Wasteland Wasteland 3 + Battle of Steeltown and Cult of the Holy Detonation Expansions Thread

[Frank Capicoli]

Well, obviously when you can't have pigs in frozen wasteland you don't have pigs fat.

Pigs are one of the most numerous animal types in the game. The people that curate the pig farm have a trade agreement with Colorado Springs.

 

[Raghar]

How can they have enough feed for pigs in frozen wasteland?

 

[Hellion]

Itz happening.

PS. The post loads just fine, just disable your stupid adblocks.

 

[Atlantico]

Pigs are one of the most numerous animal types in the game.

A topic you are eminently familiar with, rusty_shackleford

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Pigs are one of the most numerous animal types in the game.

A topic you are eminently familiar with, rusty_shackleford

Dance monkey dance.

Sorry that your love for rusty is still being ignored by the way but there is still plenty of fish in the ocean for you.

 

[grimace]

 

[Atlantico]

Dance monkey dance.

Sorry that your love for rusty is still being ignored by the way but there is still plenty of fish in the ocean for you.

Rusty's alt being all uppity

 

[Infinitron]

Summary of Matt Chat interview: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/matt-chat-thread.52503/page-76#post-6941112

 

[Frank Capicoli]

 

[Atlantico]

Amerifag gonna amerifag.

 

[DeepOcean]

Seen alot of Nu-XCOM cargo cult from both Fargo and that design guy, dumb copy paste cargo cult at that with the whole wanting a "fast and lethal" combat talk . Not a wonder how the combat system ended the way it did. It seems faster and lethal took priority over makes sense and not broken.

 

[Pegultagol]

I agree that the armor system especially on harder difficulties results in such a quick turnover of your party that it isn't too uncommon to see half your party go down for count after a bad outcome out of cutscene. It's like every party member is a glass cannon.

The game seems to have papered over this shortcoming or pitfalls by

• cheap health food items (ramen, buns, etc.) that heal 100% HP and other bonus and can be equipped mid-battle without spending action point
• the fallen character having at least three more chances to be revived, requiring three turns each time before completely knocked out (albeit accruing some penalties each time)
• plethora of abilities regarding first aid and leadership that grant bonus to healing or reviving
• doctors able to bring back fallen comrades, placing him or her again literally in your party fully healed, without lasting consequences for cheap
• multiple health items, including a deployable one, that not only allows healing from distance but over time
• mods that augment armor and increase evasion rates
• etc.

It's just that they really didn't get around to resolving the problem fundamentally but provided a bunch of crutches to help alleviate it. I can see how everything is geared to not care about being knocked out.

 

[DeepOcean]

I agree that the armor system especially on harder difficulties results in such a quick turnover of your party that it isn't too uncommon to see half your party go down for count after a bad outcome out of cutscene. It's like every party member is a glass cannon.

The game seems to have papered over this shortcoming or pitfalls by

• cheap health food items (ramen, buns, etc.) that heal 100% HP and other bonus and can be equipped mid-battle without spending action point
• the fallen character having at least three more chances to be revived, requiring three turns each time before completely knocked out (albeit accruing some penalties each time)
• plethora of abilities regarding first aid and leadership that grant bonus to healing or reviving
• doctors able to bring back fallen comrades, placing him or her again literally in your party fully healed, without lasting consequences for cheap
• multiple health items, including a deployable one, that not only allows healing from distance but over time
• mods that augment armor and increase evasion rates
• etc.

It's just that they really didn't get around to resolving the problem fundamentally but provided a bunch of crutches to help alleviate it. I can see how everything is geared to not care about being knocked out.

What is hilarious as those crutches dont actualy make the combat faster as you will waste turns over and over reviving your party members and it also completely break the difficulty of the game because you can be a really shitty player and end the fight with only a single ranger alive and you won the fight anyway with zero penalties. Double funny is that on the interview, the design guy hinted they will nerf animal whispering and the animals working as meatshields by forcing the Ai to ignore them and shoot at you because the animals working as they were supposedly designed for, broke the balance of the game. Such incredible priorities...

So, they will just completely break animal whisper because it broke the game? Yeah... makes total sense. People are actually using animals as tanks because no character, unless a 80 armor, crit immune, 100% resists, high dodge, 10 strength end game character can tank on this game.I had a pet with 2000hp and it died in one turn on a few fights

All those healing items are useless unless you are talking of the ultimate tank character that I mentioned as I've seen enemies doing 500 damage on a single burst with no crits, how are you going to heal yourself if you fall down on a single turn? You know, the enemies can have 10000 hp while you at best can get 500hp but they do the same damage as you, yeah... makes total sense, you can easily outdamage their massive health, imagine what they can do to you? Jesus, the combat design on this game is so contradictory and a mess of conflicting ideas.

What is infuriating is seeing those useless youtuber clowns, none of those shit for brains are able to say more than "Yeah, ehhhhh... it has funny jokes... it is like the Dark Souls of Fallout..." or do pretentious as fuck 10 hs review that say nothing of value. How your job is to review fucking video games and you are even useless for that?

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

is there a combat/event log in this game? I can't find one, and I do some damage or event and something floats above one of the characters heads and then disappears and I have no idea really WTF just happened, or for how much damage, and I miss most of the experience points I get...is there some sort of fucking event log somewhere? I check the keybinding chart and don't see shit..

 

[Haplo]

Very few enemies actually have 10.000 hp. Maybe some boss mob. Most late game enemies have 1.000-3.500. Which I guess is fitting, as you can still gun them down in 2 turns. Okay, the frogs have a bit more.
And no, they don't deal as much damage as an optimized party with end game weapons does. Neither they have crit resistance/immunity or 60+% resistance to elements. Highest enemy armor is something like 40 vs ~80 for the player. Optimized tank characters can survive very well. But you really need to invest in it (including First Aid with Overheal). AND you need crit immunity or high crit resistance plus elemental resistances.

 

[Luckmann]

... we need to agree to disagree here.

People only ever say this when they have no argument.

... I remember [DOS1] mostly as a game with lots of shallow gimmicks, where character building was generally done around level 5 (incidentally one of my main gripes with W2 - character building generally done at level 1). Then you only add points to same skills and change your MMO gear every level.

None of this is necessarily untrue (just as it is not untrue for Wasteland 3, aside from the MMO gear), but it doesn't change the fact that synergy between skills/abilities were infinitely better.You can pick any two or three skills in D:OS1 and there will be abilities that synergize in some way on the field of battle.

But bringing W2 perks into this discussion? Really? Most of those are boring, numerical perks. Even worse, repetitions with Mk.I, Mk.II and Mk. III progressions.

Again, arguing beside the point. Most of Wasteland 2's perks being fairly simplistic doesn't change the fact that as a whole, there are still more opportunities for synergy and interaction between the various skills and their perks.

My only gripe is that "active" weapon abilities have too long cooldowns and can usually only be used once per combat (per character).

Which wouldn't be a problem if the game actually had a better set of options with better synergy available, since you would be able to switch between what to use in any given situation.

Well, obviously when you can't have pigs in frozen wasteland you don't have pigs fat. You can't have olives either. So what would they use for frying?

Are you this fucking retarded? Are you functionally illiterate? Do you understand the meaning of "even"? I don't know how to convey to someone this unbelievably fucking stupid when something literally doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't have to be pigs fat or olives. You could deep-fry in human grease if you're truly desperate, point being, again, you don't need fucking sunflower oil to deep-fry, you obtuse mongoloid.

And have you cooked?

Yes, because I'm not a violently deficient urban bugman that thinks you need a very specific kind of oil to deep-fry something, and without that particular oil, the world will suddenly forget what deep-frying is.

Imagine someone would want to make favorite food of corrupted cops, who can't work until they finish eating it no mater what, donuts. Pig fat would alter taste.

Well no shit it would. If you ventured outside of your oversocialized hive, you'd realize that there are countless donut recipes and changing practically anything in a recipe is going to alter taste. I would recommend coconut oil, which isn't what most mass-produced donuts are made with, because it is not cost-efficient.

is there a combat/event log in this game?

Of course there isn't.

 

[thesheeep]

Started first - wiped out Liberty, her warbots and almost every other henchman on the first turn. Out of curiosity started second - she wiped floor with my squad, literally. Little crutches like that hacking immunity won't change that at all.

I also had this impression from very early on in the game.
It's not quite as bad as it is, for example, in Expeditions: Viking, but the influence of who goes first is extreme, especially in battles where you have access to your tank.

It's just a natural consequence of these separate turns for factions in combination with a pretty deadly combat - whoever goes first can wreak enough havoc to mostly decide the battle.
What's the problem with the good old initiative order in which all actors in a combat just act according to their speed? It solves all those problems.

Also, of course you can't speed up animations and turns in WL3... instant -10% off any possible score, that's just a no-no.
At least it is rather fast combat in general, they really implemented some stuff to make TB combat quicker.

 

[Luckmann]

It's just a natural consequence of these separate turns for factions in combination with a pretty deadly combat - whoever goes first can wreak enough havoc to mostly decide the battle.
What's the problem with the good old initiative order in which all actors in a combat just act according to their speed? It solves all those problems.

I suspect that the issue is the same as in D:OS2. In D:OS2 they created the round-robin turn order in an effort to curtail "alpha-striking" trivializing combat. Here, I can only speculate on the logic, but the thinking is likely along the lines of simplifying and streamlining gameplay and preventing really bad players from being consistently run over by enemy groups with higher initiative.

The root cause is the same: Lazyness. Creating an environment in which enemies have varying yet consistent levels of initiative takes effort, and in reality - just like in D:OS2 - all enemies of a given type and level likely have identical initiative. Since most opponents in any given encounter will likely be of the same type and level, they would all have the same initiative, meaning that in order to beat all of them, all you need to alpha-strike would be to beat a given threshold, after which your entire group will always go first; because while all your characters will have a spread, say 13, 15, 17, 12, all they really need to do is have over, let's say, 10 initiative.

To avoid this, you'd need to actually put in the effort to make different characters - not just carbon-cut-out opponents with randomized aesthetics - with different stats.

That kind of effort and basic-level polish is far above and beyond what we could ever expect from the likes of Larian or inXile.

There's an extremely simple band-aid solution that I originally suggested to Larian, which was prompty ignored and the thread locked:

The ideal solution, in my mind, would involve rebalancing encounters to avoid massive stacking of initiative as an end-all be-all viable tactic, as well as to add a per-round element of randomness that, despite constituting a random modifier, would not be so strong as to undo the benefits of getting a higher initiative.

While obviously completely untested, my suggestion would be to flip the aforementioned switch and thus go back to an initiative-based turn order, and then, round-by-round, modify every participant's initiative by +/- (essentially either add or withdraw) 1d[total initaitive/2].

What would this mean? It would mean that someone with an Initiative would have a per-round Initiative range of 5-15. Someone with 20 Initiative would have a per-round Initiative of 10-30. Notice how the average is always equal to your base initiative, meaning that if you have 13 initiative, during the course of all your rounds, you will average out at 13. Your initiative still matters just as much as it did before.

 

[thesheeep]

The root cause is the same: Lazyness. Creating an environment in which enemies have varying yet consistent levels of initiative takes effort, and in reality - just like in D:OS2 - all enemies of a given type and level likely have identical initiative. Since most opponents in any given encounter will likely be of the same type and level, they would all have the same initiative, meaning that in order to beat all of them, all you need to alpha-strike would be to beat a given threshold, after which your entire group will always go first; because while all your characters will have a spread, say 13, 15, 17, 12, all they really need to do is have over, let's say, 10 initiative.

The thing is, if you invested so much in the Speed stat to reliably win initiative, you wouldn't invest in other stats and thus your bonus of acting first would be way less meaningful.
Plus, initiative should always be rolled, never deterministic to prevent exactly such abuse. Sure, you can savescum around that, but if you seriously savescum until all your guys act first, then nothing on this planet can ever help you find enjoyment in games.

And finally, I feel the easiest solution would be to simply make the first round less important.
Increase the starting distance between the factions so the first round would be about positioning more than damage.
Hell, prevent attacking during the first round so that only movement can be done.
Make combat less deadly so 1-turn wiping any character becomes barely possible or only with concentrated effort - of course that would make combat take longer again, but I feel that'd be an alright price to pay.
Give everyone a free positioning-only round before the "real" combat + real initiative starts.

There are so many ways to tackle this, I just don't get what the big deal is.
I guess you might be right with laziness...

 

[Infinitron]

The real root cause is that after two consecutive commercial disasters with more experimental titles, inXile wisely decided to just play it safe and clone XCOM.

 

[Luckmann]

The thing is, if you invested so much in the Speed stat to reliably win initiative, you wouldn't invest in other stats and thus your bonus of acting first would be way less meaningful.

Yes, but alpha-strikes are extremely powerful, especially in systems that are poorly balanced and favor rocket-tag. You'd need to make the initiative trade-off meaningful and you'd want for initiative to not be a purely deterministic factor; both of these things would require effort, and for the developers to actually play their own game, likely multiple times, in order to tune encounters - something we know for a fact that they haven't.

Plus, initiative should always be rolled, never deterministic to prevent exactly such abuse. Sure, you can savescum around that, but if you seriously savescum until all your guys act first, then nothing on this planet can ever help you find enjoyment in games.

Yeah, as you can see, I agree, 100%. For whatever reason, however, initiative tends to not be rolled in CRPGs. It's a weird meta.

The real root cause is that after two consecutive commercial disasters with more experimental titles, inXile wisely decided to just play it safe and clone XCOM.

If this is meant to be a clone of nu-COM, it is an exceptionally poor one, and invalidating Initiative as a mechanic after putting it into the game seems like a very odd hill to die on for the purpose of making the game more like nu-COM.

 

[DeepOcean]

The real root cause is that after two consecutive commercial disasters with more experimental titles, inXile wisely decided to just play it safe and clone XCOM.

Xcom was about you having a bunch of soldiers that can easily die on one to two shots but it had a bunch of systems to support that design decision, your soldiers are replaceable, there are no unique companions on the battles, soldiers get injuried and you have to wait for them to recover, if the soldier dies, there are no infinite money or recruits to keep supporting all those deaths forever, nations can pull out and etc. Xcom works on a higher scale is very impersonal, focused on strategy, RPGs tend to be more personal focused on quests and small scale tactics. Nu-XCOM, while popamole, still keep many of the same design decisions.

Just taking the "Visceral and lethal" maketing buzz words combat of XCOM without caring into adapting it on a context that makes sense on a RPG scale, copying Nu-XCOM seems like ignorant cargo cult for marketing points for me.

 

[Saduj]

So any turned based game with cover mechanics is NuXcom now?

 

[DeepOcean]

So any turned based game with cover mechanics is NuXcom now?

More like any turn based game that goes for flash over substance, NuXCOM is more like a symbol of decline than the only shitty TB game out there. Plenty of nu-TB games with decline combat systems copying each other as developers think anything more complex than super babies tactics light will make normies bleed from all orifices.

 

[Infinitron]

So any turned based game with cover mechanics is NuXcom now?

I was referring to the squad-based turn system, which is in oldXCOM as well as nu.