How it is balanced right now is an issue, as there is no way to tell how much is enough painkillers without killing you and generally doing it by trial and error.
Which makes it seriously unbalance, something that already had very harsh punishment for failing.
Can you outline the actual sequence of actions you took that led to death? You geet fedback about whether you have enough painkiller each time you attempt to install a CBM, so if you just do:
Take painkiller, wait, attempt installation
repeat.
It will just work.
If you skip the "wait" part, it's not going to end well, which is why the CBM failure installation messages warn that painkillers might not have fully taken effect yet.
CBM are supposed to be a kit of the bionic and all the tools needed to install it.
A brand new CBM looted from a locked cage in a lab should not need anaesthetic or any kind of tool to install it.
A salvaged or butchered bionic out of a corpse, should need anaesthetic and tools to install
This is your opinion, and not one I agree with, the whole concept of "self-installing CBM" or "self-contained CBM installation kit" is going away, the only reason it was implimented that way was because it was simpler to do it that way, and now we're adding elements that flesh out the concept instead of everything being abstracted out.
So far installing CBM already made almost obligatory to use any kind of intelligence enhancing drug to reduce the fail chances. Which is what the majority of players did, as it has become the current metagame of installing CBMs. As the consequence of a bad installation range from a faulty bionic, mutation or death.
Yea this needs to be fixed too, especially considering the absurd examples of "inteligence-enhancing drugs" the game uses.
This seems to be a rather lazy and incomplete implementation of distinguishing between low-difficulty RNG based butchered bionics or hard-difficulty looted CBMs proper.
I understand the need between killing a zombie technician with a rock in a sock, butcher it with a pocket knife and getting a CBM; and having to get a lab card, deal with security turrets, manhacks and security bots, hack a CBM display case to get a CBM.
That's not what the change is about, it's about fleshing out CBM from realism and resource consumption points of view, it was massively over-abstract in both areas.
Plus painkillers being as vague as they are at telling the player how much is enough, and that there's a fine line between enough painkillers and "your breath stops completely", having specialized anaesthetic would be needed for the current state of CBMs.
The threshold for CBM installation is 100, the threshold for death is 240, you have to take 2.4x as many painkillers as needed in order to reach the death threshold. I tested (I know, shocking, right?) with several different sets of drugs, and every time, simply alternating taking a dose and waiting 5 minutes before trying to install led to successful installation with no death. Outside of a specific and repeatable example of death from a seemingly safe approach, I have to assume you're either being careless, not respecting the painkiller ramp-up delay, or being paranoid about the potential for death as opposed to actually encountering it.
My guess is that people who have died just continously ate pills until it worked and OD, instead of waiting and checking between pills
That is a symptom of the problem, though:
Player only gets "do drugs" message, but doesn't get any "doing another heroin may get you to OD" one.
That's working as intended, you don't get a "doing another heroin may get you to OD" IRL, it's one of the major risks faced by users of narcotics in particular. In fact our model is many times kinder than IRL since we don't have bad drugs, drug tolerance, dosage mstakes, compulsive drug use, allergies, drug interactions, embolisms, or a number of other potentially fatal issues related to drug use.
And then there is the part where OD isn't just few hours of unconsciousness, vomiting and a day of headache, but instant death with no warning.
THIS is an actual problem, tracked here:
https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/1291I just promoted it to 0.D blocker, it should have been before, but it is now.