SS2 Rebalanced Skills and Disciplines

[6643ba9292414RoSoDude]

I prefer worm piles to not be destructible at all, they're supposed to be floor hazards and allowing the player to wrench them to death is the definition of boring degenerate gameplay. I allowed fire and anti-annelid damage to kill them as a compromise, essentially just for random scenarios where a grenade, fusion blast, or exotic weapon explosion happens to include a worm pile in its radius. I don't anticipate players will bother spending resources to kill them, it's just a minor concession to AoE weapons.

[6643ba92927e5Join2]

Agreed. Destroyed only by high value resources or invulnerable are the two sensible options. Destroyed by anything is the realistic, yet silly method.

Realism brain worms is a blight. Abstraction as it pertains to game design is a lost art of the glorious 1990s.

Let me highlight why with the following example: realism's end goal here is they are a not a hazard at all because they'd just squish immediately when stepped on by this 180lbs (or whatever) man. It is clearly explained the worms are in their infancy, and you can see when you look at the piles they're too small to do any damage puncturing future space marine footwear, nor withstand such weight when stepped on. So, realism's end goal is therefore they are nothing of consequence unless you take your boots off and run around the ship barefooted, or your footwear are otherwise compromised perhaps.
Realism for realism's sake is often antithetical to game design, even when the intentions are good e.g immersion, sense of freedom as is the case here. Irrational had it right by making them hazards that cannot easily be removed, simply do chip damage when stepped on instead of attaching to your foot and needing surgical removal, and yet were just straddling the line of believability for the player to not stop and question it. The only questionable part of their design here is encouraging players to get on their hands and knees with beakers collecting them all to use a gun that isn't particularly satisfying and requires significant investment. But I get their thinking. The idea is novel and cool, and could have been good. Just did not have the best execution.

That's a point too, keeping them indestructable preserves worm ammo counts for new players whom have no idea about any proliferator worm gun thing until much later. Are you sure you thought this through Zylon?

[6643ba9292f3dZylonBane]

I prefer worm piles to not be destructible at all

They're already destructible even in vanilla. With a WormBlood implant you can destroy them with your teeth.

allowing the player to wrench them to death is the definition of boring

You might want to actually try that and see what happens.

keeping them indestructable preserves worm ammo counts for new players whom have no idea about any proliferator worm gun thing until much later.

Destroyed worm piles regenerate after five minutes.

[6643ba92931a5ZylonBane]

Just a heads up that in Beta 6, SCP will be fixing the Soma Drain psi power so it can't heal the player for more HP than the target actually has. It will also fix the drain FX object only appearing on Creature type targets (the vanilla script never teleports it to the target location).

Since healing the player will be handled by the SomaDrain script, the DrainStim receptron that heals the player will be disabled by setting its effect multiplier to 0.

Code: [Select]

class SomaDrain extends RootPsi {
function ActivatePsi() {
base.ActivatePsi();
doDrain();
DeactivatePsi();
}

function doDrain() {
local mod, drain, heal;
local obj = ShockGame.GetDistantSelectedObj();
if (obj && Link.AnyExist("StimSensor", obj, "DrainStim")) {
drain = GetData("Data1");
mod = GetData("PsiStat") - GetData("Data3");
if (mod > 0) {
drain += mod * GetData("Data2");
}
heal = scp.Clamp(drain, 0, Property.Get(obj, "HitPoints"));
ActReact.Stimulate(obj, "DrainStim", drain, "Player");
ShockGame.HealObj("Player", heal);
createFX(obj);
}
}

function createFX(obj) {
local fx = scp.CreateAt("Soma Drain FX", obj);
if (Property.Possessed(obj, "Creature")) {
local lnk = Link.Create("ParticleAttachement", fx, obj);
LinkTools.LinkSetData(lnk, "Type", 2);
LinkTools.LinkSetData(lnk, "Joint", 3);
}
}
}