Wall degredation in recent update - WAAAY TOO MUCH!

[jrista]

I just wanted to comment on the wall degradation during hurricane season in the recent update. It's WAY, WAY, WAY too aggressive. I built a nice wall around my base during autumn, and with the FIRST storm of the hurricane season, nearly my entire wall, which was both wood and sandbags around the outside, had been reduced to useless rags, sand and stubs. This is way too much. I'd have to farm the entire island, and my neighboring islands, of all their wood to keep the wall up (which I find essential to surviving the hounds later on in the game, when there are a dozen or so of them) with all this insane degradation.

 

I can understand the sand bags. They are cheap, weak, and would need to be replaced (although since they don't actually keep out the water, from what I have observed, they seem to be entirely useless). But reducing an entire wooden fence to useless stubs within the first storm of the season? That's insane. It took me most of autumn to farm enough wood to build the whole thing in the first place, and was key to me surviving the first two hound attacks. If the wall is gone within the first storm, it renders walls entirely useless in this game, and they might well not even exist at all.

 

I have not yet tried building a stone wall (barely enough stone in the game as it is), however if they degrade the same as sand bags and wood, then you truly might as well remove them from Shipwrecked altogether. There isn't enough stone in the entire world to maintain that kind of wall degradation for more than a couple seasons at most, and still have enough left over to build all the other things that require stone. I am only hoping that spring doesn't also cause wall degradation like this. 

 

The wall degradation needs to be throttled back. It's one thing to present a challenge, it's entirely another to make something so useless as this. It's downright annoying, and makes me not want to bother playing the game at all if I have no way of defending against dozens of hounds later on in the game (assuming I can get that far, Shipwrecked is tough enough as it is without the added super-fast wall degradation.) Or for that matter the armies of monkeys that steal everything, or the throngs of snakes that seem to purposely seek me out wherever I am on the map, regardless of how far away I am from their spawn points. Having no defense against any of that during an entire season? Ridiculous. I think the rate of degradation for each type of wall needs to be reevaluated. Hay walls would certainly degrade faster, sandbags a little slower, wood should degrade a good deal slower than that (were talking about full log wood walls here), and stone should hardly degrade at all, if at all.

 

Anything else, and Shipwrecked just became annoying enough to not be fun at all (I was loving it before the recent update, when my walls didn't degrade at all.) 

[julz1981]

Even before the update it was the same...just sandbags had no HP so they didnt degrade at all... In one game i built a nice limewall battlezone with 20 or so toothtrap, and then, day one of wind the entire wall was destroyed... the problem seems to be from objects hitting the wall, it's like they do 200dmg per second or something. Even a single piece of hail will destroy walls in mere seconds! They need to remove that feature entirely in my opinion. it's already enough that wind slows you down and sweeps away every items that are light enough...

[BravePotato]

Yeah, it happen to me too.But mine is stone wall,

Cost me a chest full of rocks to made that wall then it is complete broke down after first windy night.
I don't know why the dev create that mechanic, the wall is use to stop item get blown away from the wind in first place. This mechanic counter the-way-player-counter the game problem.

IMO the wall alreay have little use in vanilla game, I only build wall for tooth trap bottle-neck, surround from fire hound and capture koalefant.
Now with this ice-get-blown-by-wind-broke-down-stone-wall mechanic in SW I think I will never want to build a wall again.

[Darcy777]

I am unhappy about this update feature as well.  A stone wall should be able to survive for years.  I wish I could undo the update.  This game is already too hard for me. I'm impatiently awaiting the full release so I can have some control over the world settings.  

[julz1981]

I am unhappy about this update feature as well.  A stone wall should be able to survive for years.  I wish I could undo the update.  This game is already too hard for me. I'm impatiently awaiting the full release so I can have some control over the world settings.  

 

like i mentioned before 3 post up, this was the same before the update!!

[jrista]

Same or not before the update, the mechanic is totally broken. It's rendered walls useless. There is no way to rebuild them fast enough for them to be useful. I die all the time now during hurricane season when the fourth round of hounds come, either that or I fill up the seas with so many sea hounds that I can't travel the seas anymore. 

[julz1981]

Same or not before the update, the mechanic is totally broken. It's rendered walls useless. There is no way to rebuild them fast enough for them to be useful. I die all the time now during hurricane season when the fourth round of hounds come, either that or I fill up the seas with so many sea hounds that I can't travel the seas anymore. 

 

Use tooth traps, spiders, pigs, run far and kill them one by one, there are many tactics available for you. Also, wave 4 is easy, wait until you have 8 hounds on you! lol

[jrista]

Use tooth traps, spiders, pigs, run far and kill them one by one, there are many tactics available for you. Also, wave 4 is easy, wait until you have 8 hounds on you! lol

 

The only way to get traps is to kill hounds. But to kill hounds, rather than just run around, hop on the water, and wait for them to disappear, you need some kind of defense. (I've rowed around entire islands, and they track you as well...so it isn't like you can hop on a raft, run down to the other end of the island, prepare something to deal with them, and then aggro them into your trap or whatever it is...they stick with you wherever you go, and only momentarily run off to kill snakes or monkeys.) Eventually I do use traps, after killing enough hounds to get enough teeth to build enough traps to kill them before they kill me. But the teeth drop so infrequently in Shipwrecked (I get monster meat and only monster meat about 90% of the time...in this last game, I finally got one hounds tooth at the fifth wave, but died from the rest before I could even pick it up). I'm usually dead without walls by the fourth or fifth wave. 

 

I may also just be getting a slew of crappy map gens, but I haven't even seen a spider in three or four maps? And most islands that are worth setting up a base on usually only seem to have one pig...and with four or five hounds, he's usually dead pretty quickly.

 

Also, since the update, hounds will no longer spawn on water and run around...but sea hounds will usually spawn right then and there if you jump onto a raft to get away from several hounds on land. So basically, your screwed either way. I've ended up trapped between a couple sea hounds on the sea and several regular hounds on land trying to get into a position where I can kill them without them obliterating me before I can get enough smacks with a spear off to kill just one of them. 

 

The wall degradation thing is a massive issue. I don't mind the mechanic existing...it's way over done at this point though. Cheaper walls should degrade faster than more expensive ones. I'd expect stone to mostly last a whole hurricane season, and damn, if you could find something better than stone (like moon rocks, or maybe obsidian?) it should last longer. I've tried every kind of wall now...they all degrade at the same rate, and they are all completely wiped out by the end of the first storm of the season. Ridiculous. Ludicrous game mechanic that just makes the whole thing, particularly the hounds, excessively annoying. 

[Hexis]

I was planning to wall in my Wildbores to prevent them from running off charging endlessly at the sea, but guess that's not gonna happen. Sigh...

 

Regarding the hounds though, there's one easy no-preparation-needed defense that works especially well for the smaller waves (so long as there's no Fire Hounds ). You just need to be in/near a jungle biome, then as the hound come run around smacking every snake bush you can find once and let the hounds get distracted on the snakes. If you think the hounds will sweep the floor with the snakes, just pop in yourself, target any somewhat isolated, distracted hounds and smack them on the bottom to help out.

[cstmarc]

I think I was killed by hail in 3 hits in my last game !    Sure, it is far too damaging, and not only for sand bags.
 

[jrista]

I think I was killed by hail in 3 hits in my last game !    Sure, it is far too damaging, and not only for sand bags.

 

 

Yeah, I've been hit by hail a few times, and next thing I know my health is WAY down. Is it just the hail that is doing all the damage? Or does the wind also damage the walls? If it's just the hail, they really need to dial that back...and maybe give higher grade walls some kind of hail resistance trait that reduces the effect of a direct hail hit. 

 

The other thing about hail is it seems to ricochet. I've been hit by hail that damaged me, that first hit my science or alchemy machines. If hail is ricocheting off wall pieces onto other pieces, and the damage continues, that is even more ridiculous. 

[jrista]

I was planning to wall in my Wildbores to prevent them from running off charging endlessly at the sea, but guess that's not gonna happen. Sigh...

 

Regarding the hounds though, there's one easy no-preparation-needed defense that works especially well for the smaller waves (so long as there's no Fire Hounds ). You just need to be in/near a jungle biome, then as the hound come run around smacking every snake bush you can find once and let the hounds get distracted on the snakes. If you think the hounds will sweep the floor with the snakes, just pop in yourself, target any somewhat isolated, distracted hounds and smack them on the bottom to help out.

 

I guess I'll give this a try next time. At the moment, I'm not even interested in playing the game, as since the update I haven't been able to survive through hurricane season and that fourth or fifth wave of hounds...and man, they seem to come every six days now (before, when I was using non-degrading sandbag walls, I was surviving at least through the end of summer (which is another massive PITA...the near-continuous eruptions at the end of summer and near-continuous pyroclastic bombs is also just ludicrously overpowered), and a couple times I got back into autumn (made stupid mistakes in those games. Blah!)) 

[Talavaj]

Yeah, it seems Klei went balls to the wall with all the tedium and time wastery in this DLC.

I personally hated Wildfires in RotG since they are a dumb mechanic that exists purely to waste your time.

 

Now it's hail, volcano and floods... running around all the time to fix your crap in what is essentially the game just wasting your time does not sound like enjoyable or compelling game mechanics to me honestly.

I wish they focused on making more things to do in the DLC instead of covering up the lack of content with endless micro crapping and tedium.

[KuroiShichibi]

Oh dear god... now they broke my favourite kind of season D= ?!

 

I came back when I read that the Volcano Season was "fixed" and was happily playing through my 3rd or 4th one this time and now I am reading that hail will damage you greatly and even destroy sandbags???

I LOVED the Hurricane Season and just started going into it ... oh man .. I guess I stack up on a ton of Sandbags for the next Monsoon Season, to replace the destroyed ones <_<.

There go my sailing out plans.

 

AH WELL, we are still in early access and the peeps will surely fix that stuff when they have their next update ready.

If it gets too unplayable or not fun anymore - like with the overpowered Volcano showers - I will either start a new game, because I won't sacrafice day 230 or just wait until it is fixed again XD.

[MadamMelisse]

Oh wow, i feel your "anger" (」゜ロ゜)」

I've build a pretty cute wall, then hurricane season came ... in one Night everything's gone to ****.

 

Where is the Logic? A bit hail or SNAKE SKIN doesnt destroy a damn STONE Wall. If Klei wants to play the "Your Walls not enough"-Game, maybe they should give us cement to strenghen the Walls (or something).

 

Come on, even a damn Palm Leaf Hut is rock solid and its made of Bamboo and Leaf!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[jrista]

This problem cascades and creates other problems as well. It is RADICALLY more inefficient to repair a wall, than to hammer it and replace. I had to repair each wall piece several times just to restore it to a normal level 1 wall (why, that makes no sense whatsoever!), whereas if I hammer the stub and just replace it, it costs me only 1 log (and technically, the log is 100% recoverable if you don't build up the walls above level 1). 

 

However, because my walls were being entirely destroyed every single storm, I ended up burning through all my cut grass, and all my rocks, creating enough hammers to destroy and replace the entire thing. I wasn't paying that close attention to the rocks at the time, as I was worried about the impending hound attack. Well, I ran out of the ability to create hammers because I went down to only 2 rocks and no grass. And, of course, that was when the hounds attacked. 

 

This is a very severe issue. To survive the hounds, you have to waste massive amounts of wood repairing the walls (WAY more than it takes to destroy and rebuild them), so that they are up and protecting you when the hounds hit...but you'll likely end up farming all the wood on your island and probably the neighboring islands to do that. However to do the alternative requires a massive investment in non-renewable rock resources just to hammer and recover the wood from your original wall and replace. That is dangerous as well, though, because your open to attack while your rebuilding your wall. Since you can no longer escape the hounds by hopping into the water (sea hounds will just appear), your then stuck kiting a horde of 5, 8, 12 hounds around your island while they slowly nibble you to death. 

 

That is extremely NOT fun. Not when it happens every 6-7 days, which is what has been happening to me. I don't like the hounds much when they take 10-12 days to arrive each time...but every 6 days, with all the raging destruction of hurricane season? Ugh. Totally ruined Shipwrecked for me. :'( 

[julz1981]

The only way to get traps is to kill hounds. But to kill hounds, rather than just run around, hop on the water, and wait for them to disappear, you need some kind of defense.

The wall degradation thing is a massive issue. I don't mind the mechanic existing...it's way over done at this point though. Cheaper walls should degrade faster than more expensive ones. I'd expect stone to mostly last a whole hurricane season, and damn, if you could find something better than stone (like moon rocks, or maybe obsidian?) it should last longer. I've tried every kind of wall now...they all degrade at the same rate, and they are all completely wiped out by the end of the first storm of the season. Ridiculous. Ludicrous game mechanic that just makes the whole thing, particularly the hounds, excessively annoying. 

 

I agree that you need defenses for later waves, but i can manage fine without tooth traps for at least the first 5 or so waves... Get a pig as fast as possible, he will aggro some of them, and never hit a dog more than twice before moving away and then hit him another 3 times to kill him.

 

As for walls, like i said earlier and in another thread, they should just remove the damage done from items! Thats just plain and simply a bad mechanic!

 

[jrista]

I agree that you need defenses for later waves, but i can manage fine without tooth traps for at least the first 5 or so waves... Get a pig as fast as possible, he will aggro some of them, and never hit a dog more than twice before moving away and then hit him another 3 times to kill him.

 

As for walls, like i said earlier and in another thread, they should just remove the damage done from items! Thats just plain and simply a bad mechanic!

 

 

Totally agree about the last statement. Walls don't really have much resilience to start with...all except the moonrock and thucelite walls anyway (and I don't even think those would hold up to abrasive hail). Wood walls only have 200hp, and if the game really does consider horizontal strikes of hail from the wind as a damaging strike, it's no wonder it's gone in about 2 seconds. Limestone walls apparently have 500hp, which is more than twice as good...but if hail really is abrasive, then even limestone probably wouldn't least more than a few seconds before it was totally gone. *sigh* Frustrating. 

 

I am able to kite the hounds well enough. It's when there are a bunch that it becomes problematic. I tried the snakes, that pulled off a couple, three others stuck to me. I think I need to trigger more snakes and peel off more of the hounds before I try to kill them.

 

Out curiosity, has anyone tried to farm the coral reefs for enough limestone to build and maintain walls? They are better than stone walls by a small amount, although not as good as thucelite/moonrock walls. But I figure limestone should be a lot easier to get, and a renewable resource, making them a better wall option than stone walls (since rocks are not a renewable resource). I guess I'll give that a try, see how it pans out. 

 

I did find that I can let most of the hounds spawn, then hop on my board/boat, and usually only one sea hound will spawn. With good armor, I can take care of that one, then sail out away from the island and come back on the other side, which gives me time to prep snakes and whatnot before the hounds show up again. 

[tyraelpl]

ONE hail piece, ONE ffs wrecked like 5 sand bags... Nuff said, now fix it!

[NoOne]

the problem is that vanila and rog are built around things making base building and maintenance slower and more difficult. we dont have giants or even deer clops. besides hounds they keep it from being farmvil but shipwrecked lacks them

 

the seasons are meant to destroy your stuff . storms that wrecks walls, floods that prevent machines from working and volcano eruptions that can 1 shot you and level a entire base while its to hot to run around

 

this is why i mod the game heavily. the developers never understood what balance really is and capy seems to not care much about balance. to many monkeys on to many islands and clearing them out takes a while and its just a count down to volcano season unmodded

 

they need to tone all the seasonal stuff down and add in new giants. maybe even 1 or 2 ocean only ones . maybe even a trap one like you pick up the ring thing and it chases you on land or sea until you kill it or you leave the map

 

 

[Stroomschok]

 

 

I can understand the sand bags. They are cheap, weak, and would need to be replaced (although since they don't actually keep out the water, from what I have observed, they seem to be entirely useless). But reducing an entire wooden fence to useless stubs within the first storm of the season? That's insane. It took me most of autumn to farm enough wood to build the whole thing in the first place, and was key to me surviving the first two hound attacks. If the wall is gone within the first storm, it renders walls entirely useless in this game, and they might well not even exist at all.

 

 

Sandbags cheap? Are you kidding?

[jrista]

Sandbags cheap? Are you kidding?

 

Absolutely not. At least in my games since the update, bamboo is quite prolific. It's a renewable resource. Sand has always been ridiculously prolific. You can gather stacks and stacks of sand in a day, and you can gather a couple stacks of bamboo in a day. Then you have enough material to make stacks and stacks of sandbags. And man do you NEED to the way they degrade at the moment!

[jrista]

the problem is that vanila and rog are built around things making base building and maintenance slower and more difficult. we dont have giants or even deer clops. besides hounds they keep it from being farmvil but shipwrecked lacks them

 

the seasons are meant to destroy your stuff . storms that wrecks walls, floods that prevent machines from working and volcano eruptions that can 1 shot you and level a entire base while its to hot to run around

 

this is why i mod the game heavily. the developers never understood what balance really is and capy seems to not care much about balance. to many monkeys on to many islands and clearing them out takes a while and its just a count down to volcano season unmodded

 

they need to tone all the seasonal stuff down and add in new giants. maybe even 1 or 2 ocean only ones . maybe even a trap one like you pick up the ring thing and it chases you on land or sea until you kill it or you leave the map

 

I never had remotely the kind of base damage problems with ROG as I have with Shipwrecked. There are warnings when giants are coming, and it was always easy enough to get well away from your base before they actually landed. Dragonfly could burn acres of forest half a world away, not a big deal. Deerclopse could destroy a random structure half a world away, not a big deal. Bearbadger could stomp around and gobble up all the food stuffs half a world away, not a big deal. Moosegoose? Frog rain and he's toast. And he never once approached my bases.

 

I only lost a couple bases early on when I first started playing ROG, and that was only because I'd never encountered the giants before, and didn't know what they did. Once I figured out how to deal with them, I did.

 

The issue with this weather thing is there is absolutely no solution to the problem. No way of dealing with it. It's just massively destructive, for an entire season, and that's that. Your base is going to get wiped out, over and over and over again. Nothing you can do about it. Your GOING to burn through all the non-renewable resources in Shipwrecked no matter what you do, one way or another, between hurricane season and volcano season, because the two are massively destructive and there is no way around it. That's just plain and simple bad game mechanics. It needs to be fixed. I don't know that giants are the answer. Degrading walls might be fine, if they degraded at a reasonable rate, and did not require immense amounts of non-renewables to keep them repaired. Volcano season wouldn't be so bad if it didn't utterly destroy everything on the screen (i.e. your entire base if you don't get far enough away from it...destroying potentially countless items that require very rare and non-renewable (or very minimally renewable) resources like gold, rocks, etc.) 

 

I mentioned before, it's one thing to make a game challenging. It's another to make uncontrollable and unavoidable environmental phenomena so overpowered that they wipe you out again and again and leave you with no recourse. Just sucks the fun out of the whole thing.

[ArchVile]

Not to beat a dead horse but I also agree that something should be done about this ASAP.

 

The other day I spent an hour mining rocks and building a massive wall around my base just to have it be almost completely annihilated within minutes of hurricane season starting. At first I thought it was something I did wrong because my stone walls weren't fully upgraded so I spent another hour mining an entire volcanic island biome in an attempt to repair it. However at this point I had wasted well over two hundred stone, so I just gave up.

[jrista]

Does anyone know if the developers actually see these posts? Is this the right forum to be posting issue reports to? Definitely a problem that needs fixing soon. 

 

I decided to completely forego walls in my latest game, until monsoon hit. Barely scraped by with my life on the last hound attack (sliver of health left), so I finally managed to get past hurricane season. Got a few hounds teeth finally as well, so hopefully with traps and a wall, the hounds will be easier during monsoon. 

 

I also learned that every time the hounds come, one or two sea hounds also spawn. It does not matter if you are on the water or not, they spawn regardless, and WILL show up the next time you hit the water. I had only recovered some of my health at that point (planned to go out and pick up all my mussel sticks), and two sea hounds came at me and nearly destroyed my ship. So...beware, and make sure your ship and your health are in good condition before you hit the seas after a hound attack, and be ready to kill the sea hounds as well (still don't know any good way of dealing with those...I've died a few times when they destroyed my ship and I didn't have a life jacket on.)