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Author Topic: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality  (Read 2217 times)

Delta_of_Isaire

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List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« on: September 03, 2022, 12:46:14 AM »

There are a couple of quality of life issues in the current game that have annoyed me a few too many times. Fixing these shouldn't be too difficult but will improve playability quite a lot :)


Asteroids interrupting the burn-in sequence at the beginning of combat. In normal fights it is a minor inconvenience. But in pursuit battles, it makes the difference between successful pursuit and the targets getting away. So why does this feature even exist? It's not like asteroids impacting on armor do that much damage anyway.

Setting course to a (uncharted) starsystem (i.e. right-click on a star in the map) appears to consistently target the jump point / gravity well that is furthest away from the player's fleet, resulting in unnecessary fuel use and wasted playtime. Why does this happen?

Slipstreams disappear too often. They currently vanish 2x a year, but IMHO that should be no more than 1x a year. Too many times I've seen a slipstream and thought "hey, that will be useful for my return trip" only for it to disappear by the time I'm ready to go back.

Contact bounties target star systems, but do not point to a specific location within that star system, unlike public bounties. This can and does lead to needle-in-a-haystack scenarios. And yes I know that the time limit on the bounty doesn't expire once you've entered the system. Don't ask me how I found out. The point is that I shouldn't have needed to find out about that.

The command view in combat shows ship sprites always pointing up, with a tiny green arrow indicating the orientation of the ship. Can we please just have the ship sprites rotated instead? That would make the information much more readily apparent. In fact, the command view could use a number of touch-ups like this.

Speaking of commands: we need a way for orders to apply only to ships specifically assigned to them. Because automatic assignment of ships to orders causes more headaches than it solves. For example, if I want to order one ship to engage one particular target, that may lead to half the rest of my fleet also deciding that they should engage that target. Or, if I tell a Frigate to escort a bigger ship and then that Frigate dies, instead of the order disappearing some other Frigate might assign itself to that escort job. Which is usually not what I want.

Ship AI target selection. Best I can tell, in the absence of engage/eliminate orders, ships will tend to target the nearest enemy. Which is an overly simplistic rule that causes a lot of obvious suboptimal behavior. Most notably, slow ships attempting to chase fast Frigates; or ships with hardpoint weapons constantly rotating back-and-forth between two targets without ever properly lining up with one of them; or ships disengaging from an almost-dead target because a random different enemy suddenly became marginally more proximate. I know AI programming is difficult, but as far that goes, improving this particular behavior is low-hanging fruit in terms of the potential benefits.



Also I need to mention S-mods. A complicated topic, but I bring it up because the current state of affairs isn't quite ideal. The thing is, IMHO a large number of ships are so OP-starved that having 2-3 build-in hullmods is essential to make their loadouts work. Consequently, instead of of S-mods being an occasional bonus on a prominent ship, they end up being a mandatory storypoint sink for a large portion of your fleet. The easy fix would be implementing a way to get build-in hull mods with credits instead of SP. But that is boring. Instead, I would propose a method for your own Heavy Industry to construct custom variants of blueprints that have a specific hullmod build-in. And the creation of those blueprint variants could require storypoints. So for example: for 1 Storypoint, you can edit a Hammerhead blueprint to have build-in Hardened Shields. This approach would also fix the issue where S-modded ships are irrepleacable when lost in combat, forcing their recovery instead of building a new one with Heavy Industry.

Oh, and speaking of blueprints: please implement a way to buy or otherwise acquire blueprints from factions. Some non-hostile alternative to repeated raiding.

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Grievous69

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #1 on: September 03, 2022, 01:05:12 AM »

I heavily disagree that ships NEED 2-3 s-mods to be good. Tons of ships are perfectly fine with no s-mods, or even just one. My problem with s-mods lies in almost all other parts but I'm not sure if this thread is the right place to talk about it. If someone makes a separate thread then I'll be happy to rant but just the short version here:
  • Stupid easy choice of always building in most expensive mods (no one cares for bonus xp)
  • Penalizes experimenting with different ship classes in a playthrough
  • Getting new ships you want to see full potential of is always seen as a story point sink, now imagine someone wanting to play with a bunch of smaller ships
  • Literally less build variety than old +10% OP for all ships skill
And no, I don't care that current 2-3 built ins are stronger than old OP bonus skill, that's not the point here. The point is always doing the same old thing for most ships and making you feel bad for ditching old ships and trying something new. Or as I've seen from a couple of players, giving them decision paralysis.

EDIT: And nerfing/buffing hullmods that were perfectly fine, just to tip toe around this ridiculous system, is sad to say the least. Like I legitimately think Missile Racks are going to get slapped now, after the Hardened Shields thing.
« Last Edit: September 03, 2022, 01:08:36 AM by Grievous69 »
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Serenitis

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #2 on: September 03, 2022, 03:26:53 AM »

Asteroids interrupting the burn-in sequence at the beginning of combat. In normal fights it is a minor inconvenience. But in pursuit battles, it makes the difference between successful pursuit and the targets getting away. So why does this feature even exist? It's not like asteroids impacting on armor do that much damage anyway.
This was added to prevent ships from getting damaged without the player having any way to prevent it.
And it causes so many irritating issues, ranging from huge 'traffic jams' where your entire fleet stops before it even appears on screen then slowly crawls over the threshold. To making you involuntarily beef pursuits with no way to recover.

Personally, I would have given ships entering battle immunity to collision damage instead.
They could go back to normal rules once the travel drive stops.

And no, I don't care that current 2-3 built ins are stronger than old OP bonus skill, that's not the point here. The point is always doing the same old thing for most ships and making you feel bad for ditching old ships and trying something new. Or as I've seen from a couple of players, giving them decision paralysis.

This is why I very much prefer the way a specific combination of mods does things.
Being able to put 1 or 2 s-mods on anything without any investment other than time, and having additional incentive to use 'sub-optimal' s-mods, and being able to swap them them out at a minor cost just straight up removes all of the above.

Yes , yes, suggesting mods as 'solutions' to problems bad etc etc.
(No it isn't.)
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Megas

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #3 on: September 03, 2022, 05:14:15 AM »

Weak ships need s-mods to be useful.  Heron needs s-mods to be able to fit weapons, fighters, and ITU while having enough left for flux stats.  (Mora got +10 OP recently, but Heron did not.  Mora now has enough OP to get what it needs, but Heron has no OP left for flux stats after getting weapons and fighters.)  Derelicts smaller than Rampart need s-mods just to get the basics (weapons and armor/anti-EMP hullmods).

The problems with s-mods:
* Bonus xp refund means little if player cannot earn bonus xp fast enough.  (Need endgame fleet that can kill Ordos.)
* Too hard to swap s-mods (requires BotB toggling).  Ziggurat being unique means it cannot be scuttled for a new one.
« Last Edit: September 03, 2022, 05:18:20 AM by Megas »
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Fotsvamp

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #4 on: September 03, 2022, 05:32:08 AM »

I strongly oppose the suggestion about the command view, currently enemy ship face down and friendly ship face up in the command screen, with the arrow indicating direction in the battle scape, in my opinon this is an easier way to quickly identify the alliegance of ships (is that a friendly omen or a hostile omen? et cetera). For me this kind of pattern recognition is easier and faster than colour recognition, especially when colourblindedness is thrown into the mix.*
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Histidine

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #5 on: September 03, 2022, 06:07:15 AM »

Regarding slipstreams, they appear and disappear at fixed times (fading in July and December, IIRC) so you can schedule around that.
Personally I never liked to check the calendar for the monsoon season before going out on an expedition, but maybe I'll try actually doing it a few times.
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gG_pilot

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #6 on: September 03, 2022, 06:39:48 AM »

  • Stupid easy choice of always building in most expensive mods (no one cares for bonus xp)
  • Penalizes experimenting with different ship classes in a playthrough
  • Getting new ships you want to see full potential of is always seen as a story point sink, now imagine someone wanting to play with a bunch of smaller ships
  • Literally less build variety than old +10% OP for all ships skill
And no, I don't care that current 2-3 built ins are stronger than old OP bonus skill, that's not the point here. The point is always doing the same old thing for most ships and making you feel bad for ditching old ships and trying something new. Or as I've seen from a couple of players, giving them decision paralysis.
YES
Curent S-mode design goes  directly against playful gaming. I mean, it  blocks receive fun from trying different things.
S-mode should be spice not staple food.
S-mode should support variety and tring different tactics.

1. I recommended in other topic, make number of active s-mods  limited(caped) by  level of main character. e.i. max 15 s-modes total active at  one moment.
2. Allow  current style of s-mode unmount in dock, story  point is returned. Mounting cost SP,  Unmount cost money.
2.1 or turn s-mode into a OP bonus with diminished return. Like 1s-mode adds 10%  of ships base OP, 2 s-modes adds 18%, 3 s-modes  adds 24%, 4 s-modes adds 28% of ship  base OP.
« Last Edit: September 03, 2022, 07:02:08 AM by gG_pilot »
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Megas

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #7 on: September 03, 2022, 07:41:43 AM »

The easy fix would be implementing a way to get build-in hull mods with credits instead of SP. But that is boring. Instead, I would propose a method for your own Heavy Industry to construct custom variants of blueprints that have a specific hullmod build-in. And the creation of those blueprint variants could require storypoints. So for example: for 1 Storypoint, you can edit a Hammerhead blueprint to have build-in Hardened Shields. This approach would also fix the issue where S-modded ships are irrepleacable when lost in combat, forcing their recovery instead of building a new one with Heavy Industry.
Credits are no more boring than s-mods.  If anything, that is a great idea.  Use obvious in-game currency as currency, keep story points for actual story events, fun one-off events (like adding stable point to an otherwise perfect colony system that was missing one) or anti-frustration meta stuff (like retreat from enemy).  With something vital as this, boring but practical simple and efficient is good.  Colony upgrades should be similarly changed too.

Losing ships in combat refunds rest of the story point value as bonus xp, but as I posted earlier, unless the player already has a multi-Ordos slayer fleet (or solo Ziggurat that can kill any endgame fleet) that can get close to +500% xp multiplier, xp gain at max level is so slow that player will likely never remove all of the accumulated bonus xp.

I would not want built-in mods in Heavy Industry/Orbital Works because the s-mods I use vary by ship.  The one s-mod I use on most ships is ITU, but even then, there are exceptions (some ships cannot use or do not need ITU).  For something like Dominator and Onslaught, I want Heavy Armor and Expanded Missile Racks on them.
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Schwartz

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #8 on: September 03, 2022, 08:30:24 AM »

Nothing wrong with S-Mods, they're a great idea. Why shouldn't they, and officers, be the major use of story points for a player? It makes sense.

Yeah, the loss of burn drive at combat start is a bother and I'd rather deal with asteroids any other way, even having them removed entirely. But probably damage immunity for the first 10 seconds would do the trick.

The vague bounties do add some frustration but also some manual labor for the player that I don't strictly hate. Discovery is part of the game.

You can assign individual ships to commands by selecting and right-clicking targets. As it works now, you can have it both ways, which is better than forcing it on individual ships.
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Grievous69

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #9 on: September 03, 2022, 08:39:28 AM »

Nothing wrong with S-Mods, they're a great idea.
Can you elaborate on that? I find it weird to give a comment on something with an equivalent of "no it's not", and then move on. I'd like to know why those who think it's a good system, think that way.
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BigBrainEnergy

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #10 on: September 03, 2022, 09:19:04 AM »

S-mods costing story points runs counter to the design intention of story points. They're supposed to be used opportunistically on things like recovering a derelict capital or escaping an impossible battle, but the raw power advantage s-mods provide paired with the difficulty of grinding them later on means you don't want to "waste" any of them on fun stuff because you have to save them for s-mods.

One of the reasons for bonus xp existing is to "pay you back" for spending story points on temporary things, except it doesn't actually work all that well. If s-mods are decoupled from story points then we don't need the bonus xp system. If leveling ends up too slow you could just lower xp required to level up.

S-mods could then be expensive ship modifications you add using an orbital works on one of your colonies. This would make them more of a late game thing and how many you can buy is largely limited by the income of your colonies rather than grinding ordos.

Officer mentoring and retraining is fine costing story points, but the fact that choosing elite skills also costs story points is pretty damning for cybernetic implants.
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Megas

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #11 on: September 03, 2022, 09:56:37 AM »

Officer mentoring and retraining is fine costing story points, but the fact that choosing elite skills also costs story points is pretty damning for cybernetic implants.
The worst part of elite skills for officers is firing old officers for new ones needed for different ships and not getting any bonus xp back.  For that reason, I do not use elite skills in human officers except to test in a fight then reload after the test is done.

Not too crazy about respec costing a story point without refund either.  Only grinding Ordos at +500% xp makes that cost kind of tolerable.

S-mods costing story points runs counter to the design intention of story points. They're supposed to be used opportunistically on things like recovering a derelict capital or escaping an impossible battle, but the raw power advantage s-mods provide paired with the difficulty of grinding them later on means you don't want to "waste" any of them on fun stuff because you have to save them for s-mods.

One of the reasons for bonus xp existing is to "pay you back" for spending story points on temporary things, except it doesn't actually work all that well. If s-mods are decoupled from story points then we don't need the bonus xp system. If leveling ends up too slow you could just lower xp required to level up.
The biggest s-mod sink is colonies with 2^n costs.  That is the primary motivation for me to grind endgame fleets for +500% xp, to get more points to add more and more colony improvements to my colonies.  The cost with s-mods and officers is obvious, but they eventually become a drop-in-the-bucket compared to colony improvements.
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Schwartz

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #12 on: September 03, 2022, 01:08:06 PM »

Can you elaborate on that? I find it weird to give a comment on something with an equivalent of "no it's not", and then move on. I'd like to know why those who think it's a good system, think that way.

Sure. Since we lost all +OP skills from older versions, there are few ways the player can boost power beyond baseline to individual ships and fleets. One being skills, the other being S-Mods. It's a great idea because it is an actual, meaningful currency for the player all the way into the endgame. And the boost for ships is a fixed amount of OP. The power increase is very manageable because it doesn't boost stats but just allows for more expensive fits - caps and vents are capped and even maxing these is not a win-button. It makes losses more meaningful, ships more survivable, allows for some synergy with Industry skills that makes a lack of more straightforward fleet skills hurt less.

It's self-limiting in several ways and to me is just plain fun because it's hands-on and forces decisions and tradeoffs. Compared to overpowered officer skills in older versions which left a bad aftertaste. Watching an almost-invulnerable heavy cruiser with something ridiculous like +300% turn speed that could not be flanked, it felt like, you know what I mean.

I don't agree that the player will just save story points for ship fits. It's an endless resource that's just kinda slow to acquire. If the player struggles more, he will use story points more opportunistically. If he's a veteran, he's in a more comfortable position and may save more. I hoard SP because I can, but that's not a good habit. See: RPGs and consumables and the notion of players getting in their own way of fun. If we made S-Mods cost money, that would just increase the power baseline to every single ship having 3 S-Mods, since money is cheap. No, but I would like to see more enemy ships with S-Mods. Especially in elite fleets. Not to be able to capture these (though that should reasonably happen too), but just to have slightly more threatening targets more often.

Maybe we could have something like a "lucky find" bounty mission from a bar contact that could give the player 1 SP on top of a meagre monetary reward for a difficult bounty. Something to offset the slow pace of SP generation just by XP.
« Last Edit: September 03, 2022, 01:57:21 PM by Schwartz »
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gG_pilot

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #13 on: September 03, 2022, 03:27:11 PM »

The easy fix would be implementing a way to get build-in hull mods with credits instead of SP. But that is boring
Credits are no more boring than s-mods.  If anything, that is a great idea.  Use obvious in-game currency as currency,
  No, it is wrong idea.
S-modes should be rare spice no staple food.
Money are endless once you get a colony  or two. Inflation quickly  turns to a point, when I see a recommendation here on forum, that skill removing d-mode is no longer needed because you simply spend millions  willy-nilly for rebuild.
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Hiruma Kai

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Re: List of minor improvements for major increase in quality
« Reply #14 on: September 03, 2022, 03:38:56 PM »

Asteroids interrupting the burn-in sequence at the beginning of combat. In normal fights it is a minor inconvenience. But in pursuit battles, it makes the difference between successful pursuit and the targets getting away. So why does this feature even exist? It's not like asteroids impacting on armor do that much damage anyway.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a feature that makes it easier to run away from pursuers when I'm hiding in an asteroid field.  Essentially, what you're describing is an benefit to the defender, which applies to my fleet when running away (which happens semi-regularly for me early game in an spacer iron man run - it's rough when your starting ship lacks weapon mounts).  Since it affects both sides equally, it seems fine to me. I'd much rather favor the player in a meaningful defense instead of an effectively meaningless mop up operation on offense.

Setting course to a (uncharted) starsystem (i.e. right-click on a star in the map) appears to consistently target the jump point / gravity well that is furthest away from the player's fleet, resulting in unnecessary fuel use and wasted playtime. Why does this happen?

Not sure.  Although, once the system is on screen in hyperspace, don't you just pick the jump point/gravity well you want?  Most of the time I'm actively directly the fleet anyways because of storms/streams, so I don't think I've ever had this impact me.  I didn't even realize this was thing until I read this thread.

The command view in combat shows ship sprites always pointing up, with a tiny green arrow indicating the orientation of the ship. Can we please just have the ship sprites rotated instead? That would make the information much more readily apparent. In fact, the command view could use a number of touch-ups like this.

To recognize the orientation of the ship you have to recognize the front of the sprite, which with certain ships may not be immediately obvious at first glance (Doritos come to mind, as well as some mod ships), at least to me.  Any system for indicating direction needs to be universal and unambigious, like how the green and red arrows are currently.

Speaking of commands: we need a way for orders to apply only to ships specifically assigned to them. Because automatic assignment of ships to orders causes more headaches than it solves. For example, if I want to order one ship to engage one particular target, that may lead to half the rest of my fleet also deciding that they should engage that target. Or, if I tell a Frigate to escort a bigger ship and then that Frigate dies, instead of the order disappearing some other Frigate might assign itself to that escort job. Which is usually not what I want.

The inverse already exists in the form of the search and destroy command applied to all ships you want to ignore automatic assignment.  Which admittedly is a lot more clicking than your proposal - although it is more fine tuned in that you can leave some ships to automatically reassign if you wish.

Ship AI target selection. Best I can tell, in the absence of engage/eliminate orders, ships will tend to target the nearest enemy. Which is an overly simplistic rule that causes a lot of obvious suboptimal behavior. Most notably, slow ships attempting to chase fast Frigates; or ships with hardpoint weapons constantly rotating back-and-forth between two targets without ever properly lining up with one of them; or ships disengaging from an almost-dead target because a random different enemy suddenly became marginally more proximate. I know AI programming is difficult, but as far that goes, improving this particular behavior is low-hanging fruit in terms of the potential benefits.

Alex seems to always be making tweaks to the AI to try and improve edge cases, but I feel like you're simplifying quite a bit here.  I'm not sure it actually is low-hanging fruit.  Do you have a nice criteria that should be applied via algorithm that can show how it's easy to handle?  Keeping in mind it also has to work reasonably well with mod ships, mod weapons, as well as unusual fits (i.e. Onslaught with no PD weapons...).  Can you handle the situation with a Kite with 2 reapers.  Or a Tempest with an Ion beam?  Or how about some mod ship with modded weapons which have significant script based damage?  Maybe there is a simple universally applicable algorithm for prioritizing what a capital should be engaging, and would love to hear it if there is.

Also I need to mention S-mods. A complicated topic, but I bring it up because the current state of affairs isn't quite ideal. The thing is, IMHO a large number of ships are so OP-starved that having 2-3 build-in hullmods is essential to make their loadouts work. Consequently, instead of of S-mods being an occasional bonus on a prominent ship, they end up being a mandatory storypoint sink for a large portion of your fleet. The easy fix would be implementing a way to get build-in hull mods with credits instead of SP. But that is boring. Instead, I would propose a method for your own Heavy Industry to construct custom variants of blueprints that have a specific hullmod build-in. And the creation of those blueprint variants could require storypoints. So for example: for 1 Storypoint, you can edit a Hammerhead blueprint to have build-in Hardened Shields. This approach would also fix the issue where S-modded ships are irrepleacable when lost in combat, forcing their recovery instead of building a new one with Heavy Industry.

The whole point of story points was to be a rare resource that you're not swimming in by end game, unlike credits, so a credit to s-mod conversion completely misses the intended purpose of story points.  Now people may feel story points are too limiting for what they want to do at end game, but that's what they're intended to be.  An XP tied progression mechanic that's easier to gain at the beginning and harder to gain at the end.

The fundamental question to answer, is what should a late game player find they can do easily and quickly and what should they find hard and time consuming to do?  That would then set at what rate story points should be gained (or if they should be removed completely).  It sounds like a lot of people want the ability to completely retool their end game fleet as they see fit and without further significant investment, unlike the early game which is restricted more by credits.  I mean, you can buy a Paragon with your first million credits or so, but then you can't sell it for full price back and buy an Odyssey instead.  Late game, however, you can have giant reserves of credits at which point, you don't sell the Paragon, you just buy an Odyssey in addition to the Paragon and not care, because credits are no longer an effectively limited resource.

So would people also like to see ships sell for full price as well, to make it easier to try different fleet compositions early game?

Is it more fun to be able to do whatever you want, to have some consequences, or to have a lot of consequences for decisions you make?  What amount of friction do you want from the game to different things one might choose to do?
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