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So, for quite a long time the 'meta' for an overly efficient colony has been to cram all your storage and production into a giant-ass room and then simply negate the penalties of the room with a handful of high beauty, high value statues. Looks terrible, makes little sense in game or out, and kind of makes a mockery of the room rules altogether.

I have a relatively simple suggestion for making more sense of this:

1) For EACH tile with a negative penalty in the room, reduce the effective Beauty and Wealth of every object in the room by -N% (say -5%) cumulative.

2) Crowding a room with furniture over a given threshold has a similar effect. Lets call the crowding threshold 50%. Every Y% above that threshold inflicts a 2*Y% crowding penalty to beauty/wealth.

3) Now calculate the beauty and wealth values in the room by this cumulative multiplier.

4) Then apply the usual -X penalties for ugly items & tiles.

EG: A room has 2 statues worth 150 beauty each, and 20 floor tiles with a bonus of 2 each. Total beauty 340.

The 12 tiles of the 20 tile room are occupied (60%) by furniture/building objects. This exceeds the crowding threshold by 10% so an initial penalty ((crowded%-threshold%)*2) of -20% is applied to all positive beauty/wealth values found in the room.

Additionally, there are currently 6 tiles of dirt in the room, each of which in addition to their -5 beauty value (which also negates the tile bonus of +2), also apply a -5% mod to the beauty and wealth of the room, for another -30%.

The final effective beauty of the room is (150+150+28)*50% = 164 + (-5*6) = 134, down from its original 340.

Rather than mopping the blood off the floor, the colonists add another 150 pt statue to the room - but this occupies another tile, increasing the crowding to 65% and the penalty by another 10% (total -60% penalty now), so the value goes to ((150*3 + 28)*40%) - 30 = 191 beauty.

Adding a fourth statue would make the room crowded enough that its beauty would actually DROP, and it only gets worse from there - a completely crowded room can never benefit from beauty or wealth values, nor a warehouse full of junk and corpses.

Note that Colony wealth is not affected by this - just the value for purposes of calculating room wealth and impressiveness.

Also note that several negatives in a single square do NOT each count towards the beauty penalty multiplier, they still stack their usual flat negative penalties, but 20 stacks of blood in a single tile do not effectively annihilate the room's benefits - you'd need 20 tiles of blood spread thru the room to have that effect.

Artwork would generally be useless on a dirt floor or warehouse, due to the large number of negative mods present. Cooking dinner inside a meat-locker would be about as unpleasant as it sounds.

In order to make a room 'beautifiable' you'd generally need to floor it at a minimum - otherwise you're better off putting your artwork outside where people can actually appreciate it. In that case only the negative values within the artwork's effect radius will count against its beauty.

Because the beauty penalty multiplier for 'ugly' tiles is calculated in a flat manner regardless of the size of the room, excessively large rooms also become difficult to beautify, unless kept meticulously clean and clear of objects that trigger penalties, creating a better balance between size and function.

I have to say, the recent caravan loading patch made an enormous difference from my point of view.

Caravan loading in my colony rarely takes more than 1-2 in-game hours at this point, even with scores of items being loaded?

In my current colony I took a quest to house an evangelist in my colony for a few weeks. After causing a few fights, I arrested and then enslaved him. His equipment all remained locked after enslavement, making it impossible to remove, or apply any slave management gear (collars, harnesses, whatever).

Repro steps:
1) Accept quest that grants you a temporary pawn with locked gear.
2) Arrest the pawn.
3) Note that you cannot strip the imprisoned pawn, even if they are rendered unconscious.
4) Enslave the pawn.

Result: Gear remains permanently locked on the enslaved pawn.
Expected Result: Slaves don't get to decide what they do or do not wear...

Sry, don't have any that far back. Will try to sequester saves in the future for things like this.

My newly printed android colonist made a bond with a newly born devilsheep lamb. They were both born the same day.

Just one day later a Scyther from a large scale mechanoid drop managed to slip into the barn with my retreating animals during the chaos, and slaughtered the helpless little lamb before my Thrumbos crushed its evil robotic frame into so many plasteel fragments.

It was a hard lesson for my newborn android to have to digest in her first few days of existence. <sigh>

Having entered it's 5th year since three general purpose androids crash landed on the surface of an unknown world, the settlement called the Quantum Confederacy had reached the limits of their relationship with the Exodus Imperium.

The two remaining androids found themselves unsuited to deal with the arcane diplomatic complexities of the royals who held the key to untold power here on the fringes of the galaxy, and so they set themselves and the followers who had gathered to their settlement to a singular task: To create the Perfect leader for their colony.

They set about designing a new class of android - a being capable of both the diplomatic elegance and beauty demanded of a high noble, as well as the sheer physical and mental power to stand before the human courts from a position of strength. After a year of careful design and labor, Yuriel Dracos - the Dragon Princess - stepped forth from the bio-printers constructed expressly for her development, and into the universe - a universe which would never be the same.


I hadn't really played with the android printing process before, and when I realized that I really didn't want to advance either of my current nobles past the Praetor noble rank (they're some of my best crafters/growers), I realized this was a great opportunity to try out the android printer and design a 'perfect' high noble build with all the techs I've invested in it.

I'm also running with Genetic Rim, so needless to say she's been outfitted with some of the most powerful implants and tweaks I can generate for her. So far she's not even a year old and is an utter terror in direct combat and once she breaks out into the upper noble tiers with some of the psychic abilities available there and manage to get her some legendary weapons she's going to be off the hook altogether.

Of course if she ever suffers a berserk mental break putting her down is going to be damn near impossible - she's psychically hypersensistive so the last time I had a bad female drone I actually had to sedate her. But hey, when you play into the blatant manufactured-ultra-being anime trope, you're going in for all of it.

-Vastin

In my current game (six years in) I'm getting buried under monument decrees - I have a single noble who has announce 3 fairly massive monument decrees in the last 19 game days, so at this point all 3 are active, and this is coming off a gigantic all-hands-quadrum-long project that I had to create for my OTHER noble just prior - and these aren't even high nobles - just dame/praetor level ones.

Game balance wise this isn't particularly sustainable. Facing hordes of mechaniods is one thing, but having to completely dedicate my colony's economy to shuffling massive quantities of stone around for the forseeable future is another. It's frankly looking *much* easier to cancel my noble's title and re-title her from scratch than it would be to fulfill so many massive decrees.

I think that part of the problem game balance wise is that the game rates these monument projects as fairly easy/low value because the material value of stone blocks is so low - but the reality is that in terms of labor and construct time it would take considerably less effort to fulfill demands for cataphract armor than it would to build all these monuments - to say nothing of the map space they take up! They should be valued far higher than they are in terms of event difficulty by the system generating them.

In short, it's certainly not a bug, but it seems like a pretty major balance issue.

Uhm, otherwise I really like the monument quests/decrees - very cool concept. They're just kind of flying off the handle here.

EDIT: Oh, nevermind, relinquishing your title does not cancel decrees, and your No-Longer-Noble character still suffers from the decree ignored effects. Guess I'll just have to keep her in a crypto-sleep coffin for a couple months instead. <sigh>

EDIT: And a couple days further and a fourth monument decree. This is getting silly.

In this case the instrument was certainly *physically* accessible at the start of the concert. My colony layout is a rather heavily gridded open layout so pawns never have difficulty getting anywhere in particular unless it has been marked as inaccessible - certainly not the case here, as that throne room is my main public rec area.

I cannot say for certain that another pawn did not have it temporarily prioritized for use at that moment, but there certainly wasn't a pawn interacting with the correct instrument by the time I noticed the issue and took my screenshot, which was quite soon after the concert started.

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once."
Julius Caesar, Act II, Sc. II

Nobles should ALWAYS try to hold speeches when downed and bleeding out.

Instruments are treated more like statues than regular furniture. You must construct them in a Smithy first, then place them once they are complete - they will never appear in the usual structure/furniture build menus.

Does that help?

- Vastin

One of my two nobles held a concert, and everyone EXCEPT that noble showed up in the correct throne room.

The noble holding the concert went to her friend's throne room to play instead - both rooms have harps.

Everyone counted as attended regardless (including the noble in question), and it worked fine other than her going to the wrong room/instrument.

Yeah, not a problem. I originally thought it was a bug just because the changeover from low level to high level was so dramatic. I got ground radar pretty early because I was playing in a low-metal environment and my early colonists really couldn't find anything with it at all over extended periods.

My researchers apparently got distracted researching real things for a long time, until they eventually got back around to using the thing after they hit 17+ and it just started spamming deposits, so I thought it was a bug until I looked at it enough to figure out the math.

Alas, the savegame is too large for the forum (over 10000kb).

However I think that the way the Random Find Interval multiplies into the Find Chance results in a roughly exponential increase in real find rate for advanced operators.

Basically it seems like a 19-20 operator has a decent chance of spamming out finds every day or two, while an operator in the 1-10 range can take seasons for a single find.

So taking some screenshots and doing spreadsheet math, it looks like the Random Find Interval is basically 3/(research speed) days - pretty sure about this value.

Along similar lines, the guaranteed find % seems to increase by ~.007*(research speed) per hour? Not as sure about this because testing it adequately with my low research colonists is painfully slow and non-granular, time-wise.

The part I'm REALLY guessing on is the random find chance - I'm assuming it's just a check against whatever your current 'guaranteed' find chance is at each random check interval.

Anyway, if both those formulae hold, then a high level researcher gets exponentially more hits, because they not only have better base odds - but they check far more often as well! The fact that a successful find resets your find chance doesn't really seem to change the math meaningfully.

So... yeah. A level 19 researcher may find close to one deposit a day - around 67x what a level 2 researcher will find, and probably somewhere around 3-4x as fast as a level 10 researcher. This looks about right given what I'm seeing in the playthrough.

I'd guess it's not a bug per-se, just that if my assumptions above are correct, you really don't want to bother with scanning until your researchers are at least into the 15+ range, because their speed skyrockets as they get up there (especially with bonuses to research speed).

I've had a problem with all of my harvest decrees where the amount harvested only counts ~1/2 of the actual harvested value towards the decree.

My current game shows a current smoke leaf decree, requiring 1050 Smokeleaf. I now have 1220 Smokeleaf in inventory, and the quest shows 592 harvested. Could not attach the save file due to size (15,942kb).

I had no smokeleaf inventory or planted industry prior to the decree, so pretty much every smokeleaf currently in inventory should have counted towards the decree.

Note that I DO have mods running in this game, though none of them should be relevant to a decree involving a core plant type such as this one.

I've had two issues with the ground penetrating scanner so far:

1) The time it took before revealing its first ore deposit was far longer than expected (~2 game years with frequent use)

2) After finally finding the first deposit it has now gone crazy, revealing new deposits every day for several days running.