Gameplay stream - random observations

[Tombles]

Nice to see a thread like this! I know that you guys have been posting a lot in Discord, which is fine, except that we cannot trawl though 900 discord messages to see what's happening and collect feedback. Anything you transfer into the forum has a much higher chance of being read by one of us.

Anyways, I think I can address some of these:

2) It's a special diplomacy victory! Still work in progress, hence its erratic behavior.
5) It's a paragon unit, you can get one by buddying up to the paragons
6) Pollution was an experimental system that has since been removed, the tooltip is out of date
8) This is true, the name is definitely not an awful pun about anything else
11) It's the number of newly unlocked mods that are available for the unit. It's supposed to remind you that you can make new variants.
13) The AI sometimes thinks it can use melee attacks on fliers, but when it actually tries the system forces the target to the ground, so it hits the wrong unit. We'll fix it!
17) Accuracy is reduced based on the distance from the shooter, like you guessed. Also, if you specifically target a unit on a hex, then it's defensive stats (or being in cover) might also reduce the accuracy. You can see this at one point where the accuracy on the unit is 40%, while next to him is 80%. This is because the weapon is a direct fire missile, indirect fire weapons (grenades, etc) ignore unit defenses because they're targeting the ground, not the unit.

 

[Tombles]

Hey tombles can you comment on research effects for when you have more than one race. I can understand that class/secret would effects all, but unsure how if you are gain a Dvar settlement playing as a Vanguard would you gain explosive tech and thier racial research?

You will certainly get some of their research, which you need to unlock racial units and to ensure you have some mods to put onto them, however exactly what you get is still being heavily debated.

Possible options:

1) You get all their research, including their weapons and racial tech. This would give the most flexibility, but would hurt the game's replayability, lessen the importance of your own race pick, and provide you with far more research than you could ever do.
2) You get their racial research, but not their weapons research. This would reduce the problem of the tree being overfilled, and mean some races would synergize better than others (e.g. Assembly would synergize well with Vanguard, since they both use firearms). However, the lack of weapons research would seriously damper the potential of some units, though there are other soucres of offensive mods you could use to compensate.
3) You get a custom made skill tree that contains all the units, along with a small selection of mods (both racial and weapon mods) and operations. This gives the most balanced gameplay experience, but damages the "immersion" of the tree. We want each skill to have a little story that makes thematic sense, but that won't work if we make a custom skill tree with everything hodge podged together. Also, what is and is not included in the tree would probably be the subject of endless arguments among players.

Happiness penalty from Cruel does seem much less severe compared to other vices but maybe happiness is a bigger deal now. Looking forward to finding out.

it is less severe, that's why it only gives 1 point instead of 2! The main effect of the happiness penalty is that you will need to build happiness buildings in your colonies much sooner (2 colonists sooner) which will slow down how quickly you can produce other things, like economic upgrades and units. Having high happiness gives bonuses as well, and the -2 will reduce those.

 

[Nefarious_Nyx]

Hi guys!

I'm taking over for Tombles for a bit as he is on vacation in sunny ol' England, great to see the ongoing discussions here, some interesting insights for sure.

Great thoughts on the research options, we are narrowing down our options here to see what gives us the best gameplay and maintains racial identity throughout different playthroughs.

Is clearing any random stack from a structure going to upset that NPC faction and cause global distrust? That sounds like its going to be a problem, unless there are going to be a load of totally unfactioned units/rebel members of each faction.

There are also diplomatic options to remove faction defender stacks from sites, if you are choosing to be friends with them! And of course, we will have our fair share of marauders running around (or guarding).

Can we buy claimed/adjacent sectors to avoid a diplomatic penalty?

We are currently investigating exactly how we want to approach this, but the idea is that there are diplomatic options available to acquire claimed sectors without penalties. That's about all I can say on this matter for now.

Perhaps clear events from the list if we manually deal with them. For example, if we start claiming a new sector when there is a message saying a new sector can be claimed, remove the message.

That's a good idea! We are currently holding off on tackling the event list and todo events waiting on the final systems to be completed so we can have an overview, and I'll make sure to keep a system like this in mind when the time comes!

Dragonfly Delta had a little dome structure on it and we didn't see what it was! There was something in the fallout region too. Such teasers.

Haha, we can't give everything away right of the bat! Maybe in the next stream your curiosity will get satisfied..

Regarding research.
Is this the way research works right now? Where the player has NO trade off of military vs economic. Is there a slider that moves between 60/0 to 0/60 for military/societal research, or some other option that affects that?

Currently research income is indeed added to both research paths in an equal manner. We did concept a slider type system previously, but there were a lot of issues with people being able to control their research to this detailed degree. The balance between military and economy is tricky enough in our game without bringing research into the mix.

Ooooh i missed this is the pollution system still in the tools?? O_0! I would love to get my hands in that!!

I'm sorry to say that the pollution system is completely removed. It's for the better, trust me.

Why not just 2 but you get to use your race mod on the other race units? Or rather, why not the opposite, you don't get there unit but get to use there mod on your unit. Favoring mixing lead to more interesting replayability.

Maybe the cost scaling for tiers is not the best solution here. I'm sure not. But some tweaking needed. Altough I'm not a fan of universal mods in general. Better to have some kind of " light armor " mod for infantry models with special armor values and cost and " heavy armor " for vehicle with different benefits and costs.

Race mods in general can be applied to other races. We wanted the mod system to be very flexible, so mods are generally subdivided so they can only be applied to infantry units for example, or vehicles, or cyborgs. So while we tried to keep our mod system as widely applicable as possible, we still have unique infantry mods and vehicle mods etc.

Disappointed that even T1 unit use cosmite, this means that cosmite needs to be available from the beginning meaning it'll be really easy to have a giant supply of it and just mass produce T3/T4. I was hoping T1 wouldn't cost any and T2 would cost a very small token amount and you would naturally find cosmite around the world but would only be able to mine it once you unlock T3 unit.

A note on cosmite, keep in mind that all values currently in the game are still going to be heavily iterated on. We are looking into scaling cosmite costs but aren't sold yet on the idea. The same for the sources of cosmite income, as well as what exactly costs cosmite in the game. In the end stockpiling cosmite might be a valid strategy, especially if you can get your hands on sources of it early on, but you might be overrun by stacks of fully modded frenzied which will give you nightmares.

Sorry for the wordy-ness guys, hope I managed to shed some light here and there!

 

[Nefarious_Nyx]

Ooh when do we get to see those in a DD?

You'll be exposed to the might and awesomeness of the Frenzied very soon!

That is a bit disappointing, but if there is enough sector development in mutually exclusive directions it should be able to offset the purely research throttle on military vs economic development.

There are definitely options for those that want to gear their economy more towards one of the branches of research, to which extent we are still figuring out right now =).