Overpowered Stuff in CDDA, from a New Player's Perspective

[darktoes]

Careful about saying people disgust you. There are pretty clear rules about being civil on this forum.

That said, there’s merit to both systems.
Bionics having weight means that strength directly affects how many bionics a person can practically have which, I think, is a good thing. A larger person with more muscle mass does have more actual volume within which to store bionics. You could still have a similar system for a point limit, that more strength gives you more points, as could mutations like large and huge, or having a tail or extra body parts.

There’s also something to be said for the fact that we don’t know how much space a bionic might take up, and there’s room for some infrastructure to be common, e.g targeting system bionic, telescopic eyes, and infrared vision. Those all involve replacing or enhancing the eye with cameras, so they could all share a great deal of actual space. Whether we actually want to have things like that for game balance reasons is another matter, but I think using a system with no hard caps, only soft limits, would be a good idea.

Perhaps both, you get a certain number of “free” installation points, beyond that anything new added to an area has weight and encumbrance penalties.

[Tamior]

You know as well as I do that adding even MORE benefits to having high strength is the last thing we need in the current meta.

And adding weight to bionics will do just that.

P.S. I can see the argument behind balancing bionics to have more limitations/drawbacks, but strength is already more than useful enough of a stat to give it even more benefits.

[darktoes]

It’s a step in the right direction. Adding SOME sort of limit to bionics is going to be necessary before too long, putting it on strength would be a necessary evil. There’s still a lot to do in terms of making the other stats more important. That said, it wouldn’t actually be a direct boost to strength. It just makes carrying weight somewhat more important.

Perhaps you could have different penalties depending on where the bionic is installed, e.g the penalties for eye bionics could be negated with perception, neural bionics like enhanced memory and utility bionics like the integrated toolset could be negated with intelligence, etc.

Maybe the stats are treated as limits, I.E if you have 8 intelligence you can only have 8 intelligence based bionics.
Maybe each stat negates part of the penalties. Intelligence sets a hard limit, or negates an increasing installation success rate malus, strength reduces the weight of installed bionics, dexterity reduces encumbrance penalties, perception… does something. Maybe improves the efficiency of certain bionics?

Perception is the hardest stat to balance by far.

[Tamior]

perception… does something

Current stat meta in a nutshell.

[darktoes]

Yeah. Perception is the ugly duckling right now, by far.

[latogato]

P. S. I don’t care about rules. I’ll as many account as i’ll want…

In the past few years here was some people with that kind of attitude. I saw them repeatedly banned and finally ignored by the community. Others just marked their posts and moved on.

Many users on this forum are arguing in a friendly manner, it is not that hard to act like one.

[latogato]

The best option is to divide bionics to body parts and limit for each body part.

It is simple solution and in a past there was a similar design in the game. It was not enforced, you saw the free space per limbs but still the game allowed to install infinite CBMs, like now. I don’t know why it was discarded, maybe there was no solid agreement about the number of CBMs per limbs? I would like to see something like that again in the game.

[Sanehatter]

The intended limit to bionics are indeed the slots, which will be implemented god-knows-when. Honestly as long as they do have this limit, I find a downside to them unnecessary as much as game balance is concerned. Progression is part of any game, and not everything needs to come with an attached downgrade.

[Erk]

Yeah, limiting bionics to slots would be the main downside. It’s not an overall downside, because there doesn’t have to be a negative to having bionics overall anymore than there has to be a negative to using weapons… But it provides a check and balance to make you think about what bionics you want instead of indiscriminately adding all of them.

Some of the really clunky ones should also add encumbrance. In particular I think the integrated toolset should encumber one hand and arm. Not a ton, but like 10-20 (maybe it’s actually semi random based on the installer skills). Enough to make you have to choose between, say, an integrated toolset or a survivors utility belt without one being the auto pick.

[Tamior]

Some of the really clunky ones should also add encumbrance. In particular I think the integrated toolset should encumber one hand and arm. Not a ton, but like 10-20 (maybe it’s actually semi random based on the installer skills). Enough to make you have to choose between, say, an integrated toolset or a survivors utility belt without one being the auto pick.

Survivors utility belt will be the auto pick.
Why have irremovable encumbrance if you can have removable encumbrance?

[Erk]

Because Integrated toolset does far more than a survivor toolbelt, draws from the internal power supply, and doesn’t occupy weight or inventory volume. Also it encumbers one arm rather than the torso, which has value for different builds… If it is my shield arm, I don’t mind at all

[Tamior]

Because Integrated toolset does far more than a survivor toolbelt, draws from the internal power supply, and doesn’t occupy weight or inventory volume.

And has no negatives. As soon as you add a substantial negative it becomes imminently more effective to just carry a set of tools in your car or something.

[Erk]

Like I edited in, 10 points of encumbrance on one arm is a relative negative. My character wears a shield, I don’t care at all about that but I do care about torso encumbrance.

[Tamior]

Like I edited in, 10 points of encumbrance on one arm is a relative negative. My character wears a shield, I don’t care at all about that but I do care about torso encumbrance.

It’s kind of besides the point anyway, bionics slots is what we should focus on and implement. Adding some encumbrance to some bionics is neither here not there.

[Erk]

I agree, that was why the bulk of my post said that.

Part of bionic slots is that it needs to be possible to remove and exchange bionics anyway, which means that having one add encumbrance or cause some other drawback is no longer an irreversible issue. It’s likely just going to be harder than putting on or removing clothes.

[darktoes]

One issue being that the slot limit method is a hard cap to the amount of bionics you can install, and those aren’t as much fun. You can’t actually make a bionic monster of any kind and the player is heavily limited, plus, there’s no way to build in such a way that you can get more bionics. It’s just a flat “the player can install X slots worth of bionics”.

If you do the weight system, or something similar to the weight system, or the slot system with the weight system once all free slots are filled, then there’s only a soft limit in terms of what the player is willing to put up with. If you want to make a bionic monster with every bionic in the game then you CAN, BUT you’ll suffer some pretty substantial consequences. It’s similar to min-maxing in balance terms. You don’t really want to get rid of it entirely, but you don’t want it to be standard play, and you definitely want there to be downsides.

[Badger]

Personally I see no problem with a hard cap on bionics. If it were up to me I’d nerf them to oblivion, and they would still be very desirable.

Re shady zombies - they seem a fairly transparent way to add a small (beginning of game only) element of danger to nighttime. I think it points to the fact that the average player has a huge advantage at night given how easy it is to see in the dark.

[Erk]

Hmm. What if bionics had their own new form of encumbrance, sort of a bioencumbrance?

You get x number of bionic slots. You can fill those up without problem, just like you can wear gear unhindered.

When you exceed your basic bionic slots, you start to gain bioencumbrance. Penalties might be things like slower pain recovery, increased need for sleep/food/drink, decreased movement, chance of attacks against you damaging your bionics … Also ugliness and visibility similar to mutations, though that’s minor. The key here is that it’s independent from normal encumbrance, and that it only kicks in if you overdo it on bionics. It would resemble the negative mutations that are the similar drawback to becoming a mutant… Many mechanics could come from there.

[Invalid_Username]

bioencumbrance

That’s not a bad take. I’m big into Shadowrun, so I hear this and I immediately start thinking cyberpsychosis. Sure, you can jam as much tech in you as you want, but there are consequences for becoming more than, or less than, human.