I’d imagine 1-2 years after the cataclysm all circuit boards would rust and most anything electronic would be dead.
Where did you get the idea that I thought that using electronics is inherently bad? Can you please quote something I wrote that suggested that?
Okay. Your UPS is empty, you don’t have a melee weapon because that’s what mr caveman does, you don’t have guns because you’re not a cowboy but a UPS user. You are surrounded and you don’t have any non UPS weapons. You’re about to get slaughtered.
Question 1: Why do you think are the devs punishing you for using a UPS?
Question 2: Could this situation be made more fair if the UPS had infinite charge?
Some people are over reacting and acting like it is proposing all electric devices be removed from game…
And also about the story, what about the mutagen? I am fairly certain growing horns and a tail would cause extreme pain for a person…
I’d imagine you’d be surprised.
Are you kidding? You’re saying that high tech equipment is too powerful compared to its low tech counterparts and proposing a game change that will fix this by completely taking anything even remotely electronic out of commission for an extended period of each month. That is the point of this thread, yes?
If the meat of your OP had been something like ‘modding household electronics to be solar powered makes them too powerful’ I’d have probably agreed - I don’t generally do this, or use vehicle rigs, for more or less that exact reason. But what you’re proposing doesn’t just penalise people who abuse high tech objects to their fullest, it abuses poor idiots bumbling around in the dark with a battery-powered flashlight. Why do you think implementing a (literally) cosmic backhand to all use of electronics is a reasonable solution to the problem you describe?
Okay. Your UPS is empty, you don’t have a melee weapon because that’s what mr caveman does, you don’t have guns because you’re not a cowboy but a UPS user. You are surrounded and you don’t have any non UPS weapons. You’re about to get slaughtered.
Question 1: Why do you think are the devs punishing you for using a UPS?
Question 2: Could this situation be made more fair if the UPS had infinite charge?[/quote]
Running out of batteries can be prevented by keeping extras with you. Magic cosmic technofry weather prevents you from using your USP PERIOD for a huge chunk of game time solely to force you to play primitive. There’s no mitigating it, there’s no resource manage element, you can’t use your tech at all, period, no matter what you do, because you dared to move past using your nailbat as your primary weapon.
Well then they need to lower the chance batteries and remove the recharge station, because I went through one electronic store and had almost 1K batteries when I left it.
The point is to add an extra obstacle for the game. Something new. Not to make high tech equipment useless.
Operate underground?
Schedule a couple days for reading and equipment upkeep?
Preserve a lot of food and craft a lot of batteries and ammo for when the ion storm passes?
Repair or expand your fortress?
Pack a spare crossbow, or ‘any’ of the majority of non-electronic firearms?
Smoke a bowl?
Move out of the storm?
Hey: how will this affect bionics, especially the passive ones?
An extra obstacle is something that can be encountered and dealt with: avoid, bypass, or surmount. Put ion storms around portals or have a localized effect in a Lab and I’d be much more accepting of them: they move their location into later-game, when you can operate with or without electronic gadgetry.
Instead, this kept coming up as a periodic penalty-period: You Must Turn Off All Electronic Devices, Because JimQuaid Said So.
And folks are understandably unhappy that JimQuaid’s trying to tell them how to play.
[quote=“Blackopsman9999, post:63, topic:5561”]Some people are over reacting and acting like it is proposing all electric devices be removed from game…
And also about the story, what about the mutagen? I am fairly certain growing horns and a tail would cause extreme pain for a person…[/quote]
Mutating does in fact ding you for a nontrivial amount of pain. 
It ain’t good for your health either, and tends to make you hungrier, thirstier, and more tired. So I think that’s covered.
Adding a tedious obstacle to the game is not a good idea. This is basically on the level of issuing random dictates to the player, like only wearing red for a week, or only using words without the letter ‘e’, or only skipping instead of walking.
[quote=“Belteshazzar, post:68, topic:5561”]Operate underground?
Schedule a couple days for reading and equipment upkeep?
Preserve a lot of food and craft a lot of batteries and ammo for when the ion storm passes?
Repair or expand your fortress?
Pack a spare crossbow, or ‘any’ of the majority of non-electronic firearms?
Smoke a bowl?
Move out of the storm?[/quote]
So be a troglobite? There’s no wiring, everything would be reliant on non-recharging battery power, and you’d basically be forced into a lab base.
You’re done with using skill books very quickly. You’re not going to have a week of skill books to read except maybe the first time you find a library, and only that first time. Repairing your gear is also an hour at most.
So boring craft grinding? And with what power since all my electronics are busted? Not very fun in the least.
Why would I need to? And what could I defend myself from bears without if all my gear is broken? Be forced into playing a caveman?
Why should I be forced to play primitive for a quarter of the year when I have perfectly good, charged, and kept up electronic equipment I SHOULD be able to use for my playstyle? Why would I even have archery skill?
Not a serious suggestion, and not something that takes a week.
Impossible, you just turned my carbase off or it’s hovering over my homestead. That’s assuming it worked like a weather too, and not the instant magic everywhere effect the proposer wants.
Why not use the hydrogen reactor thing for a vehicle? Get a plutonium powered flashlight and everything? Make some more of your infinite battery supply? And also I am fairly certain people would have said acid rain is just an obstacle in the game for no reason, but after enough work it seems ok, if you people actually helped with this instead of “I want to use my laser thingy and be a god that nothing can touch and no difficulty” then maybe this could already be worked out to seem fair.
Quote from: halberdsturgeon on Today at 03:43:16 AM
Are you kidding? You're saying that high tech equipment is too powerful compared to its low tech counterparts and proposing a game change that will fix this by completely taking anything even remotely electronic out of commission for an extended period of each month. That is the point of this thread, yes?
If the meat of your OP had been something like 'modding household electronics to be solar powered makes them too powerful' I'd have probably agreed - I don't generally do this, or use vehicle rigs, for more or less that exact reason. But what you're proposing doesn't just penalise people who abuse high tech objects to their fullest, it abuses poor idiots bumbling around in the dark with a battery-powered flashlight. Why do you think implementing a (literally) cosmic backhand to all use of electronics is a reasonable solution to the problem you describe?
If USING a hotplate gave you severe radiation poisoning each time every time then just USING it would be INHERENTLY bad.
If USING a flashlight umits noise than can be heard three map tiles away then just USING it would be INHERENTLY bad.
If USING a water purifier gave a permanent +10 strength buff then just USING it would be INHERENTLY bad (for game balance that is)
Rephrasing for clarification:
Where did you get the idea that I thought that using electronics is or should be inherently bad?
For simplicity’s sake, can you find quotes of me that support these statements:
-
JimQuaid thinks that using electronic equipment (just once/at all) is a bad thing.
-
JimQuaid thinks that being able to rely solely and completely on electronic equipment and electronic equipment alone without any drawbacks is a bad thing.
-
JimQuaid hates powered tools and thinks no one should ever touch them and his suggestion will make players abandon high tech once and for all.
-
JimQuaid is a High Tech player who often uses powered tools to make nice big vehicles with everyhing inclusive. His suggestion does not force other players to adopt his (JimQuaids) playstyle of using powered tools to make a mobile home with lots of gadgets.
(Did you read me talk about rechargeable batteries?)
Which 2 of these positions do I actually hold?
Quote from: PoeSalesman on Today at 03:54:32 AM
[size=14pt]There's no mitigating it[/size], there's no resource manage element, [size=14pt]you can't use your tech at all[/size], period, [size=14pt]no matter what you do[/size], because you dared to move past using your nailbat as your primary weapon.
Excuse me?
Quote from: JimQuaid on March 25, 2014, 03:53:55 PM
I would have thought a rare lab final reward could be a shielding against Purple Sky effect.
"This is an experimental electronic fortification device. It shields one small object completely from outside radiation. You don't know what the scientists here were going to do with it, but you are sure you will find a use for it".
It would either mod one tool "hotplate (rechargeable, shielded)" or protect a tile in a vehicle ("heavy duty frame, storage battery, rv kitchen)
That or drag your stuff deep underground to use it without failure.
Quote from: Blackopsman9999 on Today at 05:10:10 AM
Well then they need to lower the chance batteries and remove the recharge station, because I went through one electronic store and had almost 1K batteries when I left it.
I have ~8500 in my trunk that i will probably never use, now that I’ve modded all my important tools with rechargeable batteries.
Quote from: KA101 on Today at 12:36:35 AM
I have a very difficult time accepting a fixed-in-space planar problem. Portals and such are relative to Earth; gravity effect or somesuch. GlyphGryph laid that out a while ago. If the Labs managed to rip a rift open, then by rights the portals should be "disappearing" only to tear through the Earth in a little less than a year's time because they're fixed points in space.
Then think of it as a ring. Another circle not centered on the sun, kinda like Pluto’s orbit, it is kept around the sun by gravity.
Quote from: KA101 on Today at 12:36:35 AM
We covered the "bleak grimdark low-tech survival whatever" outlook in passing, in the design doc: that derives from things like the wiki mainpage. The wiki mainpage is not canon, and if you want to play a game where you're jumping for joy because you found a backpack, that's your game and you can play it that way. But you've no right to make me play my game that way.
I wasn’t suggesting making people go “yeah-haw” over low tech stuff. If you were transported from your home to an extremely cold or hot place without running (clean) water, phone or internet or any electricity at all and you find a nice book to entertain you, would you jump for joy because you found that book? Or would you think “bummer, I wish I was still at home were it’s a lot cushier.” Why would my suggestion make anyone jump for joy over a backpack? By the time Purple Sky would be a problem you’d have plenty of storage and another backpack wouldn’t matter at all. If anything it makes you appreciate high tech stuff more, right?
EDIT: It was a suggestion, not a demand. I didn’t invoke the ghosts of gamers past, present and future to give me the power to bend this game to my will.
[quote=“KA101, post:69, topic:5561”]Hey: how will this affect bionics, especially the passive ones?
EDIT: It’s supposed to be a nerf. If someone nerfed the long bow to 2/3 of it’s range or increase strength/dexterity/perception requirements and a few people started screaming “Oh! That means you absolutely HATE bows and want to force us to use guns right? You want everyone to be guntotting maniacs like you and your little friends who agree with the nerf. But this goes against all the founding fathers stood for. You are an enemy of democracy, freedom and baby Jesus!”
Alright, the last part was exaggeration but I kinda feel like the guy who nerfed bows to 2/3 range.
Sorry for the formatting, going back and forth the find the quotes screwed up what I already wrote.
Yeah, fixing that formatting would make it much more legible. Ease up on the colors, please.
(Especially as red is action, whether RPing outside the Rec Room or moderation/devspeak.)
Regarding the bionics, thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, that’s still open as “powered” bionics has two definitions: bionics that you formally activate and pay bionic power for, and bionics that are passive but would involve electronics. (They’ve negligible drain, possibly powered by piezoelectricity or internal batteries.)
For example, take the fingertip razors. They don’t require power to use, unlike the claws or blade, but they do specify that they retract. Will they jam in one position (perhaps on?), or be defaulted away?
That page has a handy table of augs. How about the Internal Chronometer? That’s electronic, most likely. Diamond Cornea and the Anti-Glare Compensators aren’t electronic, though. Internal Storage doesn’t define how it operates.
If my power systems are acting up, I don’t even want to think about what Metabolic Interchange, Expanded Digestive System, or the Recycler Unit would do. Muscle Augmentation would stick around, but Wired Reflexes might or might not.
That’s a lot of if-statements there, and even simply disabling active augs invalidates a lot of people’s work. (Getting and installing augs isn’t a joke.) 5 days is easily enough for a fungal infection to incap or kill if you can’t get royal jelly and someone turned off your Blood Filter. (IIRC, 5 hours is almost to the arm-breaker stage, and you’ll be spawning fungaloids in the process.)
I’m gonna stand by my opinion: this would be an interesting localized obstacle, and could work as another Annoying Weather Pattern similar to acid rain, but as a routine, long-duration global event, it causes far more problem than it solves.
Speaking in my dev capacity: The original idea is way overkill, but can be refined. We’re trying to work with you here. Help us help you.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Good grief, remind me to be more careful about word use around you. If you’re done grimly hanging on to the literal meaning of that one word, would you mind telling me why you think, rather than simply reducing the power of things that are too powerful amongst the high tech electronics in the game, it’s better to introduce magical Doom Storms to eradicate their use for days at a time?
[quote=“JimQuaid, post:73, topic:5561”]Quote from: JimQuaid on March 25, 2014, 03:53:55 PM
I would have thought a rare lab final reward could be a shielding against Purple Sky effect.
"This is an experimental electronic fortification device. It shields one small object completely from outside radiation. You don't know what the scientists here were going to do with it, but you are sure you will find a use for it".
It would either mod one tool "hotplate (rechargeable, shielded)" or protect a tile in a vehicle ("heavy duty frame, storage battery, rv kitchen)
That or drag your stuff deep underground to use it without failure.[/quote]
I’m pretty I told you why that’s an awful idea already. An EXTREMELY RARE item, that can only work on ONE SINGLE THING to avoid your horrible caveman-forcing weather is not a good solution. What we have in lab finales now are: a pack of extra-dimensional creatures I’ve never bothered with, a pile of energy weapons, a pile of ballistic weapons, a pile of nukes, a pile of biotics, and some machine that’s apparently supposed to make super sharp weapons out of diamond. So what you propose, is a single item that wards a single piece of equipment from magical caveman storms that stomp all over electronic player’s feet. In counterpart to the piles of goodies you get from most labs. Absolutely no other way to avoid being forced to play a primitive for a quarter of the year other than to bust your way to the bottom of a lab, probably get frostbite, and hope you don’t get eaten by a flaming eye or shoggoth, in the gamble that instead of a bunch of useful things you find a tiny item that shields only one electronic thing from the forced caveman weather.
Well currently you are kinda forced to play electronicly… want a forge to make nails and start making a house? Need a welder! Want to keep some food preserved? Nope, use electricity.
Everything right now revolves electricity and it kinda removes the CATACLYSM from the game, it is more like “Meh they all died, I’m going to drive my electric car that drives perfectly down the road that I made my self in four hours.”
What are you talking about? You don’t need a welder to produce nails, and you can preserve food with a charcoal smoker. And again, why in the world does everyone seem to think that the word ‘cataclysm’ is synonymous with ‘bashing rocks together to make fire’, like it’s something obvious?
If you want to make a charcoal forge to make nails from scrap, you need a welder. If you want to make a charcoal kiln in order to start making charcoal, you again need a welder. This means that charcoal and electric paths both have the same prerequisites, and electrics get you far further.
Point taken. I don’t see why you should be able to get as far with low technology as with high technology, but no matter.