Species Balance Discussion

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Another cross post from the discord for more long term visibility.

Humans

Pros: None

Cons: None, maybe their punch.

Slimes

Pros: More blunt resistance, internal storage, significantly slower asphyxiation, much higher passive heal value, metabolizes all 6 chems at once.

Cons: Nitrogen breathing (not really a con but inconvenient) weak to slash and pierce as well as cold (I think), metabolizes all 6 chems at once.

Lizards

Pros: Weh, tail drag, higher innate body temperature, tail drag, slash attacks.

Cons: Freezing temperature will rapidly kill a Lizard, Lizard Diet.

Moths

Pros: “Flight” in no grav, effectively immune to cold temperature.

Cons: Flimsy in all combat metrics, get more fire stacks per stack, rapidly die in heat, lower innate body temperature, can’t accept pills or most foods without a grinder.

Spiders

Pros: More pockets, web crafting, pierce melee, some barotrauma resistance, immune to tarantula mechanotoxin.

Cons: Slower metabolism, rapidly die of O2 loss, lizard diet.

Diona

Pros: Actually very tanky for most direct fights, can take botany chems to heal, can split upon death.

Cons: Will catch fire when shot with a laser, and will burn rapidly once past 4 fire stacks, no shoes.

Vox

Pros: Slashing punch.

Cons: Oxygen is toxic to Vox. Currently humans but worse.

Dwarf

Pros: Smaller hitbox (not sure if this even matters), generally deeper voices, can get drunk and reduce brute damage.

Cons: Drunkness reducing brute is traded for poison damage.

Now, what do people think? Should your choice of species actually be a balanced thing? It’s hard to say. A bunch of the character of a character ties into what a species can and can’t do for example.

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I think dietary restrictions shouldn’t disallow you from eating certain things but should instead make them toxic to you

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On one hand I see and understand why species should be balanced for gameplay purposes, it makes combat more balanced for everyone and would reduce any kind of metagaming species claim. On the other hand, it can make for a lot of good roleplay for species to lean into their abilities and disabilities; potentially forcing them to come up with some other methods of combat or whatever.

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Personally, I’d say species don’t need to be balanced overall, but I think they should generally not be strictly better than humans and avoid having overpowered mechanics.
Generally, humans should be the first choice for anyone that doesn’t specifically want to play something else.
And no species should be able to get too major an advantage over humans without a reasonable counterplay.
Species can be weaker than humans as long as they’re cool enough to make up for it.

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Yea, optimally diffrent species should be (in my opinion) side grades or worse than humans so that a person would pick them not because they are the best, but like the roleplay/spesific traits that the species has

(I thought i replied about not quoted the letter ‘a’. Whoops)

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Other than lizards and dwarves, humans are the go to pick. Lizards get the gamer tail, dwarves are just slightly different humans.

Spiders in get up to 6 grid in pockets(If you were to minmax it for pistol storage), but trust me, the price of only 66% healing speed(so you take relatively 50% longer on top of fucking with cryo in jections), triple choking recovery time and 50% more choke damage is pretty damn nasty.

Voxes are humans but you have trouble living.

Everyone else have some kind of actual combat weakness which can quickly turn into their downfall, though diona robust healing truly lives up to its name - 9 brute heal is something I would want from ichor or omnizine so it actually was medicine that is sought after due to its potency rather than laughed at cause generic meds and cryo pods exist.

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I forgot about dwarves.

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I am not surprised, dwarves are the most forgettable species in the game.
Dwarves are short humans who (barely) heal up with alcohol.
In my opinion we should have a size slider for havenormal, short and dwarf versions of all the species and remove dwarf as a species entirely.

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If we get that, my Vox is gonna be SHORT!

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Edit ops continue, now with Dwarf.

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takes less damage from hot environment

No longer a thing with lizards, it’s just the cold damage now

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Oh, also I have noticed you listed lizard diet as cons for spiders but thats not true at all. They have dwarf diet aka they can eat raw flesh just fine to heal off it and not get poisoned while being fine with all the normal human diet.

Only unique diet perk to humans as far as im aware is being able to digest HONK safely.

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Surgery when so human is the most balanced race due to abbundance of organs and every other race have to deal with long organ queue.

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I don’t understand what you mean by this? I don’t remember spiders being able to eat bread and veggies at all? They can do raw meats though, yes.

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Perhaps they used to in older version but they can eat all human foods just fine nowadays.

They get all benefits of animal organs while not caring about any dietary restrictions.

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I’d change it but apparently I can’t edit the OP anymore.

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(post deleted by author)

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the only issue is vox , they are plain too simple and a direct downgrade to any other race having to just breath a gas and being intoxicated by the atmosphere , off course ,slash damage is nowhere useful to justify living on tanks, maybe adding another animal organ diet along with arachens might do something , adding some unique mechanic,(like the plasmamen) to justify the need for constant tank use would be highly appreciated. the mighty other issue is Slime , recently they have the genouras removed and you can’t longer use it , this makes slimes a direct downgrade again, as the only unique mechanic that they had for most situations is now gone. Now slimes don’t feel special, the extended blunt damage doesn’t help in most situations similar to slash and pierce, and they feel like a direct downgrade to humans again.
i am sorry for the previous suggestions, I probably keep on getting hungry in earlier rounds due to the lack of chef staffing.

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Honestly though…

That you have to constantly worry about your air is why I built and enjoy my Vox character. It’s nice to need to stop what I’m doing and yell about air, or to complain about having nowhere safe to eat while blaming Nanotressen for disrespecting my species.

I think one thing that should come up in this conversation is “Balanced for what?”

Yeah, in terms of general requirements, the mask and nitrogen requirement are “downgrades”, but they have the impact of boosting roleplay, and encourage interaction with the crew, making the species more interesting and fun to play.

Sure, humans are a good all around character… but the station is so designed around them that there’s really not much encouraging interesting role-play. This can be nice when learning new mechanics, but it can be a little bland.

The balancing I think I would like to see is roleplay related. We should give other species issues that they have to get addressed, that way they’re encouraged to interact with other departments more.

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