Starting Stat Pool

Game Talk The Bunker
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I can get behind this, though if we’re taking hardcore optimisation as our metric the same as we have been doing, then so long as there’s any advantage, that’s the assumed cookie cutter build. As you’ve said, it’s hard to get a formula that doesn’t crush the weak while curtailing the strong.

The problem here is the display. You need 3 cooking and 1 survival.

Ahhh, 'splains it. 4 points invested across 2 skills gives zombie pheremones. Alright.

Tailoring mitigates damage with armour, sure, but it takes resources to make that armour that you don't have at the start of the game, and any early game clothing recipes tend to be for the same armour you can find laying around town.
Tailoring needs more booklocked recipes. It is currently one of the few skills that you don't need books for, except to skip the grind.

Booklocking would help, particularly certain early game recipes. The skill levels for tailoring are also pretty wonky considering how readily available some things are - it takes level 5 tailoring to make the same leather jacket you can find in every tenth house and every fifth zombie. The same as you need for Nomad Gear!

If fabrication could be unfucked, this would fit here. Fabrication has some great weapon recipes, they're just made inaccessible by the fact that they all require a full forge set because someone didn't think the restrictions through.

Yeah, the gear wall for fabrication is ridiculous. It’s often more convenient to skip it entirely and raid mansions and museums instead.

Electronics 5 can give you electronic jackhammer and 4 atomic lamp and coffee maker. Those are pretty rare, but their effects can be giant.

Atomic Lamps are infinite light, which is indeed an awesome game changer (though it’s possible to work around it). Coffeemaker is arguably a quality of life perk as long as a 6 second paper wrapper fire can be used to produce 20 clean water. Electric Jackhammer… honestly I’ve never needed one, though I suppose it would help late game when you’re going through labs.

I disagree here. While currently most mid-game options suck, this is mostly because of the assumption that books are easy to get. Getting booklocked out of useful skills can happen and does suck. Early game advantage currently means "stacking dodge". If you replaced it with stacking melee and weapon skills, it would no longer be the case. It's dodge that is broken because of the math behind it and the way leveling it works. Without enough books to grind skills, MGA character will be installing CBMs and constructing a vehicle by the time the EGA one would still be clearing the way to garage/library.

Most Mid-Game options suck because:

It is EASIER to find books with high EGA (not guaranteed, sure).
MGA characters still need books (they cannot increase all skills to a point where they do not still want to be looking in the same places to find books as EGA characters do).
Books that raise fighting skills kind of suck (101 wrestling skills is pretty rare and only boosts Unarmed to 3).
It makes it MORE likely that any books you find will be useless. This ties into the rarity and mediocrity of combat books somewhat, but having high points in crafting skills doesn’t make it less likely for books of that type to spawn.
It is POSSIBLE to grind crafting skills safely without books (tedium is not a balance feature so we can’t discount this), it is much harder, and more dangerous, to grind combat skills, particularly dodge.
Dying is the only way to lose. Mid game characters who start weak die more and never see their midgame advantage. “Helmets drastically increase the number of soldiers ending up in hospital with head injuries” - If you’re living long enough to feel like books are the problem then you’re doing okay.
It’s not just dodge, though the worst offender - black belt - has it all. If you have high attacking skills and the right martial art you can block damage and lock down enemies. Late game you don’t even need dodge, and hyper-specialisation in skills gives you just that - Late game skills.

This is one of the reasons I like multi pool - it cuts many of the connections and isolates the most problematic sections.

It’s certainly helpful in identifying them as well.

1: Bad trait balance is hard to address because it’s a mixed bag of early vs late, depends on gear etc. They would get more sane if the glasses had significant eye encumbrance, mutated eyes were more common etc.

Do eyes have Close To Skin etc modifiers? Wearing fit-over-sunglasses or a riot helmet wouldn’t give me problems, but trying to stack a pair of sunglasses, fencing/hockey mask or the like would be a serious problem for me. I can’t even comfortably wear “over the ear” headphones because they make the arms dig into my ears.

2: Then there are food traits, which depend on tons of items at once.

Yeah, Meat Intolerant is probably the only one that’s given me even minor pause. Lactose intolerant isn’t worth a point, and winters aren’t harsh enough for a wool allergy to even be noticeable.

Then traits that are just the result of someone going all "this will be cool" and adding something without second (or even the first) thought. Trigger-happy and bad/good liar.

It would be nice if traits like this were “point neutral” and carried an advantage with them, like Trigger Happy makes burst fire slightly more likely, Bad Liar makes you slightly more likeable.

I'm not sure if this will work or if it will result in significant balance improvements, but it looks like a safe way to allow more varied characters.

Yeah, that’s what I meant. “0-6 stat points” can be described as safe, in terms of balance. If 0-6 is balanced, then a single pool that gave 0-6 points variety would also be balanced, so that’s something to shoot for.

I'm not sure what do you mean by 8+4. 8 base stat +4 from CBMs and muts? From what I recall, I said something like "+2 to 1 or 2 stats", not "+4 to all stats".
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Sorry, I took “8 in all important skills, at most +4 to stats in total” to mean “[8 in all important skills + at most +4 to stats] in total” as a theoretical end game goal. +2 to each stat from CBMs is very doable, while +2 from other sources (artifact, mutagen, drug, steroids, whatever) also seems pretty reasonable to me as a compromise between what we have and what a more balanced system could expect.

I’ll also add that the more content is included, the longer the average “winning game” can be expected to last, so we can expect to reach this level sooner or later.

But yeah, didn’t answer my question. Is there a difference between 12 and 16 in ranged combat? I thought that capped out much lower.

Prime Increases 4-7 strength up to 8, 8-14 strength up to 15, 15-17 strength to 18, and so on.

I’d call this a band. It homogenises strength from within a defined range (band) to a preset result.

I don't like those. I'd rather have it work like 4-7 gets +3, 8-14 gets +2, 15+ gets +1. Otherwise it gets very artificial, spoiler-intensive, punishing for "natural" characters.

That’s fine, but be aware that your version has its own sweet spots, where it’s doing exactly the same thing.

7-8 become 10 - better to sacrifice 1 point than leave it at 8.
14-15 become 16. - Not worth putting a point into 15, leave it at 14.

And if this worked for multiple stats? Sweet. 7/14/7/10 stats. End result: 10/16/10/12. A more “natural” 8/12/8/10 character gets 10/14/10/12.

We can’t really do anything with an integer system that doesn’t either give a flat rate or have a perfect sweet spot.

Of course, it’s worse with current Prime, 8/15/8/15 compared to 15/15/15/15 means there’s no point in adding or dropping stats at all, just make sure you have 8 minimum and put everything into skills for the best character possible.

Ideally I’d picture the threshold system as simply changing the metric of how your characters strength is measured. Take Ursine again:

4-7, sub average for a human, becomes 10 - Your weakest bear is as strong as a slightly above average human.
8-11: Around average for a human, becomes 13 - Average bears are strong as the strongest human.
12-13: 2/3s of your stat points, become 16 - Past human capacity
14+: All your points, become 18 - The Strongest Bear and highest possible stat.

4-7 stat characters don’t get the same strength as 8 stat characters, because 4-7 points already gave them 1-3 bonus points to spend elsewhere. Players should suffer for their penalties.
8-11 point characters don’t get the same strength as 12 stat characters, because 12 points is 2/3 of your assumed 6 point multipool investment (you cannot have one stat at 12 unless you are taking other stats down to 7)
12 point characters don’t get the same strength as 14 stat characters, because 14 points is their entire assumed 6 point multipool investment. Players should feel rewarded for specialising.

If we wanted to do something similar for alpha “You become a paragon of your species!” then it would probably be different banding - humans are more granular than bears.

4-5-> 8.
6-7 → 9
8-9 → 11
10-11 → 13
12-13 → 15
14 → 16

So Alpha humans are at absolute worst “average”, the strongest possible human surpasses human norms, and the bonus is never quite as big as it is for Bears.

With our 6 point investment we can get:

10/10/10/8 → 13/13/13/11
12/10/8/8 → 15/13/11/11
12/10/10/6 → 15/13/13/9
12/12/10/4 → 15/15/13/8
14/8/8/8 → 16/11/11/11
14/10/7/7 → 16/13/9/9

Nowhere near as “spiky” as the bear who can get up to 18 (and beyond with “Huge Taaaaank Super Tough” type traits which make bear a better choice if you want to be strong). It’s not quite a “+X to stat”, though it’s close - each band gets roughly +2-3, and there’s effectively a “range” for alpha mutants of 8-16, while the “range” for Ursine humans is 10-18 and is less granular.

Prime stat mutations are a horrible design. They would be OK if they were a guaranteed thing, but they're post-endgame thing.

As time approaches N, likelihood of finding Alpha report approaches 1. So long as you do not die any item that can be crafted or found may be assumed to be guaranteed within an infinite timeframe.

It also has the disadvantage of tailoring characters to mutation branches. Even if we ignore the realism issue (dude born with perfect stats to be an alpha mutant), we're still left with rewarding spoilers, which is already a flaw in mutation system, with having to implement going back from banded mutation (restoring stats to old levels), artificial limits that just feel weird and limiting character choices to intersection of "good stats" and "stats good for mutating" (this could actually result in more choices, but would be a bitch to keep that way).

Realism: The best person to become a bear is the person who is as strong as possible - 14. The second best person is “very strong”. That’s actually pretty intuitive realism, and players are encouraged to invest their stats in that way regardless (system mastery is inevitable in any system).

The best alpha with the more granular system up there is… 13/13/13/11? 15/15/13/8? We could lower that 8 down to a 7 to make it more of a penalty, but generally if you’re going Alpha (The safe: “Good Stats! No Specials!” mutation branch) you want to have generally decent all around stats, otherwise you’d get more out of one of the specialist mutation branches. So the best Balanced Good Stats guy is the guy who wants to take the mutation around mostly balanced stats.

Going back from banded mutation: Mutations don’t alter base stats so far as I can see in character menu (wish they did, or at least pretended to, it’s annoying keeping an eye on whether I have a malus or bonus when my stats are always green). This would be pretty much similar with any variable increment system, including diminishing returns, wouldn’t it?

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One of the recurring themes is the broken-ness of dodge, and that stats are worth SO much more than skills in most cases.

The cost relationship between stats and skills is one area being tackled here, but the thing I don’t see much of is the cost of high skills vs low skills.

Grinding skills to higher levels takes more time and effort than the low levels (that in many cases practically happen on their own). Dodge in particular is the worst offender here, since it is (essentially) hard-capped at 7 in actual play. One of the benefits of buying high dodge is that you can get IMPOSSIBLY high dodge (in terms of what can actually be acquired).

So, one way to deal with this would be to make skills cost more for each level (or tier of levels). I’ve played some systems where buying a skill level costs that skill level in points… AFTER you’ve bought each level before that (so level 1 costs 1, level 2 costs 3, level 3 costs 6, etc). Using single pool numbers for convenience, if we gave 3 times as many points (18) and made stats ALSO cost 3 times as much as right now (and maybe traits as well? would allow finer balancing of traits), then made stats cost their level in points, taking a level one skill could be CHEAP (and it should be), but they would get more and more as they go:

Skill level Point Cost Cost in stat points OLD cost in stat points 1 1 1/3 - 2 3 1 1 3 6 2 2 4 10 3 1/3 3 5 15 5 4 6 21 7 5 7 28 9 1/3 6

Obviously, I just threw that together quickly, but I think you get the idea - additional levels quickly become cost prohibitive. Profession skill points could stack on TOP of what you buy (professions that gave dodge would have to be very carefully checked).

Another idea (not necessarily instead of the above) would be to simply hard-cap what can be bought. Dodge is hard-capped at 7, so buying dodge is hard-capped at 7, for instance. Or perhaps you just can’t buy more than 7 of ANY one skill.

This could help balance in general, really, and tweaking the cost of traits, stats, etc, wouldn’t need worry about leftover “bits”, as you could always buy just ONE level of a skill with that last point, so there’s no need to worry about a small number of points not being spendable.

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In any case, dodge skill is out of the line with how hard is it to train and how much benefit it provides.
At higher skill levels, it should allow dodging more critters at once (something it sucks at currently), rather than having near-100% chance of dodging the first critter that attacks.

Coffeemaker is arguably a quality of life perk as long as a 6 second paper wrapper fire can be used to produce 20 clean water.

I don’t mean it for water, but for atomic coffee. It is a relatively unaddicting (compared to cocaine) drug which can instantly boost your stats very high and only uses relatively cheap coffee powder which you can get in bulk from coffee shops. It has a side effect of making you not fall asleep for days, but you can counter it by snorting meth (it’s a bug, mostly). And another side effect of irradiating you, but that wears off quickly enough that it won’t matter unless you are fighting zed scientists or invading irradiated areas.

Books that raise fighting skills kind of suck (101 wrestling skills is pretty rare and only boosts Unarmed to 3).

But raising fighting skills to 3-5 costs a lot of points. MGA will have just 1-2 points less by the second day.
If not for the weird dodge math, armor and HP would still be limiting factors in early combat.

It is POSSIBLE to grind crafting skills safely without books (tedium is not a balance feature so we can't discount this), it is much harder, and more dangerous, to grind combat skills, particularly dodge.

Melee combat skills grind themselves at relatively sane rate anyway. Ranged ones are a problem since they don’t give any advantage early on and later on see only sporadic use (until laser weapons). It’s only dodge here which is out of line.
You can actually grind dodge, though this is an obvious exploit. You need to get robust armor with good coverage on all body (good armor values aren’t necessary), get as many boomers as you can and get vomited on a lot. Boomer bile attack grants 10 dodge practice, while boomer’s melee attacks suck. If you wear good goggles, position the boomer behind bars in such a way that it can’t reach you but can vomit on you and position yourself in such a way that you’re in light but don’t see the boomer, you can even read a book or something, while getting vomited on.

It's not just dodge, though the worst offender - black belt - has it all.

This profession was balanced not only just for single pool, but for linear XP gain single pool.

Do eyes have Close To Skin etc modifiers? Wearing fit-over-sunglasses or a riot helmet wouldn't give me problems, but trying to stack a pair of sunglasses, fencing/hockey mask or the like would be a serious problem for me. I can't even comfortably wear "over the ear" headphones because they make the arms dig into my ears.

They do. Those modifiers only apply the way layering penalty is stacked, though. Without high base encumbrance, it won’t have an effect.

It would be nice if traits like this were "point neutral" and carried an advantage with them, like Trigger Happy makes burst fire slightly more likely, Bad Liar makes you slightly more likeable.

That’s a pretty good idea. Though the problem here is the UI.

+2 to each stat from CBMs is very doable, while +2 from other sources (artifact, mutagen, drug, steroids, whatever) also seems pretty reasonable to me as a compromise between what we have and what a more balanced system could expect.

That is changing, though. CBMs may gain limits “sometime in the nearby future”, which would make getting a full set of +stat limiting. Mutation balance is FUBAR, but we had some ideas on how to make it less scummy. Those ideas would make it give more stats, but at higher penalties (mutant body parts, for example).
Drugs are temporary. They are important for CBM installation (they devalue intelligence a lot - could be worth removing) and can help with hard battles, but aren’t the baseline and shouldn’t be assumed to help with daily grind (mowing low-level stuff, reading).

Is there a difference between 12 and 16 in ranged combat?

Not in accuracy. Minor difference in aiming time.
Could be addressed by stretching the penalty in stats - for example starting penalties from 19 in stat, but making them lower. Also having missing perception cause less penalty than dexterity.

That's fine, but be aware that your version has its own sweet spots, where it's doing exactly the same thing.

Yes, just less than “hard banding”.
Still, I’d prefer linear boosts over either. Or “soft banding” with some sort of a thresholded bonus, to smooth out those sweet spots. For example, using floating point numbers internally and giving a bonus for having remainders.

and beyond with "Huge Taaaaank Super Tough" type traits which make bear a better choice if you want to be strong

Being huge is actually a giant (heh) disadvantage for strong characters. It prohibits good armor. And “tough” type traits do not grant pain resistance.

As time approaches N, likelihood of finding Alpha report approaches 1. So long as you do not die any item that can be crafted or found may be assumed to be guaranteed within an infinite timeframe.

So it is possible to get alpha, just not feasible. Grinding that 11 cooking, then grinding the mutagens, then getting the alpha threshold, then grinding for primes.
It is a problem, but not an important one. Prime stats is something you get when you have a deathmobile with laser cannons on top.

Going back from banded mutation: Mutations don't alter base stats

They do. Currently permanent mutations apply their modifiers to base stats. This includes prime stats. Removing a prime stat (I don’t think it happens in game naturally) will drop your stats to the lowest level possible for the current band.

For non-dodge skills, you often need that 4 or 5 for it to get useful. To unlock those rare recipes you would otherwise need rare books for.
It’s only dodge. Dodge effects and progression.

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  • Dodge

Yeah, I suppose I’ll have to call in a rain check on balance discussions until Dodge (and skills in general, and possibly CBM limits…) is changed. I can say with certainty that right now even a modest investment into unarmed combat (any martial art with a stun or high power block) is far better than any investment into crafting has been in my games, and dodge more useful still, since training more or less requires you actually be able to dodge the target in the first place, but if things change we can work from there.

  • atomic coffee

Huh. Never really used it. I’ll try it out next time I see one, sleep is for the weak anyway.

  • “Raising fighting skills costs a lot vs a 1-2 boost from a book”

True enough, but with things like martial arts the difference between 2 and 4 is worth far more to survival (and finding new books) than spending those points in most other skills at the moment.

  • “You can actually grind dodge…”

I love how I find out about this right after I update to the newest version, where it caps at 3. But yeah, even without that exploit, if I start without dodge I have to isolate a child and sit around for a good long time, then gradually work up to zombie types as they become useless. It’s just too bad I can’t put a muzzle on them. Generally, though, it’s easier to level dodge when it’s almost capped against an enemy than it to catch up at low levels, so spending points into it actually makes it raise faster, rather than slower.

-“The problem here is the UI.”

If it’s helpful, there’s already a 0 point “Positive Trait”, though only for mutant starts. Long Tail - 0 points, shows up as yellow in character screen.

  • Those ideas would make mutations give more stats, but at higher penalties (mutant body parts, for example).

So Elf-a would give flexible elf-y body, lowering health in body parts with the same trait that gives ever higher tier dexterity and perception bonuses? That sounds pretty awesome, I really like the good/bad traits like Huge Talons and Inconveniently Large.

  • Currently permanent mutations apply their modifiers to base stats.

Huh, you’re totally right, my bad, it must only be CBMs that leave current stats intact and I was misreading it.

  • Prime stats is something you get when you have a deathmobile with laser cannons on top.

Is it sad that I generally have alpha threshold long before I can even find a laser pistol? My deathmobiles are always tragically un-deathy.

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For non-dodge skills, you often need that 4 or 5 for it to get useful. To unlock those rare recipes you would otherwise need rare books for.
It’s only dodge. Dodge effects and progression.[/quote]

Actually, with the suggestion I made, 3 costs the same, 4 costs VERY slightly more and 5 only moderately more than the current system. right at 5 is when the pain really starts, so again, something like that, where the costs get higher as the level goes higher, makes a LOT of sense.