[DEVBLOG#307] Security infographics! (Patreon)

Hey everyone and welcome to a brand new development blog! This time, I'm planning to focus on explaining some of the stuff coming in Vanilla Furniture Expanded - Security remake, and to show you the infographics already done!

Vanilla Furniture Expanded - Security needed a remake desperately. It was an old mod, and believe it or not, RimWorld balancing has changed with each consecutive major version update and DLC. Our mod hasn't, though, and even though mini-turrets were nerfed, our military turrets weren't, and were outperforming everything.

The plan was to ideally not remove anything substantial, and to always offer some replacement. Some things, however, needed to go, particularly the decoy turrets - which were incredibly overpowered. I know many of you will be in shambles now but it had to be done.

When remaking the mod, I intentionally didn't look at ANY stats of the original mod. If you try to rebalance something, but only edit what you've done without starting from scratch, at best you're slapping on a bandaid on the problem. I intended to fix it completely.

Just like with Vanilla Weapons Expanded, I sat down and made complex infographics with calculations to help me determine the power level of different turrets. Then, I inserted base game turrets into the sheet to get something I very smartly call a baseline.

With the baseline set, it was time to start coming up with stats for our turrets. I knew I want to add a military turret, which is meant to be a high-grade mini-turret. I knew I wanted a double autocannon, but I didn't want it to be better than a single auto-cannon. I knew I want a charge turret, but I also knew I want it to actually be very effective.

And so I typed in different values to try to get where I wanted to get, and at all times I compared the outcome to mini-turrets, autocannon turrets, uranium slug turrets and so on.

All in all, I think the balancing of the mod is in a much better place now. Nothing is overpowered. Nothing eclipses base game content. I want a mini-turret to be as viable as a charge complex, so to say. Different costs, different usability scenarios, but always a choice. That's the underlying mission of Vanilla Expanded. Expand the content offering, but don't 'remove' vanilla content. By 'remove', I mean eclipsing.

If the double autocannon is simply always better than a single autocannon, what's the point of a single autocannon at all?

Let's take a look at all the infographics and the content coming.

Now, some content is still being designed, so it's not quite on the infographics yet. For example, a non-lethal turret! But we're also looking into other cool defensive solutions if you have some other VE mods. After all, cross-mod compatibility in our series is very important to us.

Let me know what you think about the changes you see here in the comments down below!