April 6th, 2021 Livestream

Snutt & Mark Talk: Sinkable Plutonium Fuel Rods

https://youtu.be/ZWF_pdblQxY

Topics

• Features > Buildings > AWESOME Sink
• Features > Power Management > Nuclear Energy > Nuclear Refinement

Transcript

so let's talk a little bit about the plutonium fuel rods I've seen a few people point this out already yeah, so specifically the the fact that you can sink plutonium for fuel rods that trade off what was what was what started that what made you want to add that was a super late thing hence there not being any feedback in the game as well that you can sync that specific one but not the other parts, because when we went to staging, do they know what staging is so like we have like steps when a patch reaches you guys so we have different builds of the game so first we have our nightly builds we build automatically every night which like isn't maintained by anyone specifically but it's it's building automatically every night and then we take those builds and we play them and like okay they work and they put them on staging which is like the staging ground for us to put the game like it's the last step before it reaches public so to speak, so yeah that's that's what staging is yep so when we put it on there one of the people testing there, they actually suggested this that you should be able to sync it at a certain stage and I just thought that was quite interesting especially if we could create that trade-off so I just decided to give it a point value for the sink so that it could be sunk and then I kind of forgot about it then we shipped it and everyone's like wait there's a bug in the game you can sync it now yeah yeah but that was specifically done as well because yeah we go to experimental if we want to try those kind of things we have to try them there sometimes it's just best to just do it and see what the outcome is and I think generally the consensus is that it is nice that you can do it yeah, but that there of course there needs to be a trader for it otherwise you either gonna do one of the other right and the trade-off so far has been like the heart I mean one of the hard parts the harder part I think has been the the overall balancing decisions that we've made for it that some people don't agree with and trying to figure out if the what now the best course of action is for the game, because I'm pretty happy currently with the trade-off personally right so the, like how did you I don't know exactly what you did with, did you not fit did you like make, uranium fuel rods better or worse or or plutonium worse- I mean in the end nothing I mean so they change so what what the outcome is is that the fuel rods have half the cost effectively which make way less but they also give more power but yeah the the the effective outcome is that the last step to actually make the rods is half the cost from all the side resources that go in so not that doesn't include the waste itself and all the parts that are there to refine the waste into the plutonium just the last parts going into the plutonium fuel rod have been reduced by half and we mostly wanted to focus on increasing the power gain from the rod because something that I saw and I was wondering if I could kind of, turn the perspective around because of that because I saw that players were looking at it and going wow this doesn't really give that much power they didn't really look at it in a sense where you would expect it where they they look at the whole setup and go okay this was the amount of effort what do I get from it by just doing these steps they looked at it individually and how much power it gave them compared to uranium and they were kind of disappointed so something that I'm trying now is to see because I felt the balance was right just that the perception of it wasn't really hitting home gadgets so I tried to, what we did now we increased it by four so it's twice as strong as uranium right but we kept the amount that you the amount of power that you get per amount of uranium weighs the same so effectively we didn't change that much okay but maybe we still so this is the thing with game development though sometimes you only need to do a tiny tweak to make a huge effect on decision making so I was kind of reminded by this thing that happened in sanctum that occur told me about a while back where apparently they had a weapon that people felt it was super underpowered so then they balanced it and they made it stronger and they until the particle effects and then people were saying it was overpowered and then they realized they never actually changed the damage value so just by changing the particle effect people felt that it went from underpowered the actual output really hadn't changed of course this is a very different game and you can actually completely calculate the strength of your your power production yeah battery resources going in and the power that you get out but I felt maybe it's kind of a similar issue where just the perception of the vaults giving a certain amount of power might kind of mislead certain players that plutonium isn't as strong yeah as it actually kind of is I guess there can also be something with the like the the fact that it's a new thing and people feel like oh this is the way to do it it reminds me a little bit of like when overwatch introduced new characters and they always feel like they're over powered the fact is like it's just a new character and like it just feels off because you haven't figured out like how they work fully so they can also be a certain aspect of that as well is it is it final now that we are going to allow you to sink the plutonium fuel rods because some people are not like convinced convinced that this is going to stick in the ea do you know why not is it because they don't like it or is it because they think it's, still think it's a bug or I think it's because some folks still still think it's a bug or like not intended behavior okay because I haven't really seen a basically anyone arguing that it should go I've mostly seen discussions about, the trade-off itself yeah well that doesn't stop us now from removing it no but- I think it's fun I mean some people just don't want to deal with the waste so I think we kind of need to have that and I like that trade of being there where you can just get a lot more power out of it as well yeah so all you people that were og like couldn't do anything with nuclear waste we're stuck with it you guys will it's kind of like before we had lifts like you guys will remember the times before we implemented this and be like oh back in my day we couldn't get rid of waste so we had to deal with it like you guys can can still enjoy that in those days, but yeah we're gonna keep it and it's gonna go into ea