grump]

Guns are weak due to the lack of specialized ammo and omission of targeted shots and a ton of other reasons.

Called shots are in. RTFM.

Well how? If the stuff I mentioned isn't missing it certainly isn't obvious...My copy didn't come with a manual...and no...its not because I downloaded it from crackz.com

 

[Hümmelgümpf]

Well how? If the stuff I mentioned isn't missing it certainly isn't obvious...My copy didn't come with a manual...and no...its not because I downloaded it from crackz.com

Try holding ",", "." or "/" while you're aiming.

 

[inwoker]

just roleplay targeted shots

 

[somnium]

looking glass rifle:
40-40 damage is almost surely another typo. There's really no reason to use any other weapon. It's better than the vendigroth gun, even. It should probably do 15-20 damage or so, but really everything needs to be rebalanced a bit.

huh? I don't remember it doing that kind of damage. A quick search on gamebanshee confirms that. It does 10-30 damage and has a speed of 1. It's main advantage is it's long range.

Elephant gun:
Uses too many bullets per shot, and too slow. This should functuon more like the looking glass rifle currently does, but even so without quite the damage and speed.

It currently only used 2 bullets per shot witch is fine in my opinion. Maybe it should be a somewhat faster, but not that much as it is quite powerful already

Mechanized gun:
If the bullets suggestion is taken to heart this one will become a viable option. Otherwise it's good for only a few fights.

I would suggest having a high mechanical skill required for making it(right now it only requires gun-smithy)but make it only use one bullet per shot.

Special weapons:
The ones that require being a doctorate in two different fields are ridiculously underpoowered. To get to that level your character will be seriously gimped. They should do some serious, heinous damage if you manage to make them.

I don't know, the Tesla gun which is quite powerful already. Could you explain how the flame-thrower and grenade launcher function as I have never made them?

Feedback on some of the other guns:

Rifled Cannon: It should do more damage then the current 10-30 since it requires a gun from another found/bought schematic (the Charged Accelerator Gun), requires 3 technical skills, uses 5 bullets and has a speed of 2.

Charged Accelerator Gun: Right now it uses 3 bullets witch is ridicules considering the damage(1-15 + 10 electrical), it's requirements (Gun Smithy 50, Electrical 53) and illogical as the picture clearly shows a gun witch is designed to fire one bullet at a time. I would suggest making it require only one bullet

On the general tech vs magic balance: you might want to consider raising all guns damage output(or lowering all spell damage) by a certain percentage as most damage spells do more damage per second then any gun with maximum magical Aptitude (yes even harm).

Yes spell require fatigue but that can easily be countered by caring lots of blue or pink potions(I don't remember their names) witch is much cheaper, less heavy and more efficient then bullets, if you miss you still get halve the damage, you have no problems with range, you miss much less often them than with guns in the beginning, the top tire damage spells require far less skill points to get and in addition guns often require components to make that are difficult to acquire.
So all thing considering I think the guns should be more damaging then the comparative damage dealing spells(ignoring the broken disintegrate).

As for spell balance here is a nice link where the average damage is compared to the fatigue cost. As you can see harm's damage is quite a lot. Having more average damage then a higher level spell(Jolt) for less cost and having the best fatigue use/damage apart from Disintegrate. Witch way to powerful for a level one spell.

 

[Krancor]

gamebanshee is wrong about the looking glass rifle, but it could be due to a patch.

I should have said harpoon gun, not elephant gun, which takes six and is painful in its slowness.

To make the most difficult special weapons you'd need to make your character into a complete gimp incapable of fighting any other wasy so they should be pretty damn good.

I've made all of them at some point and I remember being extremely disappointed in the hardest to make ones.

 

[LaDoushe]

The looking glass rifle was 40-40 everytime I played, but I don't know if I ever bothered with the patch. It was also very slow in TB, but average speed in RT. Particularly against golems, it was useful to put the game into RT and just blast and run.

 

[Crichton]

The looking glass rifle damage was fixed in the patch, but it's still one of the most efficient guns.

I tried making a mod to balance all the items in Arcanum a few years ago and gave up since there's really no point. If all you do is choose the actions for one character in an indirect control setting, the gameplay's going to be shit no matter what.

The biggest problem in arcanum is that dex gives more action points so it's worth more than any other stat because a high dex character is moving in bullet time. The things that I thought were most important to counteract this were:

a) make every weapon of the same class a similar speed

b) make the STR requirements for high base damage weapons very high

Most of the other stuff was minor. The bonus damage on some tech weapons is too high (pyrotechnic axe), others are too low (charged gun), others I'm not sure (charged sword, pyrotechnic bow).

Since the DoT for poison is so low and so easily counteracted, all poison weapons need a boatload of poison damage to even get the player to notice it. Ditto for fatigue damage only weapons like the tranq gun.

Most of the guns that you can make aren't worth making due to high ammo usage. The one exception, oddly enough, is the mechanised gun, because it allows for 25 shots a round. However those 25 shots will cost you 125 bullets, so you'll only use it for a really meaningful fight.

Bullets are very easy to acquire in quantity by ripping off merchants while they sleep, but they still weigh you down.

Oddly enough, most spells also aren't worth casting and they're only worth learning to bump up magic aptitude.

Grump-

Life is obviously going to be very hard for you and I can't help you.

However on the specific issue of Arcanum's schematics, RTFM!

Every schematic ingredient has an icon in the top left showing the skill required.

 

[somnium]

One other thing is that the movement rate of most creatures (in particularly golems) is way to high in the turn based mode making a ranged character very difficult to play in turn based . You could negate that by constantly switching between turn based and real-time as I did, but that is obviously very tedious.

 

[Claw]

As you can see harm's damage is quite a lot. Having more average damage then a higher level spell(Jolt) for less cost and having the best fatigue use/damage apart from Disintegrate.

Eh, I thought jolt was supposed to hit more than one target.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

The real problem with Arcanum's balance is the enemies, not the PC options.

All the enemies can do is fucking hit things. They don't fling spells, they rarely use ranged attacks, they don't use items or supportive magic to beef themselves up and force you to counter that, they just go HURRRRRRRR *charge*. Even the final boss. Troika's idea of variety was easily avoidable gimmicks like what golems and mechs have, while their idea of challenge was talking a generic melee monster and cranking either its stats or its numbers way, way up, instead of giving it actual tricks to play with. Not that either of these measures were common in their own right, most enemies were puny as well as boring.

What the shit is the point of tweaking and balancing things on the PC end if you still have nothing but samey cannon fodder to use your rebalanced tools on?

Not strictly a balance issue, but only being able to control your PC while your followers do whatever is almost never works in RPGs, and Arcanum isn't one of the exceptions. Full control over henchmen, please, Bioware and Black Isle had been mixing full control with isometric real-time-with-pause for a long time before Arcanum came out. This would be even more noticeable if enemies actually became competent.

 

[chuft]

Chris Beddoes did a "Hard Arcanum" mod, didn't he? A lot of ideas in that one as I recall. I think it later became "Car Arcanum." I seem to recall Chris added a lot of Fatigue to people/creatures to make them cast more spells, since he figured out that in turn-based, spellcasters and monsters would be very conservative with their Fatigue and tended not to cast spells as a result.

I like to play turn-based, and in addition to some mods of my own to make tech characters better, I often follow some "house rules," such as no followers, no Expert or Master training in Prowling, no Expert training in anything till level 30, no Master level in anything till level 40, walking back and forth four times each time I throw a grenade to dock myself 4 APs for it, etc.

I have noticed a lot of cool stuff happens in real time, like spellcasting and bombs being thrown, that does not seem to happen in turn based. Unfortunately real time is way too fast for me to play it that way. What I would really like is some way to adjust the speed of real time play (in my case, probably lower it to one-tenth its current speed) so I could play it that way and see all the stuff I normally only see in turn-based when creatures are running up and we are not in turn-based yet - like Sebastian throwing grenades. A pause would be nice too. But these things are probably not possible.

Making turn-based harder would probably require making the monsters a lot tougher, especially the random ones like the Molochean Hand, orcs outside Tarant, kites, etc. so the encounter would scale to the character's level. I think Chris did this too, unfortunately Car Arcanum changed so many things and created so many new areas I was rather overwhelmed.

 

[chuft]

By the way if anybody knows a way to get rid of the music, which I am really sick of, and instead have the cool ambient sounds like you have by the docks at night (ocean), insects on the plains, frogs at night in the swamp, weird sounds in the Glimmering Forest etc. I would appreciate it.

The only reason I don't turn the music off completely is because in certain places or certain times of day, the string quartet finally shuts up and I hear something cool and not melancholy.

 

[chuft]

Depends what you mean by a problem. Every Fallout/2 character I play has 10 Dex, since 10 gives you two shots/turn instead of 1. You can do this at the start of the game, and Dex can't go higher (though APs can, a little) so there is a huge incentive to have a 10 Dex right from the start.

The problem with Dex in Arcanum is so many skills use it, in addition to it determining action points. Having skills based on stats is interesting, but too many are dependent on the stat that also gives you action points.

 

[Kz3r0]

Like people said, enemies in Arcanum are really weak. I don't remember anyone throwing a spell at me, even Khergan.

I remember patriarch wolf calling a succour beast, fire elementals shooting fireflash, molten arachnids as well, dread spiders casting stun,waromons summoning fire elemental, minor and hig level leech casting stun, poisonous vapours, harm, summonig undead and so on, I play always in hard mode however.

 

[Kz3r0]

Let's discuss the balance (or lack of thereof) in Arcanum. I heard so many opinions on it, that I got confused. How's it in reality? And is it fixable?

Arcanum is taylored on specific character play, it can cause some inconsistencies, but I don't see how you can address them without breack the game or undermining some build, penalizing the roleplay experience forcing choices out of character to progress in the game.
I think it's possible some refinement but not that much, imho.

Some people say that technological stuff is not balanced. Well, I can say so about balanced (haha) swords, pyrotechnic axes and charged rings.

Dwarf tech warrior rulez.
And if you play with a disadvantaged character? you should have some form of compensation.

Considering magick, many people complain that harm spell is overpowered. And then there's unresistable disintegrate spell. Temporal college spells are considered overpowered as well.

If you want play a full fledged necromancer you can't have hampered spells, you can raise their requirements though.

There are many engine issues as well. For example, backstab skill is overpowered. Normally, it just adds bonus damage to a hit, but if you backstab an unaware creature, then all creature's armor and resistances get completely ignored, you hit its HPs directly in this case. And you can spend just 2 cps on the Stun Spell. Stunned creatures are considered unaware as well as when you attack while prowling. My character had full melee and dodge skills (with apprentice training) and full backstab skill with no training, and I was using an arcane dagger (max 18 dmg, even with 20 strength). I went to Stringy Pete, stunned him and backstabbed him in 18 hits, he didn't even recover from stun (it always takes two turns). He had 300HPs and 82% DR, as you can see his resistances were completely ignored. Stun spell works on all creatures except mechanical ones, and what's more if you get an expert training in backstab, it allows you to backstab with swords and axes, you can imagine damage to an unaware creature. A master of prowling can conceal oneself even during combat and backstab ignoring resistances too, but you get the training a bit late in the game.

All hail the ninja way.

There's also a problem with throwing items (they don't use APs in turn-based), which is also related to the engine.

Well this is the point to use throwing weapons.

Another exploitable bug was automatons. If you conceal yourself (prowling, invisibility spell) you could pick up hostile automatons and make them your army!

.
If you can make this dependant on repair skill it will be like in kotor with robots, sounds cool to me.

 

[Severian Silk]

If you had a bar graph which illustrated the amount of unbalance in a spell, weapon, skill, or so forth, the ones that would stand out are obviously harm, balanced swords, and backstab. Whacking them back into line would do the game good.

This gave me the idea that maybe someone should create one of those rating sites where visitors rate each item on a scale of 1 to 5--in this case based on how "imbalanced" they think an item is. I think there are sites which offer these types of services for free.

Setting it up programatically might be a problem, though. One would need to, as there are lots of items!

 

[chuft]

Hmmm

Well I have tweaked a lot of items, modding mundane shields to be weaker (so the Flow Disruptor shield is worth something), magic shields to be better (they are worse than the ones you buy in the store), and rebalancing guns so the higher level ones are always better and they do comparable damage to what a melee character with a high strength could do. I have made studded leather weigh a lot less (so there is some incentive to actually use it instead of leather or chain), changed Torg's blessing to give you thief bonuses (so thieves in the early game can actually do something), ditto with Arbalagh's Blessing, made Absinthe essentially a thief potion (again, because Lockpick is so worthless until high levels), made Aqua Vitae a Disarm Traps potion, completely remade the Therapeutics discipline, remade various useless schematics into cool things, made Pyrotechnic Axe weaker, made Flamethrower easier to make....but the bottom line is the game is still too easy on turn-based and too hard (for me anyway) in real time, except against slow creatures like golems.

I play by the honor system of docking myself 4 APs for each grenade thrown. I also made some tech background changes (large bonuses to IQ and PE), and 1st level Gunsmithy now makes a Rifle, not a useless Crude Flintlock Pistol, so you could play a gunner without having to use molotovs to survive at low levels.

One thing that bugs me is almost all XPs come from putting hits on creatures. I have raised the experience awards for completing quests but it is still no substitute for having all your followers hang back, and shooting everything yourself. I tried arming my followers with blunt weapons to do little damage but the strength bonuses were still overwhelming. If I let them fight, I get virtually no XPs from an encounter. If they hold back (F5), I get lots. This means I essentially am forced to play a character that does a lot of damage, and never have my followers participate in a battle, if I want to get to high enough levels to play with the cool toys.

I am thinking maybe I should have an "honor system" character background that gives you a huge bonus on XPs earned - like 100% - but you have to never order your followers to "hang back" in combat. That way diplomatic and thiefy characters could earn significant experience from having their followers do the fighting. Of course if you have no followers, or order them to wait out of sight, you would get huge amounts of experience, but you would not have a party backing you up if something went wrong. (Not that the Attack (F2) key seems to work for me after giving an F5 order, but that sounds like a bug. And my followers tend to heal me even if they are "hanging back".)

I wish there was some way to increase experience from "enemy deaths" and decrease it from "hits put on enemy" but I don't know how to do that, or if it is even possible.

 

[Earth Nuggets]

Not really a balance issue, but I always felt that Velorien's blessing hands out some pretty useless skill upgrades. I was rather disappointed with the results, seeing as how solving Mazzerin's Mystery is a time-consuming affair.

Considering that his altar is found late in the game, it seems silly that the developers made one of the bonuses +12 ranks (the effect of 3 character points invested into a skill) to Persuasion, seeing as how 95% through the game, there's certainly not much a player would be able to talk himself through. There's also the problem of someone maxing the bar and then going back to Caladon to do the mastery quest. It just seems odd considering that the tension is high at this point in the story, with the gravity of the main quest and the solution now obvious. Others might disagree, but I also think the 12 extra ranks to Firearms is also unnecessary. Anyone using another combat skill would probably find this boost rather worthless. On the other hand, anyone actually using firearms, by this late point in the game has most likely already received master training. The +12 ranks to Melee you also receive from the blessing are definitely not as worthless, as many players use the skill as a backup in certain scenarios (and probably have not maxed it).

Luckily, the effects of the blessing are in the effect.mes file, so it's simple editing them. My changes are as follows: +12 ranks to Heal (another social skill) instead of Persuasion, as well as +12 to Repair (another tech skill) instead of Firearms. As combat is the meat of the game, I'd say that my replacement skills make a bit more sense than the ones chosen, as players might have previously considered them mere afterthoughts. I'd also guess that it's more likely that even if points have been invested into these skills, they have not been maxed.

Anyone else have any thoughts on the blessings?