Messages

Since you've mentioned the late, late, endgame encounter of having 12 centipedes dropping in your base several times, I'll say that that particular encounter requires no melee at all.  By that point you should have 12-15 pawns.  4 with EMP and 8 with frags can kill infinity centipedes.  You are only limited by the 35 skip psycasts per caster.  Having 3 casters is extremely reasonable and easy, so let's say the 4 EMP, 8 Frag setup could plausibly manage a drop of 105 centipedes in your base before Skip runs out.  Let's grant some uses of Stun as well for inferno cannon centipedes, so knock it down to 90 before you run out of psyfocus.  And that's with zero melee.

The only time you have a forced engagement at less than 5 cells is if you're in an enclosed room that is 5x5 or smaller.  At that point you do indeed have an option - leave the room.  Or engineer larger rooms.

Grenades do not "misfire up to almost 2 cells".  They have exactly 1 square of scatter.  I just tested it.  I took a pawn with bionics that make them pass out upon an emp hit.  Then I aimed multiple EMP grenades exactly 5 squares away from them and threw 20 grenades.  Zero of them hit the pawn.

Also I'm not saying you can't ever engage centipedes in melee.  Just don't put EMP-affected cybernetics in your melee pawns.  Simple.

Broadshield doesn't require EMP.  If you use Skip to pull the Broadshield wearer next to your firing line and shoot at him, his shield deploys to protect you.

Unless I'm missing something obvious.

Aim 5+ squares away from any pawns = never be hit by your own EMP grenades.

If friendly fire was a reason to not use gear, frags would never get used either.

This bug has been present since before 1.2 released, so it's not new to the unstable build.

The problem is that if you have multiple pawns selected that are equipped with different types of throwables (EMP grenades, Frag Grenades, Molotov Cocktails), you cannot specify a forced fire target on the ground using the "B" key. 

If you select a specific target after pressing "B", the mixed group of throwables fires off just fine. 

If the selected pawns all have the same throwable type, they can force fire on the ground with no problems. 

It's only when you have more than one throwable type selected, and you're firing on the ground that the bug occurs.

The ideal behavior would be to allow multiple types of throwables be targeted on the ground at the same time after hitting "B" and clicking the target square.

Wut.

I have a simple suggestion that I don't think would hurt anyone if implemented.

At certain times, Rimworld enforces a 1x speed modifier on events.  Usually this is done around combat.  I would like to be able to override that enforced slowdown by pressing "2" or "3" on the keyboard to select a higher game speed.

My logic is that if I have enough time to assess the reason for the slowdown, deal with it, and I feel it's suitable to return to full speed, then the game shouldn't stand in my way.

For people who like the current system, they are free to simply not hit "2" or "3" and nothing will change for them from the current setup.

This enforced slowdown is a huge nuisance to me, and this would be a really wonderful quality of life improvement.

With Skip, emp aiming is trivially easy, and with a little caution, you will never hit your own guys.

If you're allowing your guys to throw EMP grenades without aiming at the ground and Skipping mechs onto that point, I don't really know what to say.  That's not a good tactic.

Also, I know this isn't the focus of the thread, but another of the new implants - the circadian half cycler - is tremendously powerful when installed on a dedicated caster.  It allows them to meditate for 24 hours a day, which is 50% more than the 16 hours of meditation of non-augmented pawns.  The 20% consciousness loss doesn't affect psyfocus gain speed either.  The only price you pay is a minor hit to move speed.

A half cycler plus a nuke stomach together make it so a dedicated caster can crank out the new "word of..." psycasts much, much faster than normal.  Trust and Inspiration are the best choices for this, I think.

Edit:

Oh yeah also - nuke stomachs / half cyclers are amazing modifications to put in your disposable tortured artists.  With a tortured artist augmented this way, you can set their schedule to work 24 hours a day.  They will slave away making components and advanced components, no food, no recreation, no sleep, like zombies, until they inevitably have another major mental break, which you can then make a great legendary weapon with.  Deaths from failed carcinoma removals are essentially irrelevant, given that artists usually aren't key fighters and can be easily replaced.  If you wanted to be really efficient, you could pop out the bionics before removing the carcinoma, and slap it into the next disposable artist in line.

Honestly I love the new dual-edged sword bionics.

I disagree that the nuke stomach is bad.  In fact, nutrient paste doesn't *replace* the stomach, it actually synergizes with it extremely well.  Better than cooked meals, actually.  Here's my logic:

With cooked meals, pawns can carry one along with them and eat it in the field.  With paste, they have to return to the dispenser to eat.  When you're talking about a pawn working in the field, doing mining, farming, hunting, or whatever, that trip back to get a shot of nutrient paste is a huge loss of productivity time for them.

Nuclear stomachs drastically reduce the amount of downtime that pawns suffer from nutrient paste runs.  If I'm not mistaken, I believe the nuke stomach means you only need to eat once every two days.  And even then, the meal will probably happen right before or after sleep, further mitigating the travel time.

Cooked meals mitigate this benefit somewhat, because pawns can carry them and eat in the field.  But when you consider the work investment in a cooked meal logistics chain, a Paste/Nuke Stomach setup is far, far more efficient.

Glad you're reporting this.  The animal pulser should definitely work at night, even though the animals are sleeping.

Yeah I agree it's not competitive with the other chemicals right now.  The only real role it plays is that if someone's mood is really, really low, you can apply smokeleaf after they've already used ambrosia, beer, and psychite tea.  That's about it.

From my perspective, that's a fine niche for it to fill.  The problem is that joint production takes forever.  If that was sped up, I'd make wider use of it in the role of a "last ditch" recreational drug.

So I'm curious - I'd like to ask a few questions to see if we're experiencing the same bug, if I may.

1) Did your affected pawn have any health conditions?  Mine had an addiction to Wake-Up.
2) Was your affected pawn carrying any drugs in their inventory when you arrested them?  Mine was carrying Wake-Up.
3) When you arrested your pawns, did any of your arrests cause a "Guest: Departure" result for the other guests?  The bug only happened for me when that result occurred.
4) If you arrest ONLY that one affected pawn, and ignore the other pawns, are you able to sell that pawn under any circumstances?  In my case, if I didn't cause a "Guest: Departure" result, I could sell mine to the Tribute Collector no problem.

Concur, too crippling, affects too many people at once, and has no cure progress indicator. 

Relatedly - does the end of a gourmand binge grant a chance for tortured artist to activate?

Not sure if it's related, but I had a similar (though not exact) thing happen in one of my games.

I arrested three refugees, and whenever any of the arrests caused the remaining refugees to depart the colony, one specific refugee couldn't be given to the tribute collector.

Whenever I'd gift that specific prisoner, nothing would happen.  And then they would walk out of the prison and act like a normal colonist, but they wouldn't appear on the list of colonists at the top of my screen. 

My instance of this bug was with zero mods.