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1
Strategies / Re: Combat Run Theorycrafting & Open Discussion
« on: October 19, 2015, 02:53:15 PM »
Jesus Christ that is a lot of propulsion slots. I didn't think you could get below 6 delay, but I guess hover units are magic. I tend to kinda neglect them in sneaky builds just because not being able to hop over robots always ends up getting me killed.
I'm pretty sure speeds below 10 are generally unintended (b/c even the best flight prototypes should be 10 speed at most). That said, 10 move delay is more than enough. I tried a speedrun recently and got through Factory / Research with >10 move delay in under 1000 turns, although I ended up getting killed in -1 because of some very poor decisions.
I can't say I've ever had a problem finding cooling. Programmers, sentries, and transport escorts all have em. As long as you aren't fighting a lot, you're not gonna lose them to attrition much, and you can get pretty good units before you leave Materials. Although you really don't want to fight programmers because they're assholes, but still, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Just don't fight Hunters ever because they will always fuck you up.
Turn timer is kind of frustrating. Actually, I would personally prefer if it was *more* RNG. I'm not sure how, but it does seem kind of bad that you can just be very careful and reliably ninja past enemies. Ducking through someone's LoS should be risky, or at least riskier than it is now.
I'm pretty sure speeds below 10 are generally unintended (b/c even the best flight prototypes should be 10 speed at most). That said, 10 move delay is more than enough. I tried a speedrun recently and got through Factory / Research with >10 move delay in under 1000 turns, although I ended up getting killed in -1 because of some very poor decisions.
I can't say I've ever had a problem finding cooling. Programmers, sentries, and transport escorts all have em. As long as you aren't fighting a lot, you're not gonna lose them to attrition much, and you can get pretty good units before you leave Materials. Although you really don't want to fight programmers because they're assholes, but still, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Just don't fight Hunters ever because they will always fuck you up.
Turn timer is kind of frustrating. Actually, I would personally prefer if it was *more* RNG. I'm not sure how, but it does seem kind of bad that you can just be very careful and reliably ninja past enemies. Ducking through someone's LoS should be risky, or at least riskier than it is now.
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Strategies / Re: Combat Run Theorycrafting & Open Discussion
« on: October 14, 2015, 11:35:27 AM »
Maybe 50% bonus if you're overweight, but only if you are still within like twice your weight capacity. Anything more than that and you presumably aren't going to be doing much maneuvering.
Do cloaking units stack? I was pretty sure they didn't, but I honestly haven't really tried to test it. That would seem a little broken though.
Fighting with wings is interesting. You really want to make the most of your high movement, fighting only in locations that heavily advantage you like narrow chokepoints and using the cleaner bots as robot shields. Point blank shots with overloaded energy weapons / multishot weapons can instantly destroy a lot of the less durable robots like programmers if you build well. Ideally, you use your better tactical positioning and overkill to minimize damage taken, especially with items like Particle Chargers and such. But it's still hard because no matter what you have a lot of items that if destroyed can really cripple you, and trying to overcome weight problems with redistributors just means you have more equipped items that are liabilities (and weight redistributors that give more than 10 mass support are difficult to replace).
The upside, of course, is that you can do a hell of a lot more with 20-50 move delay than you can with the 200 or so you'll get with a legs / treads build, including avoiding nastier encounters and hitting up way more interactive objects and having more time to loot from stashes.
Do cloaking units stack? I was pretty sure they didn't, but I honestly haven't really tried to test it. That would seem a little broken though.
Fighting with wings is interesting. You really want to make the most of your high movement, fighting only in locations that heavily advantage you like narrow chokepoints and using the cleaner bots as robot shields. Point blank shots with overloaded energy weapons / multishot weapons can instantly destroy a lot of the less durable robots like programmers if you build well. Ideally, you use your better tactical positioning and overkill to minimize damage taken, especially with items like Particle Chargers and such. But it's still hard because no matter what you have a lot of items that if destroyed can really cripple you, and trying to overcome weight problems with redistributors just means you have more equipped items that are liabilities (and weight redistributors that give more than 10 mass support are difficult to replace).
The upside, of course, is that you can do a hell of a lot more with 20-50 move delay than you can with the 200 or so you'll get with a legs / treads build, including avoiding nastier encounters and hitting up way more interactive objects and having more time to loot from stashes.
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Competitions / Re: Weekly Seed #11 [Alpha 3c] [Seed: Point Blank]
« on: October 13, 2015, 01:02:40 PM »
Very good run for me. 4th victory (stealth of course) and in only ~5k turns. Granted, I was sort of abusing the 6 move delay, but still. If you were being *really* efficient you could probably win in 3-4k turns pretty easily.
Small notes: Powered Armor is really, really good for stealth runs. Imp. Powered Armor was giving me like 42% coverage, while only taking up 2 mass. I considered stacking them but I wasn't able to find any more of them.
I didn't really need or use the 5th propulsion slot but I wanted to see what would happen if I equipped more flight units. The answer is weird shit. Still not worth it, since you can just get utility mass capacity and you aren't getting faster and just losing a lot more energy / gaining heat.
Backup Power VII's are probably my favourite engine in the game. 4 mass for 12 power, with okay heat generation. Repair stations are pretty much the best.
I really try to take advantage of fabricators, but they always get locked or I can't find them or I don't have any particularly necessary schematics. Maybe if I tried harder to get schematics out of terminals, but usually there are more important things - finding other terminals, traps, exits, recalling any squads, figuring out which haulers need to get intercepted, etc. Even just identifying prototypes is really useful, mostly so you don't waste your time equipping useless shit. Also, having to carry around mass containers is somewhat frustrating, especially since I usually prefer to use non-kinetic weapons anyway. Finally 90% of the time you wanna build prototypes anyways, and when they come out broken that is genuinely depressing. Also, scanalyzers are usually not super useful, although I imagine in a non-stealth run they're better. But here if I'm carrying it, I probably don't really need to build it.
Also, I think both transmission jammers and ECM suites aren't that necessary for a stealth run, at least when you have 10 or less move delay and a LR scanner. Better off with hacking, storage, defensive utilities, or whatever.
In any case, pretty sure I can reliably win stealth runs nowish, even when horrible things like pic related happens. Probably time to start being more horribly violent and blowing shit up.
Spoiler: scoresheet (click to show/hide)
Small notes: Powered Armor is really, really good for stealth runs. Imp. Powered Armor was giving me like 42% coverage, while only taking up 2 mass. I considered stacking them but I wasn't able to find any more of them.
I didn't really need or use the 5th propulsion slot but I wanted to see what would happen if I equipped more flight units. The answer is weird shit. Still not worth it, since you can just get utility mass capacity and you aren't getting faster and just losing a lot more energy / gaining heat.
Backup Power VII's are probably my favourite engine in the game. 4 mass for 12 power, with okay heat generation. Repair stations are pretty much the best.
I really try to take advantage of fabricators, but they always get locked or I can't find them or I don't have any particularly necessary schematics. Maybe if I tried harder to get schematics out of terminals, but usually there are more important things - finding other terminals, traps, exits, recalling any squads, figuring out which haulers need to get intercepted, etc. Even just identifying prototypes is really useful, mostly so you don't waste your time equipping useless shit. Also, having to carry around mass containers is somewhat frustrating, especially since I usually prefer to use non-kinetic weapons anyway. Finally 90% of the time you wanna build prototypes anyways, and when they come out broken that is genuinely depressing. Also, scanalyzers are usually not super useful, although I imagine in a non-stealth run they're better. But here if I'm carrying it, I probably don't really need to build it.
Also, I think both transmission jammers and ECM suites aren't that necessary for a stealth run, at least when you have 10 or less move delay and a LR scanner. Better off with hacking, storage, defensive utilities, or whatever.
In any case, pretty sure I can reliably win stealth runs nowish, even when horrible things like pic related happens. Probably time to start being more horribly violent and blowing shit up.
4
Ideas / Re: Propulsion Rebalancing
« on: October 13, 2015, 12:17:25 PM »
Okay, so in my weekly seed run, I messed around with propulsion more and ran into some really bizarre behavior.
You get inconsistent results sometimes when you put the same parts on in different order. Also, there are situations where overloading a propulsion unit slows you down, and then turning it back to normal mode will speed you up again. I'm pretty sure there's something going wrong with whatever calculation goes on here. It doesn't really seem that you *should* be able to get below 10 speed without something weird - from what I understand none of the individual propulsion units can be that fast without overloading, and the end speed is an average.
You get inconsistent results sometimes when you put the same parts on in different order. Also, there are situations where overloading a propulsion unit slows you down, and then turning it back to normal mode will speed you up again. I'm pretty sure there's something going wrong with whatever calculation goes on here. It doesn't really seem that you *should* be able to get below 10 speed without something weird - from what I understand none of the individual propulsion units can be that fast without overloading, and the end speed is an average.
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Ideas / Re: Propulsion Rebalancing
« on: October 12, 2015, 10:59:26 PM »
By the way, I noticed some really weird discrepancies in stacking certain kinds of propulsion units.
In particular, you can reach 6 speed without overloading any flight units, by equipping 3 prototypes and a regular unit.
Even with only of the 30 / -10 prototypes, you can still get below 10, as shown in the second screenshot.
Both of these seem kind of bizarre and confusing, because I'm pretty sure just equipping a fourth prototype will give you 10 speed, which is like, less than any other combination.
In particular, you can reach 6 speed without overloading any flight units, by equipping 3 prototypes and a regular unit.
Even with only of the 30 / -10 prototypes, you can still get below 10, as shown in the second screenshot.
Both of these seem kind of bizarre and confusing, because I'm pretty sure just equipping a fourth prototype will give you 10 speed, which is like, less than any other combination.
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Stories / Re: My first win (stealth)
« on: October 09, 2015, 08:25:09 PM »
If you wanted to hit 6500 exactly, you wouldn't be able to even identify any prototypes, because you get points for those.
I tried such a pacifist run for about 10 minutes, upon which point I ran into Swarmers, which wouldn't have been so bad except I blew one of them up via ramming to try and get past them. It's definitely pretty difficult, but probably doable if you can get through Materials.
With regards to stasis traps:
I tried such a pacifist run for about 10 minutes, upon which point I ran into Swarmers, which wouldn't have been so bad except I blew one of them up via ramming to try and get past them. It's definitely pretty difficult, but probably doable if you can get through Materials.
With regards to stasis traps:
Spoiler: secrets inside (click to show/hide)
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Ideas / Re: Propulsion Rebalancing
« on: October 05, 2015, 10:57:00 AM »
The whole cost while idle is kind of weird in practice. You're better off turning off your propulsion units whenever you are stationary. Which ends up being a lot of micro for frequently little reward, but definitely worth it if you're fighting for extended periods of time. You can't really eliminate them, though, or pack them into movement, because some propulsion units give you combat bonuses while active. It's awkward.
Storage units could be worked on. I think maybe splitting up where you find them would help - right now you find all storage units in -10 because they're all rating 1. More efficient (in terms of weight) would be nice for some lower capacity ones (since they're kind of neglected), but 16m/8inventory seems like a good one slot compromise for the ultra-heavy builds.
Also - I feel like overweighted hover units might actually be surprisingly useful for a combat build. You can load up to 2x capacity and still be under 100 speed all the time, and 3x capacity is comparable to having 3 weighted legs. The only drawback is durability, but otherwise they're comparable / possibly even better than legs in some aspects. Plus, since you're overweighting yourself, you can toss on Weight Redistributors and get double mileage out of them, ignoring the fact that weight redistributors tend to explode. Things start getting really ridiculous if you can snab prototypes with -10 per slot and 30 penalty, because then you can go to like triple overweight and still be moving faster than any walking robot while *probably* carrying more than them.
Finally: on Imp Flight Units, in addition to all their other strengths, they also have a *really* high capacity for when you find them. With 8 weight when your normal units are half that (and VTOL modules are just 5), you can really dodge a lot of the normally brutal energy / heat problems associated with being a bird. The way I tend to play Materials in my stealth runs these days is usually something along the lines of flying around with a pair of reactors, a trio of flight units, and two of the heaviest cannons/shotguns + spare launcher to blast the shit out of anything that gets in my way, which is way way more effective than it deserves to be.
Storage units could be worked on. I think maybe splitting up where you find them would help - right now you find all storage units in -10 because they're all rating 1. More efficient (in terms of weight) would be nice for some lower capacity ones (since they're kind of neglected), but 16m/8inventory seems like a good one slot compromise for the ultra-heavy builds.
Also - I feel like overweighted hover units might actually be surprisingly useful for a combat build. You can load up to 2x capacity and still be under 100 speed all the time, and 3x capacity is comparable to having 3 weighted legs. The only drawback is durability, but otherwise they're comparable / possibly even better than legs in some aspects. Plus, since you're overweighting yourself, you can toss on Weight Redistributors and get double mileage out of them, ignoring the fact that weight redistributors tend to explode. Things start getting really ridiculous if you can snab prototypes with -10 per slot and 30 penalty, because then you can go to like triple overweight and still be moving faster than any walking robot while *probably* carrying more than them.
Finally: on Imp Flight Units, in addition to all their other strengths, they also have a *really* high capacity for when you find them. With 8 weight when your normal units are half that (and VTOL modules are just 5), you can really dodge a lot of the normally brutal energy / heat problems associated with being a bird. The way I tend to play Materials in my stealth runs these days is usually something along the lines of flying around with a pair of reactors, a trio of flight units, and two of the heaviest cannons/shotguns + spare launcher to blast the shit out of anything that gets in my way, which is way way more effective than it deserves to be.
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Competitions / Re: Weekly Seed #10 [Alpha 3c] [Seed: Evil Stasis]
« on: October 05, 2015, 08:19:07 AM »
mines: not even once
I got vaguely unlucky with several malfunctioning prototypes in a row on -9. Screenshot attached depicts Cogmind's last futile moments of life before he tries to blow himself up with a grenade launcher in despair.
I got vaguely unlucky with several malfunctioning prototypes in a row on -9. Screenshot attached depicts Cogmind's last futile moments of life before he tries to blow himself up with a grenade launcher in despair.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / Manual Inventory(Prototypes) hack doesn't work
« on: October 02, 2015, 01:02:06 PM »
It just parses to "Prototypes" instead which is probably not what's supposed to happen.
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Ideas / Re: Propulsion Rebalancing
« on: October 01, 2015, 10:45:52 PM »I agree that flight especially has some weird things happening with it, though don't quite understand the system you describe, or how moving two to three times as fast is a "marginal benefit." Maybe I'm misunderstanding something there?I meant marginal as in the benefit for each additional unit. You get 5 extra moves in a turn for a third prototype flight unit, while your second flight unit gives you significantly less. In terms of proportions, a 3rd flight unit doubles your speed while the 2nd flight unit increases it by 50%.
Essentially the number of propulsion units linearly affects your turn delay, which means they interact with how fast you can actually move in a weird way. The graph for moves/turn for imp flight units looks like this, or for the prototype hover units, like this. It would make more sense if these graphs were linear, but that would probably be somewhat difficult to achieve. Also, it would definitely make everything significantly uglier on the numbers side, which would suck.
That said, I still think that even disregarding all that, Imp. Flight Units and some of the other early flight prototypes should be scaled back in terms of their speed in exchange for later flight prototypes getting some of that. Even just changing them to 25 speed / -5 per extra would make them slightly faster at 1 unit, the same at 2, and then requiring 4 units to get the maximum speed. I don't think that the whole blazing fast style should be discouraged, but I do feel like you should have to invest a bit more to get it. Right now, it's just a matter of whether or not you can get those early prototypes, and frankly given that they show up on floor 2, you definitely can.
Regarding wheels, their worthlessness is intentional. This is brought up from time to time because it's not necessarily obvious, but from a design standpoint the idea is that wheels are easy to obtain (only maintenance bots use them) and useful only as a last resort. Giving them 0 penalty could be an option, though, depending on what adjustments are made to the rest of the system.Ah, okay. I thought from their presence in the scrapyard that they were supposed to be a worthy alternative to your other propulsion choices, but it does make sense for them to kind of suck relative to the other systems. I do think I found prototype wheels once, but I never made use of them.
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Ideas / Re: Propulsion Rebalancing
« on: October 01, 2015, 05:43:56 PM »
My 2 cents:
It feels kind of awkward that additional propulsion slots slow you down on the ground. I mean, I kind of get it, but in practice it means weird situations like when you go from 70/40 weight, equip a third treads, end up at 70/60 weight and are slower than when you started. Slots are a pretty huge investment - if your return on that is at best a tenth of a move per turn and at worst a handicap you're going to probably go for utilities instead.
In general speed calculation feels weird on the flight end, too. The marginal benefits of 1/2/3 imp flight units are 3.333 moves per turn (base), then 1.666 moves, and finally a full 5 moves per turn. Maybe it would be better if there just was a base "speed value" and "speed bonus value," and applied the slowest speed value first, then the rest as bonuses? For flight units this would probably mean more modules needing to be equipped for the mythical 10 delay shit, but possibly also 10 delay being more achievable without the 3x prototype build. It would also mean that you could be allowed to stack as many flight units as you wanted, because you wouldn't hit a "0 move delay" point where the game breaks. I have no idea if this would overall work out, but it feels like it would be easier to understand than the current calculations.
Also: wheels seem really worthless, but I can't really tell because there are so few wheels in the game. In general, though, their durability seems far too low to justify them (even on -10), and I think you are literally better off with 1x overweighted hover units than wheels, in almost every possible way. At the very least, I think wheels should have a 0 penalty for additional modules, since they're the middle of the road option.
It feels kind of awkward that additional propulsion slots slow you down on the ground. I mean, I kind of get it, but in practice it means weird situations like when you go from 70/40 weight, equip a third treads, end up at 70/60 weight and are slower than when you started. Slots are a pretty huge investment - if your return on that is at best a tenth of a move per turn and at worst a handicap you're going to probably go for utilities instead.
In general speed calculation feels weird on the flight end, too. The marginal benefits of 1/2/3 imp flight units are 3.333 moves per turn (base), then 1.666 moves, and finally a full 5 moves per turn. Maybe it would be better if there just was a base "speed value" and "speed bonus value," and applied the slowest speed value first, then the rest as bonuses? For flight units this would probably mean more modules needing to be equipped for the mythical 10 delay shit, but possibly also 10 delay being more achievable without the 3x prototype build. It would also mean that you could be allowed to stack as many flight units as you wanted, because you wouldn't hit a "0 move delay" point where the game breaks. I have no idea if this would overall work out, but it feels like it would be easier to understand than the current calculations.
Also: wheels seem really worthless, but I can't really tell because there are so few wheels in the game. In general, though, their durability seems far too low to justify them (even on -10), and I think you are literally better off with 1x overweighted hover units than wheels, in almost every possible way. At the very least, I think wheels should have a 0 penalty for additional modules, since they're the middle of the road option.
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Competitions / Re: Weekly Seed #9 [Alpha 3c] [Seed: SeedyRobots]
« on: September 30, 2015, 02:01:09 PM »Whoa, a new victor!? The leaderboard has three now in just a week since the tournament's end! (I'm guessing this is partially a result of the new guides?)
I did read zxc's guide to stealth, which helped a fair bit. I also read the manual (after reaching Research and dying horribly) which was also really, really helpful. I had no idea you could even perform remote hacks prior to that, which makes hacking-heavy strategies a lot more effective. As it turns out, stacking network scanners is really, really effective.
Wow, congrats! Nice gear
TBH I was going to quit and come back after hitting research, but I was so well equipped that I just kept on trucking. It worked pretty well, probably mostly because of all the hacking gear I had that let me find exits before any programmers ever showed up.
Also, the whole Access bug where the programmers never find you is kind of a relief. I imagine that's getting fixed, but it's kind of nice for now that you can take as much time as you want
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Competitions / Re: Weekly Seed #9 [Alpha 3c] [Seed: SeedyRobots]
« on: September 28, 2015, 09:24:50 PM »
Well, this was unexpected. This is, for the record, my first attempt at any of these seed runs and my first victory.
Spoiler: scorecard (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: run info spoilers (click to show/hide)
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