Tuning/Balance needs tweaking (especially for Hibernation)


wilmer007

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The game is still incredibly easy on Stalker as i can survive for days by hibernating inside a safehouse for days. Then i just eat when my health condition drops to under 5%. My health drops 1% drop per hour when cold, fatigue and thirst are fulfilled and hunger is red to the max. then i just eat something to slowly get my health back up (which can easily get back to 100% just by sleeping for 12 hours).

The player eats 32 calories on pilgrim and 60 calories on stalker per hour when he sleeps and this is still abuseable when you hibernate all the time.

I think it should be (rough numbers):

30 calories on Pilgrim

60 Calories on Voyageur

120 Calories on Stalker

this way the game doubles the amount of calories you consume as you go up in difficulty.

some people would say that they already have a hard time on stalker as it is but anyone that hibernates for days will quickly say that Stalker is still relatively easy and that's why they should be retuned.

perhaps just leave everything the way it is and just tweak the idle calorie intake to make it that much harder for hibernation.

the reason i say this is because i did a test on Pilgrim and i can survive for 116.5 hours with 1% health condition on only 800 calories from one piece of meat. that means that with can goods and food bags you can consume even less food and will probably live longer without needing to eat again. so based on that, this would mean that on stalker you can survive on 800 calories for about 60 hours. that is still alot for such a hard difficulty. i should have to eat 800 calories around every 30 hours not 60 hours. make it harder for us hibernators as we go up in difficulty.

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The starvation/hibernation "game" should be addressed, but I am not sure that raising the calorie intake while resting is the right approach. I would expect to see the body (and, maybe, the mind) suffer more strongly from starvation - it should not be possible to shake off the effects by just eating a little bit and sleeping it over. However, that might require a new game mechanic to be introduced - the "condition" counter the game currently has would have to "remember" (and somehow display to the player) how much of the condition loss is attributed to which ailment. As a consequence, different ailments could be subject to different healing conditions.

For example, if the player's condition had dropped to, let's say, 40%, and of the missing 60% some 15% were attributed to a twisted ankle, another 20% to freezing and the remaining 25% to starvation (and this info would be displayed accordingly), the player would know that he could recover 15% immediately by taking painkillers, another 20% quite easily by warming up and resting, but the last 25% only over an extended period of time without further starvation (maybe that would slowly start to creep back up if the player has spent 2 full days without starving, and this 2-day period would be reset each time the player falls back into starving). So the player would heal quite quickly back to an overall condition of 75%, but reclaiming the rest would take time and effort and continuous eating without starving.

Abracadabra - the starving/hibernation strategy would be nerfed. The player could still undergo a period of starvation if need be (running low on food for a while), but would think twice before doing so for longer periods.

Needless to say, player actions should be impeded if condition is not at 100% - worse rifle aiming, weaker melee attacks, slower movement, faster fatigue. Going out when not healthy would become a dangerous thing, especially on stalker. Hehe... :twisted:

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  • 2 weeks later...

What I want to know is why is the sleep mechanism a constant fix all for everything that is wrong with you? Why should you be able to heal up to 100% just by sleeping if you were starving yesterday? I get that water is good if you were dehydrated, but shouldn't there be a 2nd meter for each one of these that when you dip into it works like a brake shock that very slowly recharges and while it is in the bad zone, it negatively affects your positive buffs like sleeping and health recovery. Shouldn't you also be shivering cold if you are sick with the flu or shouldn't you be in constant pain if you roll an ankle that kills your fatigue meter?

All kinds of other ways to make the game more challenging without the cheapness of wolves. I just get how sleeping is what fixes everything condition based. There is no way you sleep for 12 hours and you are ready to take on the whole empire yourself. It defies logic.

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Just an idea:

Excessive hibernation (for several days in a row) might also be prevented if the game simply wouldn't allow the player to sleep for more than 12 hours per day. It would imho make a lot of sense if we couldn't sleep for days, humans aren't bears after all. ;)

An audio file might be added in which your character tells you that he/she isn't tired yet and thus won't go to sleep again.

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Alternatively, sleeping too much could give chance to cause "bedsores" that would need to be treated with a bandage. If you fail to treat them soon enough, they get infected and would need disinfectant as well.

This way you'd be sacrificing materials for hibernating.

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What I want to know is why is the sleep mechanism a constant fix all for everything that is wrong with you? Why should you be able to heal up to 100% just by sleeping if you were starving yesterday? I get that water is good if you were dehydrated, but shouldn't there be a 2nd meter for each one of these that when you dip into it works like a brake shock that very slowly recharges and while it is in the bad zone, it negatively affects your positive buffs like sleeping and health recovery. Shouldn't you also be shivering cold if you are sick with the flu or shouldn't you be in constant pain if you roll an ankle that kills your fatigue meter?

All kinds of other ways to make the game more challenging without the cheapness of wolves. I just get how sleeping is what fixes everything condition based. There is no way you sleep for 12 hours and you are ready to take on the whole empire yourself. It defies logic.

I agree with that, and if I get very badly (nearly fatal) injured after a wolf fight, I will not be 100% the very next day. It's a game not a simulator yes, but for the most difficult mode (maybe even beyond stalker) it would be very nice to have some negative conditions that will trouble you for more than 12 or even 24h.

Just an idea:

Excessive hibernation (for several days in a row) might also be prevented if the game simply wouldn't allow the player to sleep for more than 12 hours per day. It would imho make a lot of sense if we couldn't sleep for days, humans aren't bears after all. ;)

An audio file might be added in which your character tells you that he/she isn't tired yet and thus won't go to sleep again.

That would be a good solution and would actually make sense :)

Alternatively, sleeping too much could give chance to cause "bedsores" that would need to be treated with a bandage. If you fail to treat them soon enough, they get infected and would need disinfectant as well.

This way you'd be sacrificing materials for hibernating.

+1 to this as well. And in real life sleeping too much is also not healthy.

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I know a lot of these things have come up before. I also know that hinterland wants to work into figuring out a way to make the starvation/hibernation exploit less viable.

I don't like the idea of just jacking up the amount of calories consumed while sleeping. That would significantly effect the vast majority of players who are not trying to take advantage of these game mechanics. I like the idea of ramifications for both starvation (perhaps things like a fatigue penalty (like 2-4 days of not being able to recover fatigue past 50% or something after starving for a certain amount of time, or a certain percentage of time during a day/multiple days) and physical punishments for over sleeping during a 24 or 48 hour period (again can be done through fatigue penalties, or like someone mentioned bed sores which could cause various symptoms in your player and would require you to use resources to remedy).

There have been a ton of good ideas for solving this issue and hinterland has expressed a desire to solve this problem that comes up continuously, so hopefully they are aware of what we're talking about, and who knows maybe even this update will have some kind of change to this system.

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The best solutions I've seen posted are these:

1. Make starving have a non-linear effect on the player. Basically the first hour of starving shouldn't have the same effect as the 8th hour of starving. If condition dropped more rapidly for prolonged starvation, it would reduce the benefit of hibernation.

2. Make it take longer to recover from excessive starvation. This is basically the same suggest as 1 but applied to recovery instead of starvation. Just make recovery slower for prolonged starvation vs just a little bit of starvation. This would likely be harder to implement as starving isn't the only way for someone to lose condition. But maybe something like a -x% recovery rate after so many hours of starving could help.

edit: 3. add in thinning wildlife and changing positions. This while not directly impacting hibernation, does make it harder. Currently you can just camp out at places like the camp office and get kills just outside. If wolves/deer /rabbits didn't always spawn in the same spot, it would make it more interesting and harder to just hibernate.

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One thought on this I had when writing some code earlier this morning was why not make some sort of "Diminishing Returns" system for starving. As in, at first when you start out you have a Body Fat counter. The more you starve the more the Body Fat counter diminishes. The lower the Body Fat counter, the faster your condition drops while starving. Alternatively, being well fed could replenish the Body Fat counter.

Explanation: Body Fat counter starts at 10. Every 6 hours the player has the "starvation" condition, Body Fat reduces by 1. Condition loss during starvation is then increased by 10%. During this, if the player stays well fed, over 1500 calories for 12 hours, the Body Fat increases by 1 to a maximum of 10.

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I know a lot of these things have come up before. I also know that hinterland wants to work into figuring out a way to make the starvation/hibernation exploit less viable.

I don't like the idea of just jacking up the amount of calories consumed while sleeping. That would significantly effect the vast majority of players who are not trying to take advantage of these game mechanics. I like the idea of ramifications for both starvation (perhaps things like a fatigue penalty (like 2-4 days of not being able to recover fatigue past 50% or something after starving for a certain amount of time, or a certain percentage of time during a day/multiple days) and physical punishments for over sleeping during a 24 or 48 hour period (again can be done through fatigue penalties, or like someone mentioned bed sores which could cause various symptoms in your player and would require you to use resources to remedy).

There have been a ton of good ideas for solving this issue and hinterland has expressed a desire to solve this problem that comes up continuously, so hopefully they are aware of what we're talking about, and who knows maybe even this update will have some kind of change to this system.

Agree, there should be more pronounced mechanism for attempting to conserve calories. Shouldn't you naturally improve in health over time at a lower rate than you do while sleeping, until your condition meters hit their limit, for example if all of my condition is satisfied, should I not improve about 1% condition per hour, for a maximum of 24% per day. While sleeping this rate could then also be lowered, so that players don't excessively sleep, Right now the rate is higher the longer you sleep but this could be a fixed rate too could it not?

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I think it should be (rough numbers):

30 calories on Pilgrim

60 Calories on Voyageur

120 Calories on Stalker

...

make it harder for us hibernators as we go up in difficulty.

If the calorie consumption is changed so that it becomes a challenge while hibernating it will also become impossible for everyone not sleeping 23 hours a day.

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