Something bugging me for quite some time: In this game the character gets quite too fast addicted to alcohol. Just getting drunk one time might make the character addicted to alcohol, as far as my experience goes, and with a morale penalty of -120 it is far to extreme in my opinion.
I know this game abstracts time, but I just feel like alcohol is as addictive as meth, heroin or other substances. Is there for every substance a different counter? If so, maybe alcohol and caffeine could be more tolerable.
In fact, those shakes and extreme “penalties” of alcohol addiction come, in RL, after years (!) of alcohol abuse. Before you might want to get a drink and don’t feel comfortable, but this would be, in game, about -10 or -20 morale (after a few weeks or months of dayly alcohol use, which could be a few days in game).
Is it possible to change? What do you think?
I take my experience from working with addicted people and I, for myself, have been in a clinic a few years ago.
Edit: Getting rid of extreme alcohol addiction is quite tough without medication and may lead to sudden heart failure, maybe implementing this with chance of extreme damage to torso and implement a new medicine or use an existing one?
If you’ve got Lightweight and/or Addictive Personality on it seems to more or less make it a one go addiction. I’ve also noticed that using booze to power the Ethanol Burner pretty much guarantees an Alcohol Addiction even if you’re immediately using the Blood Filter afterwards.
To my knowledge, addiction in CDDA is a percentage chance per use. Not some kind of running clock of how regularly and how much you’re taking whatever.
Also the effects of various drugs is pumped up because they have major benefits to their use. As long as alchohol makes you physically stronger, and meth makes you move faster, unrealistic and immediate addiction and extreme addiction symptoms is warranted. In other words, the benefits are unrealistic, so the penalties are unrealistic too.
If we can shove all the hardcoded drug definitions out into json, I’d like to make a toggle for realistic drugs, it’d remove the ludricrous bonuses AND penalties for all of them. In other words everything would be basically worthless except painkillers (and as ingredients for other medicines maybe)
I would really like to rework the addictions system to something more sensible (even with our crazy drugs powers :P) but it’ll need to wait until after .9 in order to make sure there is enough time to test/tweak.
Thank you for your responses. I would really appreciate the rework of this system and keeping the powers. No commercial, please don’t try at home, but some of those boni are quite near to reality. There have been reasons why soldiers in almost every war got “buffed” with some substances. But this shouldn’t be a discussion about drugs, doesn’t belong here, so thank you for your time and effort. Feels good to see, that you care so much about this game and the players!
Um, you’re talking about adjusting the effects of drugs, so it is certainly on-topic, and the majority of the bonuses aren’t remotely close to reality
Yes, there are performance-enhancing drugs used in militaries, and elsewhere, but none of them work remotely like the ones in-game. Stimulants keep you awake and perhaps reduce the effects of fatigue, military pilots often take stimulants to keep awake and alert on long flights, but these drugs don’t make them more alert, they just blunt the effects of fatigue. Likewise, stimulants don’t make you move faster, though some of them may screw up brain chemistry and make you think you are. Steroids are taken to accelerate healing, they don’t make you stronger, they just make your body heal faster. There is one class of performance-enhancing drugs I’m aware of, which is the hemoblobin-increasing drugs that cause such huge issues in professional cycling. These drugs make your body produce excess hemoglobin, which means your body can respire (O in, CO2 out) more efficiently, but risks triggering heart attacks. This doesn’t even apply in DDA right now, because you can’t get winded.
Seriously, as long as drugs have magic performance-increasing effects, I’m not at all ok with making the down sides remotely “realistic”, it’s bad enough that we’re implying that taking hard drugs has some practical benefit, I’m not going to nerf addiction to be “reasonable”.
Also worth noting that the ‘season’ is only fourteen days long, at least by default. The remaining two and a half months of each season are abstracted out. So things happen a little more quickly in the game. Addictions come and go a little faster. It’s a little handwavie, admittedly, but y’know.
As to the performance-enhancing potential of stimulants, that is trickier. There is plenty of evidence that stimulants like methamphetamine and cocaine can have measurable positive influence on many cognitive tasks, including simple reaction time tests. However, under most - shall we say - ‘recreational’ conditions, the same drugs show a negative impact on these same tasks. Basically, there is a threshold upon which these drugs can provide benefit, and it is not an easy threshold to achieve or maintain.
I am not really in favor of modeling realistic drugs either. Drugs are complicated, unpredictable, have ‘stages’ with varying effects, and would take a lot of work just to make them undesirable given the game we’re playing. Cocaine use would probably get you killed in any kind of survival situation. It might make you feel like you’re faster, better, stronger, and on top of the world - but ultimately that’s just part of the high. And is liable to make you take risks that you are less prepared for than the drug effect is leading you to believe you are.
So yes, drugs are, by in large, fine the way they are. I wouldn’t mind seeing the addiction chance get a cumulative effect, starting low and getting higher the more often you use the drug over a period.
I have to admit, I didn’t try everything out in game, but to get back to what I was requesting in core: Alcohol/Caffeine with one sip and addicted, with time abstraction or not seems a bit too harsh, even when you get benefits out of drinking alcohol. Have no problems with addictions and other drugs in game, never said that in my posts, I’m using them in game quite rarely and think it’s a good thing they are so addictive and have downsides. But drinking a coke or a beer and having a chance of getting addicted right away with serious consequences to the morale seems a bit… well extreme, even with the boni alcohol and caffeine give.
About the discussion about drugs and real life use, well I think there are different points of view and I respect every other point of view one might have, and I humbly have to agree to you, if you tell me the boni aren’t remotely near reality as I have, in fact, not tried many drugs in-game. It only was based on what I saw in game and experienced in real life and so does not belong here, as I said.
And please forgive me, when I ask to not get sidetracked, like I did obviously, the matter of my request wasn’t adjusting effects of drugs, it was adjusting addiction speed of alcohol, as the subject tells, and as a sidenote of caffeine, because after I brought this up in IRC, someone was telling me about it, and I thought it would fit in here.
(and as ingredients for other medicines maybe)