[Experimental Update] - 404969

[Kevin]

Hey Grifters!

You may have noticed our recent advertising push. It's always interesting for us to watch people play the game, and there's been a huge influx in f8 reports. So we've been busy with the fixes!

Also, there's a new experiment. It's a little rough-around-the-edges, and probably completely unbalanced, but you can try out Smith's initial card set in a little scenario. Have fun with that! Feedback about Smith's card theme, playability, etc, are especially welcome at this stage. He'll likely have a little more UI razzamatazz in his final form, but he should be understandable now.

• Added new experiment: Smith's bar fight
• add some extra checks for firing people in side_early_retirement.lua to avoid an assert
• Fixing the card right-click functionality
• disable old experiments
• Added a nil-check in hesh_boss_sabotage in case the player is killed by the attack
• Add a small interval of dead time before you can click-to-skip a slide, to prevent accidental skips when slides auto advance.
• set progress max per act in game over screen
• fix noncombatant list in handler_admiralty_collection_day.lua
• Add keyword panel to the Panic meter icon.
• Amend a bunch of descriptions referring to the Panic meter to make it clear they refer to the meter, and not the condition.
• Fix identical cards being posted multiple time in a convo tooltip unnecessarily.
• Patron capacity is refreshed after time passes. This addresses an exploit whereby you can continually repopulate a location with people in order to Provoke them.
• Killer now has Replenish.
• Murder cards no longer expire after a time.
• When killing somebody, you either receive a murder card OR one of their friends will hate you.
• Most fight scenarios are no longer considered 'aggressive'
• Hyperactive now doesn't deal damage when played, only when playing other cards
• audio: missing VO combat tags on rise rebel and radical. ambience reverb volume change.
• added next turn draw condition icon
• Showing the deck screen scrollbar near the right edge of the screen, independently of the aspect ratio
• Preventing dragging on the conversation screen from being considered a click and advancing the conversation
• Fix Burn occasionally requiring you to target, even though it would hit all targets.
• Clarified description of Appropriated
• Fixed bug where Proper Channels wasn't preparing it's turn when you gain it
• Shenanigans now correctly only affects cards
• Fixed typo in Bait description
• Clarified description of wind_up_plus
• revised power, drone thrust, cripple and counter, to look proper again
• Converting the conversation screen to using a standard scroll panel. Now scrolling should work the same as in every other screen. Flicking the dialog up/down should work fine too. And the convo options are also scrollable within the screen, giving us potentially more room for buttons, or taller buttons. Scroll works well on gamepad as well.
• Fixed bug where Traumatized would immediately get removed
• Increased cost of Viciousness from 1 to 2
• Clarified description of Rapid Fire
• Fixing the boundaries of the gamepad reticule, so it can traverse the entire screen, despite aspect ratio
• Fix flipping for AUTOMECH_BOSS.  Only pass thru 'flip' to the spawning effect anim if the static frame says so, not based on the current entity flipped status. Then update scale according to current flip status in UpdateTransform.
• The Spark Baron or Rise that gives you backup on the day 3 boss now only hates you if a SENTIENT backup died
• Added wild upgrades for Bash and added the new Trauma debuff
• Delete superfluous TheGame:Win() call after killing kashio.
• Add support for ConvoOption card tooltips with no extended keywords panel.  It just gets too insane.
• Post bloated, tipsy, and slurred speech card tooltips when buying a drink or a meal.
• Fix weirdly positioned text-only convo option tooltips due to the label having a predefined region size.
• Added a new Negotiation support argument for the Wealthy Merchants
• Fixed bug where choosing the convo option to kill Foolo wouldn't actually murder him
• Character removed from top left slot in INT_Noodleshop_1 
• Panic no longer reduces if the fighter is attacked.
• Update Panic descriptive text to indicate that combat can be won if all fighters Panic.
• Add a "-" label to fighter intents that apply a debuff but not damage.
• fixed targeting on Power Through
• Move pet-training bonus to precede training dialog, so it can refer to the horrendously marked up (but correct)ly capitalized {agent.The_desc}.
• Added a feature_desc to POWER
• Clarified Drusk Life Pact
• Wealthy Merchant now only applies 1 stinging eyes instead of 2
• give bog_boss plot armour
• So many typo and grammar fixes!

View full update

[pacovf]

26 minutes ago, Kevin said:

• Murder cards no longer expire after a time.
• When killing somebody, you either receive a murder card OR one of their friends will hate you.
• Panic no longer reduces if the fighter is attacked.

 

Those are some big sneak changes!

26 minutes ago, Kevin said:

• Increased cost of Viciousness from 1 to 2

 

Somebody please explain this to me. I considered Viciousness to be unusable in most decks, and overkill in the few decks where you can use it. This suggests that it was considered overpowered instead. Anybody had any luck with it?

 

EDIT: Launching a game with Smith just leads to a black screen

Edited April 17, 2020 by pacovf

[Kevin]

Smith wasn't supposed to show up there - he's being removed in another patch.

The experiment with Smith is in the experiments section.

[Wumpus the 19th]

the bar fight's not showing up in my experiments.

the cards are in my compendium and well,

big brain

must i say anything else

the meme writes itself at this point

Edited April 17, 2020 by Wumpus the 19th

[Kevin]

Whoops! The experiment was marked dev_only.

I posted a fix. You'll get it in ~30 minutes. Study those cards until then!

[pacovf]

I suggest people have fun with Raw Power before it gets nerfed to something more reasonable

[Kevin]

3 minutes ago, pacovf said:

I suggest people have fun with Raw Power before it gets nerfed to something more reasonable

You know we read this, right?

[RageLeague]

20 minutes ago, Kevin said:

You know we read this, right?

You see, that is actually in code. It actually stands for "L vxjjhvw shrsoh kdyh ixq zlwk Udz Srzhu ehiruh lw jhwv qhuihg wr vrphwklqj pruh uhdvrqdeoh". It is a total misunderstanding.

[pacovf]

23 minutes ago, Kevin said:

You know we read this, right?

Hehe. It's more like the one card that jumped out to me when reading the compendium. We will see if I was right!

[Wumpus the 19th]

suddenly i want the bar to be it's own standard mode. it's pretty interesting as an endless mode of hordes of enemies to deal with.

also dropkick is oddly funny to me. i don't know why.

Edited April 17, 2020 by Wumpus the 19th

[pacovf]

I don't know if it's intentional, but in the bar mode, the "minions" of the person you fight appear stacked and kinda hiding behind the main enemy in the battle preview panel. I got into a fight with a merchant that had two laborers helping him, but the battle preview panel only showed the merchant and one laborer helping. 

[RageLeague]

Apparently Smith's health gain from moxie is random. I didn't know that, and I assumed that he heals fully every time, and thought he was pretty op.

Personally, I dislike Smith's playstyle, but it is probably because I don't play well with risk-reward in games in general. His negotiation's renown mechanic is a risk: If it is destroyed, you take resolve damage. But with enough renown, you get bonuses for some card effects. His combat cards involve around taking damages to gain moxie, which translates to potentially more health. That is why I like Smith's concept, even though I can't play well with his playstyle.

Also, obliterate doesn't actually cause the next card to cost health. It just sets the action count to your health for the next card played. Probably because the action count is set to a value rather than a reference(which you can't really do in lua).

[pacovf]

I haven't tried the negotiation yet, and just did one run with full combat. I was building up a ton of empty bottles, it's easy to get a full hand quickly. It's odd for sure, I have to get used to it. Moxie is odd too, the expected healed value is a bit over half your Moxie, but there is no guarantee you will get any given amount. I got 12 Moxie at some point, still only got 2 health out of it though. Due to how the math works, Moxie just limits how bad self-damaging cards are, but you don't want to damage yourself just for the moxie. Maybe if you have a ton of alleviate.

The "chain" mechanic is fun and interesting, but quite the mess to figure out what the card does. The UI should show the "advanced" versions of the cards.

EDIT: in terms of hand size, you can think of “Drink” as a delayed “Draw a card”. Thinking of it that way, Smith has a crazy amount of draw in his card selection.

Edited April 17, 2020 by pacovf

[Wumpus the 19th]

9 hours ago, pacovf said:

I haven't tried the negotiation yet, and just did one run with full combat. I was building up a ton of empty bottles, it's easy to get a full hand quickly. It's odd for sure, I have to get used to it. Moxie is odd too, the expected healed value is a bit over half your Moxie, but there is no guarantee you will get any given amount. I got 12 Moxie at some point, still only got 2 health out of it though. Due to how the math works, Moxie just limits how bad self-damaging cards are, but you don't want to damage yourself just for the moxie. Maybe if you have a ton of alleviate.

The "chain" mechanic is fun and interesting, but quite the mess to figure out what the card does. The UI should show the "advanced" versions of the cards.

EDIT: in terms of hand size, you can think of “Drink” as a delayed “Draw a card”. Thinking of it that way, Smith has a crazy amount of draw in his card selection.

I tried the negotiation first. it is wacky

Smith's resolve is lower, probably due to how he's not as sharp witted as rook or sal, at 26 resolve

his personality is a compliment to his confounding playstyle, dealing 1 damage every new argument

all the new arguments he can create are all over the place, ranging from chaos theory to subtle setup to renown, an argument that also acts as a time bomb.

renown can cause massive benefits in the player's game, however it drops smith's core by it's count when dismissed, likely because of the whole "skating by on his family name" thing.

the long and the short of it is you need to splice into your day a decent amount of fights or drinking in order to have enough resolve to live.

Edited April 17, 2020 by Wumpus the 19th

[SpicyNiceCream]

I think the moxie heal is a little unclear. When I saw the description I thought moxie 2 means heals 2 every turn but it didn't. Could be that I'm just dumb though. The endless-wave mode is quite interesting to play, maybe it could be expend to be a actual gameplay mod in the future will be pretty cool. Also some of Smith's hitting animation is uh- quite lengthy, I know he's like drunk or something, but still I think he could do with some speed ups.

[ArtixBot]

All of Smith's combat animations need to be at least twice as fast.

Some of Smith's descriptions are a bit vague:

• Does Packrat add an Empty Bottle from thin air, or do you need an Empty Bottle somewhere in deck for it to add it to your hand?
• Shatter and Bottle Hurl use the phrase "Spend X Empty Bottles:" while Right in the Face uses "Expend all Empty Bottle cards in your hand" and Hurricane uses "Expend up to X Empty Bottles." All of these cards have the same functionality of Expending X Empty Bottles from your hand, but have three different methods of description. (Entire Supply is fine since it has different functionality, since it works from discard/deck as well).
• I thought Smith's Core Argument would only deal 1 damage whenever he creates an argument. Turns out, it's whenever ANYONE creates an argument.
• Barrage selects a target randomly. Does this include friendly targets? Additionally, if it only targets an enemy, why does it have a special keyword when there are a decent number of cards that also have random targeting?
• Endless Supply could probably be reworded to "Expend up to 4 cards from your hand. Drink equal to number of cards Expended."

In terms of (very preliminary) card balance:

• Swig seems significantly better than Down the Hatch. When unupgraded, Swig will give one less Empty Bottle but will draw 2 additional cards in comparison.
• Recycle seems like it could be a Common. Given how much healing Smith normally has access to thanks to Moxie, healing up to 2 (or 3/4 if upgraded) and drawing 2 gives it around the same power level of Swig.
• Conquer doesn't seem very useful given that Smith seems to have a tough time gaining Defense.
• Dumpster Dive is almost strictly better than Reuse, despite both being Uncommon, since Dumpster Dive draws extra cards and moves 1 additional Empty Bottle to your deck.

Edited April 17, 2020 by ArtixBot

[RageLeague]

 It turns out it is not endless, but it has 20 waves. It can be easily modified to be endless, though.

Tip on how to beat this mode:

Battle everything until there are too many for you to handle.

Hire people near bosses, because some bosses are balanced around having 2 or 3 allies.

Self-damaging is very good, IF you have combo pieces such as masochist or scream. Also, the improvise card is really good, because the remove negative debuff can remove the "remove power at end of turn" debuff.

The chain cards seems very underwhelming, because of its initial high cost and the fact that their chained version isn't really that good.

Trauma's effect itself is kind of underwhelming. It's a weak point, but only works after a lot of attacks. Right now you probably should play it for the synergy with other cards rather than take it for the trauma.

Empty bottle synergies are very luck based. Haven't build a successful deck with it yet.

[pacovf]

So I've been thinking about Moxie. I like the idea of Smith using health as a resource to manage battles, and having natural regeneration that you have to balance against self-damage. Alleviate is great mechanic as a way to give Smith ways to heal that don't devolve into the player grinding battles to heal back to full.

Moxie does not work so well though, because it's both completely random, and halves at the end of each turn. If the player manages to build up a huge amount of Moxie, you might get +1 or +2 hp on the turn itself. This would be ok if Moxie didn't halve itself, since the bad luck one turn would just balance out the good luck next turn. But because it halves, bad luck on the first turn has a much, much larger impact than good luck next turns. Furthermore, healing too little has much worse negative consequences (dying) than healing too much has positive consequences (likely to waste the excess heal).

This leads to the player just not trusting Moxie at all, and avoiding any deckbuilding that would rely on it. Modifying the way Moxie works so that it's more reliable (eg., setting a minimum heal at half the total Moxie?) would mean that players can actually build decks accordingly. Right now it feels like a wasted mechanic.

About the UI: consider putting the "Alleviate hp" indicator right of the health bar, instead of mixed in with buffs and debuffs. Or putting both Moxie and Alleviate on a line of their own, the way charge/overcharge works for Rook.

 

EDIT: off the top of my head idea for reworked, more reliable Moxie: "Whenever you take damage, increase minimum Moxie by one, and maximum Moxie by the damage taken. At the end of your turn, heal a random amount between the two, then set Moxie to 1-2". Then turn Alleviate X into "Reduce maximum Moxie by X, but no lower than minimum Moxie. Heal by the amount reduced."

Edited April 17, 2020 by pacovf

[SpicyNiceCream]

NGL this is hilarious to watch. It really looks like a bar fight when you see a spinning old man fighting a drunk dude with a hammer.

Has anyone go through all 20 waves without talking to the bartender to heal/pay?

Edited April 18, 2020 by SpicyNiceCream

[Maniafig]

Just finished the 20 day bar brawl, doing nothing but combat since you want a decent deck to deal with the bosses. I didn't need many trips to the bartender at all, so for the last 5 days I had enough gold banked up to just pay everyone to go away. 

Some findings:

-Healing Bottomless Vial is incredibly OP, non-expending and reusable heal is nuts and kept me topped off on HP for most of the run. The fact that it also adds Empty Bottles to the deck is the cherry on top.

-I'm a big fan of Hole Up, but it also doesn't play nice with self-damaging Moxie builds. I don't think mitigated self-damage increases Moxie, but I'm not actually entirely sure, it's not clear whether Moxie should or shouldn't build from mitigated self-damage. Hole Up should also apply a buff to Smith that says how much Armor he's getting next turn.

-Packrat is incredibly good, at worst it's an extra draw per turn and at best it guarantees your Empty Bottle spending cards are always live. 

-Right In The Face needs to be more clear that it only attacks once per Empty Bottle expended, and not one attack PLUS one extra attack per Empty Bottle expended. 

-Shatter is incredibly valuable, battles with Smith tend to drag on without ways of applying Wound and Shatter is the only Smith card that can apply Wound.

-The Alleviate Health effect is confusing at first, it took me some time to understand how exactly it works and how it's an effect independent of Moxie.

-Dangerous Bulb is even better when playing as Smith than it already is for other character, since the self-inflicted damage happens on your own turn and triggers Moxie. 

-Chain cards should show what the rest of the chained cards added to the deck are, similar to how Alpha works in StS.

-Hammer Down looks really underwhelming. What's the point of having a high power multiplier on a 3-cost card? You get a better multiplier playing several low cost cards, or just as good or even better a multiplier playing any card that attacks multiple times. For some reason it also does a lot of self-damage.

-Cheers: Is this the only card with the Opener keyword? This seems like an underexplored keyword.

-The Pinto Pour is way above the power curve for 1-cost common Maneuver cards.

-I like the card art for Masochist~

-Smith's animations are flavorful and fit the character, but also bog down the pace of combat. 

I still need to play around with the negotiations more, there are a lot of cards that make me think they're useless (Rehearsal, Bruister, Instigate, Connections) and a lot of cards that look really good (Slick & Fall Guy, Double Down, Long Winded, Chaos Theory).

[Wumpus the 19th]

4 hours ago, Maniafig said:

-I like the card art for Masochist~

someone at klei studios was hired, paid, and had to design the card art of an alien putting on...i don't know how to feel about it...

[pacovf]

Quick check on card balance (not mentioning all, just things that jump to me):

 

BATTLE

- Pinto pour: Should be a rare, it's too powerful at common and would have too much competition with similar cards if it was nerfed.

- Conquer: should cost 1. It's hard to pull off.

- Hammer down: this is such terrible value, even upgraded. I don't know where to begin. EDIT: a 2 cost card that deals 10+ damage and triples the benefit from power (before upgrade!) is a reasonable card. The card as it stands is considerably worse, and compares very unfavourably to just playing three different attack cards, even after upgrade.

- Hurricane, Right in the face: should attack once, and repeat per expended bottle. Their ceiling is high, but it's really awkward and costly to get there.

- Intensify: either it shouldn't increase the cost of the chosen card, or both the cost and the doubling should last until the end of the fight

- Meditation: maybe the first card should cost 2, but Meditation II and III should definitely cost 1. They're not that good.

- Reduce: should either start at "up to 3 empty bottles", or at "4 defense per bottle", and upgrade from there

- Slug smash: this would be ok if either of its upgrades were the base version, and got better after the upgrade. It's terrible right now.

- Bio-strike: pretty bad for a rare, but maybe that says more about how bad Moxie is than about the card itself.

- Trauma (condition): this suffers from having to read a huge amount of text spread over two conditions to figure out what it does, and not being powerful enough to justify the time spent understanding it. I honestly would just get rid of Traumatized and make Trauma read as such: "Whenever attacked, if Trauma count is X or more, the attack deals triple damage and removes all Trauma. Otherwise, increase Trauma count by 1". X would have be tuned up to find the right value. Related: Trauma and Traumatized currently appear as buffs, instead of debuffs.

- Blood flow, Juicer: unless Moxie gets reworked, these need *huge* buffs.

- Hoarder: compares unfavourably to Packrat. Would be ok at uncommon, though.

- Raw Power: it's crazy. Good thing you moved it to Rare, but doesn't change how crazy it is. Would try it with a cost of 3, and with 3 hp per action instead of one (to *almost* break infinite combo with Unending Vial). Otherwise, needs a rework: either expend cards as you play them, or change it to "take twice as much damage as the total cost of all cards in your hand. Reduce the cost of all cards in your hand to 0 until played". Objective is to prevent a single card from making you go infinite. Smith has too much draw and too much alleviate for this to be reasonable as is. BTW, please change the action counter to a red colour, so it's a bit more clear for the player what is happening.

- Bonkers, Cheers, Kiss the fists, Smash: kind of inefficient for their cost, and too boring to make up for it.

 

NEGOTIATION

I have less experience with this. Main thing I want to say is that I enjoy the Renown mechanic, even though it needs a bit of support. There seems to be a Smith strategy of building a bunch of arguments and then destroying them, but I haven't managed to get the support for that, and most cards that encourage it are pretty bad by themselves. Hard to say. It doesn't help that the bar experiment pushes you towards battle.

- Nepotism: missing an upgrade

- Amplify: this would be ok if the damage increase was until the end of the negotiation. It's terrible right now.

 

About the experiment: please gives us a round counter to the next boss, so we have a general idea of when to hire people. Or make hires stay with us until the next boss. I think I've had a hire stay with me for a single battle, leaving right before a boss. Something else: either remove Eonwe from the first boss pool, or buff her, she's a pushover. On the other hand, move Bossbit (and Flead queen?) to the third boss pool, instead of second. End of D2 for Rook is closer to end of D3 for Sal than to her D2.

 

Unrelated: consider making the "lose X power at the end of your turn" something else than a debuff. It's getting easier and easier to exploit with all the new "remove debuff" cards we're getting.

 

EDIT: ok I think I'm done editing this post now

Edited April 19, 2020 by pacovf

[RageLeague]

Now I have finished prestige 0 on Sal's campaign with Smith, I got a better feel about Smith's negotiation.

I used an argument/renown deck for negotiation. I picked up bolstered, so it might influence my feel about how valid argument builds are, but I can say is that with a lot of the arguments doing a lot of things, smith can deal a lot of damage using the arguments and argument gaining, plus you create like 8 or 9 arguments(and bounties) near the endgame. It can be a valid strategy.

For renown, without support it's hard to get rolling, but with a bunch of grafts that benefits from having renown, and a bunch of good renown gaining cards like Contacts, you can easily gain a bunch of renown (>10) and gain a lot of benefits from it. Payoff cards like Executive and Influencer can deal a lot of damage in one turn. Once i got like 20 renown in a negotiation. Of course, having too high renown can cause the fall to be greater when it gets destroyed, that's why you need to have some sort of insurance policy against such scenario, such as Stool Pigeon, Immunity, and maybe Who?, which costs renown and reduce the damage taken on renown. Arguments remover can also remove renown without triggering it. I found duplication effects to be really good in Smith's deck, such as Carbon Copy and Dissect, because it gives you more arguments, which means more damage output and targets.

Standing is really not good. It's basically a weakened version of Calm. It would be at least somewhat considered to be slightly playable if the target mode is not random(Random composure target is really not that great). Even Footing has interesting ideas, but it's garbage considering it only counts arguments and not bounties, and usually the opponent only has 2 or 3 arguments, including core(anything more than that, there's bigger problems to worry about). Hostile cards is not really that valid in Smith, because there's only 2 cards that gains dominance. You don't play hostile cards for dominance, you play it for high damage output(Who?) or synergy with other mechanics.

[pacovf]

I’d add that Renown really wants to have 5 base resolve, to be viable after the early prestiges. And Clout really wants to provide more Dominance than 1, even before upgrade.

[RageLeague]

Moxie is hard to control, but once you do the math and have a good deck for it, it can become very good, to the point of staying at full health at the end of every battle, because you can out-heal damage so much.

How moxie works: At the end of every turn, randomly heal 1~(stacks of moxie) hp, and reduce the count of moxie by half.

For every count of moxie, the player heals 0.5 hp on average, 0 hp minimum and 1 hp maximum(I'll denote it as 0 - 0.5 - 1 because I don't want to type it every time) at the end of turn. Then this moxie is reduced to 0.5 moxie(assume best case scenario), healing 0 - 0.25 - 0.5 hp, then halved, healing 0 - 0.125 - 0.25 hp, and so on. Adding all these value together as an infinite geometric sequence, we get: 1 moxie heals 0 - 1 - 2 hp. Of course, in practice, the average is going to be less than that, because you don't have infinite moxie, and the half moxie is rounded down.

Since we know that every self-damage = 2 moxie(no grafts), we get the following: taking 2 damage will cause the player to not gain nor lose any health, taking 1 damage allows the player to out-heal the damage on average, taking 3 damage is risky, but sometimes you can out-heal the damage, while anything above 4, you can't out-heal the damage. Most of the cards have 2+ self damage, with very few exceptions, so without synergy, you shouldn't use self-damaging cards for healing. Of course, a bunch of self damaging cards have added effects that are also really good, and if you can get them to only deal 2 damage to self, then you can add them to your deck more or less risk-free for future synergies.

Moxie build synergies well with power build, because of bio strike, chest pound, masochism, and scream(which benefits from more power or generates more power, while generating moxie through self-damage/card effect). The upgraded version of blood flow can be really good, providing you can generate a bunch of moxie. Juicer sucks, because you spend 1 action to guarantee you won't get a low role, but it does nothing else, and it lowers the average health gained by 0.75. Raw power is very broken, because it's basically play everything for free, and with the right graft, you can get health out of it. Right now, there are no payoff cards for moxie, so you have to rely on other win conditions(like power or bottles) to actually defeat the enemies.