Colony Ship Early Access Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Quigs]

No economy can be balanced if you loot all bodies after large fights that require allies. Not to mention it makes no sense if you help a faction and then claim all loot as your reward.

What'd be the harm in some kind of Bilbo Baggins method? Sign on for a share of loot, or possibly give up your share for one selected item? Still lets you loot during fights, doesn't break everything.

 

[Vault Dweller]

No economy can be balanced if you loot all bodies after large fights that require allies. Not to mention it makes no sense if you help a faction and then claim all loot as your reward.

What'd be the harm in some kind of Bilbo Baggins method? Sign on for a share of loot, or possibly give up your share for one selected item? Still lets you loot during fights, doesn't break everything.

No harm but lots of scripting. Not that we're against such scripting but like any resource it has to be managed properly, considering all scripting-heavy tasks.

 

[Whisper]

Keep in mind that if you disable looting while fighting, you lose some interesting possibilities for emergent combat. Kill a guy with a weapon you could really use for the rest of the fight, go over and loot it and proceed to use it? I'm not saying it will happen often, but you take that option off the table by implementing these nanny restrictions for those that can't help themselves and must loot everything.

The possibility that systems can be used in degenerate ways does not mean that the systems are inherently flawed. I love the idea of killing a character you know has a grenade, to loot it and then use it on his companions. Again, not something that will even happen for every player - but for those it does happen to, it will create a memorable experience.

Idk; maybe just make it a custom difficulty toggle.

How often you will get other character grenades because you have 0 on yourself?
Common, you will always have some grenades in backpacks.

And even if you have 0 and rely on grabbing that only 1 from combat, you are in trouble for next parts of game and this 1 grenade wont save you.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's been commented on before: some players grabbed better guns, other grabbed ammo or grenades. We might still restrict it for the greater good, but there's something to consider.

 

[Parabalus]

It's been commented on before: some players grabbed better guns, other grabbed ammo or grenades. We might still restrict it for the greater good, but there's something to consider.

The random mooks mostly have sub 100 credits, the current system gives some extra rewards for added difficulty, it's not the worst thing in the world.

Ideally you still want to suicide all allies (less than before, since you fixed them stealing your XP), but if players want to be that degenerate just let them.

 

[vota DC]

Why allow looting in combat, especially in light of the multi-phase fights?

This happened before with the Braxton fight, but factory is full of it. I get you don't want players to loot everything, but atm they still can, it's just extremely gamey.

Is this intentional? Extra loot for spending AP for looting, keeping at least one enemy alive? Extremely degenerate.

If you loot with Smiles it goes into her personal inventory, screen says party inventory.

Also, autosave at the start of combat would be nice, like in DR/AoD.

I'm going lone wolf anyway. Everytime I see an electronic or computers check I leave it to Faythe(I either immediately go back to the pit and grab her or clear everything I can in the area first without triggering those checks).

This is also incredibly annoying, the needed change is allowing you to NOT deploy some party members in a fight. Even in a full party run I'd use that occasionally.

Fail it.

I thought I missed something, but it's just that I don't fail.

It's done in a pretty dumb way, who would ever want to skip that turret encounter intentionally?

Will be changed in the near future.

You should add an option to intentionally fail skill checks, a simple toggle would work fine.

Would fix all currently annoying situations and save you a lot of work on future ones.

They could use greedy people that loot during combat as handicap with opportunity (very risky but otherwise you would lose the loot because you are moving out of there very quickly, for example you are chased or being chased). In ja2 they had Psycho mercs that were happy trigger (in ja1 were even funnier: they refuse to change the target and quit if they don't kill enough) so jew npc that want to loot in middle of fight would be fun.

 

[thelegend]

When is the approx release date for this game?

 

[fantadomat]

When is the approx release date for this game?

When trump is re-elected.

 

[Marat]

When is the approx release date for this game?

Well, we're looking at the end of 2022 already and any delay can push it into 2023. We can do two locations a month, so that's 18 months right there (the Habitat's bigger so it will take 4 months).

Jun - Factory
Aug - Mission Control
Oct - Shuttle Bay
Feb - Habitat and the end of chapter 2
Apr - ECLSS (monks)
Jun - Heart (mutant town)
Aug - Bridge and the end of chapter 3, all locations are done.
Nov - Endgame (chapter 4)

 

[Ihavenoidea]

For me it feels like the new updates pushed the difficulty curve way up - and I've beaten both combat demo and early acces at an earlier point (running a relatively similar solo fighter).
The two thugs, and even first courthourse fight can be pretty challenging currently. I'd say the rating is - fight with Evans/first courthourse fight/two junkies/two guys harrasing another one in the drain iirc.
I understand that you want the game to be hard, but I consider the current difficulty curve - especially for the new players - to be a bit too hard. In a system with a bit easier early game, or maybe a combat skill trainer near courthouse the game would get more coverage I think. Having some more easy early game quests (or even purely cosmetic npcs, like a street preacher you can talk to, and then convince the junkies to abandon their ways for a small gain with the church) might be a better way to go.
Worst comes to worst - a metagamer gets rich and has easier fights. That currently will also happen - you can't stop someone who knows where the locks are from having a stronger lockpicker than a newbie who won't explore everything. It seems like the current development is focused on preventing a "too strong bulid" from happening with the economy changes. I'd say focusing on the 5-20% metagamers/hardcore players (by which I mean someone who playtested around 3 bulids) instead of more smooth difficulty curve (especially regarding combat) might be a bad approach. Were players complaining about how easy the game is compared to AoD?
Could be I'm butthurt my bulid doesn't work as well as it did. Still love to play the game.
Also what current implants are lootable? For example Gideon isn't, right?

 

[Parabalus]

There's a huge difficulty swing between solo and a full party, I doubt an experience as tight as AoD or DR is possible. Or desirable.

 

[Pink Eye]

>Also what current implants are lootable?
As of this patch, or update, or whatever you call it. All of them:

Spoiler

^Not my character. However:
1) Bionic Eye - Can be looted in last Court House Encounter. Also bought from Cole's Gadget.
2) Neural - Can be gained from running Doctor Woman's quest at medbay.
3) Heart - Factory. Requires a 4 in biotic skill. It's on a dead body within a side area near the processing machines.
4) Spinal - Armory. Depot A2. On a dead body. Requires 2 in biotic skill, if I remember.
5) Motor - Armory. First floor. On a dead body behind a heavy container. Another one can be found at Mission Control as well.
6) Cerebal - Can be gained from running Doctor Woman's quest at medbay.
7) Armor - Mission Control. Don't remember which level, but it's behind a door that requires a 5 in computers check. After you get past that door. You need a 5 in elecontrics to access another door. Which is where the implant is located.

Further, a lot of these implants can be looted multiple times throughout the game. For example Motor.

 

[Marat]

1) Bionic Eye - Can be looted in last Court House Encounter. Also bought from Cole's Gadget.

There is also another one to be found in Mission Control, but I can't remembere where exactly.

 

[Pink Eye]

I believe it's on this dead body:

Spoiler

Fourth floor of Mission Control; Security Quarters.

 

[vota DC]

Well with multiple copies of implants a talker can augment his army of followers.

 

[Elhoim]

Regarding looting in combat, I'm currently leaning towards:

- Only be able to loot weapons and grenades (as you said, looting armors is silly).
- Disable looting allies from factions.

I would just disable looting in fights you shouldn't be able to loot afterwards, but I worry a bit about the rule inconsistency that would generate since there's no way for the player to know why is that happening.

 

[Pink Eye]

Meh. Disabling looting during combat won't affect me much. I do most of my looting after combat. Though, when siding with Braxton, I have to loot during combat - because there's too much money to be had at first stage of the final fight against Jonas. Getting all of your allies killed during this stage. Then prolonging the fight with one enemy alive while Faythe picks up loot is how I do it. If you have a lot of medkits. You can start second stage with full health. As you're really not penalized in prolonging encounters. Haven't done it in Black Hand Fort siege as the game kicks you back to title screen after you win. Who knows how much monies you can make with that encounter.

 

[Daedalos]

Disabling looting during combat seems like a good thing to me. How useful is it really? eh How many people actually wants it and will actively use it? eh

you have to compare ALL and any of the "nice-to-haves" in any project to the cost of making said changes...

Given how limited a budget the dev team functions on, you have to trim the fat, and combat looting doenst seem that terribly important tbh..
And looting in general always gave me hoarder vibes, not very useful

and it breaks the economy of the game easily, from all the balancing of ppl hoardinger items from every corpse and box and selling it in a mini.game

 

[Pink Eye]

By the way. You guys should implement a scroll bar for inventory. I'm playing on my laptop while trying to verify something, and discovered that inventory is kind of clunky to manage when you have a million equipment. There's no easy way to scroll down unless you look for a free square. Hold right button. Then you can go down. It's awkward doing this on my mousepad.

 

[Parabalus]

Regarding looting in combat, I'm currently leaning towards:

- Only be able to loot weapons and grenades (as you said, looting armors is silly).
- Disable looting allies from factions.

I would just disable looting in fights you shouldn't be able to loot afterwards, but I worry a bit about the rule inconsistency that would generate since there's no way for the player to know why is that happening.

If you can only partially loot during combat make sure the full inventory is visible, otherwise people might think there's nothing more there and don't check after combat.

A simple "no time to loot, there's an assault" message might do the trick for the main problem.

But these chained fights in assaults are already telegraphed poorly, you have no idea that they will be there in first place when you start it. Also, auto-reload/auto-heal works, but manually obviously doesn't, and you can't change the setting in combat.

 

[Ihavenoidea]

What if looting cost was increased to 12 ap at least so full ap for a min ap bulid? Would it help balancing it in any way?
You can get a grenade, but it takes a lot of time to search a dead body and grab everything you want from it.

 

[agris]

For me it feels like the new updates pushed the difficulty curve way up - and I've beaten both combat demo and early acces at an earlier point (running a relatively similar solo fighter).
The two thugs, and even first courthourse fight can be pretty challenging currently. I'd say the rating is - fight with Evans/first courthourse fight/two junkies/two guys harrasing another one in the drain iirc.
I understand that you want the game to be hard, but I consider the current difficulty curve - especially for the new players - to be a bit too hard. In a system with a bit easier early game, or maybe a combat skill trainer near courthouse the game would get more coverage I think. Having some more easy early game quests (or even purely cosmetic npcs, like a street preacher you can talk to, and then convince the junkies to abandon their ways for a small gain with the church) might be a better way to go.
Worst comes to worst - a metagamer gets rich and has easier fights. That currently will also happen - you can't stop someone who knows where the locks are from having a stronger lockpicker than a newbie who won't explore everything. It seems like the current development is focused on preventing a "too strong bulid" from happening with the economy changes. I'd say focusing on the 5-20% metagamers/hardcore players (by which I mean someone who playtested around 3 bulids) instead of more smooth difficulty curve (especially regarding combat) might be a bad approach. Were players complaining about how easy the game is compared to AoD?
Could be I'm butthurt my bulid doesn't work as well as it did. Still love to play the game.
Also what current implants are lootable? For example Gideon isn't, right?

This is good, Vince should keep it tuned for hardcore and - if needed - introduce an easier setting at the end of development.

Build it and tune it hard as nuts, then dial it down for normies at the end through the inclusion of difficulty modes. Anything else ends up with weak difficulty, or stupid HP bloat to substitute for real difficulty. It's rarely done, but it's much easier to build it strong and tune at end, than build it weak and try to adjust later.

 

[Parabalus]

The above talk about balancing the economy made me remember than in AoD you start having infinite money in Maadoran, but nothing worthwhile to buy.

CS already improved upon the latter (no crafting helps), lots of stuff to buy and spend money on, surely will be more with uniques coming.

For me it feels like the new updates pushed the difficulty curve way up - and I've beaten both combat demo and early acces at an earlier point (running a relatively similar solo fighter).
The two thugs, and even first courthourse fight can be pretty challenging currently. I'd say the rating is - fight with Evans/first courthourse fight/two junkies/two guys harrasing another one in the drain iirc.
I understand that you want the game to be hard, but I consider the current difficulty curve - especially for the new players - to be a bit too hard. In a system with a bit easier early game, or maybe a combat skill trainer near courthouse the game would get more coverage I think. Having some more easy early game quests (or even purely cosmetic npcs, like a street preacher you can talk to, and then convince the junkies to abandon their ways for a small gain with the church) might be a better way to go.
Worst comes to worst - a metagamer gets rich and has easier fights. That currently will also happen - you can't stop someone who knows where the locks are from having a stronger lockpicker than a newbie who won't explore everything. It seems like the current development is focused on preventing a "too strong bulid" from happening with the economy changes. I'd say focusing on the 5-20% metagamers/hardcore players (by which I mean someone who playtested around 3 bulids) instead of more smooth difficulty curve (especially regarding combat) might be a bad approach. Were players complaining about how easy the game is compared to AoD?
Could be I'm butthurt my bulid doesn't work as well as it did. Still love to play the game.
Also what current implants are lootable? For example Gideon isn't, right?

This is good, Vince should keep it tuned for hardcore and - if needed - introduce an easier setting at the end of development.

Build it and tune it hard as nuts, then dial it down for normies at the end through the inclusion of difficulty modes. Anything else ends up with weak difficulty, or stupid HP bloat to substitute for real difficulty. It's rarely down, but it's much easier to build it strong and tune at end, than build it weak and try to adjust later.

I doubt CS can be tuned tightly like AoD or DR, too big of a difference between solo and full party. DR didn't have much of a problem there because it was just combat.

 

[lukaszek]

will there be quick looter perk?

 

[Ihavenoidea]

will there be quick looter perk?

Fairly sure there was - looting/reloading/something else cost reduced in half, rounded up - writing from work so can't check.
Would make the perk more meaningful with high looting in combat cost I think