Negative trait rework/tuning in the future

[Gunhaver]

1 hour ago, Promethien said:

Yes! They could even give something really special for the especially bad traits. Flatulent already does this. If you can harvest the random NG it becomes a rather valuable resource. Imagine if they did something like narcoleptics have a chance to instantly finish any job they start to make up for the danger they are in from falling asleep in hazardous locations. Can set one up to be a super genius chef or to work your farms and get the occasional instant harvest/fertilization. 

Originally Narcoleptic dupes WOULD get an extra hidden perk if you isolated them from their bed and they fell asleep. The perk was so good; people would make most if not all their dupes NArcoleptics

[Technoincubus]

Anemic - never ever. It is a guaranteed deal breaker.

Noodle Arms and Slow Learner - anything skill related is a deal breaker but this one are somewhat not as horible as Anemic.

Irritable Bowel - -50% toilet use speed is somewhat negligable, plus it produces more p.water it seems.

Small Bladder - same, more water but overall toilet perka are quite bad as they hog dupe time, so it is always better to discard it.

Biohazardous - could be ignored because illnesses are not that dangerous and only hog your time until you organize germ-killing rooms.

Bottomless Stomach - horrible because it is not addint +500 kcals but subtracts 500 kcals meaning dupe is not easting more but eating OFTEN=more time lost=never ever take it.

Mouth Breather - could be ignored because oxygen production is easily optimized

Narcoleptic - absolutely never - wasted time, dropped items. Not worth it.

Loud Sleeper - not an option early on, but could be ignored once you have plastic beds.

Flatulent - can't even imagine a situation where I could take it. It could not produce enough n.gas to be useful for...anything, it pollutes environments, by pockets of gas, it disrupts farms etc. Absolutely worst trait rivalling Anemic.

 

 

[Promethien]

2 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

Loud Sleeper - not an option early on, but could be ignored once you have plastic beds.

 

Loud sleeper is a free trait. You should be splitting your dupes into shifts so there are always some awake. From there you can always ensure beds near loud sleepers are unused.

[Majestix]

I think this discussion can be summarised as: no negative trait is a deal breaker, for every trait, there are at least some people out there that are happy to work around it, and the whole system is therefore fine as it is - no rebalancing required, case closed.

[metallichydra]

14 minutes ago, Majestix said:

I think this discussion can be summarised as: no negative trait is a deal breaker, for every trait, there are at least some people out there that are happy to work around it, and the whole system is therefore fine as it is - no rebalancing required, case closed.

not really. I don't like the phobia traits (except trypophobia and unconstructive), as they dont really do anything, and I hate flatulent, mouth breather and bottomless stomach because they are too hard.

loud sleepers, narcoleptics, anemic, noodle arms, slow learner and irritable bowel are fine.

bioharzardous and small bladder dont really do anything, which is really sad.

this leaves me with 6 / 17 traits, that I think are great. of those 6, I never take anemic (because people say "its bad!", and loud sleeper (because it messes up barracks), but I will start accepting them in my next colony (or my current).

[Technoincubus]

2 hours ago, Majestix said:

I think this discussion can be summarised as: no negative trait is a deal breaker, for every trait, there are at least some people out there that are happy to work around it, and the whole system is therefore fine as it is - no rebalancing required, case closed.

No it is exactly the opposite - some traits should never be taken because everything else is preferrable to them

[Majestix]

1 hour ago, Technoincubus said:

No it is exactly the opposite - some traits should never be taken because everything else is preferrable to them

If you read through the thread carefully, you will see that there is no trait that is a deal breaker for everybody. Sure, some are more popular than others, but your argument does not apply to a real in-game situation. If your colony is badly in need of a rancher, and the printer offers you a fast learning loud sleeper with a very good ranchingskill, then you have a decision on your hands: do you want to create a separate bed room or more space for an otherwise perfect dupe? The fact that there are less bad negative traits is irrelevant, since you might have to wait for 300 cycles before the printer offers you the perfect dupe. The fact that the game forces you to make these difficult decisions is a good thing, not a bad thing.

If all bad traits were equally annoying, then the negative trait of the dupes would not factor in the decision of whether to take them, so the game would be less interesting.

[Gunhaver]

9 hours ago, Majestix said:

I think this discussion can be summarised as: no negative trait is a deal breaker, for every trait, there are at least some people out there that are happy to work around it, and the whole system is therefore fine as it is - no rebalancing required, case closed.

That's how the United States' government has gotten to he wonderful place it is today!

Yeah I disagree. If we apply that logic, then no critique can ever be brought up as long as one or two people say it's grood despite the reasoning behind it. If someone says they like the skill x "as is" because after 2000 hours the game's gotten too easy... Well, I don't think that's a situation most people will get to. 

I'm not suggesting any traits be removed either, just reworked. If I were a better artist I'd make a jpg, but let me suggest it this way:

If I were playing to complete a normal round of ONI and during a dupe print you got these two choices

Dupe 1

+7 ranching  twinkletoes(or whatever skill you like) flatulent

Dupe 2

blank slate +- 0 to skills no traits.

You are forced to pick one to keep the rest of the journey (no murder death kills.) 

If a majority of players are picking option 2 then maybe the trait could use some rework.

[Nebbie]

Negative traits do not need to be equal, but there shouldn't be extremely large gulfs between them. Right now, flatulent and anemic especially are so out of whack hardly anybody takes them, and small bladder is in the other direction (seriously, it changes bladder fill from 100%/cycle to 100.2%/cycle, it's like having no negative trait at all and is for sure an oversight).

[Chaoticlusts]

I think a decent change to flatulent would be only making them fart while sleeping or shortly after eating so you can control the time they'll be gassy.  It'd still be a negative since ultimately that 'free' natural gas is pretty trivial but is going to mix around your base and be irritating rather than absolutely destructive to vacuum seals and waterlocks

Also why do people think Yokel is a basically no cost negative? That's 6 free science you're missing on that dupe which generates a lot of extra skill points over time.

There's some conspicuous absences with traits too, I guess having a forbidden/bonus for every job might saturate the options a bit but why is there no 'anxious +stress negative trait?

Bringing back a point system sounds great to me, it'd also allow for an extra difficulty option for those who want it (less points for dupes). That and as someone who spent way too much of their youth combing through RPG systems a point based flaw system is a nice familiar thing :).

[Hellshound38]

I would love if we could just customize the dupes using a point system. With negative traits giving points. Also add some achievements related to it. Say have 1 of each negative trait in your colony... ect.

[kerosene]

I never take flatulent, mouth breather, allergies, bottomless stomach (I play with highest hunger difficulty) or anemic.

Flatulent and allergies add two additional things I have to consider when designing my base, door restrictions and jobs. No thanks.

Mouth breather: double oxygen consumption is a deal breaker for me. It's far too strong. That it reduces atmo suit autonomy is another reason to avoid it.

Bottomless stomach is pretty bad when playing with high hunger settings.

Anemic is also pretty bad on everyone except a researcher or a cook in a late game base. It's not a deal breaker on other dupes but it does make them considerably less effective and feels poorly balanced.

To be honest I don't like this negative/positive trait system at all. It only promotes endless rerolling, and if the bad traits are avoided, has very little impact on how the game plays. I think the devs should consider removing positive and negative traits as removing an incentive for rerolling dupes brings a bigger benefit than the positive and negative trait system.

 

 

[Gunhaver]

16 hours ago, Chaoticlusts said:

Also why do people think Yokel is a basically no cost negative? That's 6 free science you're missing on that dupe which generates a lot of extra skill points over time.

I think the same way! 60% skill leveling is nothing to sneeze at! Maybe it's from the perspective of people who have 1000+ cycle colonies so lvl speed is irrelevant.

[NathairNimheil]

On 8/27/2019 at 4:22 PM, Gunhaver said:

If we apply that logic, then no critique can ever be brought up as long as one or two people say it's grood despite the reasoning behind it.

I think the other important aspect is that we are not seeing people saying "Adjusting anemic would ruin the game for me!" When one side of the question says "Absolute deal breaker!" and the other side says "Meh, it's not that big a deal" that is not balance.

 

19 hours ago, kerosene said:

It only promotes endless rerolling, and if the bad traits are avoided, has very little impact on how the game plays.

This. Very much this.

[Aelfled]

Erm, if something that is supposed to be bad has some people saying it's terrible, and others saying it's workable, then that is balanced. 

 

If everyone said it was terrible, or everyone said it was ok, then it would need tuned. Allergies was a good example of an unbalanced trait during the run up to launch.

 

ONI has very few things that force you to adapt your play in a dynamic way. There are no random disasters, etc. The printer offers you things that force you to make trade-offs, or re-work your strategy (even if that is ultimately limp along with less dupes than you wanted for a while). Without this sort of thing there is less replay-ability.

[DarkMaster13]

I think the balance problem really comes down to the massive gulf that lies between squeamish and anemic.  Most medical jobs can't even be done without skills and you'll virtually never need more than one dupe to take those.  Heck many players have 0 medical dupes in the base.  So that trait is one that nearly 100% of players will take, unless they're intentionally making the game harder.  Contrast anemic which is a large permanent penalty to movement speed.  No matter what that dupe does, the trait is going to adversely affect them, even if they never leave the base they still lose work time moving between bedroom, bathroom, hall, and work place.  If we say 25% of player take it because they don't mind the challenge or are okay with dupes restricted to the main base on a permanent basis, we have an absolutely massive difference between negative traits that are treated by the game on equal terms.

[Lancar]

I think the solution to these discrepancies is to introduce a point cost to all traits, like how the old Master of Orion 2 where you could take a a really bad negative trait for a massive point boost, enabling you to pick better/more positive ones.. Or, if a hidden such system already exists, rebalance the costs.
To get something to work with, Klei could easily get some basic data with two simple polls on this forum. One asking which people think is the best trait, one asking which trait they think is the worst. Point costs/gains can then be assigned according to the results & tweaked later.

[cpy]

Dupe traits definitely need rework.

I propose 3 star system.

3 star dupe: is your cool superstar with positives all around no negatives, but dupe need to eat more eat higher quality food (they won't even look at meal lice), require posh stuff need higher morale, gets stressed easily but man look at those stats! You probably don't want to start with those, they eat more, perhaps even breathe more? This is pretty much your highest difficulty dupe.

2 star dupes: pretty much your current mix of stats (narco, anemic and other deal breakers can't be 2 star or more dupes). This would be your regular difficulty dupe.

1 star dupe: well, they sleep a lot (narco), they are lazy (anemic) but you can feed them bit of dirt slop and they'll be very happy to do stuff for you! Though they can't be top tier professions, except for plumber and courrier they can reach suitwearing as max. But no max rank digger/builder etc. They can only reach first 2 ranks of skills.

[DemainaNyx]

I personally don't care. 

Early game I avoid flatulent and mouth breathers but that's about it.  It wouldn't break the game to take them but I'd rather avoid it if possible.

Mid game I start making atmosuit so I really don't care who I take.  Anemics aren't allowed to leave the base for a while and are encouraged to use our home gym to speed up.  I set up a system to pull carbon dioxide out of my base anyway so N.gas gets taken out with it and suits are used for gas specific areas.  Oxygen is a non-issue so who cares how much they breather.  Food is plentiful after cycle 10 so eat whatever you like.  Dropped items kinda suck but I don't have any systems that are dupe dependent right now, so I don't really care if a dupe falls asleep during his job.

It could just be because I've played this game forever but I don't see a challenge in their negative traits that much.