Thread to be updated in real-time, largely for procrastination-related purposes. All of these updates apply to the test server, which is closed to the public for now.

Right now I'm going through the old modules and taking out the ones that led to imbalances.

Importing race data into a spreadsheet, to help with balancing.

Removing a lot of the stuff from settings for Races... Seems like too many bloody database hits for something that never gets changed anyway...

Coming up with a formula to balance races properly...
Making a cup of tea, having a smoke...

It's like a blog, only informative!

Outpost flavour text...

Editing, so that I don't end up just bumping this topic all night and taking up the whole "Recent Topics" box.

Zombies done, entered into spreadsheet. Unique stable capability added. Unique street names added. Code cleaned up; should result in a small performance benefit.

See the spreadsheet for how the balance of all the races work out.

Clearly Zombies suck and something needs to be done. This spreadsheet isn't even incorporating the special abilities, and the Human abilities beat the Zombie ones. Hmm.

Moving on to other races. We'll get them all in the spreadsheet first before

Help me with the formula for this, guys.

The current metric I've got for balancing races (I just eyeballed it the last coupla times around) is thus:

BALANCE = (turns/10)+(travel/20)+atkmod+defmod+favourmod+reqmod+cigchancemod+(charmmod/2)

So, the average unaltered stats for a race with 10 turns a day, 20 travels, normal attack, normal defence, normal favour, normal Requisition from Jungle fights, normal chances of getting a ciggy, and unaltered Charm, is 7.5.

So, one turn is equal to one of these:
2 extra Travel points
10% Attack increase
10% Defence increase
10% additional Favour points after each FailBoat fight
10% extra Requisition after each Jungle fight
10% extra chance of getting a cigarette after a Jungle fight (I believe it's currently about 1 in 20 as standard...)
10% increased Charm as long as the player remains this race.

Is this fair? We probably need to tweak at least the Travel cost.

Some suggestions:

Give the Zombies more turns. They should tire less easily then Humans.

Give the Midgets increased chance of cigs. It suits there character to always be scrounging up half-smoked butts.

gotta-go.

Eh, from my game experience trying to balance them like that will never work. Your best bet is really just to give them something different enough that they're worth playing even if they're not as good, mathematically. Specials are what make races special.

Still, going off that proposed system...

Also, hopefully with the new travel system it will be worth it, but right now 2 travel points are worth FAR less than an additional turn. Since, you know, you can trade in a turn for 5 travel points. You mentioned that already, though.

The 10% extra req/cigs thing is ... not right - at ten jungle fights, adding a turn or adding the ten percent gives the same increase in total req/cigs, but gives you both, in addition to experience, so it is actually strictly better. If anything, it would be equal to getting a 10% bonus to both, not to one. This is a pretty glaring imbalance. It gets better the more turns you have, but not much better.

Other than that, it seems alright (except charm is useless except for selling to get more hps).

Oh, thats a racial consideration you could have! HPs. If you want to introduce some more complexity, anyways.

A suggestion, you could give zombies a full heal after each jungle fight. I was inspired by their special ability, they could simply eat the corpse of their enemy.

It could also take the for of a discount at the healing lodge, because they can eat the excess parts that what-his-face has from operating on others.

Also, I think that you could replace their ability with invincibility for a few turns, THE ZOMBIES JUST KEEP ON COMING SARGE. I know that you can use invincibility (you are using the normal dragon prime base, I read some of the things on dragon prime after some of your suggestions on other things), so giving them a pretty ridiculously overpowered special ability would help even it out some.

Alternatively, you could have them summon minions, possibly based off of the number of monster kills that drive kill, which would be really kind of cool. For the zombies to have been converting the dead monsters to allies would be rather cool.


Apologies for the length of my post, my state is bigger then Great Britain.

Full health bar after every fight? NO WAI

Extra special abilities for the currently-underpowered races? WAI

Update:
Mutants are by far the most underpowered race in the game. However, owing to their mutations, they should also be easy to balance out using special abilities.

Robots can now heal their companions in the Hospital Tent.

Working on an interface for them to emulate implants... Or I might just give that a miss and take it out completely, because the points allocation method is so confusing and I don't think that many people actually use the feature anyway. :-/

EDIT: Yeah, I'm just gonna comment that out for now. I might put it back in later, but I'd like to have a closer look at Implants too, first...

I think the major downside to mutants is the hit they take to exp and req gathering. I believe that JtPN played as one for a significant amount of time. There are certainly less people who complain about being a mutant then complain about playing as a zombie.

I believe that one of the major problems is the Kittymorph racial buff is ridiculous for people with high charm. Plus, the idea of a Kittymorph is more attractive on a mental stand point then numbers of the other races.

I think it would be really cool if there was a race that let you adapt to your playing style to a limited extent based on your formula.

No, dun take away my robo implant ability! (unless it's replaced with something better)
I use it at least! Though having to go through five screens every day to check chats is kind of frustrating...

Actually, what would be really nice there if there was a way other than foilwench to level up those specials. I almost never use mine just because there aren't any "boss fights" in this game, and you can only use most of the decent ones once in a game. What we need is either a way to get more specials, or some really tough (unique per day maybe?) fights we can use them all up in. The current Magpie/Mutant fights are good for that, but seem terribly uncommon.

(Note: This probably becomes less of an issue at higher DK levels, and the implants might become more important. I dunno.)

Exception: Stim implant. That ones really useful, specially for bots.

Anyways, is my assessment of the cig/req boost correct?

Went to kung-fu last night - still a bit achey, and fixing a client's PC too (hard drive diagnostics still running), so there's likely to be little coding tonight. On the other hand, my general achiness means I'm staying in tonight, so I may have some more time in which to code?

Anyway, I'm drawing up a plan for messing about with Implants. The way I see it, the current system is a bit bloody boring - they do different things, but they all work in pretty well the same way. They all even level up in pretty well the same way. I'm going to try to tie them in with similar mechanics to Glory, so they give you an edge when you need it.

I like the sound of that! I've always been a fan of the old attack, attack, attack, DESTROY THE WORLD, attack style of gameplay.

Extra variation in the fighting is always appreciated.

Playtesting the new system, with the Chemical Pack implant. It's working pretty well - I had to go through and tweak the maths a few times, but I'm liking how it works. Implants now level up independently of everything else.

The Chemical Pack is activated by adrenaline. The more hurt you get, and the longer you stay in pain, the more it'll help you out. The more you use it, the more options become available to you.

I'm going to go through each Implant separately, and hopefully give them entirely different ways of working.

Playtested the Chemical Pack implant. Quite pleased with how it works.

Plan for the Head-Mounted Laser implant:
It bears two batteries; a low-capacity rechargeable battery that is replenished overnight, and a large-capacity backup battery that has to last you for the DK run. You'll have the option to vary the power output of the laser, and a bar denoting the current heat level. If it gets too hot, it'll set your hair on fire. You can quite safely leave it at level one pretty much indefinitely, but you'll drain your backup battery.

I have to say; the game does seem a little too easy. Once you know to bank your Req every so often, there's no real challenge. I think it's probably a wise idea to get rid of weapons/armour gifting altogether, and replace it with one-shot commodity gifting. Boss monsters will also serve to mix things up a little bit.

I'm thinking one boss monster per 3 levels. I'm working towards twenty monsters per level, with one boss monster at levels 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15. The way fights work at present, if boss monsters are staggered every 3 levels, you should always be in danger of attack from one boss monster regardless of your level (since Lv1 players can't fight lower-level monsters, they should only be at risk if they choose the Big Trouble option).

Gonna have The Watcher remind the player to bank their Req every so often, and before logging out.

Drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama...
*does the Sorting Out Drama dance, and doesn't do any Season Two coding*

...who thinks I should just start banning, instead?

How about instead of banning, take their saved days, and stick them on the failboat for failing to be non-jackassy?
Call it tempnerfing. Oh, but include Island-wide special effects.
Heads on pikes do a lot. So does getting called out by the admin.
Just a concept for drama reduction.
~CTP

Nah, ending up banning them. I've got too much to do - spending an hour a day keeping an eye on them and cleaning up their drama was just an hour a day that I could have spent making the game more gooder and awesomer for Season Two.