SCP Beta 4 Issue Reporting

[6744719383a78sarge945]

I don't really like reducing requirements, it feels like you're simply trading an os slot for some CMs, which is boring, and could have other implications involving skill balance. Reducing modify requirements is horrible because high level modify is already borderline useless because of FE devices, and this just makes it worse.

I'd either port over the Tinker/FE changes from RSD and make tinker AND higher level modify more worthwhile, or do something else entirely. Maybe it could give you a chance to extract nanites from broken machines or something.

Here's what I'd do:

Tinker:
Reduces nanites cost for weapon modification and repair. Can extract nanites from broken machinery around the world.

Upon frobbing any broken machine (broken med bed, replicator etc), you can download 50 or so "residual nanites from corrupted data stream" once per machine. Not sure if intentionally failing hacking should enable this.

[6744719383c51voodoo47]

my original suggestion was to make all minigames cheaper, but that is not doable, iirc.

anyway, right now I'm quite fond of the idea to have the trait lower the requirements for maintenance and modify, and if it's easy to implement.. it's also more in line with what OS upgrades do in vanilla - add active/passive bonuses to stats, make some actions easier to perform. extracting nanites would be a completely new mechanic - not vanilla enough to be in SCP.

[6744719383f18sarge945]

my original suggestion was to make all minigames cheaper, butt that is not doable, iirc.

I have a hunch this would be possible by updating the properties via script.

If you steal the minigame from RSD you should be able to do pretty much anything you want with the costs.

It would be a bit hacky though.

Still better than further breaking Modify, though.

[674471938406dvoodoo47]

hmm, we don't want to go there (needing tinker to use epstein tools for 2nd level modifications), I would say. again, nothing even remotely similar exists in vanilla.

we shouldn't really be messing with the OS upgrades at all (remember, SCP is supposed to stay as close to vanilla as possible), but half of them are just so useless/borderline broken in their vanilla form that something simply needs to be done.

the other not yet tweaked trait is a good example - Pack Rat, allowing snacks to stack would be just perfect here, but this is so un-vanilla that I suggested passive +1 bonus to strength instead.

[6744719384261sarge945]

Tbh, I feel like scp trying to be "vanilla friendly" while also trying to rebalance things is a contradictory goal which undermines both outcomes - those wanting a pure patch will be disappointed by the gameplay changes, and those wanting a balance mod will be disappointed with SCPs need to be "mostly vanilla" preventing it from really changing anything significantly wrong with the game.

If it was up to me, I'd make SCP purely a patch/oversight fix mod, and let dml modding focus on the gameplay.

But since it's not up to me, making it reduce maintenance requirements seems okay, but I have a problem with modify because of the aforementioned FE issue already making high level modify worthless, this makes it worse, because now you can undermine high-level modify with an item AND an upgrade.

Keeping Tinker to Maintenance only makes it worth it if you adopt RSDs maintenance tool formula. IIRC this basically means tools repair an amount based on the difference between the required maint skill for the item, and your skill level. This essentially means Tinker would improve all of your maintenance tool use, because the difference would be higher.

Alternatively, using the vanilla formula, you could just make maintenance tools repair +1 weapon durability.

Having Tinker improve weapon maintenance (while making it harder by default) is a very lore-friendly and intuitive way to improve the skill, IMO. Even if you keep the lower nanite costs while modifying, it would largely become a maintenance-focused upgrade. You could even scrap the Modify nanites cost reduction and it would still be a good upgrade for people focused on maintenance.

[6744719384496voodoo47]

looking at the download numbers, and considering the very, very few "you have ruined muh game" complaints, I would say SCP serves its purpose of delivering a bugfixed, polished, yet close to vanilla experience in one easy to install package pretty well. that seems to be what most people want - the you should have went all way and I wanted just bugfixes groups are a very small minority, and can either get a dozen of additional minimods to dial everything up to eleven, or simply go with just the GOG/steam build or the tool if they think less is more.

making it a pure patch/oversight fix mod is impossible, as the definition of what that actually means is pretty vague, and as soon as you fix a set of things, you realize that right beyond that is yet another set, and so on, and no matter how minimalist your intention was originally, in the end you just end up with SCP all over again. been there, done that.

redoing the maintenance formula (and then having Tinker affect it some more) seems a bit unnecessary, maintenance never struck me as broken or unbalanced, you have your skill, you have the tools, you pop them onto the weapon, condition number goes up. the idea of lowering the requirements seems more interesting imho - as mentioned, in an emp rifle/hard difficulty scenario, taking this as the last upgrade would allow the player to maintain the gun with just a skill of 5, saving a lot of cms. the formerly useless upgrade is now worth considering, and that is the main idea here - no trait should be a complete no brainer, or totally useless, all should be very useful in certain situations, depending on your intended build.

but if you mean the proposed new Tinker trait not affecting modify, then sure, that can be considered (though going by the description, this primarily should be a modify related trait).

[67447193848faMarvin]

I was thinking it would be interesting to, on the Rec deck basketball court, add some additional worm piles to the upper area on the hard and impossible difficulties. Thoughts?

You make something that is trivial but very annoying to avoid even more annoying without increasing the difficulty in a meaningful way. I never liked the fact that worm piles were the sole reason for reactivating the basketball court lights, as it's not a good incentive. Pass.

Also, we've been discussing ways to make Tinker less useless. We're somewhat limited by what we can do with OS upgrades since we don't have engine access, but something we can do, that's relevant to the Tinker skill, is modify the properties of weapons. For example, Tinker could decrease the minimum skill requirements to repair, modify, and maintain a weapon. Or maybe that would be overpowered?

Can it be patched and reduce all nanite costs (except replicators) in the game, down to 0 in some cases? Reducing skill requirements is fine, too.

[6744719384c2cOName]

voodoo47
Is it really vague in your opinion? Stuff like adding baseline protection to power armor. That's pretty clearly not a pure bug fix thing

[6744719384e9bvoodoo47]

"pretty vague" is what I said. yes, things can get unclear once you dive deep enough. lets take your example - the armor's description clearly says it's not just a hollow framework that generates a forcefield, there is solid metal layers involved. so there should be at least some protection even if the forcefields are not running. the description and how the item actually works do not match - something will have to be fixed here. if your definition of a bug is a property that has a value of 0 when in fact it's supposed to be 1, and fixing the bug means changing the value, then strictly speaking, this is not a bug, but still, it is something that should be fixed. call it omission, call it discrepancy, whatever.

this is also how the disruption grenade bug was discovered - there was a blatant mismatch between the description and the actual effect. a few old versions of SCP just upped the damage to match the expected output, but then we have found out the damage dealing object was simply not assigned to the correct archetype (a "proper" bug). removed the duct tape solution, fixed it properly, disruption grenades suddenly magically do what they were always supposed to do (and it only took about a decade from the game's release or so). yet, some would consider this too much, as this has changed the game balance quite significantly, and would oppose the change as breaking vanilla, despite it clearly being a bug.

so yeah, this is not cut out as clearly as you may think.


anyway, the red line SCP is never supposed to cross is introducing completely new mechanics into the game - so no new AIs no matter how much sense would it make (Pistol and Shard hybrids), no ability to resurrect destroyed turrets (Repairman), no blocking epstein tool use unless a specific trait is taken (RSD). what lies between simple bugs and that line is subject to discussion, and, if consensus is reached, implementation.

either way, to make it short, GOG/steam build if you are a minimalist, the tool if you want just a bit more, SCP for the full experience, and add minimods to that if you want to go over the top. I think we have 99.99% of the market covered.

[674471938501eNameless Voice]

Wouldn't having a trait that modifies skill requirements on items behave strangely in multiplayer?
Give an item to the tinker and the skill requirements are dropped for everyone?  Though maybe it wouldn't matter, since the tinker would have the skills anyway and you could say he's explaining to the other people how to do things better.

[6744719385117voodoo47]

or that he just modified the weapon to require less. anyway, I'm guessing the implementation would not actually modify the concretes, but set something up in the gamesys, and that would only affect the one particular player who took the trait.

[67447193855c5ZylonBane]

I never liked the fact that worm piles were the sole reason for reactivating the basketball court lights

They aren't. SCP requires activating the basketball court power to activate the transmitter. I believe some other mods make this change as well.

I'm guessing the implementation would not actually modify the concretes, but set something up in the gamesys, and that would only affect the one particular player who took the trait.

As I've said, since we don't have engine access, modifying the concretes is the only practical option. The impractical option is recreating the entire HRM interface from scratch in Squirrel.

As for multiplayer, I do not care. Multiplayer is already a janky, unbalanced mess.

[67447193856b9voodoo47]

so the change would be done on the concretes, not archetypes? didn't quite catch that. well, whatever makes it work.

[67447193857d5ZylonBane]

Dynamically twiddling archetypes should be avoided, because any changes are temporary, and get clobbered the next time you load a level.

Changes to concretes are persistent.

[6744719385a77RoSoDude]

It would be much easier to change the property on the abstract archetype (same as you already do for Spatially Aware), once when you get the trait and then on every subsequent game load. The reason you have to do it on the concrete objects in this case is that many concrete objects have an overriding property assignment that would take precedence, so for those objects the trait would have no effect if done via archetype properties.

[6744719385b90voodoo47]

no concrete should have tech skill requirements set. if so, it's a redundant prop that should be removed (allowing the trait to modify the gamesys values instead).

[6744719385ce1RoSoDude]

My bad, I thought we were still talking about the minigame nanite costs, as ZB mentioned reimplementing HRM in squirrel. I don't think I've ever seen a concrete object with tech skill requirements either, at least in vanilla/SCP.

Scripting property changes on the archetype level is surely easier if you're lowering skill requirements as discussed. I do stuff like that all the time and it's very reliable, much moreso than checking over every relevant concrete object. The fact that the changes are temporary is a good thing, because it means you're in no danger of runaway property assignments.

[6744719385f8bMarvin]

They aren't. SCP requires activating the basketball court power to activate the transmitter. I believe some other mods make this change as well.

Oh, nice. Probably never noticed since I always use the battery.

[67447193862a8ZylonBane]

I don't really like reducing requirements

Reducing a requirement is mathematically the same thing as increasing a stat. Almost every upgrade in the game involves some kind of stat bonus. Do you dislike the fundamental concept of RPG stat progression?

[67447193863f5voodoo47]

half the traits lower the difficulty of performing a certain task - this would be hardly different.

[674471938683dsarge945]

Reducing a requirement is mathematically the same thing as increasing a stat. Almost every upgrade in the game involves some kind of stat bonus. Do you dislike the fundamental concept of RPG stat progression?

The most interesting O/S upgrades give the player a specific, unique bonus they can't get anywhere else - no psi burnout, health from robots, enemies on automap, two implants at once, etc.

Yes there are a number which are practically equal to stat increases - more melee/ranged damage, more inventory slots, etc. These are boring.

The fundamental difference here is that getting 3 extra inventory slots doesn't invalidate getting high level strength (especially for melee characters), nor does more melee/ranged damage invalidate high investment in a weapon skill. Reducing Modify requirements makes high level modify investment literally worthless, because Modify is useful for nothing else outside of modifying weapons, and lowering the requirements essentially renders level 6 pointless. High-level Modify is already very hard to justify because of the number of FE devices and the need to only realistically modify 2-4 weapons in a given playthrough to be effective, and this makes the situation worse.

Maintenance does have some use outside of maintaining weapons, especially for Energy players, so it's far less egregious in this case. Lowering Maintenance requirements also doesn't fundamentally undermine the usefulness of the skill because you're still dependent on maintenance tools, and making them more effective is a useful bonus that still allows high level modify to be useful. Getting a benefit of +1 to your maintenance tools would help regardless of your maintenance level, and you still need higher levels to maintain higher level weapons (and do so more effectively). Reducing the requirements wouldn't completely break everything like it would with Modify.

As a result, Tinker should either do something that aids modify without invalidating it, or affect a different skill. Modify investment essentially needs all the help it can get, and this just drives it further into the ground.

How about instead of making quips about how I don't like RPG stat progression, we all actually sit down and analyse the proposed change and it's effects on the game at a deeper level than "yeah this sounds cool, lets add it in"

[67447193869fdvoodoo47]

there already are ways of invalidating level 6 investments, as that is what you want to do wherever possible (labassistant is a good example). because you want to avoid that investment if you can help it.

modify beyond 3 is useless either way, so making it 16% more useless isn't really a big deal, and just like repair, this skill will remain useless unless overhauled completely (not doing that).

but sure, if someone has an idea..

[6744719386b84ZylonBane]

Fun Fact: The first level of modification to the grenade launcher increases grenade damage by 200%. The second level only increases damage by 14%.

By comparison, the first mod level for literally every other gun in the game boosts damage by only 10%, with 14% for the second level.

So on the one hand, this is almost certainly a mistake by Irrational that should be corrected. On the other hand, some people have probably become accustomed to this stupid-high damage boost.

For extra fun, the grenade launcher description flat-out states, "Neither modification significantly affects grenade damage.", so it's even possible they didn't intend modding the launcher to increase grenade damage at all. Which would make perfect sense. But I'm not prepared to go that far.

[6744719386d01RoSoDude]

This is presumably a contributing reason why ADaOB overhauled the grenades to have no damage scaling. Now that we have squirrel scripting, a direct fix is much more appropriate.

Also worth noting that in SCP Beta 4 (and not ADaOB), the frag grenades still did have damage scaling due to a bugged link data assignment; "Propagate Source Scale?=FALSE" is treated the same as "TRUE", where "NULL" is the real false value. Together with their increased base damage from ADaOB, frag grenades were better than all other grenades once you modified the launcher.