Hi Playmaker!
I love your mods, and I'm excited to see your renewed interest in development and balance. You've put in a lot of work lately, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. While you work on balance, I thought it might be useful to provide one player's feedback.
The trouble with balance in a modded sandbox game is that players can pull so many levers and dials that are outside of your control, and they all want a different end result. Some players will crank every enemy setting to insanity, then install mods like Rampant, Pitch Black, and Schall's Expanded Evolution to take the difficulty level to impossible. They are turning to a mod like yours for a set of tools to fight back against that madness. Other players simply want overpowered God mode. Combat aside, some players may want to be able to run around the map at lightning speed and deploy thousands of pocket bots on a big construction project without worrying about energy. The examples are endless.
For example, about 10% of the people who have downloaded "Extended Vanilla: Personal Equipment", have also downloaded "Extended Vanilla: Personal Equipment OP" to achieve the end result that they felt was fun for them. They did that because they felt the need to tweak the balance and they couldn't achieve their desired result with config options. It wasn't necessarily because you got the balance "wrong", so I hope you don't take it personally. It is more likely that (a) they had different set of mods than you, and/or (b) fun is subjective. That's what's great about sandbox games.
So what do you do about it? I think the best way to achieve balance for all players is to expose the balance variables as (startup) configs. Empower your players to tweak things to balance for their set of mods and for their idea of fun.
I really like that you've added settings for reactor size, roboports, and grids, and I hope to see you continue that trend as you continue to work on balance.
Some random (and not deeply thought out) ideas for more settings...
- Reactor output multiplier (0.1x ... [1x] ... 10x)
- Battery capacity multiplier (0.1x ... [1x] ... 10x)
- Laser damage multiplier (0.1x ... [1x] ... 10x)
- Exoskeleton speed multiplier (0.1x ... [1x] ... 10x)
- Shield capacity multiplier (0.1x ... [1x] ... 10x)
- Equipment power consumption multiplier (0.1x ... [1x] ... 10x)
I envisioned those as open variables where users can enter any valid multiplier to allow them to nerf/buff with fine adjustments.
As an aside, I hope to see some tiers for personal discharge defense, including automatic discharge and additional damage tiers. I know discharge defense is viewed as useless by a lot of folks, but I think you might be able to change that perception. The jetpack mod changed my mind about using it, and I'd love to see more tiers to keep up with modded death worlds.
Once again, I really love your work and I've been especially excited by your latest releases. EV has been a staple of my mod list for many years. Thanks for all of your hard work! I can't wait to see what you come up with next. 😁
