Nerf (sensibly) the Plains Tyrant/Skrazi

[Captain Gecko]

Putting it here right now so that we can get the most out of it, while we're still by Moghes.

We should probably nerf the Plains Tyrant. YES, I know it's effectively an absolute apex predator, YES I know this is basically a space T-Rex, and YES I know that the wastes are meant to be hostile... BUT...
I think the Plains Tyrant is PROHIBITIVELY violent right now, to the point where you can't actually escape it if it agros you. It hits VERY hard (you are out of a fight with a single hit unless you're a Unathi - though you won't last long even then), it's very tanky, and it's very fast. It's a shame because there is plenty to do with Moghes, and it's animals among other things. I imagined expeditions revolving around capturing and safely bringing endangered Moghes Fauna to the Horizon to ship them back to the Hegemony, things like that, but the Plains Tyrant is so terribly dangerous that you just can't approach it.
And hell, putting aside expeditions, that's a monstrous hazard with next to no chance of escaping it that can just end any unlucky miner or xenoarch too.

Thus I propose nerfing it by SLOWING IT DOWN.
The Skrazi SHOULD hit insanely hard, and it SHOULD be super tanky. But it shouldn't so fast that even a sprinting Unathi can't escape it, this is straight up unfair, especially with how it will very often spot you before you spot it in the night. By slowing it down, we'll be able to keep it as threatening as it's meant to be, but still leave players with a chance to escape it. Give it the basic Human walking speed, a threat so massive shouldn't be so hard to avoid, especially in low-vis situations.

Edited June 3 by Captain Gecko

[Sparky_hotdog]

Other thing to inadvertently nerf it at night, while making it scarier. Give it emissive eyes. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. (But the OP thing too).

[Evandorf]

My personal opinion, as someone who is a fan of fucking around and/or finding out, is not to nerf it but give you better tools to deal with it. I know that can be a big ask if something readily available doesn't fit the need but there might be ways.

I'm not a machinist so I don't know if this is feasible, but the only net launchers I'm aware of are the hardsuit variety. How difficult would they be to manufacture during a normal shift? Do they fit standard-ish hardsuits?

[CatsinHD]

I am honestly in support. The exact speed could be debated, though, but not being able to escape a simplemob just isn't fair. There's tough and difficult, and there is unreasonably powerful. A trade-off should be considered:
Speed, armor, damage.
It may have good armor and damage at the expense of speed. Maybe it has good speed and damage at the expense of armor. So on and so forth. Right now it has all 3 at the expense of none.

[Captain Gecko]

1 hour ago, Evandorf said:

...as someone who is a fan of fucking around and/or finding out...

As someone who's been playing nothing but Xenoarch/Anomalist for over two years straight, I'm definitely on this side too... But I still think we need the nerf, though. Taking the example of the net gun, assuming you're a miner or a Xenoarch suddenly coming face-to-face with a Plains Tyrant, you have to:

1. Drop the items you are currently holding
2. Pull out your fancy net-gun (most of the time you don't have access to a hardsuit, let alone an exosuit, so let's assume we have an awesome handheld net gun), assuming it can fit in your belt and you actually put it there (so you don't have to open up your bag and get it from there)
3. Aim and shoot (don't miss!)

The Skrazi will already be in your face before you can raise that gun with how fast it is, currently, and that's not taking into account low-visibility.

 

I still think having more tools would be awesome! And whether we nerf the Skrazi or not, and no matter how it's done, I hope we still get more things to play around with. Netguns can be super useful and interesting for plenty of things too, not just fauna.

[Evandorf]

Until a nerf is implemented I’d still recommend the net-gun though. In hardsuits it can be used at any time so long as it’s selected beforehand in the modules. And it’s fired with middle mouse, no dropping anything, no getting out your weapons it’s just ready to fire. And I don’t think it has RNG to hit you just click the thing you want to net. 
 

The only caveat is that it may be a restricted module, I’ll have to check. 

[Fluffy]

The issue is that making it slower would just mean that you can run away from it while keeping shooting until it dies, making it having less armor would mean you can shoot it dead before it can reach you, and making it do less damage would mean that it would make it a laughable apex predator if you can wrestle with it and live to tell

What you need are tools to be able to escape from it, or fight it, eg. a mech from the machinist before departing, or a freeze ray gun from science, or just bring down the large xenobiology trap and put it down between you and him (since mobs walk straight, you'd capture him)

[Rabid Animal]

1 hour ago, Fluffy said:

just bring down the large xenobiology trap and put it down between you and him (since mobs walk straight, you'd capture him)

I haven't tested this extensively so I don't know if it's actually a bug or just a coincidence (hence no report ...yet) but I'm fairly certain simple mobs will path around traps as if they're solid objects. I have never been able to catch something in the large traps.

 

Slowing it down seems like the best option. I don't think kiting is a bad strategy, and it's how you'd expect to deal with large threats anyways? Either run away or use whatever advantage you have to deal with it. The problem now is we have *no* advantage and getting the specialized equipment to deal with it takes far too much time out of the round when expeditions take upwards of an hour to hour and a half 

 

On top of all this, I'm actually surprised it spawns as a simple mob at all, and not as a player controlled admin spawn, particularly if it's this powerful.

[Fluffy]

34 minutes ago, Rabid Animal said:

simple mobs will path around traps as if they're solid objects

It's possible, it depends on the pathing evaluation, would have to check it

 

34 minutes ago, Rabid Animal said:

The problem now is we have *no* advantage

Yes, you don't have an advantage over an apex predator in its natural environment, that's why it's an apex predator, if you had the advantage over it, you would be the apex predator instead

 

35 minutes ago, Rabid Animal said:

getting the specialized equipment to deal with it takes far too much time out of the round when expeditions take upwards of an hour to hour and a half

Accept the risk of running into one and potentially dying to it then, if someone isn't equipped to deal with a threat, the threat will win, it's no policy that everyone can overcome any threat no matter how unprepared for the encounter he is - I am perfectly fine with the apex predator of a planet to kill someone unprepared to fight it

We can discuss how common finding one is though (I'd expect not very common), but if you run into a lion in a forest armed with a knife, yes it's expected you'll die, and the same applies to running into the nuclear wasteland apex predator of a planet where everything (including the specie we play, unathi) are sized up for fighting, bigger and stronger than the average

By the way, a mech is almost pre-built at roundstart in the Machinist bay, and I have fixed the slowness of printing parts for a mech, I'd not expect it takes long to equip it and have it ready for a planetside expedition

[Captain Gecko]

On 04/06/2024 at 16:44, Fluffy said:

...a mech from the machinist before departing, or a freeze ray gun from science...

The mech does not help. I made this thread just after a Skrazi whiped out a 6-man expedition safe for the machinist. The Mech survived and beat the Plains Tyrant indeed, but it did not prevent it from killing the five other crew before-end. It's simply way too fast, you have next to no time to react, and the only way to survive would have to somehow have the mech be at the front at all times. You're essentially going to play like this at all times.

The freeze gun, assuming it works on simple mobs (I don't know why it wouldn't) could be a good-enough solution to escape it. I'm not exactly sure if you can actually freeze before it reaches you, but assuming you can, the issue is that you just can't make a freeze rifle like that. You need silver, which the miners should provide... If they even find some, that is.

This is really just a space-eel situation again. It's good to have danger- in fact it's essential to make things believable, especially when we're talking about Moghes' Wastelands... But this is just ridiculous. It wasn't so bad when the only way to meet a Plains Tyrant was to toy around with a gold core, where you basically seek the risk, and you're not exactly essential to the ship as a Xenobio... But this is different. I fear a lot of players will just stay away from Moghes, fearing to get instakilled by stumbling upon a Plains Tyrant.
 

On 04/06/2024 at 16:44, Fluffy said:

...making it slower would just mean that you can run away from it while keeping shooting until it dies...

I don't agree. It's so monstrously tanky you DO NOT have enough ammo/energy on yourself to actually kill it like that. Worst case scenario, while you slow it down, give it even more health/armor

 

 

 

Another option I just thought about might be to give players an early warning. Because it often sees you before you see it in the dark, you just can't NOT agro it if you somehow stumble upon it, one way to prevent the unfair "Woops! You're suddenly dead!" and still give players the ability to fuck around (and inevitably find out) would be to give them a chance to avoid it even before getting it in their viewport. Perhaps some warning fluff messages when you get within a certain range of the mob might help. IE: "You hear a bone-chilling roar in the distance" when you get within X tiles of the Skrazi, and then, once you get even closer, "YOU HEAR LOUD STOMPING NEARBY, SOMETHING TERRIFYINGLY LARGE IS NEARBY"

Edited June 5 by Captain Gecko

[greenjoe]

53 minutes ago, Captain Gecko said:

The mech does not help. I made this thread just after a Skrazi whiped out a 6-man expedition safe for the machinist. The Mech survived and beat the Plains Tyrant indeed

I think this only happened because mechs are somewhat bugged against simplemobs and they cannot be damaged by them, and the tyrant was unable to do much damage to the mech while it was killed.

[Sparky_hotdog]

Just going to add to this again after one got loose on the Horizon. Currently the only reliable way anyone seems to have found to survive them is to use mechs, which as greenjoe says are believed to be bugged such that simple mobs can't attack them. This issue here is that they're simple mobs, who all rely on being faster than players to be challenging; Kill me fast or I'll kill you. You can't do that when this thing has the combined damage output of a full security team and more than enough health to tank one. If they could damage mechs properly, I don't think there'd be a reasonable way to kill them in their current form. Capturing them is out of the question too, as they can and will (As we learned last round) just claw through any and all walls to get out.

[Evandorf]

32 minutes ago, Sparky_hotdog said:

Just going to add to this again after one got loose on the Horizon. Currently the only reliable way anyone seems to have found to survive them is to use mechs, which as greenjoe says are believed to be bugged such that simple mobs can't attack them. This issue here is that they're simple mobs, who all rely on being faster than players to be challenging; Kill me fast or I'll kill you. You can't do that when this thing has the combined damage output of a full security team and more than enough health to tank one. If they could damage mechs properly, I don't think there'd be a reasonable way to kill them in their current form. Capturing them is out of the question too, as they can and will (As we learned last round) just claw through any and all walls to get out.

The one from last round was admin controlled, just to be fully transparent. 

[party]

The one that got aboard the Horizon, anyway. (You can tell because they don't fly across the screen and dance around you while they turn you into tartare.)

 

Animal simplemobs displaying different behaviors and having differing movespeeds is something I'm always in support of, though.

[Fluffy]

On 04/06/2024 at 22:26, Captain Gecko said:

[snip]

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/19371

 

I have decided to partially implement this suggestion, in the following way:

• It now has 1/5th less health (500 -> 400)
• You have a chance of being alerted, at up to 80% more the distance of view (7*1.8 ~= 12 tiles away, 5 tiles before it can see you)
• It heals brute damage way less fast, 1/5th than before (5 -> 1)
• Bugfix, it should now target exosuits correctly along with other simplemobs

To be clear: It's still a beast, you won't win against it alone, and you probably won't win against it in an underequipped group either, your best bet is to run away while you sacrifice a soul to the tyrant or leave an exosuit to battle it in the latest iteration of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (a mech with an unathi that pilots it), but you have a chance to hear it (NOT guaranteed, it's an apex predator, a chance) and a chance to win against it with an equipped mech

[Fluffy]

The PR was merged, so this suggestion is considered implemented

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