GH2: Rebalancing Plan

[Joseph Hewitt]

There has been much talk around here lately about rebalancing the combat in GH2. Well, I've been playing it a lot, and I've come up with the following plan. Because (as I said in the GH2v0.626 thread) I am half asleep, I will just be typing out the plan from my notepad.

1. Deal with BV. A weapon with BV should be equivalent in most ways to a weapon with DC equal to the first weapon's BV x DC. This is probably going to mean that certain high-DC/high-BV weapons will have to be changed to be viable/legal again. On a related point, maybe change the light/heavy distinction so it's based on DCxBV instead of just DC alone. This would make the pin rifle a heavy weapon, which is appropriate.

2. Scatter loses DC at medium and long range.

3. I said before that I was going to halve all damage. I've changed my mind... instead, I'm going to double all DP values for limbs. This will solve the current problem with certain module types not getting a DP improvement after increasing in size (heads, wings).

4. A negative penetration score should treat the armor of the part hit as higher than it actually is. This would obviously have no effect if the part has no armor.

5. Change the mission-granting scheme. At the moment, any member of a faction can give you a mission and it's a total crapshoot. If you join L5Law you'll have trouble ever leaving a town from all the missions being tossed at you. What I propose is that only certified mission-givers can give basic missions; NPCs generated as guards don't usually give missions, and may even get the NoPlots tag. There will be a guaranteed number of NPCs belonging to all legal factions in each city (1 to 5, depending on what kind of presence the faction has here). To compensate for fewer missions the rewards should be greater and there should be more different stuff happening.

6. Finally, I was thinking about messing around with Initiative again, and had a great idea... export some of the constants to a configuration file, and allow players (or at least playtesters) to mess with the rules directly. In theory it's a brilliant idea.

7. Some new positive modifiers to make it easier to hit someone under certain circumstances.

[magic.coding.fairy.peridot]

5. Change the mission-granting scheme. At the moment, any member of a faction can give you a mission and it's a total crapshoot. If you join L5Law you'll have trouble ever leaving a town from all the missions being tossed at you. What I propose is that only certified mission-givers can give basic missions; NPCs generated as guards don't usually give missions, and may even get the NoPlots tag. There will be a guaranteed number of NPCs belonging to all legal factions in each city (1 to 5, depending on what kind of presence the faction has here). To compensate for fewer missions the rewards should be greater and there should be more different stuff happening.

Something to watch out for here is that there are a number of different kinds of "reward" people get by doing missions: salvage, renown, money, faction reputation, plot advancement... all of these potentially need to be increased if the number of missions available is decreased. I'm thinking in particular of renown; the game I'm playing now has become tiresome several times as I've had to do an inordinate amount of grinding to get my renown up to something matching my plot advancement. I captured a couple of high-end mecha early on and could take on tough enemies, but had a few mission failures (including one where I just hit spacebar and lost the mission immediately) and died a few times in personal-scale combat. So I had to fight a zillion missions, all easy, each raising my renown by one. Getting up to ~70 when I had to rerun 40-50 about four times was slow and painful. Having more different missions will help somewhat, but having fewer quest givers per town will make this even more annoying. (Particularly when most of them just say "oh, you're not what we're looking for".) So I'd argue for having some "too hard" missions that bump your renown by (say) 5 if you succeed.

6. Finally, I was thinking about messing around with Initiative again, and had a great idea... export some of the constants to a configuration file, and allow players (or at least playtesters) to mess with the rules directly. In theory it's a brilliant idea.

I'd love to be able to tinker with the combat system (among other things) and I've found the code somewhat impenetrable. So this sounds interesting.

[Joseph Hewitt]

FacXP: Upper tier missions will grant more than one point. This is already taking shape in v0.626; I think the highest FacXP mission currently is "Defend The Base" which gives you four points.

Renown: Missions/Duels to challenge a particular NPC will allow you to instantly raise your Renown to their level if you win.

What kind of mission were you doing to just hit spacebar and lose immediately? That sounds off.

Edit- One thing I forgot last night: ECM. I think it could be balanced if ECM drained power and had a recharge time. A separate, odd idea I had for it was this: At the beginning of combat roll ECM for all mecha, and store the result. During combat if the model's defense roll is lower than this ECM value substitute the ECM and lower the counter by 1 to 5. That way, everybody gets a defense bonus at start which gets whittled away as combat goes on. Instead I may use this idea for the Mysticism "In the Zone" ability.

[JohnnyDmonic]

I like the "in the zone" mechanic, but I also like the idea of ECM as it is but with a power drain.  Personally I think going with the power drain and using the other mechanic for mysticism (or something else) sounds pretty good.  It sounds good for mysticism, but I imagine most mysticism type characters as relying on speedy/manueverable martial arts mecha, where as the mechanic itself seems like a great way to give heavy armor bruisers a chance to get some licks in before they start getting whittled away.

[Ephafn]

The increased accuracy (for some circumstances) and the doubled DP sound good. That's about what I have done in my previous game, and it made it more interesting.

[magic.coding.fairy.peridot]

FacXP: Upper tier missions will grant more than one point. This is already taking shape in v0.626; I think the highest FacXP mission currently is "Defend The Base" which gives you four points.

Is there any way to read out FacXP? As it stands, I just do random missions and once in a while get an email for a promotion and an obsolete mech.

Renown: Missions/Duels to challenge a particular NPC will allow you to instantly raise your Renown to their level if you win.

Ah, that will help. Not that I like duelling missions, per se, but a way to quickly pull your renown out of the dumps will be very welcome. The only drawback I can see is that this allows tricks like cranking your renown way down, then going in with a Dora but crazy skills to accumulate XP (which is crazy if it means ~50 fights to get your renown back).

What kind of mission were you doing to just hit spacebar and lose immediately? That sounds off.

I'm not sure exactly, they all kind of blur together. I think what must have happened was some dialogue option appeared at the beginning of the fight and I casually hit space bar to get rid of it, but in fact it was offering me choices, one of which was "give up now". All I saw was a combat starting, one of those "you'll lose" dialogs popping up and me hitting space, and then "you have lost".

I have also lost missions where I was facing the wrong way when I hit "Full Speed" so that I zipped right off the map. That it's a loss is fair enough, but it sure is tiresome when it means redoing ten easy missions again, particularly when people don't like giving me missions.

Edit- One thing I forgot last night: ECM. I think it could be balanced if ECM drained power and had a recharge time. A separate, odd idea I had for it was this: At the beginning of combat roll ECM for all mecha, and store the result. During combat if the model's defense roll is lower than this ECM value substitute the ECM and lower the counter by 1 to 5. That way, everybody gets a defense bonus at start which gets whittled away as combat goes on. Instead I may use this idea for the Mysticism "In the Zone" ability.

Meh. By analogy with real ECM I'd vote for ECM helping against missiles only, and maybe also providing stealth/long-range sensors. Though I think INTERCEPT also helps against missiles only, so maybe this isn't useful in terms of gameplay. Maybe instead of a defense roll, it would subtract from the enemies' effective sensor level? Possibly even each side's total ECM/EW levels subtract from the opponents' sensor levels? I suppose this still only affects missiles.

From a gameplay point of view, we have ECM/EW and Piloting/MV that are flat-out defense rolls. A shield gives you another defense roll, though only for the front; same for INTERCEPT as I understand it, and in both cases there's a constraint on how often it works. Guns and missiles differ in terms of range, ability to launch mass swarms, use of the sensor value, and (I think) susceptibility to INTERCEPT.

Maybe ECM could serve as additional cover? (the mech is hard to target through the haze of chaff and static) Stealth could be combined or kept separate as you prefer. This would make Stealth/cover vastly more useful given all those empty space maps.

[magic.coding.fairy.peridot]

What kind of mission were you doing to just hit spacebar and lose immediately? That sounds off.

I'm not sure exactly, they all kind of blur together. I think what must have happened was some dialogue option appeared at the beginning of the fight and I casually hit space bar to get rid of it, but in fact it was offering me choices, one of which was "give up now". All I saw was a combat starting, one of those "you'll lose" dialogs popping up and me hitting space, and then "you have lost".

I have also lost missions where I was facing the wrong way when I hit "Full Speed" so that I zipped right off the map. That it's a loss is fair enough, but it sure is tiresome when it means redoing ten easy missions again, particularly when people don't like giving me missions.

Aha. This happened again and I figured it out. It happened when I was generated immediately against an edge and facing it. Since I use menu mode, hitting space activated the default option on the menu, which is "cruise speed", taking me off the map. A stray mouse click anywhere on the screen can do this too (since gearhead only updates which menu item is selected when the mouse moves, if you click without moving after the menu changes, you get the default no matter where the pointer actually is).

I also lost some missions by waiting too long to turn: if you're going full speed, you can move several squares before you get another chance to act. If you've turned and are moving because of the slipperiness of space, you stop when you hit the edge. But if you haven't turned and are zipping along at full speed, you can lose by trying to get a last shot in before turning, only to discover that this turn carries you right off the edge.

All of these problems may have something to do with using menu mode, which I only recently learned is deprecated. I'm still trying to find a comfortable other way to play.

[Frumple]

If it helps any, anything you can do in menu mode is doable in roguelike mode; [ and ] are default for the turns, ferex, and there's other ones for cruise/full speed (beyond just telling it to run)/reverse, etc. You can redefine 'em fairly easily in the .cfg file, to something more comfortable.

[Joseph Hewitt]

If anyone is interested in updating the menu interface themselves, this is what needs to be done:

1. The menu interface should take its input and pass it to the PCA_CommandProcessor procedure instead of processing it directly. This means that the menu item values should conform to the KeyMap codes from ui4gh.pp, which currently they don't.

2. It might be a good idea if many of the key codes were also attached to the menu as MenuKeys. That way, you could either select the attack option or press "A" to open up the attack menu.

3. The menu layout and sub-menus should be user definable via some kind of a configuration file. The block of movement and movemode commands has to be dynamically generated, so their placement within the interface might not be configurable, but everything else can be. Every roguelike mode command should be accessible from the menu interface.

[SharkD]

If anyone is interested in updating the menu interface themselves, this is what needs to be done:

LOL. But you picked a programming language that is no longer fashionable. 

[magic.coding.fairy.peridot]

If anyone is interested in updating the menu interface themselves, this is what needs to be done:

LOL. But you picked a programming language that is no longer fashionable. 

I'm afraid that's part of my problem in making changes; I tried to fiddle with the name generator, and having to write it in Pascal was a major stumbling block. I haven't used it since high school, and these days I avoid compiled languages if at all possible. Even reading the code is kind of a challenge... The language plainly works well, but it's hard for anyone without current Pascal experience to do much to help.

[SharkD]

Yeah, most of my experience is with scripting languages like JavaScript, PHP and Lua where you don't have to worry about stuff like variable data types or garbage collection.