SCP Beta 4 Issue Reporting

[6742953ae11a3voodoo47]

I honestly don't know. it's a big can of worms. or rather, a pile.

[6742953ae1692sarge945]

I honestly don't know. it's a big can of worms. or rather, a pile.

Add a d4 inspiration die

[6742953ae1a3bRoSoDude]

Any idea what's going on here? ops2.mis, two lockers (966 and 552) doubled up on each other. One of them Contains links to an actual item, but one of them SwitchLinks to the Regen_Hologram teleport trap? Huh? Note that the player's frob can indeed get blocked by locker (966) which means they miss out on the shotgun shells for no fault of their own.

[6742953ae1b5dvoodoo47]

woah, beta4 does not have this fixes still? 966 is a broken/junk object, set to self destruct now (we tend to not remove vanilla objects unless absolutely necessary, as once you delete an object, it's gone forever).

[6742953ae1c99ZylonBane]

I'd delete the teleport link as well.

[6742953ae1d87voodoo47]

it will get removed when the object deletes itself. but little harm in doing it, of course.

[6742953ae1e83RoSoDude]

I noticed it's fixed in the SS2Tool ops2.mis.dml but of course that isn't loaded for SCP. Anyway, fixed on my end for the time being, thanks for the explanation.

[6742953ae2062ZylonBane]

Just throwing this out there... in the final SHODAN boss fight, what does the hive mind think about completely disabling regeneration of the shields?

The way the fight is now, between the shields rotating and the respawning SHODAN avatars, it's impossible for the player to hide and safely pick away at the shields. Players are going to be constantly having their ammo and health whittled away by fighting off the avatars, and getting shot at by the big giant head if they decide to chase after a shield segment.

The usual reason games give enemies regenerating health is to force players to stay on the offensive. But the avatars already accomplish this. If you don't aggressively attack SHODAN's shields, you will run out of health and/or ammo before you manage to take them down.

Even worse, the weaker weapons (which may be all the player has left at this point) do so little damage to the shields that it's nearly impossible to damage them faster than they regenerate.

At the very least I think the regeneration should be toned way down, but like I said I'm wondering if there's any point having it at all. The way things are now, most players consider hacking the shield interlock computers to be literally the only way to win this fight.

[6742953ae253dsarge945]

It would be nice to have more viable ways to take down shodan's shields, because the recommended method in LITERALLY EVERY GUIDE is to use ice picks.

I think at the very least, they should work the way they do in more modern games. Generally, regeneration only starts X seconds after they have not taken damage. This means that you aren't fighting against a constant heal over time, so the weaker weapons are still useful, but they can still regenerate if not attacked for a long time.

What if they slowly ramped up to a slightly higher value than they have now over about 10 seconds after being damaged?

Honestly though no SHODAN rework is worth it at all unless you also rework the instant ICE pick victory. RSD does this by having 2 phases to the fight which automatically regenerate shields to full, and only allowing hacking all 4 terminals to destroy one set of shields each time, so you have to attack them down to zero at least once or bring a huge haul of ICE picks (which in higher difficulties is not possible), which is a pretty significant nerf and forces you to engage with the fight while still being able to utilise hacking to a significant advantage. Not sure there's anything that could be done in SCP that's really vanilla friendly, though.

Although now that I think about it, it's possible to give worm piles a different respawn interval depending on what killed them. Like, a few minutes for destroyed worm piles, vs an hour for consumed worm piles. Though I'm still not sure that would be a good idea.

I would love if filling a beaker with them also destroyed them for 1-2 minutes (with no toxic could), as I feel it could improve the gameplay. Instead of simply right-click spamming a worm pile, you would have to move around a bit to really get a serious haul, which IMO gives more opportunities to step on worms, get ambushed, etc, and with them respawning quickly it means that realistically the resources are still infinite and you can come back in a few minutes so it's "mostly vanilla".

More opportunities for emergent gameplay without significantly changing resource distribution and systems is good, IMO

[6742953ae288dremyabel]

This is a vanilla SCP playthrough where he makes short work of SHODAN:

System Shock 2 Walkthrough (Impossible, All Collectibles) part 8 ??? - YouTube
I complete the game on the hardest difficulty while collecting all cyber modules and audio logs.You can find full walkthrough playlist here: https://www.yout...

Do you think for veteran players the changes might make it too easy?

[6742953ae29e0ZylonBane]

You just demonstrated that for veteran players the SHODAN fight is already no challenge at all, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

[6742953ae2ae3remyabel]

Starting to remember why I stopped coming here.

[6742953ae2bfdZylonBane]

You posted a video of someone beating SHODAN in literally 10 seconds. Are you concerned that without shield regeneration, this guy might have been able to beat SHODAN in 8 seconds? Help us out here.

[6742953ae2d7bremyabel2]

No offense, but virtually 90% of your posts are antagonistic or outright insults in some cases. This has been going on for years. I've even see other people apologize to you when you were being hostile to them. Not sure why I bothered coming back here, I should just go back to lurking, but I don't really have the patience to deal with it. Anyway, have a nice day.

[6742953ae30absarge945]

You just demonstrated that for veteran players the SHODAN fight is already no challenge at all, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

I think the point is that the SHODAN fight is too easy in general and needs a major overhaul/buff to be more like an actual endgame boss fight.

The whole citadel map is far too easy, actually, after the slog that is BOTM

[6742953ae34baRocketMan]

Unlike the flow that most of the game establishes, the boss fights generally suck because they have major Achilles heels and are uninspired anyway.  You could think of all the easy ways to beat these bosses (soma transerance, ice picks) and try to address those but the whole fight needs an overhaul to make it genuinely worthy of the rest of the game.  Taking the dive into redoing these fights in a major way is intimidating... I wouldn't want to be responsible for it, but I see no other way around the problem.

The other thing is that while some skills like soma transference are de-incentivized by the investment to get them, the reward for getting them should be an easier fight but not an anti-climatic one.  Ice picks are worse because there's no cost to get or hoard them.  They are literally laying around for any John Doe to pick up.

[6742953ae370fVegoraptor]

Giving the player a few seconds before the shields start to regenerate seems like the best idea to me. Not sure if making it a ramp instead of a step from no regen to maximum speed is worth the effort, but why not, lore-wise you could argue either way I suppose.
On a more daring note: How about the respective shield doesn't get disabled outright when you hack the console, but instead loses something like 85% HP with the others losing 10%? Something something other computers compensating for the failure. Probably not quite in the scope of SCP, I know, but I thought I'd just put it out there while I'm at it.

[6742953ae3c51ZylonBane]

Well, now that the drama queen has flounced off, apparently having no actual idea what his point was...

First, SCP is not going to overhaul the SHODAN fight in any significant way. That is out of scope. This boss fight is what it is and we're stuck with it. What we can do is poke and prod at the edges of it.

Regarding the supposed easiness of the end fight... for veteran players, I do not care. They know exactly what to do, and they're very good at doing it, so it's going to be easy for them no matter what.

For first-time players, it's only easy if they've specced into hacking or brought along three ICE picks. If they haven't, it's very difficult, because they have to destroy at least one shield segment, that's spinning around SHODAN, regenerating, and while being shot at from multiple directions.

So the problem is that hackers (or people with three ICE picks) and non-hackers face a completely different challenge in this fight. The former is very easy, and the latter is very difficult (usually). So anything that can be done to bring these two extremes closer together, within the bounds of the existing boss fight mechanics, would be a good thing.

I don't even care if the SHODAN fight ends up being a bit on the easy side. Since it comes almost immediately after the BotM fight, with no real chance for the player to restock ammo, I figure it should be easier. More of a boss coda.

How about the respective shield doesn't get disabled outright when you hack the console

There are 8 shields, and 3 consoles. There are no respective shields, and there never have been.

Now, what I have thought about doing is changing the consoles from not doing anything unless all three are hacked, to instead making each hacked console progressively reduce the max HP of all shields. That way if someone only had one or two ICE Picks, they'd still get some value out of using them.

And then, maybe hacking all three wouldn't outright destroy the shields, but would instead just cap their HP at something low, like 25% of their starting HP. So even l33t haxors would still have to do a little bit of running and gunning.

And maybe the HP regeneration could be a function of difficulty, with Easy having no regeneration, up to Impossible having full-speed regeneration.

Well, these are all just ideas.

[6742953ae3e71ZylonBane]

Here's what I currently have planned for some replacement smokes and booze scripts...

Cigarettes: Smoking a cig will subtract 1 HP down to a minimum of 1 (vanilla script will take it down to 0). It will also add 1 PSI, unless you're at  1 HP, in which case it will do nothing. This is to discourage using med beds to abuse the PSI-for-HP exchange mechanic. If you have Strong Metabolism, you can smoke cigs without losing HP. You will never be prevented from smoking a cig, even if it will have no effect.

Liquor: Drinking alcohol will add 1 HP and subtract 4 PSI, just like in vanilla. My original thought was to make this symmetrical with cigarettes, so you couldn't gain HP unless you had PSI to exchange, but alcohol grants HP because it's a subset of food, just with a side effect of subtracting PSI. If you have Strong Metabolism, you can drink without losing PSI. You will never be prevented from drinking, even if it will have no effect.

I like to think these changes will bring about a generation of hard-drinking, chain-smoking OSA agents.

Thoughts?

Y'know, now that I think about it, it's odd that SS2 provides a device to cheaply restore your full health, but doesn't provide an equivalent device to restore your psi power (like Prey does). Would probably be too unbalancing to add such a device.

[6742953ae3fb0voodoo47]

"couldn't gain HP unless you had PSI to exchange" wouldn't go with that, but if I understand correctly, you don't plan to.

"If you have Strong Metabolism, you can drink without losing PSI" maybe a bit too good - would it be possible to just halve the psi point cost? or maybe reduce the psi point cost to just 1.

[6742953ae417dJossiRossi]

I should check what the total number of placed alcohol items are, because I imagine, that without psi penalty you might only be able to restore less than 100 health total, so having no penalty with fast metabolism might not be all that disruptive really.

I don't have the stats off my head but the replicator costs of a med hypo and an equivalent number of alcohol items can't be anywhere near close or in alcohol's favor I imagine

[6742953ae4329RocketMan]

It's probably fine the way you've suggested it, although could use a bit of tweaking.  For example, no matter how many cigarettes you smoke, I don't think it should ever bring you to the brink of death (in the short term).  But of course the game programming would need to allow the cigs to stop depleting your health at a certain point so it may not be practical to do anything more complicated like this.

Liquor adding health?  Ehh.. maybe a little.  It makes much more sense for it to add health to balance out the cigarette game mechanic but is somewhat unrealistic. 

In both cases I think adding metaprops to change the stats of the player would be both realistic and cool.  So for example cigarettes could up mental tasks such as psi level or cyber affinity but drop endurance and/or agility (because hypoxia).  Liquor could increase endurance (because pain attenuation) but lower psi/cyber.  Other games achieve similar results by disorienting the player rather than changing a metaprop but kind of the same idea. 

The strong metabolism bonus is also a very good idea.

[6742953ae4705ZylonBane]

Liquor adding health?  Ehh.. maybe a little.

It's always added health. That would not be a new feature.

Thinking about the proposed cigarette functionality, maybe having them only add PSI if you're above 1 HP would be too confusing for players. It might not be obvious why they stopped gaining PSI points while puffing through an inventory full of cigs, which could lead to them thinking it was a bug. And it only costs 5 nanites to use a healing bed anyway, so players can pretty much spam it either way.

[6742953ae485asarge945]

Just install RSD. It already has that exact Strong Metabolism mechanic, and it's pretty balanced since Strong Metabolism is usually quite awful as an upgrade.

It shouldn't be too overpowered.