Starbound

Starbound

NekiFU
Lasagna 6 Apr, 2023 @ 9:31pm
feedback after my FU playthrough.
here is my quick review after getting to Tier6-7 content in a FU playthrough, wall of text incoming.

Neki is like playing FU on hardmode.

The movement speed bonus while very nice early game doesn't really cancel out the moderate damage & absolutely massive durability penalties. this works fine for early game stuff like overworld exploration or early game dungeons where you can dodge everything or parry/block the things you can't. late game dungeons like the FU version of the ruin fight, the precursor mission, and delta freya are just getting 1 or two hit killed by anything that deals physical damage unless you dedicate your armor and EPP to pure tank stats. I have never had a more difficult ruin fight than with this mod.

While very thematically appropriate the weapon buffs are pretty weak IMO, fist weapons kinda suck against anything you can't stunlock (not to mention have way less variety than more standard weapon types) though the actual racial neki claws are pretty decent until you can find a force gauntlet.

You asked elsewhere what weapon mastery did? it's actually varies between weapon types, for sniper rifles it's a small crit chance boost and a ammo capacity boost (if you use a rifle with the FU ammo system instead of just energy costs). 10% sniper mastery is pretty small, considering the neki's built in damage penalty and half of the bonus is basically wasted where you're conflicted between using a pure energy based rifle to leverage nekis massive energy pool or a ammo based rifle to take advantage of mastery. As a personal preference i do prefer races with 3 different weapon bonuses (or more generic bonuses that apply to a variety of weapon types) to add more variety to a playthrough.

And probably the most unexpected weakness of the neki is the diet restrictions, in Starbound cooking Milk is used in everything at least almost all of the high-tier non-robot buffing foods require dairy and the that don't require fruit. and yes I'm aware you don't intend to change this.

Alright now onto the positives, thematically it's very strong with things like the fist weapon / sniper mastery (was that an intentional nod to IRL cats having poor close range vision but good long range vision?) and the dairy/fruit allergy is also appropriate despite the gameplay problems i elaborated on above. going fairly fast and jumping high at the start of the game is very fun at least before techs make it obsolete.
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Showing 1-6 of 6 comments
Juni  [developer] 26 Apr, 2023 @ 10:37am 
Whoa, I only just noticed your thread, so sorry.

Thank you very much for the extensive write-up, it will help me a lot in properly balancing their stats going forward, and I appreciate your attention to detail.

As you might have guessed by now, I haven't really ever done a proper FU playthrough beyond fairly early-game stuff, which is in part to blame for stats turning out to to be this inadequate/obsolete for endgame content, since I'm outright clueless about it.

Thank you for detailing the Sniper Rifle mastery. I did consider switching the mastery % between the claws and the rifles, and just slightly increasing the base damage of all of the claws to compensate. Additionally, I've recently added racial T2-T4-T6 armors which boost their masteries further - it would be amazing if you could try those out and let me know how balanced or unbalanced their stats feel.

Overall, as I've been told numerous times by FU's project lead, my racial stats will never be truly balanced till I actually play their mod properly, and I'm beginning to see what he means by that.

If you have any more insights or suggestions in this regard - I would love to hear them, so don't hesitate to wall-of-text me anytime :)

Edit: Just to clarify, the stats ARE strictly balanced according to FU's official balance sheet, what I mean by "truly balanced" is in more of a "make for a fun-to-play experience" sense.
Last edited by Juni; 26 Apr, 2023 @ 11:06am
Lasagna 27 Apr, 2023 @ 9:46am 
I do second the recommendation to do a full progression playthrough with this mod installed to judge the balance, it's very possible you won't agree with all of my suggestions and that's ok!

I haven't gotten a chance to play around with your new racial armor sets yet, but if it do ill let you know.

I know my original post was very critical but that's how I am when i review anything, In terms of balance (in the "fun to play" category) this is far from the worst I've seen.

If i do another playthrough as a neki ill be sure to give an updated review.
Juni  [developer] 29 Apr, 2023 @ 4:31am 
I've made some slight stat adjustments in the latest update based on your feedback :)
I know this is VERY old, but, it feels usually FU players just abuse black "?" 10th level planets merchants for durability and damage (even without it, if you legally walk on it, you can find a 10th tier armor seller which would be better than the 7th last craftable tier densium thing), so i think only speed matters if you also use easy mode, which fixes hunger issue and also teleporting from lava level easily (it is way too boring to do the legal ways of getting out of this situation)
Last edited by Lake Pizza; 3 Mar @ 1:53pm
Juni  [developer] 3 Mar @ 7:22pm 
If I understand correctly, that is something that should be directed at FU in general, rather than this patch specifically... Neki have nothing to do with any of that, do they? :(
Lasagna 4 Mar @ 8:02am 
not sure why my thread got necro'd after a year and a half to complain about FU balancing.
Last edited by Lasagna; 4 Mar @ 8:02am
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