Underrail: The Incline Awakens

[oneself]

I love locusts. They are so fun and engaging.

 

[ciox]

The primary decision in a mana system is that I have a finite, common resource, and so I must play a zero sum game, and decide which skills should eat up that mana. One of cooldowns' primary differences from mana or even Vancian is that the costs become totally disconnected. (Conversely, Underrail mitigates this through scarcity of AP.)

"Mana on an individual ability basis" just makes zero sense whatsoever in this conversation.

Underrail already has mana for PSI. If you add stamina for e.g. melee attacks and it doesn't interact with psi points(like luka suggested) they are disconnected. The more colours you add, the closer you get to cooldowns.

It doesn't make much sense.

Just have one bar for everything like in my system.
And no boosters either, just accelerators like this one https://www.underrail.com/wiki/index.php?title=Psionic_Accelerator

OK, I see where you're coming from. I wasn't talking about adding mana to Underrail, though. I don't fundamentally have a big problem with cooldowns in Underrail, and if we were changing it it would be a more systemic overhaul than just tacking on 'stamina'. That wouldn't make any sense and I can't imagine anyone arguing for it.

More generally, I do maintain that there are better ways to have meaningful costs and tradeoffs, and that Underrail is an example of successfully mitigating cooldowns' flaws rather than cooldowns making UR fantastic. Adrenaline is a good example of how there's a unique and sensible consequence that adds a different kind of decision-making. I'd also be interested in someone's idea earlier about how there's limits on spamming certain types of actions in a given turn.

The idea of putting limits on how many times an action can be used per turn sounds suspiciously cooldown-ish to me, balancing stuff by setting very arbitrary limits on them that then get changed willy-nilly by patches, e.g 3 bursts per turn, then 2 years later it's 4 bursts per turn, then 1 month later it's back to 3 bursts per turn, then 4 years later it's back to 4 bursts per turn again... MMO/Blizzard style. (and Quick Tinkering unfortunately enough)
This is why I like the idea of turn enders, abilities that absolutely shouldn't be used more than once per turn are set to be actions that end your turn, everything else is balanced carefully with resource expenditure and power values.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[ciox]

so who did spears better? underrail or aod?

More like Fallout 2.

Speaking of which, Expedition has so many similiarities with Fallout 2.
You have the spears, the healing powder, the tribals, the brahmin (bison), the car that runs on energy cells and has a big trunk, the muties that used to be quite hostile but now have a large town that's friendly, the...

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[ciox]

so who did spears better? underrail or aod?

More like Fallout 2.

Speaking of which, Expedition has so many similiarities with Fallout 2.
You have the spears, the healing powder, the tribals, the brahmin (bison), the car that runs on energy cells and has a big trunk, the muties that used to be quite hostile but now have a large town that's friendly, the...

not like its first fallout related oddity but expedition introduced geck

Very true, and

Spoiler

that Acorn thingy

is kind of like a GECK also.

 

[Marten Broadcloak]

Have decided to get rid of the natives to avoid future invasions, but I'm stumbling upon Magnar. Any idea how to get rid of his ghost as a psi build without the torch yet? It seems most vulnerable to fire, but I'm not sure it's enough to kill him.

 

[BING XI LAO]

From my playthrough I got the impression that you don't need to kill Magnar's map to stop the invasions.

 

[Blackmill]

- Metathermics isn't great. It's very good early on when Cryokinesis is your best ability. And Thermodynamic Destabilization is your way for dealing with crowds before you get Locus of Control. But after that it is rarely used. Maybe droppable.

- The build lacks a way to fight machines. The robot spam in parts of Expedition is nearly unbeatable in combat for this build. Fighting 8+ 700 health robots with near immunity to mechanical, heat, and frost damage just isn't possible. And the crowded rooms in some areas make sneaking very hard. It would be good to have a backup plan if caught while sneaking.

This is where Metathermics and Thermodynamic Destabilization come into play. Mark a Strongman, drop a Proxy and send a crit Tele Punch into his face. Doesn't matter how much they resist when each punch hits for 1k+. This was usually enough to kill him and the rest of the pack that I funneled into a corridor. Only enemy during Expedition that gave me some issues were the Protectors, but nothing that stopped the game.

I know your build was primarily about sneaking but Metathermics ended up being really good for my Dominating psi run.

Good to know. I couldn't try this, since I had no Electronics or Biology skill for the Expedition, so no good Headband. And I think I would need to be higher level or have more Will anyways to do enough damage with the Telekinetic Punch. But it seems like the Destabilization wouldn't be enough by itself to blow up the others. Strongmen have 70% mechanical resistance and 90% heat resistance. Something like 450 effective would be needed, right? Follow up with a MK III plasma grenade?

 

[Alexios]

so who did spears better? underrail or aod?

More like Fallout 2.

Speaking of which, Expedition has so many similiarities with Fallout 2.
You have the spears, the healing powder, the tribals, the brahmin (bison), the car that runs on energy cells and has a big trunk, the muties that used to be quite hostile but now have a large town that's friendly, the...

It really needs a travel map for the jetski though.

 

[Fenix]

- The build lacks a way to fight machines.

If your main tool for that is Psychokinesis and Electrokinesis, then Psychostatic Electricity could be of some use.

But was it really necessary? Could they have been designed differently?

I feel that 25% of character HP is way too cheap for that. If you are 3 Con build, you shouldn't get hit at all anyway, and TM gives you a tons of possiilities fo rthat in exchange for 25% HP that never actually will be spent.

 

[Blackmill]

But was it really necessary? Could they have been designed differently?

I feel that 25% of character HP is way too cheap for that. If you are 3 Con build, you shouldn't get hit at all anyway, and TM gives you a tons of possiilities fo rthat in exchange for 25% HP that never actually will be spent.

Plus, the feats have no will requirement. For many builds it's just a 55-60 skill point investment (plus one or two feats) with effectively no other downside.

 

[Blaine]

It really needs a travel map for the jetski though.

Funnily enough, I've been thinking along those lines for the past couple of weeks, although I don't believe a simple dotted-line travel map would suffice.

While the Black Sea probably boasts a decent-sized "screen count," it nevertheless ends up feeling very small. Even in the slowest jet ski loaded to capacity with cargo, every location is pretty much just a quick handful of screens away from every other location in a roughly semicircular configuration. One almost wonders why the coordinate system exists at all except as set dressing.

Furthermore, for some reason (probably the random Jet Skier NPCs and [no doubt scripted] faction patrols) I'd been expecting danger and unpredictable encounters when I got my very first jet ski. I expected to see pirates just around the corner in South Underrail, or to run into sea serpents unexpectedly in the Black Sea. You will run into sea serpents unexpectedly exactly once, but then never again. Like rathounds, they always respawn in the same spots, and if you avoid those spots, safety is assured. The pirates never seem to venture past their ports, at least in my game.

Basically, the Black Sea is a static little pond. Underrail's room-by-room structure works when on foot and when those rooms comprise a very large, many-layered, interconnected maze; not so much when aboard a fast vehicle and the rooms comprise a relatively small, mostly single-layered, open half-circle of points of interest.

I think that "faux travel" would have worked much better. Basically, in order to travel, the player would first navigate into open water, then select a heading (based on discovered coordinates, some landmark seen in the distance [described through dialogue], guesswork, at random, etc.) and "sail" toward that heading much as an actual ship would. Your jet ski would animate moving, but remain centered on the screen. After a short while, the screen would fade to black, then fade in at (or near) the desired destination, at the wrong destination/middle of nowhere, at an intervening destination (a small isle, for example), into a random encounter, or possibly even go off-course.

Instead there is a glorified swimming pool surrounded by a semicircle of pests to exterminate. Sail the high seas... for about one minute, until you reach your destination. Granted, "faux travel" wouldn't add much more DOWNTIME to travel, but it would add a greater sense of scale and a lot more room for navigational error.

 

[HoboForEternity]

so i just bought the phaser jet ski.

it's fast!!!

 

[Blaine]

so i just bought the phaser jet ski.

it's fast!!!

That was my first jet ski. It's literally all been downhill from there. The only one that's faster ends up being slower unless you ride it naked.

Don't try to take it into combat versus humans though, because one well-placed burst from a pirate riding a floating garbage bin will sink it.

 

[Parabalus]

The primary decision in a mana system is that I have a finite, common resource, and so I must play a zero sum game, and decide which skills should eat up that mana. One of cooldowns' primary differences from mana or even Vancian is that the costs become totally disconnected. (Conversely, Underrail mitigates this through scarcity of AP.)

"Mana on an individual ability basis" just makes zero sense whatsoever in this conversation.

Underrail already has mana for PSI. If you add stamina for e.g. melee attacks and it doesn't interact with psi points(like luka suggested) they are disconnected. The more colours you add, the closer you get to cooldowns.

It doesn't make much sense.

Just have one bar for everything like in my system.
And no boosters either, just accelerators like this one https://www.underrail.com/wiki/index.php?title=Psionic_Accelerator

That shared bar is already exists, that's AP.

But was it really necessary? Could they have been designed differently?

I feel that 25% of character HP is way too cheap for that. If you are 3 Con build, you shouldn't get hit at all anyway, and TM gives you a tons of possiilities fo rthat in exchange for 25% HP that never actually will be spent.

Plus, the feats have no will requirement. For many builds it's just a 55-60 skill point investment (plus one or two feats) with effectively no other downside.

Styg did say he intended for TM to be useful as a dip for non-PSI characters, he certainly fulfilled that promise.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[hell bovine]

I have to admit, deep caverns are even more annoying than I remember them to be. I'll be taking a break, because the locust/crab/spider spam has exhausted my patience reserves.

The more I look at the encounter design, the more it seems to me as if Styg is taking inspiration from real time games, and then simply transplanting them into turn based. Styg , if you are taking feedback, that's one sure way to kill fun. Zergling rush is fun in Starcraft, because you can move all zerglings simultaneously, so it is a fast-paced action even if you have a huge stack of them. Building a huge skeleton army in HoMM III is fun too, because your 1000+ skelly stack is moving and attacking as a single unit. Both tactics are based on the same idea - producing a huge no. of cheap and weak units quickly - and both work, because they don't try to do it the same way.

Consider the following: those locusts a hive is producing every turn could have been created as a single "swarm" unit, which attacks with mutliple stings. Because it would be a single unit, this would take only one turn. Even if you let a hive run dry, this would result in maybe 5 enemy units total, but the damage would be the same, provided you'd code each swarm to attack like a shotgun, that is fire several shots with separate chances of hitting. What would be different is that the player wouldn't have to wait several turns for the enemies to finish their actions.

 

[Blackmill]

So, you can dodge the Gauntlet's electro-death with Stasis.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Ok, but you still lost it, right?

 

[Blackmill]

Ok, but you still lost it, right?

Still won. And the poor runner who beat me to the finish had walked back onto the electrical tiles.

 

[None]

- Metathermics isn't great. It's very good early on when Cryokinesis is your best ability. And Thermodynamic Destabilization is your way for dealing with crowds before you get Locus of Control. But after that it is rarely used. Maybe droppable.

- The build lacks a way to fight machines. The robot spam in parts of Expedition is nearly unbeatable in combat for this build. Fighting 8+ 700 health robots with near immunity to mechanical, heat, and frost damage just isn't possible. And the crowded rooms in some areas make sneaking very hard. It would be good to have a backup plan if caught while sneaking.

This is where Metathermics and Thermodynamic Destabilization come into play. Mark a Strongman, drop a Proxy and send a crit Tele Punch into his face. Doesn't matter how much they resist when each punch hits for 1k+. This was usually enough to kill him and the rest of the pack that I funneled into a corridor. Only enemy during Expedition that gave me some issues were the Protectors, but nothing that stopped the game.

I know your build was primarily about sneaking but Metathermics ended up being really good for my Dominating psi run.

Good to know. I couldn't try this, since I had no Electronics or Biology skill for the Expedition, so no good Headband. And I think I would need to be higher level or have more Will anyways to do enough damage with the Telekinetic Punch. But it seems like the Destabilization wouldn't be enough by itself to blow up the others. Strongmen have 70% mechanical resistance and 90% heat resistance. Something like 450 effective would be needed, right? Follow up with a MK III plasma grenade?

When I was doing all this I was like level 22-25. Effective skill was at ~300. 185% crit bonus. Destabilization was also doing like 360% damage. If the combo didn't work right out of the gate just drop Entropic Reoccurence and an Imprint and back up into a room or something.

 

[oneself]

Does Aegis camp defense get progressively harder? I am on my fifth defense and there seems to be more of them now, and Skaeder are.. different.

I don't remember it being like this.

 

[Black Angel]

Have decided to get rid of the natives to avoid future invasions, but I'm stumbling upon Magnar. Any idea how to get rid of his ghost as a psi build without the torch yet? It seems most vulnerable to fire, but I'm not sure it's enough to kill him.

Drink the Juice, stack Temporal Distortions on him and Stasis on the next turn (when TDs staccs have 1 turn left to trigger) to put more staccs of TDs on him.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Does Aegis camp defense get progressively harder? I am on my fifth defense and there seems to be more of them now, and Skaeder are.. different.

I don't remember it being like this.

i just went straight to their village on cleanse them, they never appear anymore