Black Ice VS Reinforced Stone Balance

As it stands right now, Black Ice is king for T3 building due to it being infinitely easier to craft than reinforced stone. I’d like to see some balance brought to this, and have a few suggestions I would like to pitch and discuss.

  1. Simply have Black Ice cost more Black Ice, or have Reinforced stone cost less Hardened Brick.

As it stands right now, Black Ice requires one material that is a raw material with no refinement necessary, and you could even debate that to be 1 1/2 since you can get dry wood without refining it, from the right trees. And then refining it into insulated wood. Leaving it with only Steel Reinforcements as a necessary item that requires being refined from a lesser item.

Reinforced stone has three materials as well required to make it, however ALL THREE are items that MUST be refined, adding a significant amount of time to the production process. As we all know in games like conan, time is quite valuable, so if you have the option to build black ice or reinforced stone, bur reinforced stone will take you around 2-4x as long to produce due to refinement needed, then why would you bother with it considering that it has the same strength as black ice?

  1. Make temperature matter. A lot.
    Black ice insulates against the cold and Reinforced stone protects against the heat. However, right now its pretty negligible how much they do so. If you greatly altered the value of each protection, it simply would not be feasible to have a black ice base in the desert since you would simply have heat stroke all the time, and in the north it wouldn’t make sense to have reinforced stone, as you would simply be frost bitten all the time.

  2. Alter the strength of the final product itself.
    Black ice is easier to make, by a lot, as it stands right now. So why does it have the same strength as reinforced stone? It should be weaker, and reinforced stone should be able to have a higher HP value due to the extra time and material needed for the crafting process.

  3. Alter the defensive properties of each type of building.
    Black ice is ice right? So lets make it take extra damage from grease and demon fire orbs, but extra defense against explosives. Flip it for reinforced stone, not as much damage taken from demon fire orbs, but extra damage taken from explosives.
    The point of this suggestion is not so much about which building is strong against which type of damage, just that there IS a difference between the two so that players will need to make a tactical choice when building or raiding.

  4. Have smelter thralls be given a cost reduction in refinement so that it does not take as much material in the first place to make bricks -> hardened bricks. Credit to @HonkyLips for this suggestion

  5. Some combination of the above?

Let me know if you can think of any other suggestions or if you like or dislike anything I put forth!

5 Likes

But could the Black ice not cool you down as well? It is ice after all.

Damage modifier against grease and fire is an interesting idea.

I think bricks and hardened bricks in general compared to metal are not balanced quite right yet.

2 Likes

It could cool you off, but then we wouldn’t have anything to protect against the cold =p

I think the biggest issue with the bricks is the amount of time it takes to refine all the brick / hardened brick, and then on top of that it is a high cost of hardened brick to actually craft any reinforced stone. If they just made them take less time to craft that could even be a potential way to balance it.

1 Like

The conversion rate is whack also. It’s like 4 stone for 1 brick, 4 bricks for 1 hardened brick…

I’ll have to do some testing but it feels like I get more metal for my metal.

1 Like

Yeah takes 10 stone for 1 brick and then 1 brick and 1 stone consolidant per Hardened Brick, and the stone consolidant also has to be crafted in the cauldron via 2 ichor and 1 twine (if you don’t have an alchemist, otherwise it is 1 ichor and 1 twine)

So 1000 stone will convert into 100 bricks, which then requires further refinement into hardened brick. Or you can just run up to the north and get like 300-400 black ice per node.

Right I come back slot capped with like 14k black ice, in like 10 minutes. =)

Smelter thralls need the same cost reductions as carpenters & alchemists.
Then stone bricks would cost 5 stone instead of 10 for a t4 smelter.

2 Likes

That’s also a really good suggestion, ill add that one to the original post.

it’s an igloo concept I believe

1 Like

I think the same thing. I built a (rough estimate) 100x150 foundation wall around my what I’ll just call a “city” of black ice. Took me MAYBE 3-5 hours to gather all the ingredients and time it took to craft and place. I moved due to clan mates leaving so I stripped the walls and went to the jungle. You can’t build black ice in the jungle without dying. So, I am forced to switch to reinforced stone. I have been working on it for about 3-4 DAYS and have 1 of the 3 platforms which are about 20x20 foundations layed out with a PARTIALLY complete building made of regular brick (because the reinforced stone is a joke to gather and craft) I am not even a third of the way done and honestly it is incredibly draining. I have even made some exceptions using black ice crenulated walls so no one can climb to my place (about 100 of them) I made them almost immediately (granted I had the ingredients on hand) and could have made about 4-500 black ice foundations from scratch. From my experience if you live in the hot regions of the map you are just an idiot (myself included) because the resources and time necessary to make the T3 structures that biome allows is 3-4 even 5Xs harder to make then Black Ice. There does need to be a review on this because it is absolutely appalling having to make even simple defenses out of the Reinforced Stone. I hope they look at this problem and either make Black Ice more expensive (granted the way of getting Black Ice is more dangerous thus you should be awarded more for the risk you took) or make Reinforced Stone cheaper (Granted AGAIN Reinforced Stone is made of a TON and TONS of the very basic material in the game.

Interesting suggestion, makes me want to ask the following question: Does the temperature modification protection effect only kick in when you build shelters? What about shelters of mixed materials? (Would you have the tactical option of mixing black ice and reinforced stone to lets say build a more defensively strong wall that would require the careful application of both fire and explosions to melt through? )

Personally I would add harden brick to both of the variants to solve the problem!

I agree with this balance!

That’s brilliant add hardened brick to the black ice and then drop the insulated wood maybe. I mean it calls it wooden reinforced black ice but it looks like stone or brick