A better way than durability to weaken atmosuits

[kerosene]

I think atmosuits were too good in the base game. Is a durability system a good way to make them worse? I have some doubts. Let me propose an alternative.

Atmosuits already have -6 athletics penality, but this is eliminated by the Exosuit Training skill (which also gives +2 athletics). I think this skill is the real reason atmosuits are too good. If atmosuits were a choice between environmental hazard safety and movement speed, then there would be a good reason to not use atmosuits all the time.

What changes should be made to the Exosuit Training skill? Here are some possibilities:

1. The skill no longer affects athletics and instead allows using atmosuits and jetpacks. I think this would lead to a playstyle where players minimize atmosuit / jetpack usage and design most of their bases accordingly.

2. The skill no longer eliminates the atmosuit penality but still gives +2 athletics. This could work but it might not be enough to discourage players from putting all their duplicants in atmosuits (because once duplicants have a high athletics skill, losing 4 athletics is no longer very noticable). The atmosuit penality could be changed to -60% speed, applied multiplicatively, so that it's always a strong penality.

[crbd115]

I do think that a % speed penalty would work better then the current system as late game a flat modifier is barely noticeable since many dupes can have +20 athletics.

[BaloneyOs]

So many ways to go about this.

- Have them give a unique debuff like "stuffy" or something. Maybe have it drain extra stamina and/or decrease morale after a while?

- Wearing them increases calorie consumption.

- Prevent suited dupes from eating/drinking/bathrooming.

- Give dupes a new negative trait, "Claustrophobic".

- Have other penalties that double as flavor, such as reduced cuisine, doctoring, or decorating.

- Reduced exploration range.

- Make them a more dangerous vector for diseases.

[TripleM999]

I would prefer the life maintenance option. No eating or drinking, no toilet or showering... no sleeping. No medicine or recreation in an atmo suit.

[NewWorldDan]

I would kind of like to see different tiers of atmo suits.  You could run everything through the same set of docks.  A basic air mask that protects against irritation and has 10kg of oxygen.  A tier 1 atmo suit (maybe made of plastic or whatever) that holds 20kg of oxygen and provides 100 degrees of thermal protection and a tier 2 atmo suit that we know and love.  That requires 10x as much reed fiber to make.  Make those suits expensive.  Right now, the pips have planted so much wild reed fiber that I don't know what to do with it all.  

[Majestix]

14 hours ago, BaloneyOs said:

So many ways to go about this.

...

- Wearing them increases calorie consumption.

...

- Give dupes a new negative trait, "Claustrophobic".

...

Calorie consumption becomes a non-issue in the long run, like the athletics penalty. A negative "claustrophobic" trait could easily become another one of those avoid-at-all-costs traits if its effects are at all severe. I like many of the other suggestions.

Having said that, clothes having limited durability does not seem like a crazy concept to me. For sure, on maps without thimble reeds, this is a very serious penalty, but there are other ways of rebalancing that, e.g. lowering the reed fibre cost of insulation from 5 to 2-3, say.

Maybe in the DLC this will never even be an issue, because there will always be an asteroid with thimble reeds. I am more concerned about this coming to the base game.

[Yunru]

I must say, I really like durability because it's a problem that inherently scales with use. 

Keep your dupes in suits at all times and you'll have to deal with it to a degree such that you'll want to automate it as much as possible, but use them only when entirely necessary and it's an occasional blip. 

[dupe soup]

my guess is that klei doesn't want players using suits for everything (and I don't blame them), at least without some kind of cost.

i don't mind the durability mechanic, but an alternative method would be to restrict the kinds of duties a dupe can perform while suited; maybe limited to mining, building, and possibly operating.  this gives suits a specific role instead of being a free pass to ignore temperature/atmosphere/liquids outside of your sealed living quarters.

[nakomaru]

I also like durability because it guarantees that the mod to remove the feature is as easy to write and maintain as possible.

[zerogamegame]

4 hours ago, nakomaru said:

I also like durability because it guarantees that the mod to remove the feature is as easy to write and maintain as possible.

LOL I read it as an oxymoron because if there are game features that are so bad that essentially forcing majority player to use mods, (eg pliers) then it is a very sad reflection on the developers' mentality. 

 

I am definitely not welcoming this change, because it is after all a sci-fi game and if atmosuits has durability then why my SPOM can run till eternity? Why plant or animal have fixed lifespan instead of random deaths? Why are dupe immortal, should they age and have athletic penalty?  

 

Current iteration of atmosuit is not a end-all solution to a lot of people would think, Dupe still cannot dive into magma or molten niobium without getting hurt. While having athletics penalty maybe not have an impact I would believe setting a speed cap on atmosuit is good enough to make player think twice using it or forcing player to build extensive tube system / plastic ladder / fireman pole to circumvent it.  THAT will kind of what ONI would be, everything is always 80%solution 20% new problems. heh.

 

 

[BaloneyOs]

13 hours ago, Majestix said:

Calorie consumption becomes a non-issue in the long run, like the athletics penalty. A negative "claustrophobic" trait could easily become another one of those avoid-at-all-costs traits if its effects are at all severe. I like many of the other suggestions.

Calorie consumption is actually a scaling issue because it builds up towards triggering starvation in the middle of a work schedule, and we know how much labor that ends up costing. Something like claustrophobic can probably be balanced with numbers in a way that makes it not universally worse than some other negative traits, perhaps something like a minor increase in stress when in a small room or wearing suits.

The main point though is that almost anything is more interesting than suits having durability.

 

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Maybe in the DLC this will never even be an issue, because there will always be an asteroid with thimble reeds. I am more concerned about this coming to the base game.

This would be even more guaranteed to annoy people but I'd argue that it's less than likely to happen due to how much backlash there already is for this new gimmick.

[Meltdown]

How about changing the way maintaince works? Currently we get working suit undocked and converted to broken, have to move it to the forge and repair it.

What if, instead of undocking and transforming to another entity, suit would just stay in dock and become unusable. The dock would create repair errand that would require delivery of reed fiber and some dupe time. With this system there is no need to worry about replacing suits or delivering broken suits to forge. It also removes need to have spare suits. However, it actually locks the whole dock instead of allowing to use it with replacements.

I'd rather deal with current system, but it would address some of existing concerns about suit delivery. More restrictive, but simplier.