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Am I the only one who thinks that taming animals isn't worth it anymore. I've played multiple Cassandra extreme games on some of the latast 1.0.xxxx builds and have notice that games where I keep no tamed animals vs taming 2:1 animal to pawn ratio, its like play easy mode vs actual extreme mode.

Here are some of my thoughts on taming animals:

The opportunity cost for taming animals is so bad I was wondering why I was even doing it. You have to dedicate a ridiculous amount of work time to even tame animals and then train them to be useful when you could uses the opportunity to actually uses your pawns do something useful like haul items themselves which there do a way better job than like 3-5 hauling animals combined. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't need to constantly reinvested work time into to retraining them cause there lose training in 1.0. Your putting more work into the animals than animals will ever give back fighting or hauling. You also have to include the work used up to hunt/grow food for them, tending to there mountain of wounds as there always obtain ridiculous amount wounds in fights and the worst of all has to be the amount of work required to clean up the dirt there drag around everywhere. As mention in multiple other threads already, bonded animals is more of hinder than a actual benefit. Also I'm not sure if this is corrected but I believe one of the latest builds mention that difficultly is adjusted with the amount of tamed animals. If this is true, then there is more reason to not tame animals.

I like the idea of the taming mechanics however the current way the taming mechanics works its just doesn't work. Who in there right mind would put invest more work into a system and get less work return out of it. In is current state, I would recommended people killing off there starting animal straight away to avoid bonded animal death debuff later on in the game. Also kill off any other self-tamed animals that come along and don't tame any animals.

i personally think animals still worth it <at least hauling ones>, just simply don't get too many of them when your "financial" situation can't support more animals
i tend to have special stockpiles, like cloth+herbal medicine+neutroamine next to drug table, stone chunks next to stone-cutting, cloth/devilstand next to tailoring, steel+plasteel+component next to fabrication+machining, vegetable next to stove, and then set all things to "drop on floor" <except for dangerous drugs> -- so hauling animals 're great help and my colonists barely need to walk around at all

the "upkeeping"'s barely noticable, since i just leave a dedicated trainer and some other "half-time" trainers

so, mathematically speaking, if i 've 5 dogs, i basically "lose" 1 hauler, "reassign" that hauler as a trainer, but get 5 "haulers" back

i just did a quick test with the new deadfall, n it's, say, rather useless now, the hit chance is pretty low, i generated 3 raids each with 10 raiders, putting traps outside perimeter walls, putting them in tunnel, putting them at choke points, and the result was that the deadfall traps barely triggered at all since the raiders just "accidentally"/"coincidentally" slipped through the gap

a way to "close off" the gap is to put sandbag/chunks or something in between, so that the raiders 'd have to step upon the traps, however, doing so 'd also affect your colonists pathing as well, not so viable

while reducing the ability/possibility of abusing traps sounds nice, seem to me the solution doesn't work, it's bugged btw, as mentionedby others, exclusion zone not work on unfinished traps

for me, traps 've been the main tool to deal with sappers by putting them at "designated weak wall spot", or putting it into mine to prevent insects, or putting them around turrets, especially sniper & autocannon, but now all those raiders, mechs, etc. can just slip through 'em all :|   

normally, i'd set up at least 2 separated power system, connected if needed with a single switch somewhere along the line, normally switched off, of course
each grid get connected with 2 different battery batches, each with 4-5 batteries (late game), so 8-10 batt. total, 1 batch get switched off once it get fully or almost fully charged

does generators need to be? my last few runs on 1.0, i played full chemfuel+geothermal, n non of the generators roofed, no problem, as for breakdowns or zzzts, well, those happen all the time, i'm not sure it's any more frequent than when i use turbine+solar
as for wire, well, there's also chance lightning happens, so roof if u want

with bridge being a thing, i just out right use bridge instead of pump unless what i need is room with some flooring or heavy stuff or growing ground

and does waterproof conduit actually needed? i remember i just used bridge+normal conduit instead,  cheaper in all way

edit: yes, checked, an across-water conduit can either costs 8 steels+research, or it can just be 12 wood+1 steel, wood is basically free, so the waterproof conduit only pays off if u 're hit >8 times with lightning, fire, or zzzt at the same spot
i think the waterproof conduit should costs 2 or 3 steel or even 1, as it already required research

This has certainly improved in 1.0 from my experience, mainly since eyes no longer scar instantly.

This is a really nice change. The fact that hares no longer can like bite your eyes out in one unlucky attack is huge. Thanks to Tynan for that!

Colony wealth scaling is fair, but I do agree that it should be discounted somewhat; even sending out just half of your colonists is a big risk to take. Especially with ambushes where you have very little time to position your colonists, unlike an outpost assault where you can coordinate a planned attack. Perhaps it could be like the old raid points system where item wealth is taken into account at an increased weight, if it isn't so already.

That being said though, I haven't really sent many caravans out since this particular change, so I'm just going off of my current experiences with the 'old' scaling, and effectively multiplying that by a factor based on what I've seen with newer world events on my map.

World map events scaling to your overall wealth is not fair in the slightest. Its not like you bring your whole colony with traps and turrets to a fight, right? So why in the heavens would the game count your overall wealth not the wealth of people and equipment you send out? That would be fair. I guess i can see the problem of that approach - you can try cheesing world events by sending a couple people in mediocre equipment late game to circumvent most threats. But current idea of using colony wealth as an element of threat scaling just makes lategame caravanning absolutely not worth the risk. You don't even risk just your caravan, you risk both a caravan and a colony wipe.

If you wanna keep caravanning viable even late game - it should be possible to send out small contingents of people on mining and trading missions, without the risk of just sudden death via 16 raiders. I understand outposts having such high enemy counts - it should be damn challenging to take out someone else's base. But other events could really use a chill pill.

if it only base on the caravan you send out, then you may send out only 2 colonists for a quest, eventhou your maximum capability is 10, so that's not gonna work so great
instead i suppose a model something like this should do

let's assume the number of colonists is x, the total wealth is y, the total of fighting equipments (armors, weapons, turrets, etc.) you've is z

the max capacity (rate) of offensive capacity that you can "generate" 'd be calculated base on x & y be z1, similarly, z2 be the max for defensive

it'd be your best interest to keep your REAL fighting ability (z) relatively close to z1 & z2 as the incident involved fighting 'd take into account z1 & z2
e.g:
raids 'd send out the offensive with z1' (raider's strength) = 50%-100% (or more - depend on game difficulty & weither or not u sent out caravan) of z2
meanwhile, ambushes = 40%-60% of z2, meaning it's your best interest to send out half your offensive ability   

i think scaling base on caravans' strength/wealth not gonna work, since u may very well, send out 2 colonists with bare equipments for a load of nice reward

scaling on wealth isn't working nicely either, since wealth doesn't neccessarily scale with reseasonable ratio with defense/offense ability

let's have it scale on fighting capability of the colony instead, calculating base on the total number of armors & weapons & colonists available in the colony, weither they're equipped or not

"only allowed ingredients" probably means if the stack 're forbidden, say, cloth for example, then they won't take it even if the bill set "yes"

though i think in 1.0 the forbidden+allow seem buggy as hell, a lot of time the survival pack meal stacks or the drug stacks still get mysteriously disappear eventhough i already set them forbidden, no colonist being gourmand or chem. interested/fascinated, and there 're still a lot of allowed simple/fine/lavish meals accessable

was it "liquid" or "liquor"? i dont remember correctly, but as far as dogs go, "liquor", meaning beer, alcohol, well, in Vanilla, beer