Love the threshold concept, and the capstone mutations. A very simple way to make the capstone mutations very distinct is to have them cancel a lot of opposing mutations, then when you reach that point it narrows your focus even more. Just a thought.
Re: balancing mutation-acquired factions. I don’t see any reason to worry about this. Maybe you want to have a horde of rats folowing you around, and that’s not so great grom a game-power point of view, but so what? I mean if people want to add sensible adjustments that increase balance that’s fine, but “no need to do rat faction because it’s not as good as triffid faction” doesn’t make much sense to me.
Addressing balance though, I was envisioning it working by determining some amount of clout with a faction, and that would set a maximum number of followers you could attract, and just being near individuals from that faction would tend to have them decide to follow you. The simple way to do balance is to scale the number of followers based on how good the followers are, so at the same level of clout, a rat king might have a dozen ats following them, whereas a plant master might only have one or two triffids. Also as KA points out, the potentially more inteligent rats might be a benefit in utilitarian ways.
While the ideas in this thread are certainly interesting, I’d point out that playing Mutagen/Purifier roulette is already damaging (health hit each time you take a sip) and difficult, since the ingredients and tools aren’t exactly easy to come by in the quantity that you’ll need to mutate and purify yourself towards your target. Grant you, I didn’t have Robust Genetics, which made things slower, but getting even the small list of mutations I that wanted without ones that I really wanted to avoid was probably the single most difficult endeavor I’ve done in this game, even though I got way luckier than I had any right to. If you make it any more difficult than it is, I think it will become impossible for anyone without Robust Genetics to accomplish on a realistic amount of gaming time.
I’ve been thinking about mutation based factions and how about this: For certain “factions” like say a wolf pack one of the wolves doesn’t join you just because you have right mutations. You will have to defeat the alpha male then some might join you and some might go away based on how well you fought or something. So for some of the factions you will have to do tasks before they join you. Also about the rats for a thief like char might prefer the rats that may not be as good fighters as a triffid but they could bring him supplies, distract enemys or poison a settlements food or water storage. So that when the people die because the water is poisioned he could go in and safely grab the loot.
[quote=“KA101, post:43, topic:3755”]Looking for a particular mutation is pretty difficult without targeted mutagens: good job with the success you had.
What sort of mutations were you seeking, Aluminumfoil? That’ll help check whether these make unplanned-mutation totally impractical.[/quote]
I was hunting down Bird Wings but I didn’t want a beak, feathers, etc. I started off with regular mutagens and purifiers until I figured out that I could make mutagens myself. Then I eventually sat down surrounded by a bunch of gallon jugs full of Mutagen, Bird Mutagen, and Purifier and binged until I got what I was looking for.
[quote=“Aluminumfoil, post:45, topic:3755”][quote=“KA101, post:43, topic:3755”]Looking for a particular mutation is pretty difficult without targeted mutagens: good job with the success you had.
What sort of mutations were you seeking, Aluminumfoil? That’ll help check whether these make unplanned-mutation totally impractical.[/quote]
I was hunting down Bird Wings but I didn’t want a beak, feathers, etc. I started off with regular mutagens and purifiers until I figured out that I could make mutagens myself. Then I eventually sat down surrounded by a bunch of gallon jugs full of Mutagen, Bird Mutagen, and Purifier and binged until I got what I was looking for.[/quote]
OK, Bird Wings is category-specific so Bird mutagen ought to do OK. Glad you got what you sought.
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Raptor’s getting an upgrade: the Arm Feathers. Net negative, but good for melee types and helps boost your Raptor category-strength. Will slam out a few more such mutations for other categories in the next few days.
EkarusRyndren’s suggestions have been useful in this regard, as have those made in the IRC. Let me know!
The name is what I was worried about, not the nerfing To be honest I’ve used mutations for flavor more than function, for the most part that’s what they were originally, lots of flavor, not much use until you were far, far into the tree of your choice.
[size=1pt]I AM THE LIZARD KING.[/size]
The name is what I was worried about, not the nerfing To be honest I’ve used mutations for flavor more than function, for the most part that’s what they were originally, lots of flavor, not much use until you were far, far into the tree of your choice.
[size=1pt]I AM THE LIZARD KING.[/size][/quote]
Ah. Not planning on making MUTCAT_VULPINE. Just had an excuse to give one segment a Name, and see how many people are familiar with old-school Sonic.
To be honest I’ve used mutations for flavor more than function, for the most part that’s what they were originally, lots of flavor, not much use until you were far, far into the tree of your choice.