Gang mechanics - Devs please read

[PolyLumberjack]

16hrs into this game and it is a fun little game. But the biggest issue I've had (aside from my PS4 controller not working, despite my best efforts) is with Fish with the Gang ability. Bibo(?) mainly. When you first start in survival and you reach adulthood you gain the ability to turn Gang's on. Sweet right? We can devour everything in our path.

Except not really. At first when you start a gang you get frustrated, the other fish in your gang get the food faster than you, and you see at least 3 that are bigger than you. But eventually their stomach fills and they aren't interested in eating anymore. So you catch up, and eventually your easily thrice the size of the next biggest fish in your gang, and now they refuse to eat other than to not starve to death.

Next issue is that the other fish won't attack targets with you, because suddenly everything is too big. I'm soloing sea turtles while the rest sit back and watch. The AI thinks that the turtle is too dangerous/big a target so they won't attack.

Then finally the attrition rate. At first I was losing fish because I was hunting dangerous prey. Then the odd goliath or mahi mahi would pick off my babies. But the biggest reason for losing my gang members? Me. I was too big and too fast. Even my base swim speed they were not able to keep up. Oh, and I was big enough that when I clicked the Eat button, it would gobble any adult members of my gang in one gulp.

I've played with a number of fixes in my head, first among them being a food sharing system where every member of the gang shared in the xp from food, but realized a better solution was needed once I noticed the other problems as well.

I think the best solution is to remove the gang ability, and instead make it a "Swarm" fish. You start off as one fish, but once you reproduce or absorb stragglers into your Swarm then you have another hidden stat which increments up by one, call this stat SwarmNumber. The base attribute is 1. If you find a single straggler and add it to your Swarm it becomes 2. This multiples health and damage as you would expect, but as far as the game is concerned you are one entity.

Now say you have a swarm of 10. The base stats of the fish are 1 damage and 10 hp. So your swarm deals 10 damage and has 100hp. For every 10 points of damage dealt to the swarm, you lose a fish, and your stats decrease.

You should still be able to level up and gain size and stats the traditional way, but it applies to any fish in the swarm as well, this way you can reduce the number of stats tracked, and it represents survival of the fittest. Slower and weaker fish are "removed" from the swarm first and when the survivors reproduce they have better genes in the pool. Might be a little weird to see a fish make the jump from baby to level 10 (or whatever the swarm level is) right away but it's just a beefy fish from beefy parents.

The swarm should also be nebulous, and not focus on a single fish (except when it is just a single fish). When it's a swarm it loses the traditional bite attack and instead has a bounding box that contains all the fish in the swarm. Clicking the attack button causes all the fish in the swarm to bite at whatever is in the bounding box, same with the eat button. XP from food just goes to the Swarm and not individual fishies and the Swarm levels up (and not individual fishies).

Questions?

[Frost Spectre]

One way to ensure you have big gang members, seems to work only with Bibos who have the rage ability, the smaller fish gang members stop from eating things if player is not chewing the meat, the gang members start to gain size, but they will stop counting as gang members as I've experienced once they hit a certain size and you turn off the ability.

[boyyys16]

how to start gang

[The Patriarchy]

the game is abandoned.

[Astabolt]

Originally posted by boyyys16:

how to start gang

this post is almost 5 years old bro wtf

[boyyys16]

Originally posted by Ichthyovenator ♦:

Originally posted by boyyys16:

how to start gang

this post is almost 5 years old bro wtf

how do i add fishes to my gang