Unstable build feedback thread

[HnDn]

That's a terrible way to play, btw. The game is designed for loss and recovery, you're totally neutering it.

I'm gonna redesign how permadeath is presented. Maybe on by default.

One problem I had with permadeath was not being able to continue a game due to a corrupted save. I forget whether my computer crashed or had a power outage, but the xml file was cut off at some point. I always play with it off now (on other games too) to avoid this.

[Greep]

Grrr..   So apparently caves are actually death traps just waiting to happen.  I noticed that apparently what looked like complete overhead mountain was actually thin rock roofs, and decided to remove roofs on my whole area to see what was up.

So now I'll have to probably have to deal with drop pods and infestations making the whole inside mountains kinda pointless.

I guess it's not completely over: that's the extent of the disaster area, so I can maybe trap it with IEDs and wall it off.


Aaaaarg, and dudes keep eating my simple meals meant for the refinery rather than the fine meals.  Muh optimizations noooo.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[iamomnivore]

On the topic of weapon reload and windup / winddown times.

The winddown times are ridiculous. I'm going to fully agree with every person talking about the "glue" effect. Suicidal melee units just ruin combat, now. They run in and everyone gets "stuck" in there. I had two short bows firing on a single enemy raider and even with the stagger they could barely get two shots in. Then, with what seemed like a decent distance between then, I tried to move one ... Wow. Just, Wow. I was watching that damn circle for way too long. What's the pawn doing? Shouldering the bow and then counting his arrows? This makes no sense and I don't believe it serves the balance.

This may have been a bit of an overboard nerf. It may be a good idea to review the impact this has.

[Madman666]

Your larger, more populated, more mechanized base is making that much more noise, vibrations, and heat. Of course more and bigger hives would be attracted.

Also, I'd just like to set forth a concern about players, admittedly not playing on Extreme, trying to set the standard for and provide opinions on what it is. Let us crazy people have our pinnacle

Its still bs amount no matter how you look at it. Thats 400-500k wealth worth, not 175k. 70 bugs. And i ll mention once again, that it wasn't even extreme difficulty level, it was "hard". I don't play extreme masochistic levels, so feel free to make it however unfair and unbalanced you want - its there for that reason. But hard should be hard. Not crazy.

[Tass237]

Your larger, more populated, more mechanized base is making that much more noise, vibrations, and heat. Of course more and bigger hives would be attracted.

Also, I'd just like to set forth a concern about players, admittedly not playing on Extreme, trying to set the standard for and provide opinions on what it is. Let us crazy people have our pinnacle

Its still bs amount no matter how you look at it. Thats 400-500k wealth worth, not 175k. 70 bugs. And i ll mention once again, that it wasn't even extreme difficulty level, it was "hard". I don't play extreme masochistic levels, so feel free to make it however unfair and unbalanced you want - its there for that reason. But hard should be hard. Not crazy.

You may be ignoring the Ramp Up factor, which also can greatly affect the difficulty level of incidents. The longer you go without having any problems with incidents (such as colonist death), the higher the Ramp Up factor is.  Balancing the Ramp Up factor is probably why Tynan asked people to post pictures of the Dev Mode graph of Ramp Up from actual gameplay.

[Greep]

Well rampup is reflective of all raids, not just infestations.  If that infestation is the equivalent of a couple of centipedes, it's gamebreaking.  haven't hit an infestation yet thankfully, but looks like I'll just be destroyed outright when it happens 

[Madman666]

You may be ignoring the Ramp Up factor, which also can greatly affect the difficulty level of incidents. The longer you go without having any problems with incidents (such as colonist death), the higher the Ramp Up factor is.  Balancing the Ramp Up factor is probably why Tynan asked people to post pictures of the Dev Mode graph of Ramp Up from actual gameplay.

In that case, I sure hope this will be rebalanced, because if that thing just punishes you for basically playing perfect without losing anyone, by making next bad event even more atrocious and more and more the longer you manage to play perfect - thats just silly. Your wealth raises - you suffer, you pull through those hardships without losing a guy - get ready to suffer even more. The logic of it is brilliant. Feels like the goal of the game now is to get rekt and come tell a story about it

[fritzgryphon]

Maybe kill your own colonists to keep the ramp up factor low?

Would be a good way to get rid of lackluster pawns or unwanted refugees...

e..  Seriously though, I like the logic of ramp-up.  If the raiders failed to dent your colony on their last raid, they would certainly come with more power the next time (or just give up and leave you alone).

[Madman666]

A game that makes you sacrifice someone just to get a discount on the next bad event is kind of broken.

[alxddd]

I've played two year+ games in 1.0, one Crashlanded and the other Tribal. The latter started at v.1956 and I played it until yesterday. I am not a hardcore player by any means, but I have been playing since about A11 so have been involved in this process for awhile.

Difficulty
- I usually play Phoebe/Randy Rough, but reading through this thread I decided to back off a difficulty level in 1.0 for fear of the increase in difficulty.
- Overall I found it pretty slow and easy, so I'm going to go back to Rough and see how it treats me, but Randy felt more like Phoebe at the Medium difficulty. Raids are exceptionally small, diseases and sickness kind of a non-issue, resource management not really a problem (although I could see that changing in mid-late games)


Caravaning
- While it is worlds better (pun intended), it still feels obtuse. I'm not sure if the Forage per day contributes to Days of Food or if it's separate and on top of the food we pack. I'm not sure if I bring Hay or Kibble if the animals will prioritize eating it.
- I had a colonist wearing tribalwear die of Hypothermia while caravaning despite it not getting any colder since he left home, not having any temperature problem at home, and not getting any warnings. So some improvement to temperature warnings would be useful as it felt like it came out of nowhere.
- I saw a bug fix yesterday I think that might address this problem, but I had a single colonist with an Alpaca and a Muffalo go caravanning and the colonist froze to death. When the colonist died I got two notifications - one for caravan death and one for colonist death. The two animals essentially disappeared off the map, but then days later I got the same two notifications of caravan death and animal death for the Alpaca, and then again for the Muffalo some time later despite them no longer being available to me on the map. It would be great if a colonist could go and save the animals in this situation, or at the very least have the caravan death signify that the animals are abandoned, and not have those further notifications come up.
- I saw someone else suggest this, but I'd like either a little icon on each settlement or a list somewhere on the World Map of which settlements have offers on the table so that I can better keep track of my options.
- the planning mode is essential and good, but it would reduce clicks if you could just right click on the world map to set pins in order to calculate routes, since right clicking the map currently does nothing.

Other
- Hoopstone description says "A simple ancient game played with a stones..."
- Impressive and Very Impressive Barracks is still a negative moodlet, which I get is trying to encourage individual bedrooms, but seems a bit ridiculous.
- tree sowing time is waaaaaaay too long. I would trade a shorter sowing time for a longer growing time
- graves no longer have names, which takes away my own ability to properly mourn the loss of colonists, and takes away some story depth.
- I get that you're going for game balance, but misandry is asymmetrical to misogyny and I encourage you to consider its removal.

I had some other notes about combat but I think a lot's changed in the last few days so I'm going to start a new game and see how it feels. I know research was updated recently as well but generally speaking I agree with a lot of people on here that some of the more significant researches like electricity and microelectronics should take longer to obtain, but that some of the smaller ones would be best to stay where they were.

I tried to screenshot the ramp-up graph but it wasn't available in dev mode in my game for some reason. I attached wealth and info.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Boboid]

To be perfectly clear - I'd been crushing raids for the last ~60 days with little more than the occasional animal death. Shield belts are a massive deal.

The system itself isn't just designed to ramp up. It's supposed to be able to ramp down as well. The idea being that the game can (hopefully) ramp things up to a crescendo.
A really tough and interesting fight where tough decisions had to be made and things were lost in the process.
And then wind down a bit to give the player some breathing room.

I genuinely think it's a pretty good idea - The more accurately the game can analyze how well you're doing the better it can provide interesting experiences. Wealth and time aren't sufficient.
And that infestation was interesting! It was you know.. 93% of what my colony could've possibly taken on and a tiny bit of rng either way could've been the end of me but it was at the very least interesting.

The good news is that the system can be changed fairly trivially. Tweaking a few values here and there is fairly easy. If there's lots of evidence that infestations are scaling too hard? Boom, one dial and it's changed.

Additionally keep in mind that was the 2nd highest difficulty. Re-read the description if you want a reminder of what that's supposed to mean.


I only wish that I'd started the colony post-patch so I could provide a ramp-up graph .
The only "problem" is that I've grown strangely attached to a colony that just barely fought off a ravening horde of insect invaders.
The system works

Moreover there's no point speculating here in the forum. Go play the game and report back your experiences. If infestations suddenly wipe out your colony then that's useful information. Anything else is just theorycrafting.

Edit:

I get that you're going for game balance, but misandry is asymmetrical to misogyny and I encourage you to consider its removal.

Jesus christ.. talk about things likely to derail a thread and apparently they jump out of the woodwork.
Putting on my brown-trousers for that one.

[Madman666]

So its designed to ramp up indefinitely, until it finally manages to kill\maim someone or downs half the colony. Then it sees - oh, i finally got you, here some time for you to recover, before i go in for the kill again. Funzies. I hope i ll be able to kill this thing for my run.

And FYI i am already playing, so no need telling me to go play.

[Boboid]

I think I've somehow failed to accurately communicate the nature of the system and its implications.
The system isn't sentient and malicious. It's not trying to murder you or make you have less fun.

Let me frame it this way - Infested Planet uses a Malicious Mutation system to try and vary up the player's gameplay. Basically if the system sees a player using a particular tactic it picks from a list of modifiers designed to counter that tactic. Some mutations are mutually exclusive, and there's a maximum that can be applied at any given time.
The goal is to prevent the player from sticking with one tactic throughout the entire game.
This system works.
However it only works because it's surprisingly good at analyzing player strategy. It makes surprisingly intelligent and effective decisions that can really throw a wrench in the works.
If that system didn't do a good job of collecting data it would be pointless.
It would constantly make ridiculous and unintelligent decisions because it can only a very small set of decisions.

Rimworld isn't really like that - The system can do lots of different things to affect player gameplay. Some more noticeable than others.
Theoretically that system can do anything - make raids larger, reduce the rewards from quests, make trading less efficient, hell, even make it rain less often when large fires are occurring.
There are a bunch of subtle ways to increase difficulty in rimworld that aren't plugged directly into raid size. Raid size is just the most noticeable and volatile.

The system can be changed to create giant moments of extreme tension or simply ebbs and flows in difficulty.
Something that I happen to know you already like as you play Randy.

It doesn't have to ramp up raids until you're crushed, and I'd be amazed if that was the intention.
More data = More appropriate decisions = more player enjoyment.

[topace3000]

That's a terrible way to play, btw. The game is designed for loss and recovery, you're totally neutering it.

I'm gonna redesign how permadeath is presented. Maybe on by default.

I agree with this from a design perspective, maybe call it something other than "permadeath" or "iron man," both of which make it sound like uber hard mode rather than "the baseline game presented without the option of cheating."

[Syrchalis]

If ramp up works this way I dislike it. It's like the wealth mechanic's bad side. Good quality, undamaged equipment = bad for you, shouldn't be the case, but it is. Luxury items and making your pawns happy -> also bad for you (in terms of raid strength).

My actual experience with the system is that it doesn't make things THAT much harder. However I went from very hard to extreme so I'm really missing a baseline here.

If this system is more meant to make recovering easier, because it's main purpose is to scale down threats after you suffered losses (material, wealth or pawns) then it's a completely different story.

Also here is my ramp up graph. I haven't lost a pawn, but one got a bad brain injury (one hit by one elephant, and she was wearing an excellent advanced helmet... thanks RNG) and she is a vegetable.