Amigara balancing?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Encountered them for the first time today, and have to ask are they entirely WAD atm? I don’t mean WAD in terms of being glitchy (although maybe that also), but just in terms of the whole balancing of them being really weird.

5 of them appear. I hit one of them. Don’t even see what effect it had because the game just freezes up for a minute (presumably a combination of trying to process multiple z-levels of combat while I’m stunlocked?) and come back to a logspam of “The amigara horror hits your right leg but your armour protects you. You manage to avoid staring at the horrendous amigara horror. You block a lot of the damage with your qiang! The amigara horror hits your torso but your armour protects you. etc etc etc”

Then I hit it again. Freezes up again, and now honestly I’m not sure if it’s crashed or if I’m just stunlocked but they’re unable to kill me.

Now it’s not at all that I’m upset about getting wrecked - they’re supposed to be end-game content, my character wasn’t exactly a combat monster, and I was mainly just curious and planning on save-scumming anyway. But this seems like a really weird way of making a tough fight.

Reading the wiki (assuming it’s not completely out of date on this?) it says

In order to safely & profitably handle the Amigara Fault, you'll need: 
20+ Intelligence OR an Artifact that protects your mental state (if you're protected, you'll get a message about it)
the capability to do at least 100 damage per turn in melee (the Amigara Horrors are HARDTOSHOOT, which grants them a 75% chance to auto-dodge shots)
good armor and/or Dodge skill; Dodge 7-8 isn't overkill here
at least 3, and ideally 6+, Computer skill</blockquote>

and

You will get anywhere from 3 to 5 of them; they're slower than you and don't Dodge that well, but excel in melee and have a ranged paralysis attack. On their turn, each Horror that can see you generates a random value between 1 and 20. If that value is higher than your Intelligence, you're paralyzed for a few turns. Paralysis can and does stack, leading to the previously-mentioned effective one-shot kill

20+ intelligence??? Who has that besides post-threshold cephalopod mutants?? And similarly an artifact that protects your mental state seems like a super rare and specific requirement.

But at any rate, having stacking stuns that you can’t do anything about (there’s not many ways to raise your intelligence once in-game (without the Stats Through Skills mod at least)) but leading to an effective ‘one shot kill’ that could take hours because the creatures doing it aren’t actually that fearsome and can barely scratch a decently outfitted character.

And I thought my char’s intelligence of 14 was relatively high!

Anyway, it all just seems like a really oddly balanced fight. Is the stun not due a massive nerf balanced by a concomitant buff to their damage (and maybe resilience, idk) to keep them lethal, but make the fight more dynamic and…well…more fun (and to stop it taking hours even while you’re stun-locked)?

P.S. Not played the game or been on these forums in months and months, so feel the need to add that I’m really amazed by all the progress that’s gone into the mod the last year or so. So many awesome improvements and additions and really great to see an amazing game and great collaborative project like this continuing to make steady progress all this time, refining anc expanding an already fantastic experience! :slight_smile:

2

I most definitely agree. 20+ intelligence is a hard threshold to pass even for cephalopods. (not to mention if they do manage to hit you and you have 20 intelligence, the pain might drop your intelligence below 20.)

Not only this, but the amigara usually protect a pretty useless item. I’d say it’d be okay if they protected some artifact that could completely alter the game in some way, giving you powers beyond imagination.

In this way, I don’t really perceive the amigara as end-game, more like a challenge where the only reward is being able to say “I did it.”

3

Im not sure what the issue is. Ive never had too much issue with them.

An acid bomb or two and they can paralyze me all the want, theyll melt before they do anything. And besides, I do take high int characters, but nowhere near the 20 needed. I can stab them just fine.

They are weak though, which is a slight bug in my eyes. But then again I do have a mod specificly addressing the idea that things are weak . . .

4

I have a simple solution for that.
For each successful stun-attack let it add -6 thirst to the affected character. In this case if some character became stunlocked, they are guaranteed to die within a reasonable amount of turns.

The amount of intelligence you need basically states that you have to engage in combat PUMPED AS FUCK. Do all drugs at the same time, that’s the only way. You don’t have to have permanent INT of 20 or even close to it. Being stunned once in a while doesn’t hurt much, the worst problem is only if you get stunlocked.

As of the issue itself, I guess it is a known oversight, I’ve reported it a year ago when I was stunlocked for 150 000 turns basically saying “U R DEAD”.

Not only this, but the amigara usually protect a pretty useless item. I'd say it'd be okay if they protected some artifact that could completely alter the game in some way, giving you powers beyond imagination.
That's not exactly true. When you kill all of amigara horros, they left behind a random artifact. That's the point of fighting them.
5

For what it’s worth I’ve got a PR up right now that should address the “Game appears to freeze” issue; once it goes in you will be able to at least see what is happening even if you are stunlocked.

6

im still in favor of not giving them “parastare, 1”.

things tend to spam anything with less than 4 cooldown.
30, 20, or 15 make it a lot more managable

7

They’re supposed to be difficult, and honestly even when I had 16 of them running on me (since I was using them to test my PR) I still easily got 2-4 moves on a standard, brand new, 8 INT character before they managed to kill me. IMO at least, they are currently working as intended, their key aspect is that they freeze you (which is also an aspect from their source material), else they become total pushovers.

Trust me, simply making you able to see what happens when they are attacking you (rather then suddenly being confronted with a whole WALL of messages at once) makes them seem a lot more reasonable.

(Course you’re always free to mod them if you like, but for vanilla, at least, I’m in favor of their current position).

8

Id be in favor of a gimmick.

Something like they drag you into the fault, or something. Its hard to create a psychological thriller/attack piece out of a game where free will is paramount. And of course your metamind is not the character’s mind.

Dog Thing is just as physically non-threatening. Many of the mine finales will outright kill a newbie player, but once you get a set level of skills/weapons/armor you should have no problem with them.

And yes, in my mod here I buff most mundane monsters to be stronger than dogthing. Even thingthing has some competition.

9

This problem has been happening with me for months now, don’t worry.

10

Main tactic for me is to just dose my survivor on int boosting stuff. Adderall, coffee and atomic coffee… that sort of thing and end up with pretty good results. Can still be somewhat problematic trying to kill them all fast enough for an artifact to drop, but it’s not too hard.