Bio Engineer Archive

Wow...this is breathtaking...and really an amazing amount of energy for the good of our profession. Thank you so much for such a constructive and fascinating post. Really quite a mindful (I liken it to my compulsive fascination of quantum mechanics, astronomy, and cosmology with the added bonus of being completely unable to understand differential equations or integrals). I follow and don't follow, so I want to jump out with my naivete and really try to understand deeper. Point-by-point:

• Obviously I know what HAM is, but when you use it in this equation are you using the maximum value (be it H, A, or M?), or are you using an average? I realize that the H & M values are off right now, but how about the critters on live right now? That would help this non-master-scout with interpreting CLs .


• When we see the numbers for resists, are these percentages of resists? Some of the screenies I've seen actually list them as just plain numbers (i.e., "7" instead of "7%"). Also...how do resists work in practice? If you have a 45% kinetic resist, does that mean that you can lessen the damage of a blow to your HAM by 45%? I've always been curious about this but always forget to post that question.


• Are your calculations based on wild animals or solely on BE-made animals? If the latter, how are our critters comparing to the wild ones of equal CL? This is key to me since the posts to-date are not clear to me as to how our CL's will compare to wild. Are our critters finally more powerful than those CHs can tame?


• How does armor affect resistance to attacks? Why would it cost HAM in other words...shouldn't armor help you survive an attack better? If armor drops your max HAM, isn't the benefit of HAM a draw? And how does light, medium, or heavy armor (though the latter doesn't appear in-game at all to my knowledge) specifically affect critters/people?

I so appreciate the insight here. I am very excited about the clone stuff (since I'm not a Tissue guy--purely clones). Our new critters are truly cool .

You are failing to include damage output and specials which also seem to effect the level of the creature.

Well i stumbled across an oddity today which actually made me realise that there is another factor at work when determining the CL ratings based on the stats for the critter. I went out on the Endor for the TC to gather some data for those calculations I think I discovered which allow for an accurate estimation of CL ratings and should be helpful when we're making clones.

The oddity arrose because of another topic on the CH forum about the two Merek kings:

• Blood-drenched merek king
  
• 35% energy
  
• 10% kinetic / blast / stun / restraint / heat / cold / acid / electricity
  
• no vulnerabilities
  
• light armor
  
• 13,000 HAM
  
• CL56 (cannot confirm this myself saddly)

• King Merek Harvester
  
• 60% kinetic
  
• 100% heat
  
• 50% cold / acid
  
• 5% blast / stun / restraint / electricity
  
• vulnerable to energy
  
• light armor
  
• 11,000 HAM
  
• CL50 (also cannot confirm myself)

Now they said that the new system is utterly useless because it's clear that the harvester has higher protection than the other king but has a lower CL rating. Now of course anyone who takes a decent look at these two can see there's alot of reasons why the BDM King is higher than theKing MH. The point I noticed though is that the BDM King reads as a CL40 critter when you look at the resistances. I'll just quickly summerize here but it works out like this:

(35x3)+(10x3)+(10x1)+(10x1)+(10x1)+(10x2)+(10x1)+(10x2)+(10x1) = 225

*please note that I've amended heat and acid to x2 because they are slightly more common than other types, this means the system is more accurate I've noticed.

Now we know that light armor also accounts for around 75-100 resistance stat bonuses plus it negates the +4000 HAM bonus usually given to CL50 critters. However that should mean that this King is around 11500 HAM like the Harvester King. But it's higher. Now gaining 2000 HAM by trading 200 resistance points from the allowed quota doesn't seem quite right since lower level mobs have gained far more HAM from a far smaller sacrifice. Then it hit me, the BDM King isn't vulnerable to ANYTHING. The sucker is totally protected against almost every form of damage possible ontop of being armoured as well.

So what I think your seeing here is that when something has utterly no vulnerabilities they lose a certain amount of their resistance equota, in this case it would appear as if it has taken armor twice thus it's around 100 points short of what it should be after donating some to be 2000 HAM higher than normal.

This is important information for people making generally tough critters, make sure they have some weaknesses otherwise your hampering how high you can push the other stats by a significant amount.

Very insightful of you... once again my hat is off to you Tal-N

Damned Tal, very VERY nice
/applaud

Oh and while I'm here I'll just apply the calculations to this sampling of higher level critters and see how things fall as I go along so you can see I'm being fair I like this first one cause it's gonna be interesting to see if heat and acid protection is really x2 and not x1 as I originally considered.

• Blurrg Sand crawler (CL40)


• 45% kinetic / energy


• 100% heat / electricity


• 20% cold


• 30% blast / restraint


• vulnerable to stun and acid

(40x200)+3000 = 11,000 estimate. Actual HAM is roughly 10,000. Remember of course CL20 gains a +1000 HAM bonus therefore CL40 gains +3000. On the whole I'd say the calculations for the HAM are very accurate via this means.

Resistance quota should be around 400-450. Estimate is as follows.

• (45x3)2


• 100x2


• 100x1


• 20x1


• (30x1)2


• -10


• -20


• total = 620

So that is clearly too high even with a drop of 1000 from the HAM, if I apply x1.5 for heat and acid the results come out as... 575 .. if you then drop things further to mean that heat and acid are considered the same as other damage types then its ... 530 ... now considering how they can get up to 450 typically then an extra 80 points in exchange for 1000 HAM still seems off. One thing though is that acid is generally a widespread vulnerability in the game so perhaps they consider it as a higher weighted type. Say x2 for example.

To see if this is true then you need something that is 100% resistant to acid, so lets take the Spitting Rawl.

• Spitting Rawl (CL24)


• 30% energy


• 100% acid


• 10% kinetic / blast / restraint


• vulnerable to stun / heat / cold / electricity

So it should have an estimated 240-300 stat quota..

• 30x3


• 100x2


• (10x1)2


• 10x2


• -40


• total = 290

so that works..

...out as 520 quota for the CL40 Sand crawler. Hmmm, that doesn't sound right either.

Gonna try and find another CL40ish critter cause there might not be a normal increase as the CL ratings rise, if a CL40 can exceed 450 quota then perhaps the CL50 ones can exceed 550 too without penalties. I'm gonna check.

Keep up the good work Tal.

I would have thought Damage Per Second and special attacks, particularly poison, disease and knockdown will definately need to be worked into the calcualtion somehow.

This is using the current system as an example buta Bile Drenched Quenker with its poison can take on and beat a Graul Mauler if it can get its poison going early enough, and with the ability to tell a creature to use its special attacks this will become especially important.

Annago

Yeah I'm sure it's bound to make a difference, however it's clearly from all evidence a very minor one. The majority of the CL appears based around the resistances and the HAM because if you look at peoples pets these are what has changed. The damage the critters cause and their specials are unaltered.

I'm not disputing that specials are important, hell I explained for ages that a Guf drolg can crush a cowardly gurreck because of it's special attack, but I'm saying that looking at this system they haven't made specials all that important to the CL rating.

Great thread Tal-N, thanks for sharing. I'm glad to see that specials won't be effecting CL, but I was wondering if the reverse is so... on the talthazar site the 3 examples shown with low CL all have just 1 special, but the CL 35 Rancor has 2. Is this a known result or just dependant on the samples used?

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EvilJonUk wrote:

So you want to change your height, weight and features?
No I'm afraid as a highly skilled medic and master of genetic engineering I can't help you. Apparently I should have been wiggling my butt in a cantina to learn how to do that!

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Very OT, but sadly, no, even as a Dancer/BE who has done a good bit of butt wiggling, I still can't do these things. Bump for the BE involvement in ID requests in sigs tho! *ducks as Tal-N throws things at the mention of human genetic tampering on top of being OT*

Actually there was a topic people loved a few months ago about allowing BEs to have a process to change a players species when they got bored of their current ones. They'd have to step into a machine that looks alot like that cloning machine which is highly expensive and needs multiple professions to produced the components for. The bio-engineer then performs a process which turns the player from what they currently are to a default appearence in another species which they want. The process also causes 99% wounds and alot of BF meaning that after your done with them they need to also visit an entertainer and doctor for healing plus they'd need to see an ID to have the default appearence changed into exactly what they want to appear as for that species.

The same could be done with gender as well however species changes are alot more desirable and will become even more so when the new player species are added next year and people don't want to delete characters they spent so much time building up on a certain server with all their friends on it.

Yes, I've read that before and I think it's a killer idea... did this ever get mentioned to the devs? Is it on our list the other Tal asked for a while ago? It seems like it should be if it got so much attention...

Was my question about specials stupid or just covered in other threads I should be reading? o.o