Destructible cyclops is completely useless
Ambaire
Join Date: 2016-06-27 Member: 219206Members
Why would someone bother making it now that it can be destroyed, let alone destroyed by just about anything? It's a dumb change and should be reverted.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Why even play if you can die?
Would you rather the Cyclops be an I win button or an interesting addition to the game?
It used to be able to flood if you went too deep. AFAIK it had always been immune to creatures up to the new patch.
But the new Sea Dragon was changed and now it magically detects my Prawn through the deepest rock between us with some sort of omnipotent player gaze that makes it completely impossible to sneak through. The Sea Dragon is also very fast and bypassing a Sea Dragon without anything than the Cyclops is now very difficult to almost impossible.
That means the devs forced the player to use the Cyclops, because once you turn on silent running with the Cyclops, the Sea Dragon is magically blinded and can no longer find the player inside the Cyclops. It's counter intuitive, as you wouldn't think silent running actually blinds the Sea Dragon, but as soon as you realize it, the new Cyclops gets your safe passage to the prison. You don't even need the decoy system or fire suppression system. Only the shield for going through tight spaces with your Cyclops.
That's the next trick: The Cyclops shield isn't good against the Sea Dragon. But it's perfect for avoiding using the Cyclops cams. It makes the Cyclops invincible for about 15 secs and the player can use it to knock against rock at that time without damaging the Cyclops. So instead using the damned cam system, you can just turn on the shields, knock through a narrow passage for a short time and wait for the shields to recharge. And then repeat until you are in open terrain again.
A small overview over the Cyclops extras:
So if you want to go to the deep, your 4 slots should include hull reinforcement, shields, sonar and maybe power efficiency and nothing else. If you use silent running and shields for the purpose I described, you should be invincible again. Just don't let you fool from a Sea Dragon swimming right in front of you, thinking you have to do anything else than stay in silent running and ignore him, as he stays truely blind if you keep cool.
Recently, i tried aiming the lights at a boneshark with no effect, but he might be simply too far/ not looking in that direction. I have to try harder next time.
Shields seem to be quite usefull while encountering larger creatures - you can avoid getting massive damage from the Sea Dragon, if you are not on silent running for some reason. (accidential right click for example)
12 seconds is more than enough to stop making noise.
I also found the fire suppression highly usefull - no need for (quite expensive) extinguishers, and an ability to kill all fires at once, and for free, is what I like to have at my disposal. I was really happy to have this module installed during my trip to the Thermal Plant, since the Sea Dragon's attack can (and in fact did) put half of the sub on fire...
Keeping that im mind, it is my second must-have after the hull upgrade.
Generally, it is all about building a locker right next to the upgrade console.
Getting back on topic, I don't think the Cyclops is that useless or hard to use - while sharks causing damage make no sense for me, it is still rather hard to sink, unless it's intended to. The only creature posing a real threat is the Dragon, but it SHOULD be. And still, it is more likely to hit the Cyclops while trying to kill the player as soon, as he decides to exit the sub.
If you still want to keep that, you can, just change your game mode to creative.
But nobody said anything about wanting an invulnerable vehicle; they want a vehicle that doesn't feel, bluntly speaking, fragile as glass the moment you take it out of silent running - to the point that a pack of sharks (only three, with 30 damage each) can do more damage in one round than a Reaper Leviathan's 80-point attack can.
Simply put, it's not that the sub can be destroyed that was really the issue; it's that it feels too easy to damage and/or destroy for the wildlife when it should only be big creatures like the leviathans that can wreck it and, with all due respect, anyone paying attention to the forums would already know that it's more an issue with damage balancing rather than it being destructible. And that's all to say nothing of the huge bug in silent running with how external cameras - who's lights go automatically on when you use them - draw creatures (especially bonesharks) to you even while running silent.
They're still working on balance, I'm sure they'll find a way to address this in the next few updates.
If it weren't for the fact that Obraxis seemingly didn't even know there were said issues and instead thought people were taking issue with the sub being destroyable at all, I'd have been more hopeful about that. As it is, IDK if the devs are even reading the forms that much anymore. Heck, IDK if he's even seeing this or if he just dropped one reply and took off
Just because they don't reply, doesn't mean they aren't noticing or listening. Replying takes time, something that they don't have much of. Furthermore, they have to worry about how they reply, understanding the intended meaning of whose post they are replying to, trying not to offend anyone (hard to do these days) and how to answer the question satisfactorily according to its meaning. Additionally, these 'issues' are perspective-based; I personally think this change added a lot to the game - it was way too easy. Finally, if people want a bit of a realism idea put into the smaller Bonesharks' abilities to damage the Cyclops, how about the fact that the advanced wiring kit runs throughout the Cyclops' hull, as seen when it is destroyed (look at what lies in the gap between the hull's outer layer and the interior walls)? To elaborate, let's say, due to the Boneshark's characteristic of having a huge endoskeleton covering most of its body and its size being relative to that of a human, it weighs roughly 250kg. This, paired with the high velocity it moves at when ramming the Cyclops, would create a lot of force and that force striking the hull of the Cyclops, would likely damage it and compress/crush the wires and mechanics found between the hull's outer and interior layer, causing damage and possibly sparks, ultimately leading to the necessity of welding and the possibilities of fires starting on board. There's some realism for y'all.
You think their opinions about this are going to change? They've said they're working on balance, the majority of players think that this is the right move, so the best he can do is come back and repeat what he's just said.
"We'll be looking at further balancing of damages and creature as necessary."
There. Done.
I'm sorry, but none of what you said is... well, really all that difficult to do, in my personal opinion. As it stands, it feels like they're looking at the wrong thing or took the complaints the wrong way - a single line of affirmation doesn't seem all that hard by comparison.
Also, contrasting your claim about the Cyclops being "perspective-based", I likewise point out that (A) it was flash-printed as a single massive block and therefore should be harder to damage than a normal earth-sub and (B) as the pressure-compensator description illustrates, manipulation of the structure on the molecular level is standard, so there's once again no reason for the hull to be that fragile.
Also, once again, the fact three bonesharks do more damage in one round than a full-size leviathan who's total body mass is superior to nearly a dozen bonesharks kind of sinks your comparison, in my opinion - heck, the fact the leviathan can't do that kind of damage via that premise actually kind of proves the creature-damage scale is imbalanced. Add to that the fact that the bonesharks are the weakest of all the predatory sharks, dying to less than 3-4 knife-strikes, and it kind of undercuts the idea that they could do more damage with a ram than a leviathan could with it's jaws - or in short, if that's "realism for y'all", I question what brand of it the game's actually using.
It's not whether or not their opinion's change; it's the fact that it seems they don't actually know what it is that the community's taking issue with - you can't tell me thinking people take issue with the sub being vulnerable and taking issue with simply how easy it can be destroyed are the same thing. Acknowledging that they know what it is the community's talking about isn't that much to ask for, is it?
DO you know how hard coding is? It's not this:
It's this:
A thread about how easy it is to destroy the Cyclops is responded to with "it can't be invulnerable" instead of an indicator of damage values being skewed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't fundamentally misinterpreting the entire point of the thread kind of the complete opposite of "aprppos"?
You forget; this isn't about coding. It's about feedback - both getting and giving it. Coding is the part you do after taking feedback into account, provided you actually know what it is people are complaining about. IDK if the devs do - and it's precisely because of how much work goes into coding that you kinda want them to know where you think that work is best needed. That's half the point of having a game in early-access, isn't it?
Things need to be though out before they are tossed out, or you get Fallout 4's settlements, an unfinished bucket full of garbage and that is a polite way of putting it, that NEVER belonged in that game in the first place.
It is kind of the point, but the feedback devs get is reams and reams of data from your playthroughs.
While it is sure nice to hear (nice) opinions, the data they are gathering is showing them the bigger picture, and while it may be obscuring some specific details, in general, they will guide the game towards what is best for the majority.
The vocal few on the forums DO NOT represent the majority.
If in-game play-data was the only means of feedback needed or wanted, why even have there be forums like this one in the first place though? Furthermore, as @Rezca noted repeatedly in their posts about the ILZ corridors, "what is best for the majority" doesn't actually always gel as such if the devs decide to change what that bigger picture should be - the results of gameplay functionality don't tell the devs if the player actually likes said features or how they're implemented; it's just data on whether or not the function worked properly. How can they guide it towards "what is best for the majority" when game data alone doesn't even paint a picture of what said majority wants as opposed to how what's currently in functions?
The thread isn't about how easy it is to destroy the Cyclops. The OP's post literally says that they want the Cyclops to be invincible.
Pretty much, they want a easy way to beat the game. Personally I like a challenge, it keeps the game interesting and keeps me playing if the game has challenge behind it.
Except the OP didn't say "The Cyclops is too fragile". They quite literally said actually let me directly quote!
See notice how they're not saying "The Cyclops is too fragile and should be tougher", they're saying, quite literally, right there, that the fact that the Cyclops taking damage at all is a Dumb Idea and should be reverted to its previous (invulnerable) state.
Sorry, but all three of you are kinda wrong about that.
See, notice the bolded part; it's not simply that the sub isn't invincible, so much that it went to invincible to incredibly fragile/went from one extreme to a worse extreme.
The only thing I've seen so far that attacks the Cyclops regardless of silent running are bone sharks which again I state is still probably a work in progress.
My issue with that is that as far as Obraxis seemed to be concerned, it didn't seem to be that way; he comment makes it seem like he thought people's issues were purely because it wasn't invincible, not that they felt the damage system was skewed.
Also, I kind of think that's a moot point - the sub's still fragile regardless of silent running. Hell, if anything, that could be taken as another detriment - that you can't take it anywhere unless silent running is going 24/7 because everything can easily cause bad damage to it, even the weakest of the shark-types (bonesharks, which are the easiest to kill, cause 30 damage per bite - that's almost half of what a Reaper does... and three sharks attacking together do 90, which is more than what a Reaper does per round of attacks).
It's still going to be more squishy and paper thin than it should be, and that in turn will make it so that you need silent running just to get past the shark-filled areas, let alone the leviathan-inhabited ones. Put, silent running has a huge bug in it - namely that, because the external cameras have lights on them that turn on by default every time you use said cameras, it means you can't use them without making yourself visible to creatures and especially bonesharks even while in silent running. That's not "work in progress" - that's a flaw of the actual Cyclops' mechanics.
You are correct on that front, however the point is invalid, as I did not state whether or not I thought the damage/creature scale was balanced. This is primarily due to the background information of this post that this damage scale would be balanced, therefore I felt it unnecessary to point that out, but it would appear it was for people like you - my mistake. You are, however, correct - it is highly imbalanced, especially with the Reaper leviathan being constructed primarily of muscle and cartilage, however that's where the needed balancing will come in. For clarification, I agree that it needs to a little more balanced. For the realism part, I was only touching base with those who said it was amazing how the sharks of that size could do any damage at all. Finally, it isn't a giant cube, it's hollow.
PS: With that whole molecular reorganisation thingo, more realism could be incorporated with physics once again. Much like a diamond with its crystal structure, it is very tolerant and resistant of PRESSURE, yet it is quite brittle. This molecular reorganisation thing could be related quite easily, as the molecules could have been arranged in a manner to resist pressure more so than direct forces striking the metal and causing vibrations along the hull, making it more vulnerable to damage, yet more resistant to pressure. Just a thought.
Also please don't feel like I'm trying to disrespect you or anything like that, just interested in our little convo and different perspectives.