Weird Worlds: Rebalanced

[IckyJoelIdeaVole]

I finally gave in and purchased Weird Worlds after enjoying the demo for a few months. While it's certainly an amazing game, the balance in many areas leaves much to be desired. Since I haven't been able to locate a mod designed with the intention of improving this, I've decided to create one myself.

I'm uploading what I've done so far, although in it's current state I would say that it disrupts play balance rather than improving it. This release is simply for testing purposes and does nothing but decrease the hitpoint values of all shields. Full details can be found in the included readme.

Judging from the activity on these forums, it looks like I may have missed the boat as far as contributing to an active modding community goes. I hope there are still at least a few people around who want something like this. Please post any suggestions you might have or just to indicate your interest in the project.

[IckyJoelIdeaVole]

While the lack of comments is something I rather expected, it is no less disappointing. There have been a handful of downloads, however, which I consider to be a small degree of success.

I have updated my first post with a new release that is somewhat more substantial than the first one. In other words, it actually adds something that doesn't require a careful eye to damage statistics to notice.

The addition is a new race, which may seem out of place in a balance mod, but is something that I felt compelled to include. Rather than repeat myself, I'll just state that more information is available in the readme. Before anyone gets too excited, though, the new race is nothing more than the pirates from the mod tutorial retooled to integrate better with the existing game world. They also feature customized graphics.

The next release should take some time, since I plan to bump this up to a complete v1.0 before uploading anything further. I hope that the absence of updates won't be taken as a sign that this project is dead, I just see no further point in releasing things piecemeal now that I've demonstrated what I'm up to. All suggestions will be greatly appreciated as the process of implementing my rapidly expanding list of changes continues.

[clomaka]

Activity here comes and goes; i wouldn't worry about it too much. I look forward to seeing what you get up to

[IckyJoelIdeaVole]

I plan to continue on with my mod for my own enjoyment regardless, so I'm not particularly concerned that there doesn't seem to be much activity in here. It'd definitely be nice, though.

Maybe the upcoming board game release will inspire some of the old posters to peek back in here.

[sgqwonkian]

IckyJoelIdeaVole said:
I finally gave in and purchased Weird Worlds after enjoying the demo for a few months. While it's certainly an amazing game, the balance in many areas leaves much to be desired. Since I haven't been able to locate a mod designed with the intention of improving this, I've decided to create one myself.

You know, I actually kinda like the quirky broken-ness of Weird Worlds combos. It's like combo decks in Magic - fun to watch it come together. Sure, it makes it impossible to lose sometimes, but at least when that happens the game wraps up in 10 minutes or less and you can play again. Less fun are the games where you never had a chance, but I suppose that's at least occasionally necessary to keep the game thrilling.

Too much balance and you'd end up with a boring game, I think. Note this is the opposite of my approach to most games - I tabletop RPG and board game all the time, and like those balanced and fair. But for a game as short and quirky as WW:RTIS, I don't think balance is as big a deal.

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I did a bit to address the balance issue in one of my mods - Drives 'R' Us - by identifying the most busted weapons and giving them all a tag in common so only one would appear per game. I also trimmed back the likelihood of things like the Mantle or Bauble by making alternate versions of them and putting a shared keyword on those items or quests, too.

Less successfully, I tried to fix the whole ambush situation in my Sgqwonkian Crisis mod, but backwards-facing ships turned out to not be the solution I thought it'd be.

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Other balance issues I'd want to address (but never have) is reducing the potency of ramming. One way to do that would be to just dramatically increase the range of all weapons. Though that would run a risk of slowing down the processor a smidge if a lot of projectile weapons started shooting from far off when big fleets faced off.

Another way to deal with ramming would be to double the defensive values of hulls / shields and double the damage of all guns. That would make ramming a better-armed ship really risky.

While I've often thought about such ramming fixes, I've never felt strongly enough to justify the time necessary tracking down every entry and fixing them all to make it work thoroughly.

[IckyJoelIdeaVole]

I agree, actually. The game would certainly be a lot more balanced if one just took out all the game-breaking items, but that'd just make the game incredibly boring. I'm trying to tweak rather than remove whereever I can for exactly that reason.

The problem I think is that combinations of items aren't emphasized enough. There's too many things in the game that do what they do so well that other things become completely obsolete. For example, once you have the hyperdrive the layout of the map becomes completely irrelevent; you may as well be reading the star names off a list. And once you have the PVC, enemy fighters may as well not exist, which neuters many races entirely. Other races and bosses that rely on larger capital ships become a non-interactive pushover once you've got the Gong.

I think a balance can be reached between the game being a grab-bag and complete tedium. That's what I'm trying to find.

[lexicat]

I suppose, one could write mods, such that the adversaries also had the chance of having odds-turning armaments...

Lexicat

[Phlagm]

I take a different approach. I make more horrible enemies, and then more awesome weapons and shields, and then even more horrible enemies, ad infinitum. I've now got some enemies that are nasty enough that if you waltz into the battle with the most awesome stuff, you had still better be on your toes.

[sgqwonkian]

IckyJoelIdeaVole said:
There's too many things in the game that do what they do so well that other things become completely obsolete. For example, once you have the hyperdrive the layout of the map becomes completely irrelevent; you may as well be reading the star names off a list. And once you have the PVC, enemy fighters may as well not exist, which neuters many races entirely.

If you haven't done so yet, you might want to take a look at my Drives'R'Us mod. In it I added more drives and more weapons, and then used flags/keys to make the biggest game-busting items turn up less often. Much of this was done to address the same issues you're talking about: I decreased the commonality of things like the PVC and Hyperdrive, and aimed for a somewhat more balanced power curve. It's available in one of the other threads on this forum.