Debate mechanic

[Iamnuff]

I've only gotten to use this rarely. Twice in the tutorial and then again during the 'people watching' contemplation well into chapter 3.
I managed to debate the gangs and the working class pretty well, but I can't seem to defeat the wealthy citizens, likely because I havn't had enough debates in the past and haven't buffed up my debate skills by doing so.

Did I miss a bunch of chances to debate people, or did this whole mechanic really get put on hold for multiple hours?

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

There are various places around that you can get into where you can debate people, but not a huge number of them. Currently there are 24 debates in the game, and some of them are mutually-exclusive in the prologue, and others are on various paths in chapter 2+. A full 9 of those are in the people watching thing.

Overall, you're not going to be able to buff yourself going into these debates. Some of it is unfortunately the RNG being a bit too tough for these specific scenarios. For the next build, I'm reducing the target on these from 700 to 600. In the meantime, passing a turn and trying to debate them again is likely to make it possible.

[ShadowAngel]

Welthy citizens in "People Watching" have absolutely unrealistic targets. I tried around 30 times, at this point I have memorized all the sequances. Mostly I miss my target by 150-200 in best case scenario. Those debates realistically should top out at 500 max.

[Iamnuff]

Originally posted by ShadowAngel:

Welthy citizens in "People Watching" have absolutely unrealistic targets. I tried around 30 times, at this point I have memorized all the sequances. Mostly I miss my target by 150-200 in best case scenario. Those debates realistically should top out at 500 max.

I beat the wealthy man, it was the wealthy woman who was impossible.
Didn't help that the way the bonus-challenge things are set out seems to make them impossible.

The first one is Abuse, but Abuse skills only hit this woman for like 9, so even if you double all five in the pattern, you're still getting crap all for damage.
Plus, it hands you the cards in an order that makes it impossible to fill out the other bonuses.

Mostly my issue with her was Mistrust though. When I got down to my last five or so cards, they were all like +10, +15, +20 mistrust, and I just didn't have enough discards to get rid of them all.

The thing the dev said about lowering their HP would probably do it, but I just switched my goal from 9 successful debates to 6 and moved on.
Less rewards, but I got to actually progress (and then accidentally murdered 10,000 people because I didn't realise what my Worker units were doing, lmao.)

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

More changes for the next build:

* The balance of how much things affect wealthy citizens in debates has been shifted around quite a bit to make those more thematically-appropriate and less difficult in general.

[13900IpForThis]

What are the benefits of the debates existing in the game?

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

They give a sense of roleplaying and adjust the pacing a bit.

To me, the difference between a visual novel and any other genre is that you have to "prove it" with your choices in some fashion.

For example, in Stardew Valley, why is it important that you water your crops, rather than that just being skipped? In FTL, why have all the subsystems and things, rather than just making a choice at each node on the map, and then making the next choice?

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From a more concrete standpoint, they are a way to get some more information out of someone, or to get someone to do something they would not otherwise do, without just having a stat check, or a resource expenditure, or something along those lines.

It also provides a way to get a bit more than usual, in terms of small secondary bonuses, which is a nice thing that allows for a spectrum of completion beyond just "completed the thing." The hacking minigames in Cyberpunk 2077 are a good example of this.

In general, it also breaks up habituation, and provides variety.

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The other thing that separates VNs from other genres is the general gradation of choices. In Factorio, you can choose to build a thing, but you can make it an absolute monstrosity of a construction that barely works, but does get the job done. Or you can do it cleanly and elegantly. So there's more feeling of authorship of the thing you built.

Every game is somewhere on a spectrum for how binary or analog a lot of various mechanics and choices are, and the goal of any given game in terms of tone, mood, etc, is what helps determine what makes sense.

[erandomone]

I think I got lucky with the wealthy folk. I won two of those debates, but I *did* have to trigger all three bonuses and also have some overlap on an abuse/threat patterns.

[13900IpForThis]

Hmm so if I understand you correctly, rather than making a city building AI game, a turn based AI game, or a visual novel AI game, you want to provide a more holistic experience of being an AI, therefor different tasks and mini games are required to provide that feeling?

Honestly, that's a great vision for the game. I've been wondering why you put a lot of these things in the game.

My concern is that right now, those mini-games/tasks are actually taking me out of the chair of being an AI. Funnily enough, I keep thinking all the clicking I have to do (for example, salvaging for resources, going into military bases, equipping armor piercing rounds, moving units into place, clicking on a unit then clicking on an enemy unit for a few turns) are all simple things an AI should be able to automate.

Another example is the technology. If I understand it right, upgrades appear for the stats of the androids. They're all minor, like I am upgrading a certain stat of an android. The change is so minor I don't feel the change, even though it is more 'realistic' that an AI would be upgrading parts of an android rather than the entire thing. As for the bigger upgrades--they appear based on what I am doing? Would one run's technology progression differ greatly than a different run?

Right now, it feels like the game is a big clunky machine (makes sense for a game in beta) There is a lot of width. I'm still new (9 hours) but I haven't felt like there is depth to what I'm doing.

While I have you here, your writing is excellent. Some excerpts of being an AI, like someone trying to out-wait us so we just stand there for hours, or how humans feel like they need to fill the silence, and a bunch of other small excerpts brings life into the game.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

I appreciate the kind words on the writing!

In terms of automating everything, quite a lot is automated as you go, but there comes a certain point where there's no game left if you just automate everything. A lot of it comes down to decision points.

With the things like scavenging, most of that is actually automated after you do that a time or two. Once you get some Alumina manually, and same for Scandium, you start automating that before too long. I like the Factorio model of introducing new mechanics, where it's manual first, and then automated. You start out digging coal with your little character in Factorio, for example.

With things like applying armor piercing manually, or needing to periodically get the prismatic tungsten, that never gets automated too much, aside from in total war scenarios (skystreak missiles). Automating that would make it so that there's no real consequence to just killing all the mechs, and they would all be easy prey for you at all times.

Overall, especially as you get more into chapter 2 and 3, a lot of things get automated, but not everything. I tend to start with the non-automated version, and then go for the automated version as people move along.