This makes me sad. Seems kind of redundant to give them 200hp but then they take like 500% more damage to unprotected limbs than any other class. They should have some kind of innate armor, you know because they are fricken terminators essentially. The game makes it appear that steel body parts are just as tender as flesh. That's quite absurd.

Yeah, they are oddly weak at first but once you get them properly trained very little can stand in their way. The way I see it is that they are already able to survive acid, weather effects, and will never starve so why not make them a bit weaker at first. Go find yourself a cannibal, cage it in a player owned building then let it out to fight your Skellie. If you get knocked down get right back up ASAP. The Skellie will get strong pretty quickly. Oh, and lock the door behind you to keep the cannibal from escaping.

They seem relatively strong in the beginning due to their large health pool, but fleshbags supersede them when you can afford nice armor on them, which isn't that far into the game. Like if your skelly gets hit in the head by a big hit, it takes away over 100 points, whereas your armored guy takes only 20 or so damage from a similar hit due to damage mitigation from armor.

So it seems the longer you play, the worse skeletons get and the better everyone else gets. Even the benefit of no food requirement diminishes to the point of uselessness, as it's not hard to find food and Cats are easy to make. Additionally, the Skeleton health bonus also diminishes as you can buy prosthetic limbs with 265 health. So they really don't have a lot going for them apart from the coolness factor.

I think Skellies should just have some innate armor and an energy requirement like oil, batteries or power cells. They seem to be currently operating on a perpetual energy source and they don't need oil or some kind of lubricant ? I hope they redesign them. They are really fun to play from a roleplaying perspective.

Btw that's a pretty cool idea to level toughness. I might give that a crack. Cheers!

You do make some good points. I also agree that the Skeletons should be reworked a bit. You just gave me the idea to go back into the FCS and work on some mods to tweak Skeleton stats and see if I can make an energy "food source" that they may need every once in a while. Thanks for inspiring me to play with the mod kit again.

Hah! That would be awesome. I would be very keen to playtest it if you did something like that. It just makes sense to me that robots would require oil so as not to seize up. I suppose someone could argue that they are self-lubricating, but then again that doesn't seem to fit into the depiction of current technology in the game world.

I don't really have a clear image of how they should be balanced, but ultimately, I think they should at least be moderately more robust than a human wearing medieval armor. I do find it cool how they are susceptible to blunt force trauma and resilient to cutting, that works for me, as does their quick recovery mechanic.

I personally think oil or energy cells would compliment the class nicely and possibly help balance them out as a class once their integrity issues have been ironed out.

One last thing I was taking into consideration is that, Skeletons are a rare breed. From what I've read there only exists a handful of them in the game- this I think could afford them some flexibility when it comes to balancing.

I have no problem testing and tweaking a mod again-and-again until it works.

I did think it was very odd that they can bleed oil and somehow get more as though they can produce it themselves. I know the easiest thing to do would be to increase their limb health with a simple mod that would only take a minute to make, but I like the idea of giving them a natural damage resistance that is higher than the other races much more.

Aside from a couple of places I know you to recruit them, they are pretty rare in most of the known world. I have only seen maybe three wandering around in the wild alone. The first one I ever recruited was Sadneil. "He" is now the leader of one of my long distance scouting groups.

Yeah, innate resistance would make a lot of sense. Though the combined mitigation from both armor and innate resistance might prove difficult to balance. Having a potential 100% mitigation on the two active slots could be problematic. Like if you gave innate resistance universally to all limbs, you would be limited to a relatively low cap as to not approach total mitigation on Legs and Chest. This makes me inclined to think that higher limb health might be the only solution. That to me seems a pretty safe bet in terms of balance purely because meatsacks can have 265 limb health AND full armor mitigation. No food requirement isn't very good compensation for that in my eyes.

You've had better luck than me. I've only found Sadneil. Sadly I've not encountered any other Tinheads during my travels. Word has it that there is a total of 6 in the game that can be recruited.


Edit: I was just checking to see if there are any existing mods that attempt to fix skellies. There was one called Buffed Skeletons but it was way overboard- 400 limb health and buffed Strength. There was another that seems more balanced, it's called Skeleton Upgrade modules Reworked. It doesn't raise health but gives subtle boosts to different attributes. I'm installing it now. .

If you do not mind, let me know some time what your thoughts are on the Skeleton Upgrade Modules Reworked mod.

Will do. I've been stuck running between Admag and Squin for the last few days trying to get some research done and there aren't any Tech shops around these parts to buy some of those modules. I'm not far away from the Hiver's, maybe they have some.

Well, not even the Hiver's sell them. Might try my luck at Black Desert.

Edit: Finally got back to BDC and the trader had one Attack module and one Stealth module. I installed the attack module which gives 20% bonus to dex along with +10 attack/defense, it also has -20% modifiers to basically everything not melee related except for martial arts, that also takes a hit. Cost was 17,000. Seems pretty legit so far.

What I don't really understand is why my attack speed and block speed actually go down when I equip it. But the total value at the bottom goes up.

After some more gameplay with skellies I think I might be guilty of downplaying the effectiveness and importance of thier limb recovery mechanic. Which is to say that they do have very minimal downtime from injuries, especially from cutting attacks. Even their blunt wounds heal much faster than any trauma sustained by biological races. That, and the rate of limb degradation is so mild that I rarely ever needed repair beds.

There are some hairy moments when your skelly takes massive head trauma, like from harpoon turrets. But I think on average, the overall limb health bonus pays dividends in combat more often than not.

Regarding the Modules, they seem fairly balanced to me. I would have liked to see different grades of modules and the cost increased at least two-fold, with the existing modules serving as top-tier. Just seems like a really strong item to have and probably should be gated for new characters, I think a cost increase would accomplish that.

Yeah, the skellies do usually outlast other troops, unless of course they get bopped on the head twice, but RNG would really have to be hating on you for that to happen frequently. I also underestimated the value of limb health on limbs that do get coverage.

I think this type of balance hinges greatly off of the weapon phsyics. I mean if the majority of mobs used weapons/animations that had a propensity of targeting your head it would present a huge issue for the skeletons, but that doesn't really appear to be the case, at least not that I have noticed.

It might even be good that certain weapons/attacks do have a bias to landing head shots, as we can't ecpect skeletons to be strong against everything.

Regards the modules, thanks for reminding me to adjust the prices for them. Out of curisosity, are you the author of that mod ?

No, I am not the author of that mod. I have had the urge lately to get back into playing the game more and making some mods to adjust some of the issues I have with some items in the game such as the robot limbs.

You did help bring back some memories of the few times my Skellies were taken down by a lot of hits to the head and chest from groups that got a lot of lucky hits in.

I think one thing does help the Skellies is that most of the attacks in the game target the limbs and most hits that could even cause a Shek to lose a limb just hinders a Skellie for a bit.

Some of those prosthetic limbs are pretty strong. Those 290 health legs and 220 health arms with stats bonuses would appeal to anyone I would think. Currently playing custom Dark hive start so I'll probably have a need for some pretty soon.

I also installed this Nekos Economic overhaul mod to make the game a bit harder, but it's got some really whacky edits that don't make any senseto me. Like basic first aid kits are worth 700, ration packs are 11,000 with 300 nu, but Grohan is 75 nu and costs 247. Even just a crappy small backpack is 10,000, 20,000 in my game with edited trader mark-ups.

Also I installed Gen-mod, which does add some cool stuff. But unfortunately it has changes that makes the game too easy and forgiving. So I've been busy reverting all that cheesy stuff.

Couple of other mods I'm trying out:

Attack slots x2
Bigger badder bosses
New weapon Dissemination mod
Reactive world
OMO's armour for the world
GenMod - CCO Hive starts - (currently playing this, but edited it to start with just a Dark hive prince)