Alpha 17 is on public unstable branch

[XeoNovaDan]

...

That's part of the fun with randoming.

[Renegrade]

I've been noticing a lot of incendiary launchers in raids for this build.

I'm fighting a raid right now that has a steel shiv.. a club...and four incendiary launchers.  That's a little extreme.  These things used to be rare, now there's at least one in every fight.  Is that intended?

The fight didn't result in any human casualties, but I've already lost half the durability on the starter pistol, and about a whole shotgun's worth of durability in only three or four raids..

[imetallica]

About the complexity of the game, I wonder if using F# for core game logic would help to "simplify" code.

[iota_x]

Love the game immensely @Tynan.

Best game I've played in years, and more than 500 hours deep after buying on Steam around A14. And I played a while pirated before that due to your enkightened view on DRM.

In any case, a couple of things I've noticed after finally jumping into A17.

I like that peg legs can get injured/damaged now, however, they have been 'healing' when I have my prisoners in bed being tended. Not sure if that's intended. It seems more intuitive that I would have to replace the damaged peg-leg with a new one. I'm not far enough in to comment on whether this happens with bionics.

Secondly, setting tables to not be gather spots doesn't seem to stop any of my colonists from eating meals there even if the bedroom they are in is not assigned to them. I feel like before the update pawns would only eat meals in thier own room if the table is set to not be a gather spot, but maybe I just had better table placement for my dining area.

Lastly, I don't play on rediculous difficulties, and my current game is Cassandra rough. I am finding that I am in the camp that says infections are too easy to deal with. I don't even use a proper infirmary with hospital beds, but just allow pawns to be tended in thier own (often poor) beds in rooms with wooden floors. I do always have a pawn with cleaning at priority 1, so the rooms are clean, but my most recent raid left 3 of my 6 pawns out of actions, and 2 more prisoners needing care too. Ran out of herbal meds (which are almost too readily available in the temperate temperate forest we reside in) and while all but one of my pawns was still healing my (luckily) uninjured doctor was hit with malaria.

(side note: hit with Malaria in the middle of winter? what is this, Randy Random?)

End of story, I was able to self tend the doctor (skill 11 this whole time) and everyone survived with basic no med tending while he was not in bed resting. Including the prisoner who got an infection and was given no meds at all, but was tended to.

Thanks again for the amazing work you do, and hopefully some of this is relevant to you.

[trihero]

By the time you're able to safely raid a pirate base, you have no need for any of the loot they have. Doesn't give any incentive to raid pirate bases.

[Renegrade]

I'm liking many of the new features, with the new auto-switching/higher wattage sunlamp at the top.  It actually gives a purpose to designs that aren't just spamming generators (in wooded areas anyhow).

I have noticed some other things though - it seems with the enhanced AI that the battle scaling is a little too aggressive (unless the intent is to effectively scale the difficulty up).   Just faced off 12 very well-armed pirates with my band of 6; in A15, that would have been fairly trivial as they would have fixated on a single target, which I would have arranged to be well covered..but now, it was an incredibly difficult battle and took heavy casualties.  Nobody died, but the hospital looked like a slaughterhouse..

- The enemy chainguns were incredibly accurate, hitting about 60% of the time with a 2-skill pawn against someone covered by granite walls and sandbags - not bad for someone at max range and literally 1 in shooting skill.  Fortunately an enemy grenade killed both enemy chainguns.  The tooltip from the enemy's perspective didn't show anything unusual either.  It did seem like it was shooting 5-6 times instead of 3 though.
- Fire continues to be annoying.  Although there weren't any incendiary launchers this time, there were two molotovs.  Catching pawns that are on fire and running around is really hit and miss.  They need to be less spazzy, especially as it's necessary to un-recruit the second pawn to put the first pawn's fire out, and they then wander away..
- Micro seems to be increasing enormously, especially if I'm going to have to equip friend-killer el-cheapo weapons like incendiaries and grenades to counter the enemy zerg.  Maybe...too much.  I'm all for micromanaging around enemy break-throughs and such (they seem much more capable now), but having to make sure my friendlies aren't throwing grenades into a melee fight would be insane.
- Are raids more frequent, or is it my imagination?  Same evening as the prior one, another raid appears (the prior one was one of the pursing-a-pawn types though).   Much smaller this time - just seven pirates...with two molotovs.

(Cassandra Rough)

I like that peg legs can get injured/damaged now, however, they have been 'healing' when I have my prisoners in bed being tended. Not sure if that's intended. It seems more intuitive that I would have to replace the damaged peg-leg with a new one. I'm not far enough in to comment on whether this happens with bionics.

Bionics also "heal".  It's always been that way.  Trust me, you don't want it any other way - in vanilla, bionics only come by once in a blue moon.  Also big hearty NO to peg leg replacement.  It's still possible to lose a pawn to peg-leg installation...

Lastly, I don't play on rediculous difficulties, and my current game is Cassandra rough. I am finding that I am in the camp that says infections are too easy to deal with. I don't even use a proper infirmary with hospital beds, but just allow pawns to be tended in thier own (often poor) beds in rooms with wooden floors. I do always have a pawn with cleaning at priority 1, so the rooms are clean, but my most recent raid left 3 of my 6 pawns out of actions, and 2 more prisoners needing care too. Ran out of herbal meds (which are almost too readily available in the temperate temperate forest we reside in) and while all but one of my pawns was still healing my (luckily) uninjured doctor was hit with malaria.

You basically DO have an infirmary with that cleaning 1 stuff, and a quality doctor.  Note that the quality of the bed doesn't matter at all.  If you mark it as a medical bed, it's the same still (+10% to immunity gain).  Only the actual researched hospital bed matters, and it's only by a small amount (4%, 6% with a vitals monitor IIRC..)

If the goal is to force infected people into beds, the bed immunity gain factors (10, 14, 16%) would have to increase a lot, prior to any increase in infection lethality...

[Bellicosity]

- Are raids more frequent, or is it my imagination?  Same evening as the prior one, another raid appears (the prior one was one of the pursing-a-pawn types though).   Much smaller this time - just seven pirates...with two molotovs.

(Cassandra Rough)

Registered to post about this exact problem. Same difficulty. Had a raid with like 2x or 3x my colonists number, ended up losing a colonist. Then literally the SAME DAY another raid comes in with another 2x or 3x my colonists number and kills off the rest of them. This was first year, barely set up colony, not even 40 days in.

First raid was pirates, 12 or 13 of them to my 6 colonists. Shotgun to the face killed one of my colonists.

Second raid was tribals, another 12 or 13 of them to my 5 colonists who had just gotten treated in their beds. Defenses are busted from the earlier raid so it was essentially impossible to stop them.

This seems to be a recurring theme in this update. The storyteller tends to keep  beating up on you repeatedly then giving you a long reprieve. In a previous game I had pirates, mechanoids, then tribals in quick succession.

[Sunfish]

Here's my experience with the build from May 12th, about the diseases and infections. I'll go ahead and say, I do kinda suck at this game, despite the ridiculous amount of time I've played it. I've never been able to play on extreme difficulties, and rough usually hands me my own ass. I find diseases way easier a challenge to work with than raids, personally, and I don't mind the micromanagement and personal observation of pawns. I kinda like it actually, but I do have a "Sims" background rather than a dwarf fortress background.


-------
Crash landed, Arid Shrub land, Randy Random, Rough

Day 18
One pawn, age 20 with Plague
Normal bed, sand floor, regular medicine
Bed rest the whole time, only a few micromanages
All better in 3 days

Day 32
3 pawns with infections
a bit of unit of standard medicine left, trapped from herbal meds by manhunter pack. All are in stone tiled bloody bedrooms.

Graham, 20
Infection in Torso. Good Bed.

Stone, 36
Infection in Torso. Poor Bed

Benton, 21
Infection in Torso. Poor Bed

Began also suffering from starvation, as they were trapped by Alphabeavers.

Day 33
Rooms have been cleared up. Still trapped by alpha beavers, running out of medicine. Primary carer is Mie, doctor skill 6, and is suffering severe bloodloss, and back up is Rob, doctor skill 5, and is frail and missing an eye. The dog died of bloodloss and has become our only meal source.

Benton has a major infection, 35% infected/35% immunity. Still has severe bloodloss.
Stone has a major infection 36% infected/33% immunity. Moderate bloodloss
Graham has 55% infected/54% immunity. Moderate bloodloss

Day 34
Just after midnight, Graham died from his infection, with immunity 80%.

We have run out of medicine. Prisoner went berserk, and was mauled by beavers.

7am, Stone hits extreme infection. 79% infected/79% immunity, bloodloss minor. Cannot reach herbal medicine due to beavers.

17h, Benton has gained immunity, despite food poisoning from eating a rotten husky. His infection hit extreme, numbers unknown since I assumed he'd die.

19h, Stone has developed immunity.

The beavers have fled, so now they will not have to resort to eating Graham's corpse.

---------
I feel like the diseases are fairly balanced at the moment. I'm losing some pawns, but not necessarily all of them.

As an aside on the rivers cutting through mountains, this is how you get caves. Sure, real caves keep going deeper and deeper, but I think this unusual geologic features actually help to bring a feel that this isn't actually earth.

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

[GiantSpaceHamster]

I've only played one A17 game so far, and am about one in-game year into my play through right now. I really love the way the world map is shaping up with roads and rivers now, and roads providing faster travel between locations. I also like, conceptually, the new quest system. Unfortunately, I have passed on nearly every quest so far though. The "pay for location of something" quests don't give good enough rewards for me to spend silver buying the location and then sending a chunk of my force out to try and beat the turrets (away from my base, leaving it vulnerable to raids). Similarly, the "please take out this bandit camp for a reward" quests seem too difficult. This is based on limited experience in A17, but I sent 4 of my 7 colonists, the ones with my best weapons, armor, and fighting skills, to a bandit camp. This was the third such quest I received so far this game so my expectation was that it would be balanced for my current colony size. I was waaay wrong. A dozen or so well armed enemies swarmed me and there was no cover at all around the edges of the map where I could hide. The whole thing was over in maybe 10 seconds. A complete wipe of my raiding party. All but three enemies were hidden inside their base so I had no way of knowing before engaging what I was up against. Perhaps some sort of scouting mechanism would help here.

I think the quest difficulties and risk/reward need more balancing. It's not that I expect every quest to be easy or even approachable, but right now it doesn't seem like any are worth the risk. But I love the idea and think it could definitely be improved.

My last comment is that more information on what is changing would be very helpful. I did see one or two posts that mention changes between builds, but more than that, anyone coming into the A17 unstable branch would benefit greatly from a list of features that have been added or enhanced/re-balanced. I find myself only testing features that are obviously new or different. For example, I fell into my old habit of hunting manually by drafting one or more colonists because I recall the old automated hunting was very inefficient. Has it been improved? I have no idea, because I am not going to test every single feature unless I have some indication that it has changed.

Nice improvements overall, looking forward to more!

EDIT: I am playing on Cassandra Rough

[Wintersdark]

Lastly, I don't play on rediculous difficulties, and my current game is Cassandra rough. I am finding that I am in the camp that says infections are too easy to deal with. I don't even use a proper infirmary with hospital beds, but just allow pawns to be tended in thier own (often poor) beds in rooms with wooden floors. I do always have a pawn with cleaning at priority 1, so the rooms are clean, but my most recent raid left 3 of my 6 pawns out of actions, and 2 more prisoners needing care too. Ran out of herbal meds (which are almost too readily available in the temperate temperate forest we reside in) and while all but one of my pawns was still healing my (luckily) uninjured doctor was hit with malaria.

You've still got a good doctor and clean area.  In this case, infection should be a literal non-issue.  That's just not a problem. 

Infection is a danger when things aren't all shiny that way - you've just fought a battle in your base, there's blood everywhere, etc.  That's when infection should be a serious danger, and it is it.

If infection is a danger when you've got clean rooms and a good doctor, it's a game-stopper when you don't have those things, and that kind of sucks if you've just fought off a big raid or been randomly bitten by a squirrel on day 1.

[Skinnay]

You've still got a good doctor and clean area.  In this case, infection should be a literal non-issue.

Infections are a huge issue even with our modern doctors in our modern hospitals. Why should a rag-tag group of people living in the wilderness be somehow immune to this threat?

I started a new colony on Cass extreme yesterday with the latest build. Infections are ridiculously easy to combat. They're a bit more prevalent than A16, but much less deadly. I saved one guy with no meds at all, just tending without meds. On extreme difficulty.

[trihero]

I feel like it's overwhelming and unfair when 4 of your colonists get hit by malaria before you have hospital beds, especially on a non-jungle map and you get hit by raids before and after it.

[East]

It is impossible to prevent exploits from games. I know. But I think I need to report, so I leave a message.
It is a way to damage the roof of a merchant's muffalo. The muffalo's health point is high and does not die easily. It just bleeds.  the bleeding is stunned. It has been difficult at Alpha 17 but still possible.
Create a small roof area and drop the roof when the target muffalo. comes in alone. . If the bleeding of the muffalo is over a certain level, it stuns and rescues the muffalo. Then you can get items from muffalo. Muffalo has been rescue and has no penalty.
It may seem difficult, but it will be easier than you think.

http://i.imgur.com/LIDE2qI.jpg

[ChJees]

It seem the latest update have removed the 5% Globe Coverage in Dev mode. A oversight?

[Renegrade]

By the way, loving the crafting hysteresis options being vanilla now.  The roads and rivers are neat and add depth and flavor to site selection and such too.

One thing I've noted however in my playthroughs is that I tend to lack people to actually participate in any sort of caravan-y activities for a looong time.  Five or six people can't really be divided too well, especially if there's an assault at the other end of the trip...

Infections are a huge issue even with our modern doctors in our modern hospitals. Why should a rag-tag group of people living in the wilderness be somehow immune to this threat?

Keep in mind that it's a game, not real life... Plus I have yet to die from an untreated scratch in real life either (I'm kinda "rub dirt in it and walk it off" when it comes to most medical things in real life).

The scenario you describe is more of an issue for people who are near-death.  In the game, as it stands now, there's no real difference between a squirrel bite and someone who was turned into chutney, infection-wise, even though the latter should have a lot more problems than the former.  Quantity of pathogens matter, especially for bacterial ones.

<Insert joke here about "Hospital Architect">