Blowing the Fuses

[Goliath]

Power related mechanic. Suggested because Power Restore grind is nigh impossible.

Whenever power is restored on a generator, any affected building has a chance to get their fuses blown, effectively removing the power on that location. (Doesn't count for grinds)

To anyone on the tile, the message would display something like "The power briefly returned, but went out again in a poof."

[Goliath]

A second mechanic could be having a chance to overload the generator when repairing power in buildings, at a very low chance.

[DylanMakTyme]

Like the idea. It also occurs to me that a lightning strike could cause an outage and that power plants are more susceptible to lightning strikes than other buildings.

Which then leads to the whole topic of how storms can lead to temporary changes in the conditions of play. Snow, flooding, fog, extreme heat and cold, you get the idea. Everyone talks about the weather, but the development team could do something about it.

[sohdbrimks]

Really like this fuse idea.
Lighting strikes I'm not sure would work RP wise next breath sice the map is inside a dome. But maybe the dome is so advanced that is has weather simulation though idk

[DylanMakTyme]

The dome is news to me, but I don't go looking for spoilers or spend a lot of time on the forums. Static build up owing to chaotic climate management inside of a genuinely massive dome sounds like fun. Flooding always works. Pressurization/depressurization issues?

[Nightwielder]

I like the idea of more opportunity to repair power. It's definitely an issue. The fuse idea is great.

[Fellis]

This is fine, but the suggestion is purely in service of power repair grind. I'd rather put in some sort of reason to incentivize keeping the power off in buildings, more than the current trolling resource points and power removed grind.

I'm not sure the order of this suggestion being made and the discussion on NCG discord about power and doors on Sept 4, 2021, but power and doors are both mechanics that just serve as morality adjustment and grinds in my eyes. Of the two, power is definitely more interesting and worthy of salvage, mostly because it is a very visible mechanic and those are inherently more engaging. Aside- I'm aware power affects searching, but the only incentive to this is to keep power on in resource buildings. It also affects shadow hunting, but no hunters are making sure power is on, and turning power off is AP you could have spent hiding which negates shadows anyway.

So I guess while we could implement this, I'd rather see the community discuss or help think of mechanics to make power more engaging and give reasons for it to be a push and pull of keeping the power on or off, rather than explicitly saying the grind's too hard.

As for doors, I would prefer they get removed eventually. I think it's a mechanic that is vestigial from urban dead and we have the options of:
1. make mechanics that interact with it more, and try to make doors some sort of actual defense thing?? +door hp?? yuck
2. find another engineering thing to help adjust morality and banish doors to the pit

[Fellis]

For instance, while I was writing this feedback: Power off inherently is evil and Stygia is a night plane where demons have search bonuses.

What if demons/evil factioned folks (with an appropriate upgrade) ignored night/power off in Valhalla as well?
This would inevitably troll new players who want to search their 190 books in peace, but hey maybe they can join evil factions to level up instead! Also there would be two sides (neutral and good) also wanting to keep the power on. I don't particularly like this solution though.

What if neighborhoods with a certain % of power off/on had infusion bonuses towards good or evil? This is a little more effective at being integrated into faction war, because now I can attack the next piece of territory by literally undermining or rebuilding it's infrastructure, and going after non-resource tiles could gain a majority without interfering with local factions that might not care about the overall metagame. So say 0-35% powered is evil, 36-70% powered is neutral, and 71-100% powered is good. Generators flipping the whole neighborhood are eliminated.
This suggestion is a little harder to comment on because I'd say most of the player base is unfamiliar with infusions, but this is more in line with what I'd look for when trying to pitch a suggestion. Something that is engaging with the more fun parts of the game (IMO, not everyone is into facwar) and can give a little more stakes to the visual feedback of the game map. I'm not sure this is perfect either, but just trying to leave off with something rather than a "nah I don't dig the suggestion".

[Fellis]

There was more discussion of this on discord and any adjustment of power mechanics should probably adjust or remove the impact of power on searching.

Thoughts:

1. Halve the bonus and penalty that Lights/Night grant so that it is less impactful. Due to how searching works, -10% search bonus is like 20%-30% less effective searching which is huge for mechanic with no feedback (also implement current search/hide odds in the tile descriptions)

2. Power only adds search bonus at night (mitigating it completely), being in a powered building during the day has no inherent bonus to search. Maybe increase base search chances by 5% or so across the board to compensate for the 10% loss from no power bonus, which I'm not sure is accounted for in the design of search odds

3. Eliminate all search bonuses from power, and time of day.

I'm mostly in favor of #2, searching at night should be as effective as in the day, in the right circumstance. If this was combo'd with my idea about affecting the "neighborhood tendency" which could also be affected by Evil SH and other things, I'd like to see demons/evil factioned with upgrade mitigating unpowered searching because they are incentivized to keep it off, and two other alignments are incentivized to keep power on


Also just a reminder that although I have the Dev team tag, I'm just thinking out loud here as any other community member. Nothing I say is indication of what might be put into the game, that's a bigger discussion amongst the team and admins

[Kylinn]

Another suggestion: eliminate zerg flagging on power mechanics; i.e., allow turning off / restoring of power to the same building just like any individual door can be broken and immediately repaired by the same person. No more wandering around looking for buildings with the power out - just make your own!

[Fellis]

[Kandarin]

I'd generally agree with Fellis that this (and related suggestions) is in service of a grind. To move forward and actually make the mechanic better, we'll need ways for the mechanic to serve player experience instead of a grind. Possible facets of this include:
- There should be ways for power status to influence overall territory control (as with Fellis' examples)
- Power being on should activate more features than just searching, as with the current Hospital and Aug Clinic examples
- Demons (and Evils in general) should have some ways to obtain benefits on darkened tiles, providing an incentive to sabotage power as part of territory control