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Suggestions to balance the game


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First off, I'd like to start off by saying I've loved the game so far (for many refreshing and unique reasons that make it all the more awesome a find). That being said, there are some places that can do with some easy touch ups to make crazy stuff like 446 days in game the fruit of korean starcraft-esque finesse only.

1. Pigging out is de-lish~!

It's far too easy to farm pig camps in the game. It takes about 2 days to have the materials necessary to begin farming for a total of 8 pieces of meat a day in these camps. This takes out the tension in finding food when such an abundant source is also the most effective. An easy fix to this would be to not have pigs run when you come close to them(It'd also make giving them meat less of a chore). That means it's much more skill-based and time consuming while generally being much less reliable. Having them in that kind of grouping also means you'd usually have to forego the meat to have a pigskin there to collect later and create a single pig shack to get a steady stream of meat, which still necessitates gathering more food sources.

2. Tufts and saplings and farms, oh my!

Gathering resources is tough on a survivor, but when you centralize a big stream of resources flowing in, it's not quite as tense anymore (and frankly, it's just over-powered). An easy thing to implement that would make it much more of a challenge is giving the grass tufts and twig saplings the same fertilize mechanic as the berry bushes (3 grabs and then a manure refresher). This makes manure much more valuable, and perpetual farming much more stressful as competing needs for a relatively scarce resource gets tough.

3. Totally bushed

Berries are still just a tad too over-powered a resource (even with the several limitations already put on it (gobblers were genius, bye the bye)). It's great that gobblers are super fast (makes them a huge time waster to the easily angered and sadly uninformed), but I believe even Kevin acknowledged that they can just wind up providing the player with even more meat. To bring just a bit more tension with the berry grab, a new hostile mob should have a chance of spawning out of a berry bush (though at a smaller percentage chance than a gobbler). Atleast it's monster meat at the trade of a hit, or more, instead of free, pure meat.

4. Pig power

Taking down spider dens, or tentacles, or the newly aggroed tallbirds(great change for balancing purposes) can be a chore. And like most things, throwing pigs at the problem is a great solution. This does take out much too much of the tension in these encounters, though (also, allows for collecting silk and the best weapon in the game way more easily than it should be). Giving them monster meat 3 times turns them into werehogs, which is a good idea, but seeing as they usually won't last too long depending on their usage, having them turn into werehogs at complete random when given monster meat will make it all the tougher a decision. Also, forests are plenty of effort to forage (luckily, wilson's no sap). Pigs make recovering wood a breeze... far too easily. Making them 'winded' after 3-4 trees, needing more meat, will limit the usefulness and add more of that precious resource known as time to the wood gathering process.

- - - Updated - - -

5. Jump start

Frogs are tricky, especially with those super small hit boxes. All the same, they're way to easy to gather meat from. Many will say that the tentacles provide a general fear of the swamps enough to not worry, but many of the ponds are alongside the road anyway. A simple implementation to solve this would be to have two toads spawn by a pond instead of one. This means it's much tougher to collect without atleast taking a hit (yes, it means more meat, but it also means they get to actually attack at all).

6. Nighttime visitors aren't expected, but are always fun

The hound addition was great (random mob swarms? count me in), and the hell hounds are a great counter to tree forts. However, it's still a bit too easy to fortify yourself so you won't have to be afraid at night (my tree fort never lets more than one hound randomly through), but i'm sure you developers don't want us breathing easy, especially at night. An easy implementation to kick things up a notch is add a ghost spawn that relentlessly follows you for the entire duration of the night, this means that a player will always need a portable light source handy, and it'll mean delicious circumstances like mutually spawning hounds and a ghost sprinkled with those hungry spiders for the unprepared. Since torches can't last the whole night or put up a fight, miner helmets will be all the more necessary and make fireflies another mandatory resource. Since this is a bit too much for beginning play, an effective implementation of this would be to wait until day 30, or better yet have it happen randomly after a player has dug up a grave (and more chance of happening over the amount of times the player digs up graves), this makes digging for golden booty a tougher strategic decision on the whole.

7. Golden opportunities

Who even uses flint tools anyway, amirite? Gold tools can last for months. And gold is pretty abundant.... So with the above implementations limiting the pig king use (or atleast making it a tougher choice), getting gold is still just a bit too easy. I like the nov 13 change not having every boulder provide gold, but considering the amount of boulders on any given map, the rate should still be lowered, making it more of a commodity and having the need a difficult decision about food (now more scarce with the above additions) and nighttime terrors when getting gold tools.

8. I never knew wilson was a meat-cat

Meat effigys are great (tentacles are seriously ridiculous, man), but you can make how many? It's not too tense journeying back to your dropped loot when you have 4 more meat effigies. Where's the tension when you have safety net after safety net? There should only be one meat effigy at any given time. The mechanic of having wilson wait to grow out his beard for the resource is an awesome game mechanic that makes way too much sense, but meat me half way, here (heh... half way).

Even with all of these things in mind, It won't at all stop me on my journey to collect max of all stackables and make my hat collection complete (just need one more bit of tentacle genitalia, oh boy), but it'll definitely make everything much more balanced and enjoyable to newcomers and veterans alike.

Also, be sure to add your guyses/ galses thoughts and ideas below

Edited by Pulpsock
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tl;dr

Game's too easy make it harder.

j/k on a serious note tho, after reading what you expressed was quite interesting. The suggestions surely 'balance' out the game for people who've already played it and mastered the art of survival(Cheers to all the forum vets here). But for newer players, it would really be tough to get in once you got this level of balance added into your game. Sure they are great to raise a challenge. But think about the new people.

BUT there could be an option before starting the game allowing you to select what level of difficulty you want and your suggestions could very well work for a hard mode, which I think some of us would love.

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tl;dr

Game's too easy make it harder.

j/k on a serious note tho, after reading what you expressed was quite interesting. The suggestions surely 'balance' out the game for people who've already played it and mastered the art of survival(Cheers to all the forum vets here). But for newer players, it would really be tough to get in once you got this level of balance added into your game. Sure they are great to raise a challenge. But think about the new people.

BUT there could be an option before starting the game allowing you to select what level of difficulty you want and your suggestions could very well work for a hard mode, which I think some of us would love.

i like the idea of difficulty option, i am not a good surviver lol, and for new player who know nothing about this game, its very hard to survive if all they get is hostile mobs and hard to get food....since this game doesn't have tutorial mode, most ppl will take a while to figure things out....we can't spend all day worrying if the nest berry bush we pick will **** us XD..i mean i get mini heart atk when the globbler pops out lol..imagine more scary monster..ugghh..my heart......yes, i am a very jumpy person

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But if you notice, most of these changes don't really effect beginner play. It's basically a list of solutions for the current exploits in the game for those who can make it past 30 days easy. The only one up there that would make it any more difficult for absolutely new players would be the hostile mod chance in bushes suggestion (which should be small (so it'd be rare for a new player, and usually only show up when mass farming)).

Seeing as this game is a survival horror, I'd just love to see it blossom into a game that anyone can get into, but can only effectively be a place where those who practice and prepare and act like scared wusses (such as in real life) will make it to the dozens to hundred days on the board. Balancing is the key. A hardcore mode would be an easy solution, but what would hardcore mode make different? How fast your hunger goes down? How tough and frequent mobs are? The exploits are still there, so would it really be all that different from what experience we have now? Questions to ponder. Btw, I just can't help being verbose... curse my non-stop thought process!

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Yeah that would make it tough. But bee boxes are kinda OP. I have way to much honey and i make honey ham about every other day. I Just like the idea of a snake jumping out from a bush or a venous creature the poison wont last to long say 30 Hp at max. I don't know just an idea.

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it's not a bad idea, we will have to c what the Devs will implement in the future patch...for now i think they should balance out when hound should attack, some ppl who just bought the game get attack on there first day, ofc they would not know what to do in this situation...some ppl might say that it's easy to kill them but if u r a new player to the game, they wouldn't know what to do unless they have time to explore first....they should be fix to start spawning let say...day 10...or so on and so on.....starting over is not fun for everyone..

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Wow I hear you there. For me I think hounds are way to easy. I just slap down a stack of monster meat and proceed to the beating while they snack. But yeah I could see hounds being a serious problem for new people.

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Pigs are overpowered, that's about as much as I'll agree on here.

The downside to resource hording is that it can all go up in flames, even more likely with the new flame hounds. Also, taking the time to go and gather them is dangerous, your reward is conveniently located supplies.

The fertilise mechanic combined with gobblers is enough in my opinion. I've got bored of chasing gobblers down and constantly losing berries in the process, monster meat & honey are the lazy-man's way of keeping alive. All I'd suggest is having gobblers be less skittish.

As for pig armies, I'm not too worried what happens with the combat side of things, because most enemies can be taken out solo without much effort and the only time I ever use them in combat is to kill them off if they were fed monster meat once or twice. That being said, if your suggestion of nerfing their deforestation capabilities get's acknowledged I will hurt you. Collecting wood is a chore, it is boring and tiresome and wastes days, ANY feature that makes it easier should stay. I'm sick of people trying to make this game more of a grind, instead of more fun.

Nothing wrong with frogs, now you're just being silly. They're essentially a rare rabbit that fights back, if you want to nerf them why not nerf rabbits too? Hell why not nerf everything. Spears are overpowered, lets make it take 12 hits to kill everything.

I barely read number 6, but all I gathered from it is you want me to hold a torch all the time just in case. Yeah, no. The inventory size just shrank, why suggest essentially shrinking it more.

It'd make more sense for the pig king to not "trade" with you if you've attacked a pigman that day. And gold tools are fine, it would be nice if their durability was lowered though and a higher tier was introduced, perhaps made from red gems or some new less renewable resource.

Ok maybe I agree with you twice, 1 meat effigy at a time is good, I never tried building two for my first few playthroughs because I kind of assumed that'd be how it would work.

I just want to say, there's only so much time in the day, people need to stop suggesting things that would simply drag out the checklist of things you need to do each day. I'd like to be able to actually go adventuring from time to time. The game isn't about making survival a chore.

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In relation to your comment on wood gathering, it's not about making the game a chore, it's about making it more difficult to stockpile and make time more scarce. Also, since when are frogs rare? They are situated in all swamp biomes and respawn every day. I don't want to make the game dark souls, but I believe that balancing the game means making every element of the game equally viable (none being too overpowering or easy), and having to choose and really set a plan out before every day. I'm past 100 days and I could do nothing for 40+ days with the food i've stored, and essentially indefinitely with the resources i've gathered. Hell hounds, as I mentioned before, are a great mechanic, but they still get stuck behind a tree fort all the same. Finally, no need to be incendiary, as i'm just putting out some ideas

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