Free Network Tower radio towers jack up the price of all towers?

[Lyzak]

Is this intended? It seems frustratingly game-y that, because I didn't pay for my first radio tower and instead ran a Lib 4 to get a free one, that any future radio towers I want to buy are way more expensive. It would seem to me that free radio towers earned via completing the Network Tower raid should not contribute to the jack-up in radio-tower building price.

[fowlJ]

It's 'intentional' in the sense that they are aware of it and didn't feel the need to change it - the game just counts the number of radio towers you have and bases the price on that, since in vanilla there was no need to distinguish between radio towers you have and radio towers you've built.

As to whether it's 'game-y' or not, think of it this way: What does the increase of price per radio tower even represent within the fiction in the first place? Unless every radio tower you build is bigger than the last one (for some reason), it doesn't really make sense from a realism point of view that they require additional materials to construct. It's just a gameplay mechanic to begin with.

[Lyzak]

I mean gamey as in it entices the player to "game" the system, it has nothing to do with how realistic or unrealistic the increased cost of towers is. It strikes me as counter-intuitive that the "right" strategic decision is to make sure you purchase all the radio towers you'd ever want to purchase with supplies before putting in the extra effort to run Lib IV anywhere. It strikes me as punishing that the game would go "Oh I see you were a good boy and smashed the Network Tower mission in Region C, hope that's how you wanted to acquire ALL of your radio towers because now every additional one you want is going to be prohibitively expensive." That's "gamey." Having to make arbitrary, unintuitive strategic decisions because that's how you "beat the game." Or prevent the game from beating you.

In either case. I don't mean this as a rant, more an explanation. If Pavonis really doesn't see a need to change it then I won't waste my breath, there's a hundred and one other 'features'/bugs in this game I could be bitching about. But I figured I'd try and get some open conversation on the issue and see if people care.

[Saph7]

If you get your first radio tower by paying for it with supply, your second radio tower costs X.

If you get your first radio tower by getting it for free via Lib 4, your second radio tower costs X.

If you take the second approach, you're already getting a free radio tower. You don't get a double discount.

[Lyzak]

If you take the second approach, you're already getting a free radio tower. You don't get a double discount.

Yes, that is in fact a perfectly reasonable other way to look at it but it doesn't really address my comment about it being gamey because it entices specific, arbitrary strategic decisions. You're coming at it from something of a "fairness in game balance" perspective, I'm coming at it from a "What choices does the player have to make and are they fun?" perspective. They're kinda oblique, and don't really intersect meaningfully with one another.

[fowlJ]

[explanation of terms]

Okay, I see what you're saying now, and I can kind of agree - I'm not really sure how much of a realistic concern that is, though? Like, for one thing, I don't think the intention is really to unlock the network tower and then just stop, even though that is of course a valid option - it's more of a reward for pursuing the liberation missions, and if you follow up on it by doing the HQ, that alone will pay back whatever you 'lost' to the order-of-operations thing, to say nothing of gaining a region that can freely produce supplies (at a 20% bonus).

I'm also somewhat doubtful that this will ever be a campaign losing mistake - the supply economy is pretty flexible, 50-150 supplies can typically be drummed up if you need to contact a region yesterday, even if it means selling more than you would normally care to. (I do agree that it doesn't necessarily make sense to have to, though, now that I understand what you're saying.)

[Lyzak]

50-150 supplies can typically be drummed up if you need to contact a region [...]

My next radio tower costs 300 supplies and I'm into FL 13-14. I should be spending most of my dosh on coilguns and power armor, not scrapping a handful of elerium cores for radio towers.

In either case, I can't divine the true gameplay intentions behind the radio tower changes in 1.3, but if I were to put on my game design hat for a minute, I'd assume it was to try and encourage players to interact with their regions more, and run more missions. Because contacting regions is a necessity to complete the game, and therefore making contacting a region affordable is a necessity, it follows that running liberation chains is a necessity too. I don't think free radio towers from Lib IV is a "reward for pursuing Lib V," I think it's part of the core gameplay loop for beating the game.

Again, without knowing for sure what the true purpose of this change was, my guess is that Pavonis intended "Run the Network Tower" to be the correct way to get radio towers, and purchasing them with supplies is just an infrequent "lifeline" resource when you need the bonus NOW and can't be bothered to finish the network tower, either because of regional strength constraints, or time constraints, or something else.

[Saph7]

In either case, I can't divine the true gameplay intentions behind the radio tower changes in 1.3, but if I were to put on my game design hat for a minute, I'd assume it was to try and encourage players to interact with their regions more, and run more missions.

It was to encourage players to interact with the Lib chain more, and make liberation a more attractive choice in general by giving heavy incentives to go up to Liberation 4.

[Lyzak]

It was to encourage players to interact with the Lib chain more, and make liberation a more attractive choice in general by giving heavy incentives to go up to Liberation 4.

Yup-yup. I probably could have used some clearer wording, but that's what I was getting at.

Now, based on what you just said - heavy incentives to go up to liberation 4 - and the fact that the price of radio towers goes up significantly more than it used to in 1.2, wouldn't you agree that that makes liberation chains more part of the core gameplay loop? Ergo, the "primary cycle of things the player does to progress/win?" To me, that says that supply-purchased radio towers are, as I said, a "lifeline" resource. You can't do a lot of them, they're meant to get you out of a pinch.

And currently, proceeding with that "core gameplay loop" gradually takes away that lifeline until you basically can't make use of it, if you haven't already.

Calling it a "Double discount" makes it sound like "core gameplay loop" and "lifeline to get you out of a pinch" are more or less treated the same from a gameplay balance perspective, which is what I personally disagree with. Hopefully that clears some things up.

[fowlJ]

50-150 supplies can typically be drummed up if you need to contact a region [...]

My next radio tower costs 300 supplies and I'm into FL 13-14.

Yeah, but what I meant is that depending on your difficulty the cost of radio tower increases by 50-150 for each other tower - that's what you're losing, not the full cost of the tower.

[Saph7]

And currently, proceeding with that "core gameplay loop" gradually takes away that lifeline until you basically can't make use of it, if you haven't already.

That's not really how it works. At the point you're currently at in your campaign, the price of radio towers is prohibitive, so if you want to expand, you have to do liberation chains. However, if you keep doing liberations and get into late game, you'll eventually reach the point where supply stops being a meaningful constraint anymore. This is because supply scales more or less indefinitely with the amount of regions you liberate and the amount of rebels/engineers you assign to the job, while other resources don't. At this point your bottleneck becomes alloys and (most especially) elerium - supply doesn't matter.

If Radio Relays worked the way you want them to (the first one you build is always just as cheap no matter how many free ones you get first) then the optimal way to use them would shift to "do one or two Network Towers, then leapfrog 1-2 regions to build one relay next to the Blacksite, then stop." It wouldn't make the game any less 'gamey', just substantially easier.

[Lyzak]

If Radio Relays worked the way you want them to (the first one you build is always just as cheap no matter how many free ones you get first) then the optimal way to use them would shift to "do one or two Network Towers, then leapfrog 1-2 regions to build one relay next to the Blacksite, then stop."

I suppose I understand your comment about the way the supply economy changes (if the player tackles strategy in that way, but "is there only one optimal path to play LW2" is another debate entirely). However, I have to say I don't at all follow what you're talking about regarding what the "optimal way" to do radio towers is if they "work the way I want them to."

I mean... yes? Absolutely you'd want contacting the Blacksite region to be cheap, that's kind of... the point? You try to use radio towers to make expansion into strategic territory more affordable. Whether I have slightly-cheaper radio towers or radio towers that get more expensive even if I get all my towers through Lib 4, I'd like to TRY and get those towers into positions to make Blacksites cheaper to contact. Of course, I also don't know where any of these Blacksites are until I progress through the golden path objectives, so even if I can get a radio tower next to one of them, I'm going to have to probably build more when I figure out where the next one is.

I honestly am not sure what you're trying to argue here. "Build radio towers in a way that makes expansion cheaper" doesn't strike me as gamey and it's the strategy players are going to use regardless of how tower price changes. Again, it's kind of oblique to what I'm arguing. Feel free to clarify?

[nmkaplan]

For what it's worth, this is what JL had to say when asked about this right after 1.3 was released:

Does the free radio tower you get from liberation count towards the increasing cost to manually build radio towers?

It does. (The vanilla code just counts how many towers you have when pricing the next one, and I didn't see a compelling balance reason to add a large coding overhead in distinguishing between free and paid-for towers).

[Lyzak]

For what it's worth, this is what JL had to say when asked about this right after 1.3 was released:

Does the free radio tower you get from liberation count towards the increasing cost to manually build radio towers?

It does. (The vanilla code just counts how many towers you have when pricing the next one, and I didn't see a compelling balance reason to add a large coding overhead in distinguishing between free and paid-for towers).

Well, it's always a possibility that no one presented the necessary compelling argument.

Having said that, I've said about all I have to say on the matter. I'm not entitled to a balance change on my whim, I just figured I had something constructive to say about what I perceive as a player. Undoubtedly Pavonis has bigger priorities than saving the player a few hundred supplies, and as I said, I've fistfuls of other more frustrating problems with this game right now. This is just the one I could talk constructively about without going on a mile-long rant.

[Saph7]

I mean... yes? Absolutely you'd want contacting the Blacksite region to be cheap, that's kind of... the point? You try to use radio towers to make expansion into strategic territory more affordable. Whether I have slightly-cheaper radio towers or radio towers that get more expensive even if I get all my towers through Lib 4, I'd like to TRY and get those towers into positions to make Blacksites cheaper to contact. Of course, I also don't know where any of these Blacksites are until I progress through the golden path objectives, so even if I can get a radio tower next to one of them, I'm going to have to probably build more when I figure out where the next one is.

I honestly am not sure what you're trying to argue here. "Build radio towers in a way that makes expansion cheaper" doesn't strike me as gamey and it's the strategy players are going to use regardless of how tower price changes. Again, it's kind of oblique to what I'm arguing. Feel free to clarify?

If radio towers were done as you're suggesting, expanding to the Blacksite would be very fast and very easy. So while we could change it, it'd require a fair amount of rebalancing for no particularly good reason. As you've already pointed out, by any objective standards that puts it exceedingly low on the priority list.

[Manifest]

It's just a gameplay mechanic to begin with.

It's a gameplay mechanic meant to incentivize liberation, isn't it. For it to work by de-incentivizing buying a network tower every time you use it, is also somewhat less of an incentive to liberate for network towers. In a way.