The danger of germs are laughable

[TheGCat]

I played since the Outbreak update and now with the oil update several games with round about 400+ Cycles per game. No one of my dupes have ever taken a disease. In my last session I don't build the ore scrubber. Just into the slime biome, grab all the stuff and fine. No disease. I have tested a while and u must stand with your dupes several days in the slimelung area to take the slimelung disease. That isn't a challenge. Its nearly impossible to take slimelung How about the germ thing ? U put it in and its never seen again ?

I need a challenge! U know, harder!

[Lumina]

In my first try of the Oil Update (didn't play a lot in the previous one). First attempt, got two dupes with disease. Second, got one or none, i don't remember exactly.

I'm not the best player. But i already know the game and i used doors, wash basins and preventing dupes with too low immunity to go in the slimelung area when needed. My main problem with the slimelung was when i had extensive work at high priority in the area.

 

The thing is : is slimelung supposed to be a hard threat ? I don't think so. The slimelung area are close to the starting area and a new player will probably open it too soon by mistake without tools to prevent the disease to spread, but will probably be able to control it and learn how to avoid it after a time.

I see the food poisoning as an easy to avoid disease and the slimelung as a moderately difficult to avoid disease. If you plan your base with door and wash basin, and some control about activity in the slimelung area, you should be fine.

But some areas could have more vicious and dangerous diseases, requiring more tools to fight them and more caution. Later enough so people could learn how to manage diseases with the existing ones.

[Kasuha]

I noticed slimelung is now much more contained in slime. Before, most slime had over million germs and were spreading them to the adjacent tiles. Now, most slime tiles have below million and are the only ones that have the germs. That, together with exosuits, makes them quite a non-threat. But I would guess another rebalancing of diseases might be in order in the future, although not necessarily in the upcoming release or two.

[Byste]

5 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

I noticed slimelung is now much more contained in slime. Before, most slime had over million germs and were spreading them to the adjacent tiles. Now, most slime tiles have below million and are the only ones that have the germs. That, together with exosuits, makes them quite a non-threat. But I would guess another rebalancing of diseases might be in order in the future, although not necessarily in the upcoming release or two.

In my OI save, I'm noticing that slime still spreads to certain adjacent ores, but not others. Off the top of my head, it doesn't spread to gold amalgam, but it does spread to abyssalite.  Definitely less threatening than it used to be, though, I see slimelung at ~500k on slime ore.

[Coolthulhu]

The most significant change was to overpopulation mechanics. Earlier, a single tile would contain uncapped number of germs, meaning you could easily have a tile with just 20 g of pO2 but 15k slimelung. This would make tiny pockets of germed pO2 much more dangerous than big, dense clouds, as dupes would inhale thousands of germs per second.

It was not exactly a bug, but almost a bug.

Similar to how slimelung relies on heavily overpressurized pO2 over pH2O to have somewhere to spread to - it would be harmless without those.

[Michi01]

15 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

I noticed slimelung is now much more contained in slime. Before, most slime had over million germs and were spreading them to the adjacent tiles. Now, most slime tiles have below million and are the only ones that have the germs. That, together with exosuits, makes them quite a non-threat. But I would guess another rebalancing of diseases might be in order in the future, although not necessarily in the upcoming release or two.

With the Oil Upgrade, the amount of germs per tile is limited by the tile's mass. If that's why it happens, they should increase the threshold (at least for slime).

[Kasuha]

Since exosuits now provide almost complete protection against diseases, I believe germs could be changed to spread more aggressively. Such as when amount of germs in a tile increases, some of the increase should go straight to adjacent tiles without limit on how many germs are there in the original tile. And perhaps there could be more of realistic germ transfer pathways, such as from water to a duplicant that went in. Or heavily infested buildings and material drops could release part of their germs to the surrounding gas. Even dying from overpopulation could be replaced by spreading to adjacent tiles unless they're overpopulated too.

It's hard to tell where to stop, there are many intuitive germ transfer mechanics missing in the game but I can imagine they were left out both to improve performance and to keep the game balanced so they need to be added carefully.

[TheGCat]

The First Outbreak Release was the best germ feedback. It was okay. Not to easy and not to hard. But now.... They must change it. And as u said, the exosuits destroy all the negative effects that u can get. No diseases, no overheating, no hypothermia etc. The exosuits protects vs all! The exosuit thing is a good decision, but the environment must be more dangerous!

Nasty Animals! Earthquakes! Radiation! Low gravity and similar things. And don't forget the ALIENS, u know, the bad one. The one from the wardrobe.

[NanoD]

I am mixed about it. For me it feels like I can do basically anything and never get a dupe sick. But then I watch tranx almost kill his base with slimelung. 

If you think the germs is to easy you could test out with lower immunsystem in a custom game. 

[chemie]

when they decided a wash basin beside the toilet was all that was needed to prevent food poisoning, I think we all knew their approach to disease and how hard they wanted it.

Too bad it took so many months to develop a game mechanic that was so simple to eliminate from game play.

[NurdRage]

I agree the whole disease thing is somewhat weak. But i don't really blame them too much.

It feels like Klei just wanted to get the feature in there and then tweak its effectiveness later. It's still early in the development cycle and they're still adding in new mechanics and features. Every time you do that, especially if it's something significant like exosuits, you're going to break the balance of the game. Sometimes render what was awesomely dangerous to patheticly weak.

It still seems like they have a lot more features coming. Especially since they're already introducing new materials like naptha and diamond. Even if they fix disease outbreak now, it'll likely get broken again. 

Maybe after a few more features come out they'll release a "Danger upgrade" that amps up the difficulties like disease, stress, food shortages, exploding overloaded circuits, gas toxicity (chlorine should actually be *damaging* to dupes, it was used in WWI to kill soldiers after all) , and so on.

Maybe even make the animals super vectors of disease. After all, a lot of real life animals would be great pets... but they aren't because they're disease ridden. 

Now by all means our complaints are legit and we should still make them so Klei is reminded, but at the same time we should contain our outrage until the the game goes into the "balancing" stage of development. 

 

[chemie]

So it also looks like you can run food poisoned water to sinks without any harm which is silly.

[jigggy2000]

For the exosuits. One idea they could implement that I've seen done in another game  (star citizen) is make it so depending on what the dupe's are doing determines how much oxygen they consume. For instance, just walking and delivering equals normal consumption. Climbing ladders and harvesting could equal just a bit more. While building, digging (and the soon to be added combat) could consume the most. This would allow more strategy and challenge in using them. 

Although it wouldn't make sense to add this to just exosuits. it would probably have to be added in general to how the dupes breath overall.But thinking about it some more, the exosuits are supposed to be really heavy so they would consume more than normal anyway when performing tasks. They could probably keep the normal breathing  outside of them I suppose. They could also make it so they consume more stamina in them too. leading them to resting more when used excessively. The germ resistance they provide is one of the core reasons to have them so they can't easily change that aspect.

 

[vonVile]

Currently Dupes and clothes are a combined value when it should be separate. Germs should get on clothes to raise the possibility of illness. You will then have Dupes forced to change clothes to clean the dirty ones. This will also bring in the mechanic of Dupes using washboards and soap (made from Chlorine) or use a washing machine and dryer, which would need power and liquid input and output. This would also force players to use the clothing machine to make multiple sets of clothes. Dupes would need a new clean outfit every day or their stress will go up. Dupes could also have a personal wardrobe closet to store their clothes and expand the clothing assigned to a Dupe to multiple attires. Yes, there will need to be a Laundry job.

[0xygen]

The game is to avoid disease, and capable to avoid if you know how to play. play as if before outbreak update, you will get sick.

[Xarian]

On 10/3/2017 at 6:33 PM, 0xygen said:

The game is to avoid disease, and capable to avoid if you know how to play. play as if before outbreak update, you will get sick.

I added one sink (same plumbing line as the toilets) and completely eliminated disease in my colony. Slimelung only happens if your dupes idle outside - doing normal things, they'll never get sick.

 

Disease is a joke.

[GuyPerfect]

On 9/30/2017 at 12:25 PM, DustFireSky said:

I need a challenge! U know, harder!

As soon as the Printing Pod is ready, every time, make a new Duplicant. There's your challenge.

[Oozinator]

1 hour ago, GuyPerfect said:

As soon as the Printing Pod is ready, every time, make a new Duplicant. There's your challenge.

That's a performance challenge only..

[ShamPeiN]

use natural tiles only, dont build any tile, doors are fair game but not allowed to use them horizontally, thats a challenge 

[TheGCat]

5 hours ago, GuyPerfect said:

As soon as the Printing Pod is ready, every time, make a new Duplicant. There's your challenge.

Not a good challenge, because think of the horrible lag u get. I print max 20 Dupes and finish then. The lag of the game is horrible enough, if u digged out 3/4 of the map. If the game would handle the  CPU performance better, okay, but so, never.

 

3 hours ago, Oozinator said:

That's a performance challenge only..

TRUE!