[Experimental Update] - 359243

[Kevin]

Hey Grifters,

Experimental is back in business! This update gets rid of a couple of bad difficulty spikes, and fixes a whole bunch of card bugs. Oh, and now you can pet your pets. It's fun!

We've got some fun new content planned that we'll be rolling out over the course of the week, so stay tuned for further updates!

• You can pet and rename your pets in your room at night.
• Give back pinned cards on bandit goon death.
• Crayote spitters give you one stack of slime instead of two.
• Tune down the drusk damage / card insertions in higher prestige levels.
• Remove the punitive damage from Intimidation.  Remove REPLENISH because the card has a lot of keywords, and without the punitive damage it's less of a problem.
• Limit combat joiners in organic fights, so that the player doesn't get overwhelmed in the early game when sent into, say, the bandit bar.
• Browbeat can be played at 0 actions again.
• Can't play combat_drone, vroc_whistle, or protoype_drone if team is already full.
• Calculate appeal_to_reason cost in any deck, so that it synergizes with eg. swift rebuttal.
• Clarify description on Scruple.  Also give it stack behaviour.
• Delay the end-turn-button on fights. Also hiding the end-turn and concede buttons if the accept-surrender button is visible.
• Delay the end-turn button showing up on negotiations.
• Speed up card upgrade flow on the deck screen.
• Fix crash when removing some particle systems on cards.
• Fix coactive orbslug only triggering once a turn.
• Fix Last Stand giving 2 power instead of being stack-based.
• Fix Last Stand not being applied in all circumstances, such as being bled.
• Fix text on improve_accuracy condition.
• Fix potential infinite loop while resolving autoplay cards if the card is able to draw/reinsert itself into your hand, or the negotiation is won/lost in the process.
• Fix crash if insulting the opponent's core modifier to win the negotiation.
• Fix crash due to 'insulted' being triggered more than once (eg. by destroying an argument with Insult and triggering Ipso Facto).
• Fix crashing modifying nil unstable_drone condition due to team being maxxed; can happen if DRONE_GOON is your ally and you have allies already.
• Fix strings for Enhanced Defense.
   

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[pacovf]

2 hours ago, Kevin said:

Limit combat joiners in organic fights, so that the player doesn't get overwhelmed in the early game when sent into, say, the bandit bar

 

Would you mind explaining what either of "limit combat joiners" and "organic fights" mean?

[Kevin]

Of course!

There are two types of fights in Griftlands: organic, and scripted. In a scripted fight, you go to a special place to confront a target, and the quest running it all controls who is there. It is able to fine-tune the difficulty of the encounter because it has ultimate control of the agents on both sides (minus any mercs or pets you have along the way, but that's supposed to make things easier so that's ok).

An organic fight, on the other hand, gives you a target but doesn't constrain where they show up. It just throws them into the world, and lets the games systems control the surroundings. So you might have to deliver a summons to someone who is alone in their house OR who is standing in a bar surrounded by their friends.

This makes for some cool emergent gameplay, but it can sometimes set you up for failure, especially in the early game where you are playing with the starter deck. The new feature in experimental tries to measure the combat strength of each side, and then limits the number of people who join your target, so that you don't get steamrolled.

[minespatch]

5 minutes ago, Kevin said:

An organic fight, on the other hand, gives you a target but doesn't constrain where they show up. It just throws them into the world, and lets the games systems control the surroundings

Wait a sec, did you use this system in Invisible inc?

[Kevin]

I was more of a writer than a programmer or designer on Inc, but to the best of knowledge it procgened each level and all of the things within it when you actually went to it. Your targets, as such, didn't actually exist until you started your mission.

Griftlands has more persistent world state that lasts for your entire run, although we do a LOT of smoke and mirrors to try to make it produce interesting situations more often than it doesn't. We teleport people around to be where then need to be when you look at your map or visit a location, and try to make decisions about what's going on at the last possible moment to keep the game state as flexible as possible.

[minespatch]

1 minute ago, Kevin said:

We teleport people around to be where then need to be when you look at your map or visit a location,

I don't have the game yet but when I saw the dev stream and it showed the maps with different missions, it took me back to my previous playthroughs of invisible inc.

[pacovf]

1 hour ago, Kevin said:

Of course!

There are two types of fights in Griftlands: organic, and scripted. In a scripted fight, you go to a special place to confront a target, and the quest running it all controls who is there. It is able to fine-tune the difficulty of the encounter because it has ultimate control of the agents on both sides (minus any mercs or pets you have along the way, but that's supposed to make things easier so that's ok).

An organic fight, on the other hand, gives you a target but doesn't constrain where they show up. It just throws them into the world, and lets the games systems control the surroundings. So you might have to deliver a summons to someone who is alone in their house OR who is standing in a bar surrounded by their friends.

This makes for some cool emergent gameplay, but it can sometimes set you up for failure, especially in the early game where you are playing with the starter deck. The new feature in experimental tries to measure the combat strength of each side, and then limits the number of people who join your target, so that you don't get steamrolled.

Hm, ok, thanks for the explanation!

I agree that the location of a fight has a large effect on its difficulty, and that was an issue that had to be addressed. I think I would have preferred if the difficulty (and reward) of the quest took into account the location of the fight, instead of the solution you went with, because it gives each location a stronger sense of identity. It also seems like it would make the process that determines who joins whom in a fight more opaque than it already is right now. But still, this is definitely an improvement.

[TheCoolestFool]

Guess i don't have to spend all my money now at the bar bribing people to not participate in the fight on day 1 lol. Kind of liked that potential for a difficult fight.

Are there anymore prestige levels coming soon? 

 

[YouKnowWho]

 You can pet the dog! YESSS!

[Kevin]

1 hour ago, TheCoolestFool said:

Guess i don't have to spend all my money now at the bar bribing people to not participate in the fight on day 1 lol. Kind of liked that potential for a difficult fight.

Are there anymore prestige levels coming soon? 

 

Not in this update, but definitely eventually.