This mod improves the default campaign. The executives and perks have many problems corrected.
Instructions: Be on next_version. Download https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/158042656587382784/164486603513921538/campaign-rebalance.zip, extract the contents into \Documents\My Games\Offworld\Mods, then start Offworld, go to Options->Gameplay and select the mod. On the main menu, the bottom left should now say "Version XX (mod-name YY)" instead of just "Version XX".
Warning: if you update the mod or game in the middle of a campaign, your campaign save may be corrupted and you'll have to start a new campaign.
Here's a video of pbhead playing Sam. There are spoilers.
Changelist:You can play as all 9 executives, not just 4. They are differentiated. In order of least to most skill requirement, they are Raskolnikov, Maisie, Crichton, Reni, Joji, Kamat, Dawson, Rubini, Sam.Perks are permanent, since permanent perks are fun. Balance is accomplished in better ways.Each executive trades one engineer for cash every turn. This prevents repetitive strategies, by stopping executives from just becoming faster versions of themselves. Plus, competitors no longer have unreadably long perk lists, and losing a round still lets you purchase something.Resource shipments buffed. Possible shipments are now the 5 primary resources and electronics, which prevents broken mechanics.BM perks no longer appear on-found (which was annoying) or on specific HQ levels (hard to keep in mind). They are now on-upgrade, worth 150k-250k. Their increased strength also means players don't need to read long lists of small perks.Free Building perks appear at HQ level 2 for Water, Quarry, Mine, and Geotherm. On-found buildings cause involuntary and random ganking. The claim selection between level 1 and level 2 introduces decision-making, thus reducing the randomness.Patents changed to appear on HQ level 3/4/5 instead of being on-found. This balances their change from temporary to permanent. For now, there is a bug in the main game code that prevents <onHQlevel> from working with patents; all patents are given on-found instead.Hints are replaced by flavor text. Placeholder flavor text is replaced by better flavor text.Removed colony bonuses, which are poorly designed.
v21: Sam gets Free Hacks.
v22: shipments now 150k. v22.1: Sam loses her 2x water shipment, since she already has a Free Water Pump. 22.2: no PD engineers show up in the pool, and no Free PD perk, except for Raskolnikov. Unfortunately, free PD auctions still show up. I cannot change these auctions, since changes to them will apply to skirmish as well, and I don't want that.
v22.3: forgot I left Maisie with 2x PD, those are gone now. Raskolnikov's life is miserable enough already without Maisie punching him in the face
v23: loading hints replaced by flavor half the time. Because hints are not separated into their own xml file, this is the best I can do.
v24: between-round choices now properly randomized, after the xml file structure changed. 24.1: whoops, forgot to actually add the new file in. 24.2: remaining hints are gone, thanks to Soren for the help.
v24.3: Blues taught me how remove.xml actually works and corrected the version in the mod. because of differences between beta 10 and beta 11, I don't understand what's going on, but hopefully it's fine. the goal here is to remove the errors showing up in output_log.txt, such as "Missing read for attribute: iScanChange in Data/colony-bonus". in terms of gameplay, there are no changes. if everything works out, you won't see any differences unless you're looking through log files.
v24.4: glass shipments changed to electronics shipments
v24.5: Crichton's double Free Engineering Lab changed to Free Engineering Lab per upgrade
v25: Joji used to have 1 Offworld Market Engineer, now he has 5. v25.1: his other engineers have gone missing
v26: design documents all organized. You can read them in the zip. No gameplay changes.
v27: Rubini's engineers changed to make him a little more coherent, but he's still not in an interesting position.
v27.1: Maisie gets all HQ types
Credit to:
Blues for fixing a bug that made the mod not load, another bug that made the perks not load, another bug that made the flavor not load, another bug that made the event turn option not randomize, and another bug which produced errors in the log.
pbhead for recording his playthrough, resulting in lots of balance changes
Gameslayer for giving me an updated perk.xml and making suggestions
I added all my design docs to the zip file. Some of them are interesting and worth reading.
Hey pbhead, wait a day or so before you start streaming the next one. I am changing Sam at the moment to make her more friendly.
Ok, Sam has been changed. He now gets 80% Cheaper Hacks, and loses his Faster Hacks perk. I suppose this will do.
Not sure if this is something you fix, or something Soren fixes.
but either one player games need to not be allowed to happen (dull) or you need to actually be able to win (best), or conceding the match needs to not cause the week to reset (probably needs to happen anyway)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d12MhVoUrA8
This is something Soren fixes. I'd prefer player-only matches to happen, but only rarely.
Conceding advances you as long as your stock price is not the lowest. Here, your stock price was the highest, yet you were booted back anyway. That's another bug on top of the overtime no-winner bug.
Could you describe the steps needed to reproduce these bugs?
also, is this on next_version? If not, that's a problem...
When a campaign map lets you in as the only player, the round doesn't end on the end of the 7th Sol, instead going into eternal overtime. Also, conceding in this 1-player mission doesn't advance the round count like it normally does.
This is next_version.
This bug should happen with the default campaign as well, since I haven't touched any of the AI colony selection logic.
Turns out not just that, but pbhead's campaign save was corrupted by entering the no-opponent map.
pbhead, can you post Documents\My Games\Offworld\Logs\output_xxx.txt if you still have it for your run of the first campaign mission?
There were two, for the first mission of my 24.1 campaign (not live yet on the youtubes) but here you go: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36550973/outputforjaiwera.zip
(and there seems to be one map with no players again.)
save file(s)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36550973/CampaignSave.zip
Right now, I'm trying to diagnose 2 things:1. In pbhead's Sam playthrough, no engineers were murdered on the second round, but it should happen every round in my mod. I know, thanks to Blues, that the xml structure of event-turn.xml changed, so I changed my mod to match the new xml structure. Blues also showed me the C# code dealing with it, so I am reasonably confident that it matches. But the murders are not showing up, so there's an incompatibility somewhere, maybe a new one.2. Soren said in chat that 1-player missions don't show up in the default campaign, and neither do $0 HQs, and that my mod could have introduced a problem. He said in chat this morning that he fixed the 1-player missions. I'm still looking out for why the $0 HQ is occurring.Soren may find the campaign save useful for the $0 HQ problem. The error log contains missing colony bonuses, but that's just because I removed them, and they've worked before. Everything else looks fine, which rules out the main class of mod errors I can think of. Whatever is happening doesn't seem to be something I can diagnose by myself.
The 1 mission bug was my issue.
Hey users,
Soren Johnson said: I'm adding a Sim AI Mission game option to the campaign. Takes a loooong time, but if you want it, it's there.Soren Johnson said: if you want to turn it on, you have to mod game-option.xml for nowThis isn't a default or in the mod, but if you want your AI to play rounds instead of gain magical bonuses, it's a choice you have. This option took 20 seconds on Blues's computer.
pbhead, if you're still up for a next video after those frustrating changes, test something first just to make sure it's working, no need to record the test. Start a campaign and then concede the first round. If the UI completely fails to appear in the hiring screen after the first round, then upload Offworld_Data\output_log.txt. Otherwise, if it doesn't completely disappear, then things are probably fine and the test succeeded.
This is just in case, since I don't know what has changed in next_version.
well. I am taking a break from this for a tad. I look forward to trying out the Sim AI stuff, but I have real life which will have me out of town for a while. which means no desktop, which means no recording OTC.
Sorries.
Ill be back able to record again on the 10th, and hopefully by then B11 will be on the main branch, and wont lose my save file.
pbhead, there have been no mod changes since your last recording. The vanilla game has a design freeze until release, and I won't be here after release, so I won't be updating the mod in the future. That's it for me. Thanks for the help!
I also deeply recommend against recording any multi-session campaign before the game release, whether modded or unmodded, because the vanilla next_version campaign is going through many save-breaking changes at the moment.
Beta 11 Mod Postmortem:
The executive starting perks are still miles better in the mod than in vanilla.
The BM perk mod changes are a moderate improvement.
The anti-ganking level 1/2 Free Building is a minor improvement.
I rushed the writing in two hours since OTC isn't my IP, but half of it is pretty good anyway, so I'm satisfied. It's out of date after the next_version name changes, but I won't bother fixing it.
The rest of the mod is unimportant. Patents, colony bonuses, permanent perks, shipments, etc are improved, but not to a degree that makes significant positive impact.
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