Do you think the various playable species should be equally balanced for combat, or are you okay with some having inherently more power in combat?
Efforts should be made to keep species balanced for equality in general combat.
Efforts should be made to ensure no species has extreme advantages, but minor combat advantages are okay with me (innate slip resistance, inability to wear shoes, 10-20% extra punch damage)
Species should not be explicitly balanced for combat at all, and extreme variances in capability are okay with me. (hypothetical stingers for apids, Oozeling water weakness, IPC being annihilated by EMP, Innate martial arts such as tail-sweep tripping)
0voters
I have no specific plans going along with this poll, it’s almost exclusively curiosity this time. There’s some lingering ideas I had about tweaking species to make them more diverse, but those changes would be a drop in the bucket compared to real species diversity in the end.
Combat isn’t even the question.
Every species needs to be its own, unique experience in my opinion.
Right now we have species in a really bad place that have basically no mechanical difference to humans(ethereals), or even are an upgrade from humans (felinids).
We’ve had apids for years, but what are they but just dead end code, all looking the same?
I personally like species variety, but the thing is, barely anyone pays attention to them codewise. Moths and Lizards were bugged for over a year in the preference menu. There’s so much beestation needs to catch up on.
I think we are catching up, but its not something that can solely be blamed on code. So many people just want to stick to their one static character slot. Everyone can remember that when we had Squids, no one played them. We had flies? No one played them. We need much more people embracing the variety that having multiple character slots gives you
Seriously though, having more customization for basically everything would be nice. I don’t know what that’d look like, but it’d be pretty cool to have more options. That and maybe giving more charslots, but I know that’s a donator thing so it probably wouldn’t happen.
Iirc No one mantained the code, not many people played them and at the time we were about to start using kapu-limbs so coding wise it was less work if the Squid people weren’t there to loosen the amount of coding needed to get kapu-limbs to work(spoiler they never finished the job)
I would rather have it be focused on gameplay benefits instead of things that dont really matter (yay my sprite looks a bit different and I eat different stuff)
Flashes always suck because it’s blind either way.
Getting zapped sucks twice as much.
I can be beat to death with a fly swatter.
I am rather flamable.
And cannot eat meat.
BUUUT.
I get to point and laugh WHEN gravity gets cut, cause I semi-fly.
Wings look great, and I can hide what I carry under them in some cases.
and I don’t have to worry about the chef cooking much cause I love mushrooms and love eating clothing, which no one else do.
People are focused too much on the advantages and not the disadvantages. I think that adding specific downsides to species that you have to work around helps make species feel more unique than advantages.
Right now we have a total of three races that feel substantially different than humans. IPC, Plasmaman, and Oozelings. Every other race is basically a reskinned human +/- a minor side grade. What do IPC, Plasmaman, and Oozelings have in common? They all have substantial disadvantages.
IPC get mega fucked on by EMPs, can’t take most chems, and take mildly more damage. Plasmamen have to breath plasma, have no DNA or blood, wear a plasmasuit 24/7, revival is hard, and take way more damage from all sources. Oozelings have their special blood system where toxin is reversed, water fucks on them, and don’t catch on fire.
I guess the simplest way to put it is that you are always thinking about downsides in the back of your head, not so much the upsides.
We have way too little speech variations. They are way too funny and cool for us to limit it. I like it because its both a downside in a way, but also adds unique flavor without just being a “coder took muh feature away to balance me”
Never agreed with the water weakness for (offbrand) slimes…
But if you are interested in ideas for gameplay changes:
give or replace water death with built in blood deficiency. Kinda weird that the species with the easiest blood gain never capitalised on it…
Possibly port shapeshifting from elsewhere.
My personal take is that differences would be nice as long as it doesn’t make it physically impossible to play a job as a certain species.
Like how Moths couldn’t play engineering or robotics without an extremely rare set of goggles which couldn’t be manufactured
Instead of just adding the ability to make welding goggles or reverting the “bugfix” which made welding helmets no longer work I got pushback and told that a T3 tech web is a fine entry point at which basic role competence is acceptable. This is where I think things would be pushed too far. This isn’t combat balance… this is just unplayable…
Luckily goggles are… somewhat more accessible… and if not there are work arounds
Spaming radius flash 5-6 times should in theory cause a moth to go blind.
Felinid debuffs.
Extra hearing damage from flashbangs, like moths get extra eye damage.
Now attracted to lethal lasers like laser pointerss, an lasers that pass adjacent to them, they’ll pounce towards it after it passes them.
Tail-grabbing is goes straight to aggressive grab, but has a second’s delay to compensate for skipping passive grabs.
