I think it's time to have another discussion about relative value of different skills.
Growing - a must have. The emperor skill. Without a decent value of this skill, you can't make food efficiently or grow cheap medicine. Growing is also good at making rooms prettier, the disadvantage (compared to Art) being that it uses more room, time and plant-friendly environment. Surviving without Growing is possible, but very, very inconvenient. It will be mostly berries and hunting (or cannibalism). Trading for food is not reliable. Growing is also a good source of sturdy protective apparel (devilstrand), can provide resource for carpets and armchairs, and make loads of money (even without currently unbalanced smokeleaf). It can also provide drugs. The skill has never been more valuable. Oops, I forgot growing trees for wood.
Construction - a very important skill. Eventually constructors start wandering around without purpose, but for the first year at least constructors are invaluable. Poor constructors take forever to get anything done or repair and waste resources. Actually it may be more required than Growing, because without sowing plants you can survive but if your 3 starting colonists can't construct you're doomed. As a bonus, good constructors make good beds and dining chars / armchairs which give your colonist mood bonus from comfort. I think you can sell furniture now so constructors can also make money, but I don't know how much and who buys it.
Mining - an important skill, crucial if you want to make an underground colony. Without mining, building a ship is extremely tedious (especially now that there's deep mining - you don't want to miss it). But you can do well without mining, just stonecutting will get you very far, and even a bad miner will get you the required steel.
Medicine - important skill, and people say diseases got nastier (I only had flu so far in A16). A bad doctor means scars and infections, and absolutely no installing bionics. But a skill 8-10 doctor can last you an entire game unless something hits him, so the skill is not that great.
Crafting - good to have, but you can loot decent weapons and quality of apparel / armor vests is not that important as long as it's not awful. Material and having enough resource for new apparel matters more. However, good craters can make lots and lots of money, for example selling devilstrand parkas in year-round growing zone.
Shooting
An interesting skill, because unlike others you'd like to have a lot of it on many colonists. But sniping mechanoids aside it's enough to have about 8-10, or at least it feels like it. Very high skill levels don't feel that powerful, you might be destroying your targets' fingers or ears with little effect.
Melee very, very hard to train and of little use. I can't remember a time when I needed more melee fighters. Maybe I should finally play an all melee colony to see how it's like.
Animals - marginal. Most of the useful animals (like alpacas, chickens, dogs, bears) don't need skill at all. Bears do need if you want to train many. But animal herding is absolutely terrible alternative to growing when it comes to feeding a colony. Ironically, hunting is much more faster for generating leather and meat. The skill is not required at all for animals to reproduce, lay eggs or grow wool, and you can buy animals from traders.
Research - not important early, and by midgame you end up with a tolerable researcher one way or another. Even on ice sheet you can start with a sunlamp and potatoes in gravel. Few technologies actually benefit you early - gun turrets, devilstrand, etc.
Art - the only way to make money in ice sheet, but having to rely on exotic goods trading SHIPS is terrible. Art in Rimworld is boring (only sculptures) and serves only two purposes: mood bonus and money. And it's not that great at moneymaking. Also, artists tend to have obnoxious backgrounds and are not useful for anything else.
Cooking - nice to have, but Nutrient Paste Dispenser is actually good alternative and it's like you have an extra colonist. You will want to develop a good cook eventually probably, for the fine meal mood bonus (not all biomes can sustain lavish meals). Early on your people can put up with nutrient paste and... don't really have time to cook.
Social
Oooh, I actually forgot about this skill ! Between "Wanderer joins" and chased colonists, the skill has fallen from important to almost useless! It does give you more options for recruiting, but you will get more colonists anyway. Price reduction is very, very small and not worth talking about. Non-recruiting effects, if they exist, seem marginal to me because I have numerous colonists with Social disabled and they get along fine.
--------------
Moral of the story: Animals, Melee, Social definitely need another pass to make them more useful and interesting. Art works, but is a bit dull. Growing offers many, many benefits and Construction is the hardest to live without.
I find it quite difficult to believe hunting generates food faster than the Chickpocalypse ::) .
Research is a really lame skill game design wise. All your pawn does is sit perfectly still for hours while getting research points. And when you have all the research unlocked, it's useless. It seriously needs a rework from the ground up.
Some comments or suggestions on how to make skills feel more useful:
Growing
I think this one needs to be solved the other way round, i.e. making foodcrops a bit less effective and safe to spam. If for example growth times were roughly doubled and nutrition costs for pawns reduced by about 40%, we would get the following effects and design space:
The crops could be differentiated more into "work efficient" and "quick and safe" on one axis and of course ground type tolerance on the other. If for example corn took 25 gamedays to grow under normal conditions but was notably more efficient than the other types in regards to farm size and work needed per nutrition, then corn would be the "easy crop", but be risky to grow in the colder areas because the growth time is near the total growth period and it would be prone to cold snaps.
On the other hand, lets say potatoes stay as the robust and quick crop type, but are the least efficient overall. They would become the go-to crop for difficult biomes in the early game until they get replaced by, say, corn and rice, when you have greenhouses or hydroponics or both.
The lesser total amount of foodstuffs would make creating and selling a huge surplus all the time much more work and space intensive as right now, helping out with the "the first 1k money are relatively hard, after that you swim in it" problem (of course many other things need to be changed for that, too, but that does not fit this topic).
Animals
A while ago, there was a thread here where someone suggested animal traps and similar things for hunting. What if we combined those with this skill? Being able to hunt with less work effort and more safely, but perhaps some kind of material investment for the traps and slower would make this a skill that is desireable for more than a few edge cases.
Social
Perhaps making "free" extra colonists more rare but implementing something similar to what the hospitality mod has, i.e. being able to recruit visitors in addition to captives, would help with making this more useful. Also, the haggling bonus could be buffed (I would suggest making the base price gap harsher from currently +/- 25% to 30 or even 35 and doubling the haggling bonus). Additionally, perhaps high social skill people can do something similar to the "kind" trait or prevent or break up fistfights or stuff like that? Perhaps check into that mod that makes "leaders" and borrow some concepts to apply to this skill?
disagree with almost all of these.
IMO:
growing...marginal...it levels fast and you only need 5 for most things, 8 at max. harvest failed happens at low growing, but its not a very serious concern. I suppose you don't want a colony where EVERYONE is incapable of plant work, but literally anyone can manage growing.
construction - crucial on sea ice or the extreme weather challenges, useful anywhere else, as higher quality furniture is always nice, but again, unless you're on sea ice or NO ONE can do it, you'll still be fine.
mining - as a skill its near the bottom of the list. even 0 skill miners get the job done eventually, there is NO benefit of higher mining except speed...no quality gain, no reduction in waste, no "succeed or die" - this is one skill i don't care what level it is, only if pawns can or can't do it.
Medicine - really useful. it CAN have it's impact minimized with liberal penoxycyline use (and i haven't had an infection on a treated injury yet in A16, got em all the time in A15 for bad torso arm or leg injuries), but if you don't want to have to pay for penox/neutro or you want to install prosthetics, you'll need a good doctor...good doctoring improves pawn uptime after an injury too, better treatment = faster healing.
Crafting - IMO the skill i consider most critical in the game. If i have a good crafter, he'll crank out insulating, good apparel and whatever weapons i want, when i want. Before long mmy colonists all end up with exactly the right gun or plasteel longswords.
Shooting - good to have a few decent shooters for snipers, but anyone can point a gun. I certainly look at this skill, and it weighs into who i take or not, but i won't turn away a good pawn or take a bad pawn because their shooting changed my mind.
Melee - completely overshadowed by the brawler trait. a brawler will be fantastic no matter their melee skill (which will be high anyways), and almost any other pawn will have close enough shooting/melee skills that a gun would be better, or will have 0 or 1 in the violent skills...in which case they get grenades or a personal shield and longsword.
Animals - hit or miss...some maps have no animals, obviously little use there. some maps are inhospitable to animals, no animal skill use there either. other maps have numerous boars, alpacas, or predators. If you HAVE the animal skill on those maps, it can be great. 20 hauling animals can really open up the workload of other pawns, despite the awkward system, 4 bears released around a corner onto pirates can be really effective (you'll likely need new bears afterwards though), and alpaca wool is amazing. The big problem here is that low animal skill is near impossible to train up, and can easily be lethal. Low animal skill is pretty darned close to useless for animal use.
research - either you focus on it or you don't...skill helps, but the fact that research projects can be teamed up on with multiple people at multiple benches means the investment of time, resources, and manpower can make up for lack of skill, conversely, even an 18 skill pawn won't get anything researched if he does other stuff than researching. This skill also eventually becomes ABSOLUTELY useless as you hit the end of the research tree, and has diminishing returns up to that (you focus on what you need most, eventually you're researching incendiary IEDs "just because" without ever planning to use them).
Art - As far as A16 goes, now one of the most useless skills in the game. it is hard to sell (exotic goods ONLY, and caravans don't carry much silver), too heavy to transport, and the impressive room benefits can be otherwise easily obtained with cleanliness, good flooring, and some decent furniture (tables, beds, chairs, chess tables all add to beauty). For money making, tailoring or growing (drugs) will nearly always kick the snot out of art.
cooking - with the unintuitive, micromanagy way that nutrient paste dispensers work, cooking is another vital skill. Fine meals give an 11 point mood boost over nutrient paste...thats a pretty hefty amount. In early colonies where beauty and cleanliness are tough, late colonies where the "expectations" mood boost is gone, and any colony where a long-term bad event happens (bonded animal or relative death spring to mind), that fine meal can be THE factor in staving off breaks. Get an impressive dining room and any time someone is feeling down, you can send them to eat a meal...drug mood boost with NONE of the side effects. Alongside crafting and medicine (and construction, to a lesser degree), a 6+ in cooking is something I routinely look for...passion to get to even higher skill (for more meat per butcher) is a definite plus too.
Social - the ability to CHOOSE which pawns you get is massively useful. wanderers and refugees give you no, or almost no preview of the pawn you get. slaves tend to either not show up (you have too many pawns) or show up too early to be able to consistently afford any good ones. Of all of the "free pawn" methods, only escape pod crashes give you a clear preview and choice, and even then, if you're not in a hostile enough environment, they may not join you, forcing you to capture and recruit (using social) to be sure you get them. This means that captured raiders remain one of the best sources of cherry picked good pawns. Admittedly, since prison breaks were added, then in A16 the free pawn events feel like they happen more, social is LESS useful than it was, but is still vital for snagging really good pawns. Plus if you don't start with decent social, its a complete crapshoot about ever being able to consistently recruit prisoners.
I'll agree melee needs a boost...but more importantly, it needs a FIX...there is an inherent problem in the fact that the brawler trait is exponentially more useful than the skill.
Social suffers from the problem of it being just a random % roll twice a day to recruit, and there seems little difference between a 0.6% chance to recruit a 99 difficulty prisoner with 4 social, or a 1.3% chance to recruit the same prisoner with social 16.
Animal SKILL is fine...the %s for taming could use some tweaking....a cumulative % gain per attempt feels like a necessity....taming boars with decent animal skill at a 7.5% success chance is really tedious, especially when each failure has 1/3 the chance of taming to turn the boar, and nearby boars into manhunter. by all means keep the manhunter failure, but make each failed tame attempt add that % or half that % to the next attempt....that is how animals are trained after all...repetition.
Mining and growing need a serious look as SKILLS....as things you can do in a colony, they're fine...vital even. As skills that show some progression...some improvement as they level, they're sadly lacking. Mining skill could be linked to chance to produce stone chunks, growing skill could adjust the yield or even growing times...in fact the growing skill references "ongoing care" to the plant...a 1-10% reduction in growing times, or a 1-20% increase in yield are certainly in the realm of the realistic and the possible.
Art is such a minor skill, and always has been such...i'd almost rather see the art and construction skills either merged, or reference each other....constructed furniture, namely beds and chairs could base their comfort and rest effectiveness off construction, but beauty off of art. Construction as a skill is fine, but it needs separate JOBS in the work tab for quality work and for building work....i want everyone somewhat capable to build my walls and doors fast, but i don't want Johnny Useless, who is only assigned to construction to keep him from being idle to build the new beds with his 1 construction skill when i have Engie at skill 16.
Crafting needs to be split into tailoring and smithing/machining. flat out "crafting" such as stones, smokeweed, or components could use those values (like plant cutting uses growing for speed) but wouldn't be a registered skill.
Research, needs a system overhaul....there should not be a skill that can STOP working completely. skill could use a tweak to keep people from sticking 4 researchers on a project to power out breakthroughs if an endless research perk ever crops up. Maybe a % chance to get a breakthrough that slowly builds up based on time spend researching...individual per pawn per project means more pawns gives more chances to succeed, but high skill still gives more consistent results.
Research
IMO worst thing about this skill is that once you research vital tech, it's a dead weight. Research should affect more than, well, research speed. Mechanoid disassembly efficency maybe, hi tech drug production etc.
Mining
As long as there will be no sustainable or permanent mining source, it's a waste. Almost everyone can mine, no resources will be ever lost or pawn injured. It becomes MUCH more important with Deep Core Drilling mod where you can mine small aounts of inexhaustable resources but with longer time. Without mods - never had problems with mining entire map even with 0-1 mining skills.
Shooting
Never saw much difference with shooting. Sniping mechanoids usually just take more time and swarms of raiders killed by massive bulletstorm.
Melee
Useless skill because melee is useless and so dangerous that it hadly can outperform ranged. Every melee is a gamble of traumas, lost limbs and other nasty stuff that almost never happen in ranged combat. Hope there will be some improvement in the future.
Social
Game already provides you with pawns from events and wasting gazillion of food hoping to recruit with 0.5-1% is not worth it. Discount is negligable given you can earn so much money that discount hardly will be noticable. Leendary 20 skill will get you a 10% discount.
Cooking
Very important. Fast and better meals with short but nice mood buff keeps colonies alive and kicking.
Crafting
THE most important skill. Related to almost anything. Better clothes, better guns, better armor.
Medicine
Always good but just so random. Legendary doctors fail as much as 5 skilled ones.
Artistic
can't imagine any use for it. Statues? When they get expensive, only ships can buy them. Beauty can be raised by other means and overall it's not a great source of income.
Growing is super useful because there is never a point where the job is done. There is always something to plant.
Animal handling, research and construction (to some degree) suffers from it. Once you get your most important research projects done, research becomes absolutely useless. And once you get all your animals trained, animal handling becomes useless.
I think there simply should be things that pawns having those skills can perform to never be obsolete.
Few ideas:
- Animal handling skill of the owner affects the rate at which animals haul, help colonists and so on. I'd put a limit on how many animals can one handler have, preferably scaling with his skill level, so that having more than one would be profitable.
Have the hauling/help skills of animals be a deteriorating bar - if there is no handler to take care of animals, they will continually go wild, and stop doing what they are supposed to.
Because handler would have to spend far more time taking care of animals, I'd increase the rate at which animals haul, and also enable them to haul outside of the area they are directed to, so they are more useful overall. Maybe add something else that animals can do. :?
- Research affecting medical skills, or something. D: Or construction and medical? Simply expanding the research tree, so that you quite never can research everything and instead have to chose what kind of colony you will be can help.
- Construction isn't that much affected by it, since you can build things and sell them (which I personally find very tedious), but I guess something could be added to it. No idea what, tho. :V
For myself I split the evaluation of the skills in how important they are for survival and how many people I need for it in the different phases of the game.
Building & Growing
Always and Always needed, the number of different useful plants, and the quality of construction and speed, especially when dealing with stone walls is very important.
Also a green thumb grower is the best possible colonist of all.
Medic
you always need a medic, but I tend to set everyone who has talent for it to work at it,
because many hands get the job done faster. One talented surgeon is important later.
Crafting
is the lategame skill where you need most people working in .. just because it takes up so much time until the stuff gets finished, and there are just so many workbenches connected to this one skill. It's important through the anoyance it causes.
Mining Speed may not be important but is very usefull, a talented miner digging out five blocks while the untalented one digs out one makes all the difference in early and midgame ressource collecting
Animal Handling not very usefull most of the time, but it sucks not having it, for the additional haulbots ..
Artists ..meh, sometimes I use them, sometimes I don't .. they are really the one-trick pony of the rim.
Quote from: Thirite on February 09, 2017, 10:36:47 PM
Research is a really lame skill game design wise. All your pawn does is sit perfectly still for hours while getting research points. And when you have all the research unlocked, it's useless. It seriously needs a rework from the ground up.
I fully agree. And the research itself is boring - predictable, hierarchical tech tree, nothing like in Master of Magic or Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island (boardgame). My suggestions for more dynamic research like researching cures for diseases as you encounter them, researching ancient artifacts before use, weather stations, predicting solar flare/storms/volcanic winter, autopsy etc have been repeatedly ignored so I gave up. But at least in recent Rimworld version Research takes longer to become useless, and it may actually be viable to build multiple research benches.
QuoteCrafting needs to be split into tailoring and smithing/machining. flat out "crafting" such as stones, smokeweed, or components could use those values (like plant cutting uses growing for speed) but wouldn't be a registered skill.
Yup, crafting governs too many skills all at once. Perhaps make "crafting" and "artisan" or something, with crafting being for all simple tasks like smelting, stonecutting and building furniture, while artisan is for all artworks but also for gear? Constructing would then only be used for stuff like walls, doors, roofs, power plants and perhaps work stations, but not beds or tables.
I think this could balance the three skills nicely without having to introduce a new one.
Quote from: Perq on February 10, 2017, 03:58:52 AM
- Animal handling skill of the owner affects the rate at which animals haul, help colonists and so on. I'd put a limit on how many animals can one handler have, preferably scaling with his skill level, so that having more than one would be profitable.
Have the hauling/help skills of animals be a deteriorating bar - if there is no handler to take care of animals, they will continually go wild, and stop doing what they are supposed to.
Because handler would have to spend far more time taking care of animals, I'd increase the rate at which animals haul, and also enable them to haul outside of the area they are directed to, so they are more useful overall. Maybe add something else that animals can do. :?
I really, really dig that concept. Perfect extension of the animals skill to keep it useful.
I would put doctor over mining, due to the fact that mining becomes significantly less useful when you reach later game, and have less need for mining, while doctoring is a skill that is needed forever.
I completely agree with growing being at the top. and also, melee is strong, don't underestimate it.
Some posts, like Limdood's, made me look at it differently. We definitely need to separate growing JOB from growing SKILL. I meant the thread mainly for discussion of skill value. This is potentially true for all skills, not just Growing.
Also, it would help if you disclosed how you typically play. I play vanilla on 2nd hardest difficulty level, often in Ice Sheet.
Growing - the benefit of the skill is the ability to plant Healroot and Devilstrand. Devilstrand is nice to have, but not necessary. Planting and harvesting is faster, which matters more in biomes with generous winter (short or none). As of A16, even Desert is considered a generous biome because plant don't need to be watered or don't have any other form of upkeep (they do in cold biomes). Finally, there's harvest fail chance. 50% at skill 0, 20% at skill 4, 3% at 10. This is a big deal if your growing space is limited (sunlamp). You can't train Growing effectively in biomes with harsh winter, so starting values are even more important there.Also, harvest fail chance is a big deal if for some reason you can't plant and have to harvest berries. But I can see how the SKILL is not so important in temperate forest, arid shrubland, desert, and rainforest. You can train anywhere, anytime. On ice sheet - the cheapest way to train a room of flowers in gravel. You need a lamp and heaters.
Mining - I would not put it over Doctor. I'd rather have a good doctor than a miner. While it seems to affect only mining _speed_ , this is important if your colonist has other duties as well. Especially if the miner has to walk long distances over snow.
Social - cherry picking colonists doesn't work well because there are so many wanderers. After a few wanderers, other recruits stop coming unless you're ruthless and kill off bad newcomers.
Crafting - I still maintain that the skill is not that important. You can get by with a skill 5 crafter, enough to mostly dodge the Awful quality. And early game you just don't need it. Material is much more important than normal vs superior quality.
Yesterday my ice sheet colony was lacking in long range weapons, which is pretty important with plentiful mechanoids. I had a survival rifle, an awful assault rifle, and a sniper rifle. Then a pirate raid came and I looted 2 assault rifles and a survival rifle not counting other goodies like LMGs. They were quite okay, Poor-Normal quality and over 90% health.
Since we went into a change discussion I add my 2 cent.
I would like to mix up following skills :
Construction
Crafting
Art
the Removed Repair Skill
into these other skills :
Construction -> as in Construction Worker, Mason and Carpenter, builts and maintains walls, furniture and simple workbenches
Mechanic -> builts, repairs and maintains everything that is above industrial level, also used to craft weapons and other technical stuff.
Tailor -> crafts anything to do with fabrics
Mining -> should be used to cut stone blocks and smooth floors
Medical -> should craft Medicine and Drugs. Drugs should get a similiar mechanic to food poisoning. ( respect the chemistry )
Crafter -> makes anything left over, including art
Firefighting disabled. Hauling disabled. Incapable of violence. Will never do cleaning. The vast majority of these are strictly psychological. And if they don't stem from physical health problems, they are not impossible. What about Social skill being used for counseling and psychiatric treatment ? Using Social skill, one colonist could talk another into unblocking a skill, or maybe make a colonist discover a hidden passion (more likely if colonist has few passions). To balance it out, traumatic events could give colonists mental scars, and they would lose a passion for something or stop doing some kind of work. So colonists with high Social would always be in demand and have something to do. Currently they're only useful early.
Best:
Construction - "fail to construct" is a problem, as it causes waste of resources and time. High skill prevents this. Higher skill also means faster construction, which saves time. Higher skill also means better furniture, which is increased money, mood, and time (rest efficiency). I simply will not start a game without someone that has a burning passion in this.
Mining - Except on bases that literally have zero rocks (ice sheet, sea ice), the ability to clear rocks (and do it quickly) is important. One of my starting colonists must at least have an interest in mining.
Shooting - Your primary defense for most of the game. Either an interest, or an inherently high skill on one of my colonists in paramount.
Good skills:
Cooking - An interest in this is great to have. at 6, fine meals cost just as much resource as a simple meal, and provide a mood boost. Higher skill is faster cooking, and this game is all about managing time.
Growing - An interest in this is great to have. Even if you're not collecting healroot at the start of the game, having someone that's able to reliably sow and harvest rice makes survival much easier.
Research - An interest in this is great to have. Even if the colonist starts at zero, your one dedicated researcher will eventually be able to carry your technology by himself.
Less Important:
Crafting - Great for rocks, but partially offset by having a workshop with two tools cabinets. You can make a fully functional army entirely comprised of drops from raids, though. Tailoring is a non-issue.
Medicine - Good if you have it, but even a colony of zero-medicine pawns can keep you alive. Glitterworld medicine makes up for a lot of shortcomings where bionics are involved.
Don't really care:
Melee - I'll equip all my shooters with clubs and swords if the need ever arises. Not once have I said, "I wish I had someone with 15 in melee right now."
Social - Someone will come with a passable value in this skill eventually. I can keep my desired pawn imprisoned and try indefinitely until then.
Animals - I really tried to like this, but taming is just too risky, and training will happen eventually. I don't really need that dog to start hauling any time soon.
I tried to force-tame bears in a couple colonies, and even when I had a 16 animals guy on it. He tamed two bears, then died to a third one after a failed taming attempt. Simply a terrible risk:reward ratio.
Art - There are other ways to get beauty in your room. There are other ways to get money. Art is largely a non-issue for me.
Cooking, growing, medicine, and shooting are the skills I usually try to make sure have covered when starting a new game. For all of these I generally accept either a moderate starting score (8+) or a passion with pretty much any value. I prefer but do not require a burning passion. Of these, I consider cooking the least important since that skill will level quickly anyway from constant use. Growing is very important since it has gates at skill level 6 and 8 for important things like herbal medicine and devilstrand and I usually want to be able to start growing those as early as possible.
I consider construction important, but not when starting a colony. Even with no passion someone can work their way up easily enough. I don't consider a high mining skill important at all. When I mine I throw the whole colony at the job so it doesn't matter if a few are slow, with everyone working it goes pretty fast. This is also how I feel about early game construction, but later on it's more important to have a high skill to upgrade quality items.
Everything else is just nice to have in various ways in my mind, although generally speaking I try not to have any skills that all colonists refuse to do.
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 10, 2017, 06:26:19 PM
Firefighting disabled. Hauling disabled. Incapable of violence. Will never do cleaning. The vast majority of these are strictly psychological. And if they don't stem from physical health problems, they are not impossible. What about Social skill being used for counseling and psychiatric treatment ? Using Social skill, one colonist could talk another into unblocking a skill, or maybe make a colonist discover a hidden passion (more likely if colonist has few passions). To balance it out, traumatic events could give colonists mental scars, and they would lose a passion for something or stop doing some kind of work. So colonists with high Social would always be in demand and have something to do. Currently they're only useful early.
Excellent suggestion. Perhaps therapy could use a mix of medical and social stats or something.
This is a really interesting thread, thanks for the thoughts everyone.
You know what would be a really ballsy way of surviving with a trio of Construction disabled colonists ? Attack a pirate colony. Gun them down. Take over and use their buildings. Wait until some peons join you.
Melee - combat is not just striking, hits or cuts, the practice also teaches to avoid attacks, overthrowing opponent to the ground or knockout. Rework melee in my opinion is necessary. Melee combat should include a function in which during a fight, you can mark enemies to overthrow instead of just killing. Additionally, the increased chance to dodge grow along with fighting skills. Personally in my life, I trained martial arts, also participated in the reconstructions of medieval history and larp tournaments. Fight teaches much more.
Growing - another issue, which is unreal in their rights, I will use examples from life because each of us is able to observe them. My grandmother has a garden where planted vegetables and fruits, it also has fruit trees and various shrubs (maybe healing). Skill my grandmother is very high, but it has no effect upon the durability of plants to temperature, this property is individual plants regardless of the technique of planting, the thing that can change the time and size of fruit or vegetables, proper planting, prepare the soil, has a large influence on the course and effect. Conclusion greater skill = higher harvest in less time. The speed of collecting the same. I'm thinking of greenhouses but the game would become too easy.
Mining - mastery not only makes doing something more efficiently. Mining that digging, burrowing, chipped, there are many methods, depending on your needs. Also needed are different. If drilling mountains and we want to make the railway crossing it depends on us time to get it done as quickly as possible, so we choose the method to quickly dig. When ore interest us, we must change the method, time becomes less important issue. We want to extract as much as possible. Digging as process can make part of the required material be wasted. So again digging as the process is different for minerals, metals, salts, coal, rock. The physical properties are different so as not to destroy and extract have to do it differently. Unless that it was destruction is the goal. Conclusion If we dig iron that time of digging is the same but the amount of ore is higher. While digging in the rock to to break through is made faster.
Crafting - suggest simply split on his sub-discipline as suggested someone before me
Research - a skill that is based on the understanding of the operation of technological solutions in all fields. From easy to extremely complex. Arises from the fact that the person who is doing it improves their understanding of the operation of natural laws of logic, physics, and many others. What can you do with this knowledge? Here range of possibilities is very high. Researcher can become an innovator, a person who improves the already existing elements of the environment. This is just an example, but it should give food for thought. Currently, after the discovery of technology becomes useless.
as usual, sorry for rusty English
Melee needs rework as stated above.A difference in melee of the 2 combatants should result in more grazing and misses upon the experienced guy. Add some joy furniture like boxing bags and change them and horseshoes to training melee/shooting(per joy% increased) and chess to increase research while TVs increase random skill(like watching national geographic or cooking channels) and add a policy for joy activities like it is for drugs.
Research - The simplest way to add usage for this skill can be to tie global learning factor to the skill lvl with more scientific people analysing what they do while they do the other jobs or simply add a classroom workshop(blackboard) which works on a similar way to what the current TV does and bills to it that impart knowledge in skills depending upon the teachers research and the skill being taught and also the students research skill. This should also increase research for the student/teacher
Growing - the best way to deal with the growing problem is to change it to a similar fashion to the current wound treating with a %quality assigned at planting which will change the growing speed to +-20% and sometimes for the more 'advanced' plants failing planting altogether like surgery failures. Harvesting can also be assigned a %quality which will reduce/improve the yield and catastrophic failures can also result in destruction of nearby plants while the present harvest failures are just normal failures.
Mining - High skilled miners should increase the yield of deep mining.
Social - We can add a new task on the comms station to look for recruits and a higher skilled person can find a better person faster. We can be shown his bio and whether we should accept him or not and normal attempt to recruit should occur if we accept. To conserve memory space from needless chars, we will assume that that char died a year after contact.
Animals - A higher taming skill on a pawn should be required for the present random taming and we could add a DFesque animal knowledge system in the colony saves and a high skilled tamer can research already tamed animals/carcasses(e.g. what they eat) to improve the colonies knowledge on the animal type for future animals.
Shooting - There should be a setting for the 3 different shooting modes currently depicted by traits. The careful shooter/triggerhappy people can get different mode types for selection.
Eg- normal people can get fast,normal and slow shooting modes while a careful shooter can get the slow-normal,slow and slower modes with slow-normal being between slow and normal.
Medicine - Well we all know what is wrong with medicine in the current patch.Enough said.
Art - Again taking an idea from DF, artists can maybe create wall paintings to increase beauty.
Hauling - Not a skill as such, but still it needs to be improved upon from the 1 stack limit now that weight has been properly added. A cook should not have to make 10 trips into the freezer because there are 10 different items with only a single piece each. Likewise a bionic improved person be still limited to 75 units. The better way to do it is to 'load' the items hauling/crafting into a persons inventory till the weight limit and if there is space left and the job needs other materials, to go load those materials into the inventory as well. An while we are at it, maybe increase the weight limit for all those non hauling disabled people while the non hauling trait is changed to -carrying capacity.
The incapable traits should instead be changed to severe mood penalties for doing it over a reasonable time period. Presently, it just doesn't make sense that there can be a violent incapable person who will go on berserk rages and kill people while also refusing to lift a finger on invading pirates who are going to enslave him and it can be a matter of victory/defeat if he joins the fight or not.
This is highly dependent on map type, but I generally consider Cooking an essential skill for large, ambitious colonies. I always start by building my kitchen and food storage area, and I expand the base out around them. Pawns need to eat often, so they need easy access to tables and the food stockpile so they can eat and get on with their day.
As mentioned before, a good cook is essentially a constant +12 mood modifier (no awful meal debuff, +5 for fine meal) to every pawn, assuming you have access to both animal meat and vegetables. This is huge, both early on and in the late game, where you start losing your natural mood bonus.
Medicine is most poweful early on. A good doctor might pull you through those disastrous early diseases, but once you have a good supply of regular medicine, you don't need incredibly skilled doctors to do good work. Still very important for operations, so again, the more ambitious the colony, the greater the importance of Medicine.
Construction is only important for building certain things. Any usable furniture or objects that use up components should be left to experienced constructors, to avoid comfort penalties and lost components. It's very handy to have a bunch of people working on building walls, or you risk getting raided while your one constuctor is trying to wall in the entire compund, while also building furniture, joy items, workbenches etc. It's generally too much work for one pawn in the early-mid game.
For Medicine I noticed again that Doctors have to cheer up and feed the patients.
I think this should fall under the category of social jobs, the same way they do it with prisoners.
Quote from: SpaceDorf on February 11, 2017, 05:29:08 PM
For Medicine I noticed again that Doctors have to cheer up and feed the patients.
I think this should fall under the category of social jobs, the same way they do it with prisoners.
Its a rather hard choice since in real life, that cheering up usually is the doctors telling the person that he is going to get better.
How useful is the shooting skill really? I'm thinking "not much". My best shooters are un-scarred colonists with the Careful Shooter trait. I have at least one with maybe 2-3 levels in shooting using a normal quality LMG, and she lands almost every shot. Another shooter with skill 10 (Expert I think is 10) and an Assault Rifle, NO Careful Shooter trait, misses about half the time.
I think that, on average, skill should matter more than inherent "ability". Careful Shooter should probably be nerfed, and skill level should play a bigger role.
Quote from: sadpickle on February 12, 2017, 06:18:04 PM
How useful is the shooting skill really? I'm thinking "not much".
It matters for precision weapons like the sniper and survival rifle. You want to maximize the chance that these colonists hit because of the long cooldown. Because of the fast nature of combat, using these weapons are a gamble (you only get a few shots before the enemy can shoot back) and you want to stack the odds in your favour.
For spraying weapons like the LMG and minigun, shooting is mostly irrelevant. The shots are unlikely to ever connect directly, the damage comes from the sheer amount of dice rolled and the way that the game calculates missed shots. Just make sure other pawns stay well away from their line of fire.
Construction:
Top tier. Creating crucial defensive structures and shelter quickly can save colonies, but these scale into building for bulk goods (dining chairs) or exotic goods (armchairs) at high-end quality and the upper tiers even count as art. Rapid conversion of resources into cash and necessary for most everything puts these guys way up.
Growing:
Having this high helps food efficiency which is nice, and having access to devilstrand for armor is a plus.
Cooking:
Another way to rapidly output cash if you have the resources and something you'll probably be spamming anyway.
Crafting:
High quality clothing sells well, has a lot of possible input materials, and contributes to armor. You can make weapons too if that tickles your fancy.
Research:
Crucial early game as a tribe, but if you're not a tribe the game hands you most of what you need and the rest is available fast.
Medicine:
Junk stat for now, with few exceptions. If you use glitterworld medicine, a skill 5 disinterested oaf can 100% operations in a regular bed. If you don't, a luci boosted bionic 20 skill doctor can still fail sometimes. They are often (due to 50% hit rate on average) the ones that get disease so can't help much there, and most other injuries are pretty trivially handled by anybody.
Shooting:
Helpful but careful shooter trait is better on snipers and the tuning still favors killboxes/traps. Much less micro on a good one if doing door or cover/clear "waiting for targets" type micro.
Melee:
Underestimated. Other than the sniper strats melee can safely do what shooters can. The problem is that sieges and mechanoids make these guys disappear. Well micro'd melee with personal shields is arguably less risky than shootouts (defeat in detail + mostly blunt damage). Like shooting, however, the large #'s on high difficulty and better utility of just dumping raids w/o the micro muscles melee out as a relevant skill. Swatting people down in 1 volley of swings with 3 plasteel longswords is great times though.
Art:
It's decent. You get $$$ and beauty/wealth added to rooms, and that makes mood management a cinch on all difficulties. I got stuck with 3 of these recently and managed to get them all a table, lots of exotic goods caravans called in that run.
Animals:
Suffers similarly to melee but a few of them can trash those "land in your base" events and haulers are handy.
Social:
Trade prices are the most useful benefit, and it's non-trivial.
Mining:
Crucial to those under-mountain base builders. Inconsequential in most cases if you're not going that route.
If starting with 3 people, I would prioritize construction, growing, crafting as one with at least "interested", and at least one guy that can shoot to make into a sniper. I play tribes almost exclusively though, and usually have < 5 people at start, so I'm often taking what I can get. I rate construction #1 by wide margin though. It's so versatile and consistently necessary early game.
Quote from: Sola on February 10, 2017, 06:45:50 PM
Good skills:
Cooking - An interest in this is great to have. at 6, fine meals cost just as much resource as a simple meal, and provide a mood boost. Higher skill is faster cooking, and this game is all about managing time.
Research - An interest in this is great to have. Even if the colonist starts at zero, your one dedicated researcher will eventually be able to carry your technology by himself.
Less Important:
Crafting - Great for rocks, but partially offset by having a workshop with two tools cabinets. You can make a fully functional army entirely comprised of drops from raids, though. Tailoring is a non-issue.
Medicine - Good if you have it, but even a colony of zero-medicine pawns can keep you alive. Glitterworld medicine makes up for a lot of shortcomings where bionics are involved.
Don't really care:
Melee - I'll equip all my shooters with clubs and swords if the need ever arises. Not once have I said, "I wish I had someone with 15 in melee right now."
Social - Someone will come with a passable value in this skill eventually. I can keep my desired pawn imprisoned and try indefinitely until then.
Animals - I really tried to like this, but taming is just too risky, and training will happen eventually. I don't really need that dog to start hauling any time soon.
I tried to force-tame bears in a couple colonies, and even when I had a 16 animals guy on it. He tamed two bears, then died to a third one after a failed taming attempt. Simply a terrible risk:reward ratio.
Art - There are other ways to get beauty in your room. There are other ways to get money. Art is largely a non-issue for me.
Cooking - yup, the game is about managing time. And this is why having a good cook is vital. Food poisoning slows down your work flow immensely (50% if I remember correctly). So this is way more than just mood boost and little faster cooking. :P
Crafting - depends on what you define as
army. If you aim at bullet-proof vests and some basic weapons, then yes, drops will be enough.
If you wan power armors and charge rifles, crafting is essential. Not to mention that crafting enables you to get long-term components, which are crucial to get if you plan to get your 10+ colonists from the planet. :P
Glitterworld medicine makes up for it, when you have it. When you don't, either shit hits the fan or you have one dude who can save your day.
Melee - And this is because melee is very powerful. :V Afaik melee skill increases the base damage of the weapon by a %. A good quality plasteel sword wielded by a skilled pawn can deal around 25-30 damage per swing, every 2 seconds. Needless to say, unarmored pawns lose limbs left and right to such pawns. :V
Social is a tricky one. One the one hand it is useful when trading (yes, that 7% bonus does change a lot), but on the other there are very little occasions to train it, other than keeping that 99% prisoner as a chat partner to our
charisma pawn. TBH, it feels like an exploit.
I think some of these skills should be far higher at the moment you get such colonists (if it applies to them, of course), but grow way slower, say only when making a successful deal (the higher the amount of traded goods, the more exp, but still low). So that a colonists with
trader history can actually trade, and don't have to talk to prisoners in order to learn it. :V
What I'm saying here is that some skills should be almost permanent - once you get a pawn that has a history of doing something well, he should be able to do it well but others who didn't start with it would not learn it easily.
Hmmm. To narrow it down, I'd list down what I think are the 5 best skills and the 3 most lacklustre ones to have in this game.
Not in any particular order,
The 5 Best:
Cooking - I rank this very highly because besides reducing the risk of your pawns getting food poisoning and thereby reducing their productivity, it also affects their butchering capability. A good cook will be able to butcher animals efficiently, thereby increasing the amount of meat being harvested. I'm only aware it affects the amount of meat gotten but if it extends to the amount of leather/fur acquired as well then it becomes even more important.
Medicine - Although a good doctor isn't needed all too often (unless you get constantly raided and suffer injuries from events), it is nonetheless, extremely important to have one. A good doctor can mean the difference between keeping your best pawn at peak health or turning him into a cripple. Especially given the huge lottery that is played when doing major operations (unless you've modded it). Not exactly very fun when you intend to "upgrade" your favourite pawn with bionics only to have your doctor accidentally lop his head off or gouge his heart out....
Growing - For me personally, this one is here because you need a high growing skill (level 10) to access Devilstrand. Besides that, being able to grow healroot (for early game meds) and smokeleaf (for trading purposes) makes it super useful. Also, with capable farmers, you'd be able to keep your food supplies sustainable. It becomes even more important when you need to maintain your animal farm as they can burn through haygrass pretty quickly depending on your farm size.
Constructing - A good constructor would be able to build stuff quickly which is very nice to have. But most importantly, a good constructor would do two things, determine the quality of the item built, and reduce the chance of precious resources being wasted on a failed construction. These two factors makes construction an important skill to have.
Shooting - To me, this is important because of two factors. First one, it improves your hunting efficiency, and the second, its very important for defensive purposes. A good shooter can mean the difference between a manhunter animal reaching you before you shoot it to death or between a raider being taken out first or you.
The 3 most Lacklustre:
Artistic - This one is purely for aesthetics and not exactly key to me. Sure we get decent money from them and it does boost the beauty of a room. But money can be gotten through other means (smokeleaf, drug production, even selling meals). And beauty is not difficult to increase even without art sculptures.
Animals - This one I find is rather underwhelming. Simply because it doesn't seem to affect the amount of wool or milk you get from your farm animals. Sure training animals to randomly haul, rescue or protect your pawns is nice. But the effort invested can be pretty wasted if your pet husky gets incapacitated because in the midst of defending you, it gets mauled or shot to death. That and when they go forward to melee, the chance of them getting caught in a crossfire is pretty high. If the skill affect the amount of wool or milk you harvest then it would probably be worth. But for training itself, we'd have to be able to have some way to reduce the chance of our trained animals being taken out too easily (maybe craftable armour for them) for there to be a greater purpose.
Melee - Now this one is subjective. I do know that there are fans of this but to me, the trade-off doesn't seem to be worth compared to shooting. You'd need a good set of clothing, armour, and personal shields in order to make a melee toon worthwhile when taking on raiders. And even then, they have a significantly higher chance of getting critical injuries or even dying compared to shooters. Even in a fight with manhunter animals, a shooter can pretty much take out an animal before it reaches him, but a melee would likely suffer a few injuries in trying to take it down. I personally would like to see melee be given more weight but currently, its like the saying "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight..." being taken literally.
There are other skills which I do find important but those can afforded some leeway in their use. Stuff like mining and crafting are key to me as well but they are trainable over time. Crafting is actually very important but its one of those skills which you can pretty much upgrade by spam crafting cheap stuff (wooden bows and such). Research is a little lacklustre as it falls off in the end game but not as much compared to the 3 I mentioned above.
Research is kinda useless after the tree is finished. It could at least prevent skill degradation or something.
Quote from: makapse on February 12, 2017, 01:40:14 AM
Quote from: SpaceDorf on February 11, 2017, 05:29:08 PM
For Medicine I noticed again that Doctors have to cheer up and feed the patients.
I think this should fall under the category of social jobs, the same way they do it with prisoners.
Its a rather hard choice since in real life, that cheering up usually is the doctors telling the person that he is going to get better.
True, but that kind of cheering is mostly not needed.
The patients you need to cheer up are the ones that are bound to bed by circumstances,
non-functional bodyparts or crappy diseases.
It could also open the way to help colonists that are on the edge or have a mental break, instead of a smokeleaf and hops based therapie.
I'd like to see the Social skill have an ongoing impact on the mood of the other colonists. For instance, people with high social skills might crack a joke which gives nearby colonists a +1 or +2 moodlet for a short time. They'd be more likely to say something encouraging in a conversation, also resulting in a small bump, etc. And it would be really nice if a high social person could be instructed to go defuse an argument between colonists before they start beating on each other.
Medicine we already know needs an overhaul but I'd like to see there be a reason to keep multiple doctors around through specialization. For instance, you could have specialties like Organ Replacement, Bionics Installation, Plastic Surgery (fix those noses and ears!), and Neurosurgery. Any doctor above a certain skill threshold could train (maybe through the high tech research bench?) at most two of the specialties, and those abilities wouldn't be available without the specialization. Unspecialized/lower skilled doctors would be medics or trauma surgeons who can stitch up bullet holes and melee weapon damage, install peg legs and eye patches, fight disease, etc. A trade to keep non-specialized doctors viable might be that a specialized doctor is very good in his specialty, but he won't be as good as an unspecialized trauma surgeon of the same skill level for dealing with the everyday stuff.
It's a mistake to think that every skill is important for every game. Artistry isn't important for year-round growing zones, but on maps where there is nothing to work with except stone and no growing period, you need an income and art is perfect for that.
It would be nice if patients who can walk ate by themselves. It would work similar to delivering food to a prisoner. People would love the ability to build tables and chairs in hospitals. It's not even that it would be more efficient (marginally), but because it would look nice and polished.
Quote from: cultist on February 13, 2017, 09:32:20 AM
It's a mistake to think that every skill is important for every game. Artistry isn't important for year-round growing zones, but on maps where there is nothing to work with except stone and no growing period, you need an income and art is perfect for that.
But why shouldn't a game strive to make all skills roughly as useful ? It's not even a problem that art is not very useful. It's BORING and not fanciful at all. It's completely static. In Rimworld, artists sit in a basement like some kind of gnomes, instead of fooling around, acting pretentious and becoming alcoholics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2erFUojbAA
Artists in this game are utterly predictable. I don't know how to implement it, but artists should take inspiration from world around them, have dry spells and amazing streaks of creativity. They should beautify the world around them.
I think 'pure art' jobs should be only a part of what an artist does in Rimworld. Things like 'art on chair' or 'art on bed', currently governed by Construction skill, should be governed by Art skill. Artists would have a chance to put such carvings or decorations in everything they make - furniture, carpets, jackets, shirts, walls, lamps, animal beds, improvised turrets, incendiary IED traps, doors. Most pieces of equipment and static structures could be decorative, granting beauty, mood and sometimes social relations bonuses.
It would work like this: base stats of an item or structure would come from the base skill - Construction for walls, doors, furniture. Crafting for weapons and apparel. Base skill would determine HP, insulation, comfort for furniture. But if the maker of the object also had the Art skill, he has a random chance to add such decoration to the item when making it. A person wearing a jacket made by an artist who successfully rolled an Art check would have better social relations with people and a mood bonus. It would be possible that an Awful jacket has an Excellent embroidery on it.
There could also be a very small chance that an artist decorates an already existing item or structure. An artist might put a carving or a mosaic on a floor of a temporary room, and later be unhappy if you run a wall across it to redesign your base.
Making everything "equally useful" is unrealistic (in the sense that measuring + accomplishing this from a development perspective is so constraining that it's not worth doing). What you do want is for situations presented by the game to make options more or less desirable.
In that vein, medicine, melee, and similar skills that don't see nearly the benefit of high skill as others do need a look, as many of these types of skills are fine w/ nobody interested and your top pawn being relatively low level at it. Melee with good micro is an effective early game option to get more high-priced clothing to use or sell and prisoners, but it's not very dependent on the skill, more so just on engineering 3v1 or more beatdowns and avoiding infect-able injuries (or making time with them very short).
If not equally useful, then at least equally interesting. It makes sense that Art is not as important in a frontier settlement. If they can't make my colony effective, they should at least make it pretty or provoke various emotions.
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 10, 2017, 02:56:39 PMYou can't train Growing effectively in biomes with harsh winter,
sure you can...in the same gamey way you can train other skills in the game.
Have ANY patch of gravel warm enough to allow you to sow crops...light doesn't matter.
Make a 1x1 growing zone set to oak tree....plant oak tree, force cut oak tree, repeat until growing skill is where you want it. Sure it's cheap, but no worse than operating and release mad-doctor-style on prisoners just for skill, or constructing tables and chairs and chess tables and billiards tables up to almost max, then doing the last 5 units of work with your best constructor
Quote from: Perq on February 13, 2017, 02:33:47 AM
Quote from: Sola on February 10, 2017, 06:45:50 PM
Good skills:
Cooking - An interest in this is great to have. at 6, fine meals cost just as much resource as a simple meal, and provide a mood boost. Higher skill is faster cooking, and this game is all about managing time.
Research - An interest in this is great to have. Even if the colonist starts at zero, your one dedicated researcher will eventually be able to carry your technology by himself.
Less Important:
Crafting - Great for rocks, but partially offset by having a workshop with two tools cabinets. You can make a fully functional army entirely comprised of drops from raids, though. Tailoring is a non-issue.
Medicine - Good if you have it, but even a colony of zero-medicine pawns can keep you alive. Glitterworld medicine makes up for a lot of shortcomings where bionics are involved.
Don't really care:
Melee - I'll equip all my shooters with clubs and swords if the need ever arises. Not once have I said, "I wish I had someone with 15 in melee right now."
Social - Someone will come with a passable value in this skill eventually. I can keep my desired pawn imprisoned and try indefinitely until then.
Animals - I really tried to like this, but taming is just too risky, and training will happen eventually. I don't really need that dog to start hauling any time soon.
I tried to force-tame bears in a couple colonies, and even when I had a 16 animals guy on it. He tamed two bears, then died to a third one after a failed taming attempt. Simply a terrible risk:reward ratio.
Art - There are other ways to get beauty in your room. There are other ways to get money. Art is largely a non-issue for me.
Crafting - depends on what you define as army. If you aim at bullet-proof vests and some basic weapons, then yes, drops will be enough.
If you wan power armors and charge rifles, crafting is essential. Not to mention that crafting enables you to get long-term components, which are crucial to get if you plan to get your 10+ colonists from the planet. :P
Melee - And this is because melee is very powerful. :V Afaik melee skill increases the base damage of the weapon by a %. A good quality plasteel sword wielded by a skilled pawn can deal around 25-30 damage per swing, every 2 seconds. Needless to say, unarmored pawns lose limbs left and right to such pawns. :V
By the time you're able to craft power armor and charge rifles, you will already have someone that's capable of crafting. That is very far along the tech line, and not something I worry about on my first 8 or so pawns. A capable crafter will appear eventually, and at that point, he's going to be my component-maker, tailor, and smith.
...And that's if I don't simply buy the charge rifles and power armor. Silver is easy to come up with. Dedicating a day, 200 steel, and 10 components (or whatever it costs) to a sniper rifle is less awesome.
As for melee, agree to disagree. I'll take ten survival rifle guys over five survival rifles and five infantry any day. Easier to micro, less worry about friendly fire, and less danger in general. With shooting, you can potentially kill people before they get to your pawns. With melee, you are going to trade blows, and that's a chance of injury I simply don't like.
I'm doing a bit of a skills relevance review for Alpha 17, so that should address a lot of these concerns. I do agree that they don't pop as much as they could. I think they could be more relevant, make more interesting choices, characterize pawns better, and different play more with different pawn sets.
Quote from: Sola on February 13, 2017, 05:25:31 PM
As for melee, agree to disagree. I'll take ten survival rifle guys over five survival rifles and five infantry any day. Easier to micro, less worry about friendly fire, and less danger in general. With shooting, you can potentially kill people before they get to your pawns. With melee, you are going to trade blows, and that's a chance of injury I simply don't like.
Thats why I like at least 2 or 4 Melee Pawns to hold the flanks and different weapon ranges and fire rates to micro a true elastic defense approach.
If a melee pawn gets through to your snipers yoz have a problem and the whole line might collapse.
If said melee pawn is greeted by the sword wielding bullet sponge ..
I had a thought that the research skill could be a slightly more generic "science" skill. The idea is that it represents a pawns more theoretical skills rather than practical.
As far as gameplay mechanics is concerned, it would mean he is better with research (obviously), but also more advanced manufacturing, like knowing how to operate more advanced crafting tools like computerized assembly benches or 3D printers. Those aren't really in the game, but it would make sense to me if the component assembly bench was more advanced and you needed a high research pawn to operate that. Certain things would still require more practical hands on crafting and assembly skills, but stuff like components or high tech gear would require a brainy guy operating a computer.
Also I think it would make sense if that was the skill for drug fabrication. There are chemists who wouldn't know anything about how to handle a scalpel or bandage a leg, but would be really good at running a drug lab.
And as an aside, I think it would be interesting if some of the crafting required a production line of manufactured goods. Right now most crafting is mine steel, make gun. Would be interesting if late game equipment required more intermediate steps, like how some items require components that can be assembled at the component bench. This would either mean you need to setup a larger production line or you could trade more for the stuff you need.
Melee isnt good, but it isnt useless either. I never use my melee guys to attack when i have a shootout with pirates. But i use them when i am starting to loose. Put a melee with skill 20 on every side of a door and watch them pirates break the door. These 2 guys can take out 10 pirates with high tech gear with ease.
When looking at Rimworld skills, I see basically 5 orthogonal skill groups:
- Fighting: Shooting, Melee
- Survival: Medicine, Cooking
- Production: Construction, Crafting, Art, (Research)
- "Dumb labor": Growing, Mining
- Interaction: Animals, Social
How did I get to those groups? Well...
- Fighting: These are the only skills that matter once you've entered combat. Depending on your play style you might only need them until you've built your killbox, but even then they don't become totally useless (e.g. if you get hit by a drop pod raid).
- Survival: These skills are needed to keep a baseline colony running. Well, one could argue about cooking since it could be replaced by eating stuff raw or getting a nutrient paste dispenser, but I'm currently thinking more along the general concept behind the skill.
- Production: These skills are necessary to create a stable living (and working) environment. You can absolutely survive without these, but it will be a challenge to keep your colonists mood above the breaking point.
- Dumb labor: These are skills that absolutely don't require mastery to be useful. I personally see them on the same level as hauling or cleaning: You probably want someone in your colony to be able to do these (depending on your map), but you don't really care about how good they are at it (well, ignoring the growing level requirement on healroot/devilstrand).
- Interaction: These skills can be powerful under the right circumstances (e.g. training massive amounts of hauling animals or recruiting valuable prisoners), but don't influence the basic colony survival much.
As you can see, the different groups all have their own aspects and are more or less independent from each other. However, I still have some issues with this arrangement.
First of all, the "Dumb labor" section feels really a bit out of place. There are some cross-cutting concerns to Survival (Growing) and Production (Mining), but the skills themselves are too basic to really compare to the skills in the other categories. I think these should be moved to the same level as hauling or cleaning, as they really are about the absolute basic tasks one could do (basically anyone having a more or less functional body could do these).
Then, let's look at the Production skills:
- Research: While I think it does fill a balance gap in the game (tribals creating power armor from the start would be a bit weird), I don't really like how it is implemented. It affects nearly every other skill in some way (by basically unlocking new possibilities there), but the researcher by itself doesn't have to be capable of doing anything in those skills. I'm really doubting someone incapable of cooking would be able to "research" pemmican, or someone without any knowledge in crafting could investigate the creation of power armors. I feel like this skill could be split up among the other skills (e.g. add an "experimentation" bill to existing workbenches that lets you research new technologies).
- Construction: I think this skill currently is too broad. It covers basics (walls, doors, roofs, ...), furniture (tables, chairs, workbenches, ...) and electric installations (generators, heaters, coolers, ...). And while I'm not too set on the distinction between basics and furniture (making a door kinda seems similar to making a table), there is a huge level of difference when comparing these to electric installations regarding required know-how, tools and details. (Also, I'm not too clear on why the comfort level of furniture is tied to its beauty level, but more on that in the next point.)
- Art: If you want a perfect example of cross-cutting concerns, it's the art skill. Art is basically about making beautiful things (or, possibly, making things more beautiful). And while sculptures fit the first interpretation quite well, I don't get why the art skill isn't used when determining the beauty of other stuff. Like, how does a constructor determine how beautiful he should make a certain piece of furniture? Or, what makes a colonist think their clothing is really awful when it has barely been used? One possibility to address these interesting questions would be to include an artist (think: designer) in the creation process: An artist might make a polishing pass on a piece of furniture, or design some fancy cuts/patterns for clothing. This could be the same guy creating the chair or t-shirt, or someone else (so your main constructor/crafter can focus more on making a functional piece instead of worrying about aesthetics).
- Crafting: If you think construction is overloaded, I don't know what Crafting is. It covers creating drugs, clothes, weapons, armor, fuel, resources, and I'm sure I'm still missing some (I'm starting to wonder why cooking got its own skill). The question is now: What to do? Should one split this skill up, and if yes, in how many parts? 3 as per the work schedule? 4 with an additional "military stuff" skill? What about drugs (move them to wholly to Medicine or an extra skill)? Add a "dumb labor"-like refining skill for stuff like stone-cutting and smelting? Or something completely different?
Other than that, I think Social is a bit too weak right now, but there were some good suggestions in this thread already.
(Also, on another note: I'd like some way to train colonists in Melee, maybe something like a dojo? Currently that is the only skill where you really have to risk your colonists life to train it...)
Well, these ideas still don't fix the "mastering" problem that's currently in Rimworld, but just increasing the number of skills (e.g. by splitting construction and/or crafting) should increase then number of masters needed to cover all skills (which would require larger colonies, with more pawns able to do dumb labor, and so on).
Quote from: Deathawaits4 on February 13, 2017, 10:18:40 PM
Melee isnt good, but it isnt useless either. I never use my melee guys to attack when i have a shootout with pirates. But i use them when i am starting to loose. Put a melee with skill 20 on every side of a door and watch them pirates break the door. These 2 guys can take out 10 pirates with high tech gear with ease.
You're not going to level a single colonist to Melee 20 without a melee neurotrainer. Before you have kevlar vests and kevlar helmets, you'll be trashed. Now you can survive, but you need to hit enemies many times and melee tends to have high damage output. Either you go down fast or they go down fast. Are you going to fight with plasteel knife ? And things that can take a lot of damage tend to dish out a lot of damage.
About splitting Construction - note that by midgame constructors already have nothing to do. Only occasionally you expand by building another room, or make some repairs. Splitting Construction may make sense from realism point of view, but such colonists would become unemployed even faster.
There is a reference to Warhammer 40k scale in RimWorld. And when it comes to melee, I see it just how it is (was?) in tabletop Warhammer 40k - melee is to break ranged-heavy squads.
And to be honest, this is how I see melee in RimWorld. Using ranged is obviously a good choice over melee - because it is ranged. But to shoot you need to aim, and that needs some distance and space. Honestly, the fact of melees locking ranged in melee fight makes it fun and diverse. It isn't just about who has better guns - it takes strategy to not let your ranged guys be overrun by melees.
Using your melee guys to attack a shooting range of enemies is simply a bad play, and it won't work. Yes, melee guys will get hurt, but it is better for those melee guys with proper melee weapons to get hurt over guys with ranged weapon who will most probably get killed, because they have no weapon to fight back (other than iron hands of justice :P).
Striving to take no damage seems logical, but honestly it should not work.
Having full-ranged army should almost always end up in failure. If game generates armies that can be shoot off before even reaching you - something is wrong (unless you have weapons are better than they are supposed to be at given point in game).
For the same reason kill-boxes are such a plague, to level of exploit. No sane raider would enter something like that - they would try to get around any way possible, and if nobody is coming out, they would first burn every single geothermal generator, piece of cable, plant and so on.
Being able to defeat raids with no damage on your part (be it building, injured pawns or cut off limbs) would suggest raiders are complete morons who don't know what they are doing. And if so, they would be long gone, because nothing that is that dumb survives in the Rim. :P
Ps. Got a little off-topic, but I hope it still serves to explain why I think melee should be a thing, and why skill itself should be considered as useful, even tho there are some exploits (like kill-boxes) that prevent it from being useful.
Just inserting my 10p into this discussion here...
Shooting - The skill we all know and somewhat love, shooting bears some relevance in lower levels. However, with the way it's set up; momentum slows down past level 6, and the gains seen from shooting skill increase slow to a crawl past level 10 because of the way the post-process curve is currently set up. For instance, a healthy level 20 shooter isn't even as accurate as a scyther, and level 20 shooting requires serious investment in neurotrainers, and probably a passion and high starting skill to begin with. Furthermore, a level 1 'careful shooter' will already be more accurate than a godlike marksman which you probably invested a lot in. The only factors that bear true weight at the moment are health factors and traits.
Melee - Melee skill bears some weight in the lower levels (similar to shooting), pretty much determining whether you give somebody say a gladius, or a longsword. However: accuracy gains suffer from severe diminishing returns past level 6, and the accuracy improvement from level 6 to level 11 melee is only 5%. As many other people have pointed out, this skill really doesn't bear significant enough relevance.
Social - A good socialite feels like they have some validity when it comes to prisoner recruitment and trade price negotiation. Positive traits indeed helping with the former case.
Animals - Somebody good with handling does see a slight improvement in taming and training, but I haven't really observed the differential that much. I usually go with canines and grizzly bears anyway.
Medicine - Great trait to have early-game, as a decent medic can make or break one's survival of a disease such as the plague. Wounds are less of an issue, but I tend to assign high level doctors to those bleeding out rapidly and with many wounds. As for surgery, I usually only use Glitterworld Medicine since the nerf, so skill bears little weight there.
Cooking - Great improvement through the lower levels, but loses its momentum in the higher levels. I still aim for good cooks though for the speed improvement mainly.
Construction - I feel that Construction is good in its current form: low level constructors are terrible, godlikes generally come out with a great deal of excellent+ quality things.
Growing - Along with other skills, growing gets significant improvement through the low levels, but returns diminish hard through the higher levels - with the exception of plant work speed. Also the fact that certain lucrative products are gated behind higher growing skills is a motivation to get higher level growers. I generally look for at least a level 6 or 7 grower with interest when doing crashlanded.
Mining - Mining skill honestly bears little weight overall, with the exception of speed. Due to this, I tend to put most people on some sort of mining priority due to the complete lack of consequences for lower skills other than slower mining.
Artistic - Same story as Construction. Not something I look for immediately as essentials come first, but I do eventually look for a strong artist to give everybody large sculptures for their bedrooms, and grand for the dining room.
Crafting - Similar story to artistic: I don't look for top-notch crafters immediately, but I do once established. I find it useful to eventually be able to manufacture high-quality weapons, clothing, and armour.
Research - Excellent gains throughout, but is completely redundant once all research is over and done with.
Very good post, XeoNovaDan.
The growing job seems to be a major source of out of control wealth:
* selling simple meals
* parkas
* joints
* furniture (wooden plus armchairs)
* beer (used to be profitable)
* infinite wooden sculptures from tree farming
I think it's because in many biomes you can plant as much as you wish, and plants have no upkeep cost. You only plant and harvest. You literally make something out of nothing, then sell it. Mining has finite resources on the map. Loot comes from raiders. You get some plasteel from mechanoids. Leather and meat from hunting are finite.
And don't forget flake :P
Flake's the most profitable drug you can make, even more so than smokeleaf and yayo. Mass isn't a factor as they all have zero mass.
In my playthroughs...
Critical
Construction - This is the king skill. Having someone with a high Construction means less build failures on expensive or critical projects, higher-quality furniture (sometimes with bonus art) that improves the room just by being in it, and quicker deployment of floors, sturdier walls, and other such things. When my pawns start getting constant mood bonuses from having nice rooms my Construction pawn is almost always the one getting the credit.
Growing - The queen skill. As someone earlier in the thread cited, this is a recurring job that will never, ever be finished. Maximizing the output and minimizing the time spent on any infinitely-recurring job is important for me, since that's more time my pawns can spend doing something else. I wish it had more to it, but this is ranking by importance, not by excitement.
Medicine - The prince skill. You only need one pawn good at it but you'll want two or three. Higher Medicine skill means faster, better treatment, bionics, and pawns with greater uptime and fewer health issues. All in all, this skill is the oil that keeps your colony flowing and keeps you safe from the minor mishaps of day to day life.
Important
Cooking - Just good enough to be useful. As with Growing, it's one of those tasks that'll never, ever be finished, so doing it quickly and properly is important. Fine meals are a direct benefit and avoiding food poisoning is also a plus, since that means less work for your cleaners.
Crafting - This is where my money comes from. Additionally, better weapons means better accuracy and better armor is much more resistant to harm. If my colonists get nice clothes out of the deal, too, more power to 'em.
Shooting - Pew, pew! Guns just work better for defense than melee weapons do. Having a sniper who can cull the horde before they get close to my base is always lovely and a higher skill seems to mean they're less likely to shoot their fellow colonists instead of the raider.
Useful
Mining - It's good to be able to do it quickly (especially with plasteel) but you can generally find or train a decent miner or two and it's a labor almost anyone can do. It's a job that eventually finishes (unless you literally never stop building) and so efficiency isn't a huge concern. It's also a job with no quality modifiers.
Research - Will generally train up on its own, especially if you find Research interest on a pawn who doesn't do much else. Disable everything but Research and watch them become an all-star. Like Mining, it's another job that will eventually finish completely, at which point Research becomes useless.
Useless
Social - I like having at least one pawn with good Social so that if I see a prisoner I want I can recruit them sometime before the heat death of the universe. That said, recruitment chance seems to be really arbitrary (and eventually becomes nigh impossible as colonist numbers increase) so even then it's not all that useful. I haven't really noticed any difference in trade prices, either.
Animal - They don't seem as useful or as desirable as they should be, and it's a shame because I love animal handling. Animals are okay for hauling, but eventually I have enough idle colonists that hauling isn't a concern. They're okay as ablative armor in raids, but if a bonded one dies I get a depressed colonist and if their handler dies I may have a lot of manhunters running around. They're also constantly eating my meals (regardless of kibble/hay) and dirtying up the place, making more work for my cooks and cleaners. I really want this skill to be good, but it's not - Animals generate more work than they save.
Melee - It simply gets too dangerous as time goes on since Shields aren't craftable and eventually won't survive long enough anyway. Raids get far too large for a melee fighter to risk engaging. Additionally, it seems to be one of those skills where a high skill doesn't matter.
Art - Mostly used as a way to turn excess resources into money, but that's something my Construction guy can do just as well. Beauty improvements are also generally handled by Construction. I'm not out to build a palace, after all.
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 14, 2017, 06:59:59 PM
Very good post, XeoNovaDan.
The growing job seems to be a major source of out of control wealth:
* selling simple meals
* parkas
* joints
* furniture (wooden plus armchairs)
* beer (used to be profitable)
* infinite wooden sculptures from tree farming
I think it's because in many biomes you can plant as much as you wish, and plants have no upkeep cost. You only plant and harvest. You literally make something out of nothing, then sell it. Mining has finite resources on the map. Loot comes from raiders. You get some plasteel from mechanoids. Leather and meat from hunting are finite.
Raids (offensive and defensive) also let you make something out of nothing. The main difference is that for defending raids, you're rate limited by event proc. Growing is rate-limited by the pawn(s) doing it and only marginally constrained by space on most biomes (with sea ice, ice sheet, and to a lesser extent extreme desert being exceptions).
Even for skills that let you add enough value to material to turn a profit buying --> constructing, crafting or sculpting --> selling you wind up rate-limited on trader supply of the good. For growing you instead cap out on what useful items are available for trade (trader resource offers are finite).
However while growing is lucrative, the main case against it is that it is only a piece of the puzzle in early-mid game survival. You CAN live without growing anything at all, but you can't live without keeping pawns alive by definition. Growing is (a little) down the totem pole in that regard, though its contribution to food is the most straightforward way to get it.
Don't forget you can request trade caravans. I've never used it so far so I don't know if there are any limits other than silver to how often you can do it.
Another idea for Social: rework discounts. Instead of a pitiful 0.5% / level discount for everything, there would be a larger discount but only for some randomly chosen items. Some kind of hash function would be used to select which. For example in one caravan you might talk the trader into lowering the price of stone mace, military helmet and chemfuel. Another time it would be alphabeavers, t-shirts, beer, wool and granite. It would give an impression of bargain hunting, and would provoke players to experiment with different items. Higher Social skill would give you discount for more items.
What should also account for position of the skill is how time consuming they are ..
so how much sense does it make to double on skills.
I divided them in Trade Skill and Occasional Skill
Trade Skills - the pawn works at those, he has no time to something else but becoming a master is only a matter of time.
Crafter, Cook, Builder and Grower, Research( until everything is done ), Artist ( if you are into it )
Mining ( mountainous )
Occasional Skill
Medic ( except if you have him crafting medicine ), social , animals ( depends on the number )
Mining ( anywhere else ) Shooting for Hunting
and Combat Skills .. well .. you know when you need those ..
I think adept social Colonists also make friends faster and are less likely to insult others or start a social fight ..
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 15, 2017, 01:27:59 PM
Don't forget you can request trade caravans. I've never used it so far so I don't know if there are any limits other than silver to how often you can do it.
Another idea for Social: rework discounts. Instead of a pitiful 0.5% / level discount for everything, there would be a larger discount but only for some randomly chosen items. Some kind of hash function would be used to select which. For example in one caravan you might talk the trader into lowering the price of stone mace, military helmet and chemfuel. Another time it would be alphabeavers, t-shirts, beer, wool and granite. It would give an impression of bargain hunting, and would provoke players to experiment with different items. Higher Social skill would give you discount for more items.
You have to wait several days in between requests. It is possible in late game colonies that your production --> purchasing power outstrips trader good availability, even more so for useful goods. The game's kind of "over" at that point but it can happen.
Incidentally on standard sea ice (not the extreme challenge where it is literally always too cold to call caravans) it should be among your top priorities, definitely a first build after shelter/power and higher priority than hydroponics.
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 15, 2017, 01:27:59 PM
Don't forget you can request trade caravans. I've never used it so far so I don't know if there are any limits other than silver to how often you can do it.
4 days cooldown per friendly faction, 600 silver each time. This should not be made any harsher, because it is crucial and expensive enough in the early game and harsher settings. The problem with "we have to much stuff" is the speed and ease with which it is aquired over time and the lack of money sinks, not that our vendors are too good nowadays.
QuoteAnother idea for Social: rework discounts. Instead of a pitiful 0.5% / level discount for everything, there would be a larger discount but only for some randomly chosen items. Some kind of hash function would be used to select which. For example in one caravan you might talk the trader into lowering the price of stone mace, military helmet and chemfuel. Another time it would be alphabeavers, t-shirts, beer, wool and granite. It would give an impression of bargain hunting, and would provoke players to experiment with different items. Higher Social skill would give you discount for more items.
I love that idea. Discount is always, say, 35% off, and for [level] articles on normal traders, half of that on those "has a few items" guys.
Quote from: TheMeInTeam on February 15, 2017, 03:29:13 PM
Incidentally on standard sea ice (not the extreme challenge where it is literally always too cold to call caravans) it should be among your top priorities, definitely a first build after shelter/power and higher priority than hydroponics.
The strategy reminds me of this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNaXdLWt17A
By all means, DON'T choose the simpler solution and don't migrate to a more hospitable land. No, make a caravan come to you.
Quote from: Stormfox on February 15, 2017, 03:29:27 PM
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 15, 2017, 01:27:59 PM
Another idea for Social: rework discounts. Instead of a pitiful 0.5% / level discount for everything, there would be a larger discount but only for some randomly chosen items. Some kind of hash function would be used to select which. For example in one caravan you might talk the trader into lowering the price of stone mace, military helmet and chemfuel. Another time it would be alphabeavers, t-shirts, beer, wool and granite. It would give an impression of bargain hunting, and would provoke players to experiment with different items. Higher Social skill would give you discount for more items.
I love that idea. Discount is always, say, 35% off, and for [level] articles on normal traders, half of that on those "has a few items" guys.
Something like that. Another possibility would be that with high Social you get a wider selection of goods. "I'm really not supposed to sell those spare parts for our trade ship, but...". Or even you gain the ability to
sell some goods the trader doesn't actually want, such as sell some kibble to a weapon supplier.
Quote from: Trylobyte on February 15, 2017, 11:38:33 AM
Cooking - [...] since that means less work for your cleaners.
Social - [...] That said, recruitment chance seems to be really arbitrary (and eventually becomes nigh impossible as colonist numbers increase) so even then it's not all that useful. I haven't really noticed any difference in trade prices, either.
Melee - [...] Additionally, it seems to be one of those skills where a high skill doesn't matter.
Food poisoning also causes a -50% debuff to consciousnesses, which in turn makes your pawns work much slower. :v Because of that, having a good cook is pretty crucial - otherwise you'll have your colonists work way slower, which may turn into a death scenario. :P
There is a difference in prices, but they are small. Still, they are big enough to make a difference. Think of it that way - getting 7% more silver for your sold stuff means that, indirectly, your trader just produced 7% extra goods. Sold 3000 rice? You just got ~196 extra (if you have 7% bonus, I assume). Buying? Same thing.
It might be hard to notice, but these things add up pretty quickly if you are trading a lot. If this bonus was much bigger, it would be wayyyyy overpowered.
Melee skill increases damage with melee weapons. :@ A level 19 melee with plasteel sword can output 16 damage per second (hits for 32 every 2 seconds - high chance to severe limbs, since it is focused damage. It is very frequent for raider to lose their arms and drop their weapons - unless they simply get killed by 2 hits in the torso. :V). For scale, Charge Rifle can output 14 DPS (assuming you hit everything). I feel like hitting in melee is pretty easy, too.
Melee cannot hit your own guys, no matter how many and how close your enemies are. Melee cannot be locked by enemy melee charge. YOU can lock enemies in melee.
I mean, it is not perfect, but honestly I think people underestimate melee.
i just recruit only colonists who are incapable of nothing.
as for passion/interest. i prioritize people with passion/interest for shooting or melee + 1 other skill at random.
i let pawns specialize based on their passions and i keep an eye out on balance so that at least 1 pawn is specialized on each task. though at start, my skill priority is construction. i always start with at least 1 passionate builder with high skills.
QuoteBy all means, DON'T choose the simpler solution and don't migrate to a more hospitable land. No, make a caravan come to you.
If you're going to play there at all, you might as well take advantage of the options provided. For whatever reason, those caravans can reach you much faster than you can travel to other bases. Since you don't have starting resources to set up enough power for sun lamp + hydroponics and still cover other needs comm console is much stronger.
Migration turns it into a tundra or boreal start with a delay, but you have enough starting food to cover ground and can raid pirates for even more stuff along the way. Without trade, you just don't get resources to grow, excepting cargo drops + occasional slag chunk to smelt.
Quote from: Perq on February 16, 2017, 01:33:16 AM
Food poisoning also causes a -50% debuff to consciousnesses, which in turn makes your pawns work much slower. :v Because of that, having a good cook is pretty crucial - otherwise you'll have your colonists work way slower, which may turn into a death scenario. :P
But that only needs Cooking 5 to more or less negate. Fine Meals only need Cooking 6. Anything higher than that is just speed at that point. I don't really need a good chef, I just need someone who isn't terrible.
QuoteThere is a difference in prices, but they are small. Still, they are big enough to make a difference. Think of it that way - getting 7% more silver for your sold stuff means that, indirectly, your trader just produced 7% extra goods. Sold 3000 rice? You just got ~196 extra (if you have 7% bonus, I assume). Buying? Same thing.
It might be hard to notice, but these things add up pretty quickly if you are trading a lot. If this bonus was much bigger, it would be wayyyyy overpowered.
I suppose I don't notice it because I don't do a lot of trading, and by the time I do get around to it I'm usually cleaning out caravans with merchandise to spare. Even a 10% bonus becomes somewhat trivial at that point. Even without that, though, it's only a good skill for a colony that absolutely depends on trade to survive (Sea Ice for instance) and is merely a bonus in other settings.
QuoteMelee skill increases damage with melee weapons. :@ A level 19 melee with plasteel sword can output 16 damage per second (hits for 32 every 2 seconds - high chance to severe limbs, since it is focused damage. It is very frequent for raider to lose their arms and drop their weapons - unless they simply get killed by 2 hits in the torso. :V). For scale, Charge Rifle can output 14 DPS (assuming you hit everything). I feel like hitting in melee is pretty easy, too.
Melee cannot hit your own guys, no matter how many and how close your enemies are. Melee cannot be locked by enemy melee charge. YOU can lock enemies in melee.
I mean, it is not perfect, but honestly I think people underestimate melee.
Melee skill increases DPS only because melee skill affects hit chance. It doesn't affect damage or attack speed, which are determined by the weapon. As for melee vs. ranged, that's a different debate, but I'm firmly in the ranged camp - Enemies that can't get close enough to hit me do zero DPS after all. It's got its uses, surely, but I don't rate it as high as Shooting because simply being at range is an advantage in and of itself. If I'm going to tie enemies up in melee I'd rather grab someone with good Animal and tame a bunch of dogs/boars/attack chickens and let those loose to bog down a raid while my shooters mow everything down with charge rifles. No more worries about friendly fire -and- a delicious dinner. More easily-replaced than colonists.
Quote from: Trylobyte on February 16, 2017, 10:47:54 PM
Melee skill increases DPS only because melee skill affects hit chance. It doesn't affect damage or attack speed, which are determined by the weapon.
Noooope. While it doesn't affect attack speed (which is determined by the weapon), damage IS increased by the skill of the wielder.
If you are at your computer (I'm sadly not atm, could just make some screenshots), check the details on equipped melee weapon and then click on damage. You'll get a detailed list of what affects it. Skill level is sure on that list. :PWeird you are arguing that melee is bad without even fully understanding how it works, eh? :PSeems I didn't understood melee myself, being silly here. Well shit. D:
Quote from: Perq on February 17, 2017, 02:20:22 AM
Quote from: Trylobyte on February 16, 2017, 10:47:54 PM
Melee skill increases DPS only because melee skill affects hit chance. It doesn't affect damage or attack speed, which are determined by the weapon.
Noooope. While it doesn't affect attack speed (which is determined by the weapon), damage IS increased by the skill of the wielder.
If you are at your computer (I'm sadly not atm, could just make some screenshots), check the details on equipped melee weapon and then click on damage. You'll get a detailed list of what affects it. Skill level is sure on that list. :P
Weird you are arguing that melee is bad without even fully understanding how it works, eh? :P
Dweeb has skill 7 and the Brawler trait.
Damage on the equipped weapon:
(http://wstaw.org/m/2017/02/17/lies1_png_750x750_q85.jpg)
Damage in the DPS (
Damage
Per
Second) formula:
(http://wstaw.org/m/2017/02/17/lies2_1_png_750x750_q85.jpg)
Damage per hit is affected by weapon, its material, quality, and its health. Neither skill nor Brawler trait increases damage, note the 2nd picture and base weapon damage is the same.
Skill and brawler only affect hit chance, which generally increases damage dealt over time.
The end.
Yup, I'm wrong. Translation is wrong, to be more precise. :P In Polish translation there is a "skill" multiplier, but it really is QUALITY multiplier.
Given the values themselves it seems that melee does really have really low impact.
All in all value is still pretty high, but melee skill itself should affect it more.
This is a little off topic, but since the unlimited silver supply came up and it is part of the skill problem indirectly....
With the fact we all work our pawns everyday, 10+ hours a day. I am surprised none of them ever want to be paid. Yeah i know there isn't really a economy for them to need paychecks, but could you imagine if they expected to be paid. And if the amount that they had to be paid was tied into whatever skill they were mostly using and pro-rated for the level of the skill. That 20 skill passion researcher would really cost you bank.
A decent way to not only put a curb to the money supply issue, but make having people to make money be a necessary part of a thriving colony. And the fun mood hits when you couldn't afford to pay them lol.
Quote from: XeronX on February 17, 2017, 08:47:42 PM
This is a little off topic, but since the unlimited silver supply came up and it is part of the skill problem indirectly....
With the fact we all work our pawns everyday, 10+ hours a day. I am surprised none of them ever want to be paid. Yeah i know there isn't really a economy for them to need paychecks, but could you imagine if they expected to be paid. And if the amount that they had to be paid was tied into whatever skill they were mostly using and pro-rated for the level of the skill. That 20 skill passion researcher would really cost you bank.
A decent way to not only put a curb to the money supply issue, but make having people to make money be a necessary part of a thriving colony. And the fun mood hits when you couldn't afford to pay them lol.
In a way, they do expect to be paid....have your pawns set to only work and sleep, and you'll soon end up with a -20 totally joy deprived mood penalty...use nutrient paste exclusively for food saving, and you stack more penalties on top....pretty soon the pawn will "strike" by mental breaking. Since it is pure survival, you merely have to "pay" the pawns by keeping them happy enough not to break, which is pretty accurate of modern economy (pay employees enough to keep them coming into work each day...no matter what that "enough" entails)
So people think Mining is a bad skill outside of mountain bases, because you will get all that ore sooner or later anyway. They have a point. Outside of edge cases like large maps in cold biomes, mining speed doesn't matter much.
At the same time I'm annoyed pretty much anyone is good at stonecutting or tree cutting. I think tree cutting has been recently linked to Growing skill (again), but it's just trading one bad thing for another. Planting strawberries shouldn't be as physically exhausting as chopping trees.
Idea: combine Mining, Tree Cutting and Stonecutting. The new skill would be 'Hard Work'. It makes quite a bit of sense that a person good at mining would be pretty good at stonecutting or cutting trees. At least this way colonist doing this kind of work will get some related benefits.
My earlier, more elaborate proposal based on a system similar to needs/addictions:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=20381.0
Quote from: b0rsuk on February 23, 2017, 01:32:25 PM
So people think Mining is a bad skill outside of mountain bases, because you will get all that ore sooner or later anyway. They have a point. Outside of edge cases like large maps in cold biomes, mining speed doesn't matter much.
At the same time I'm annoyed pretty much anyone is good at stonecutting or tree cutting. I think tree cutting has been recently linked to Growing skill (again), but it's just trading one bad thing for another. Planting strawberries shouldn't be as physically exhausting as chopping trees.
Idea: combine Mining, Tree Cutting and Stonecutting. The new skill would be 'Hard Work'. It makes quite a bit of sense that a person good at mining would be pretty good at stonecutting or cutting trees. At least this way colonist doing this kind of work will get some related benefits.
I like the idea. Call it "Labor" and make all those "will not haul" guys into "will not do Labor, but do other basic stuff". Solves two things with one change.
At first I was a bit offended by B0rsuk because planting and cutting is pretty much the job Description of gardening.
But putting physical labor into one skill sounds to good to pass.
Personally I would prefer if a Job uses multiple skills and every skill had synergie effects on the base statistics of the pawn. Like traits do now
Wood chopping and mining should synergize with melee for instance. Being stronger should affect hauling capacity ...and so on
Only cutting *trees* would be taken away from Growing. When clearing trees, I often don't care which colonists do it, or rather I assign it to colonists with no important things to do. Trees are often cut just to clear an area because wood is usually low value material.
@B0rsuk
I got that about the trees :)
And I support your notion ... I just wanted to differentiate between my oppinion before and after I thought about it.
"Labor" could include smelting as well.
There is a potential problem.
Currently those jobs - tree cutting, mining, stonecutting, smelting are under 3 work checkboxes. While thematically it would make sense to put them under a single checkbox - it would be awkward. The jobs are similar in that colonist goes and works on a static thing for a moderate amount of time, and thematically they need strength. They also provide resources. But these things have different priorities:
- tree cutting is important if you want to build, not so important otherwise.
- mining can be top priority if you lack steel
- stonecutting has high priority if you lack stone blocks
- smelting is high priority if smelter is on, because it uses A LOT of power.
If they were all under the same checkbox, player would have to often suspend one of bills.
On the other hand, current system is awkward because first I assign no-skills to plant cutting, then they finish cutting trees and damage my harvest.
By the way, Art and Animals skills could be improved with these fun and flavorful additions:
* playing instruments, providing joy for others within certain distance, even through walls if they're not too thick. This would really flesh out minstrel and bard backgrounds.
* fishing. Based on Animals skill, it would allow a colonist to get food from a water pond, even in winter.
Quote from: b0rsuk on March 08, 2017, 01:59:19 AM
* fishing. Based on Animals skill, it would allow a colonist to get food from a water pond, even in winter.
How do you keep fishing from permanently trivializing food?
Quote from: Limdood on March 08, 2017, 09:17:43 AM
Quote from: b0rsuk on March 08, 2017, 01:59:19 AM
* fishing. Based on Animals skill, it would allow a colonist to get food from a water pond, even in winter.
How do you keep fishing from permanently trivializing food?
limited, slow regenerating fish supply, based on the size of the body of water
in combination with fishing skill.
Oh .. and the Best skill in Rimworld is :
Art .. It generates money, has a single workbench it is attached too and a single priority setting. Very easy to manage ^^
Quote from: SpaceDorf on March 08, 2017, 09:21:35 AM
Quote from: Limdood on March 08, 2017, 09:17:43 AM
Quote from: b0rsuk on March 08, 2017, 01:59:19 AM
* fishing. Based on Animals skill, it would allow a colonist to get food from a water pond, even in winter.
How do you keep fishing from permanently trivializing food?
limited, slow regenerating fish supply, based on the size of the body of water
in combination with fishing skill.
That, and predators competing with you. Ponds would attract (polar) bears, seals. Ponds wouldn't regenerate fast enough to be worth building a base around. Fishes would be small animals, you'd need to catch a lot of them so to be cost effective you would have to build small fishing cabins around the map with temporary fish stockpiles. Also, you need some kind of bait. A colonist with low Animals skill would use too much food for bait because of more failed attempts.
what about coasts?
also:
QuoteAlso, you need some kind of bait. A colonist with low Animals skill would use too much food for bait because of more failed attempts.
This would compound the already existing serious problem of the animal skill - its useless at low levels but you can't train it up because...its useless at low levels
Quote from: b0rsuk on March 08, 2017, 01:40:51 PM
That, and predators competing with you. Ponds would attract (polar) bears, seals. Ponds wouldn't regenerate fast enough to be worth building a base around. Fishes would be small animals, you'd need to catch a lot of them so to be cost effective you would have to build small fishing cabins around the map with temporary fish stockpiles. Also, you need some kind of bait. A colonist with low Animals skill would use too much food for bait because of more failed attempts.
Thats the same direction I was thinking and I also thought better skilled animal trainers could feed the fish population to raise them faster.
I'm thinking Boom-Trout or a manhunter pack of flying fish.
Quote from: Limdood on March 08, 2017, 02:01:19 PM
what about coasts?
Polar bears in longboats.
Quote
QuoteAlso, you need some kind of bait. A colonist with low Animals skill would use too much food for bait because of more failed attempts.
This would compound the already existing serious problem of the animal skill - its useless at low levels but you can't train it up because...its useless at low levels
Just make it so every attempt trains, not every success. So you would initially spend grain or bugmeat or whatever to go fishing, but you would train Animals at the same time. Actually it would
fix the low Animals problem. "Too much food" as in "too much food to be profitable". Early on, you lose money on tailoring or sculpting too.
Quote from: J_Dawg_27 on March 08, 2017, 02:16:10 PM
I'm thinking Boom-Trout or a manhunter pack of flying fish.
Fishing ambushes could be a thing. Your dog attacked by a catfish, or your colonist by a tentaclerape monster.
this sounds like something that should be on the 'we make horrible suggestions and come up with terrible ideas' thread :P
Worst: Melee. Melee skill increases melee accuracy very marginally and nothing else. Even ignoring issues with melee combat, the skill is kind of terrible. You can actually raise it easily enough, it trains very quickly compared to shooting, but the accuracy benefit is too marginal. Replacing it with an "Athletics" skill that both increased melee capability and movement speed might be good. This would help out melee combat in general by letting them close in on range more easily, and give general utility to passionate "Athletic" characters.
Strongest: Crafting. This skill does so much. Crafting, Tailoring, Drugs, Smithing, Smelting. Everything trains it, and it affects quality of everything which is often a huge deal.
Favorite design: Growing. The speed increase from having a good grower is quite noticeable. Having a very strong grower is like having two weak growers, and the better your growing crew is generally, the faster you plant fields. This is a bit different from other skills in that they're limited by other things. For instance, 2 slow growers for most crops are as good as 1 strong grower, but 2 weak doctors aren't as good as 1 strong doctor, or 2 weak crafters aren't as good as 1 strong crafter. It seems like it scales more fairly for the game.
Special mention: Handling. Handling is fine for the most part, but a common issue is that you need a base level of skill before you can tame wild animals, and you have to tame wild animals to train it up. I like it generally as a skill, but the threshold for many wild animals is just too high. The pawn should at least be able to try with a 0.5% chance when his skill is too low rather than flat out not be allowed.
I feel similarly about any other skill that has hard skill level requirement to do. Like planting medicine or devilstrand, or crafting medicine. The requirements of doctoring and crafting on medicine for instance are very awkward. I'd rather see a critical failure or something. Chance to lose the materials, or in planting a failure to plant properly that isn't noticed until the plant dies in a few days, or has an extra long growing time.
Quote from: J_Dawg_27 on March 08, 2017, 02:16:10 PM
I'm thinking Boom-Trout or a manhunter pack of flying fish.
Carp. If there's going to be a dangerous fish, it has to be carp. (Dwarf Fortress reference.)
Quote from: PetWolverine on March 10, 2017, 02:49:45 PM
Quote from: J_Dawg_27 on March 08, 2017, 02:16:10 PM
I'm thinking Boom-Trout or a manhunter pack of flying fish.
Carp. If there's going to be a dangerous fish, it has to be carp. (Dwarf Fortress reference.)
I would actually prefer the boom-trout .. or boom-crab for the rimworld touch.
Rimworld is not yet ready for carp .. it's still in the elephant phase :)
Crap .. someone mod this please -- > boom-crabs
a mixture between boomrat and the elder scrolls mudcrab.
The ultimate IED.
Lets Make Colonists Afraid Again !!
Construction - Important since construction will be used until the end of the game.
Growing - not important. I always use hydroponic basins. When I need to grow something, I command all colonists to do it.
Medicine - not important. I use glitter world medicine on serious cases. There are many ways not to take any damage at all in rimworld.
Cooking - I always use nutrient paste dispenser. This skill is useless to me.
Crafting - important. Crafting for colonists and money is always a full-time job.
Shooting - not important. My colonists shoot randomly at endless hordes of enemies. Accuracy is not an important factor here. If ones miss, others will get shot, thus, they rarely miss.
Mining - not important. I always have nothing left to mine for 90+% of my play time in 1 colony.
Research - BEAST! It is very important especially on boundary condition scenarios. The ability to access all technologies is crucial which will decide life & death.
Social - not important. If you do not have goods, you can not sell it and I mass-product goods like China...
Animal - not important. My pawns are always better than 1 animal. I would prefer 100 colonists to 100 chickens.
Melee - not important. In contrary, I want to keep this low to avoid dying from using fists.
Art - important. Money is important so Art is important.
I group the skills as follow:
Early game needed: Growing/Mining/Building (this allow you to set food in RW)
Secondary skills: Researching/Social (getting more pawns and hydroponics/gunturrets is important)
Lategame skills: Crafting/Cooking (increases mood and gives you better gear)
Another idea for Social:
Traits are hidden. They get revealed over time after the colonist joins you. This would prevent the formulaic, knee-jerk reactions like "depressive = don't recruit". Prisoners and fresh recruits wouldn't display traits. Not only that, they would deliberately "act normal" to avoid detection.
Traits could be detected using Social skill during the recruitment process (also called "chatting with the prisoner"). Currently it's beneficial to recruit prisoners as fast as possible. But leaving a prisoner on "friendly chat" for longer would give an increased chance to detect his traits, because there would be more Social checks.