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I've been reading feedback pretty intensely in the last few days. Most of it's positive but some players are writing concerns about things like animal taming maintenance or turret maintenance. I figured it might be worth offering some of my thinking on the balancing process. It could enrich the feedback process if you guys knew *why* I was making some of these changes. I can't guarantee I've got everything right (yet), but I can guarantee there is a thought process behind every change.

The first thing to note is that nothing is final yet. The whole reason we do unstable builds is to get feedback so that we can fix the problems. So if there's something you don't like in the unstable build, don't worry too much - if it does turn out on broad testing to be a bad idea I certainly intend to change it. And in fact I've already adjusted quite a bit in the few days since unstable came out. It's best to not get sad about something that may not even happen.

The second thing is that theorycrafting is really dangerous. Theorycrafting is when someone just reads or thinks about a game, imagines how it might play, and gives feedback based on that without actually playing it in significant depth. The problem is that games are frightfully difficult to imagine and hard to predict from a description. Even professional game designers with 15 years' experience can't theorize accurately at how a game design will play. I can't! So we use tons of coping mechanisms (constant playtests, short iteration cycles, unstable builds for feedback) to escape from our own mental incapacity. So it's best not to get sad about something you've just imagined - it may not turn out that way at all in real play.

The theorycrafting point I think is especially important on something like the animal training maintenance. Consider this: We all know they need maintenance now, but how much maintenance do they require? There's a huge difference between needing to re-train each animal every 4 days and needing to do it once every 60 days. But from the changelist, nobody can tell this since no numbers are written. Which means that theorycrafting about this change requires simply inventing a certain balance point - which could be off by more than 10-fold! From this alone, any imagined outcome from this must be suspicious since there's a really good chance it's off by 10x or more in terms of impact. Even those who think training maintenance is a negative change might be okay with it if it was 10x milder than they're imagining.

The actual intent with this change is specifically to make it so that super-swarms of attack animals are still viable and still powerful, but require commitment. In B18 you can have 100 attack boars for almost free. They feed themselves automatically by eating grass. They haul stuff for you, rescue your people, fight your battles with zero risk to colony or colonists, provide meat and leather (even when killed in battle), reproduce themselves for free. All this can be done for the price of training each (free) boar once. It's an insanely OP strategy in B18 to the point of being quasi game-breaking.

Animal training maintenance is quite mild; it should be barely noticeable at "normal" animal herd sizes and even if you have a mega-swarm it just means you need a few dedicated beastmasters to keep them all together. A few dedicated beastmasters is still a a small cost for the benefit of a mega attack animal swarm, it's still a bit OP compared to the core strategy of straight-up gunfighting. (Though I still plan to watch for more play stories about this and see how it really plays when someone tries it, the balance can still shift either way.)

---

Regarding how I'v approached balancing the game, here's one of the ways I see it. The way Beta 18 was, we can imagine there are 7 player strategies. Label them Strategy A, B, etc. What we had was this:

B18
Challenge level: 6
Strategy A strength: 9
Strategy B strength: 8
Strategy C strength: 6
Strategy D strength: 5
Strategy E strength: 4
Strategy F strength: 3
Strategy G strength: 2

A few observations about this:
1. People love strategies A and B. They're super strong! They always work! They give you what you want, which is victory.
2. People don't even think about strategy F or G. These are newbie traps. You try them once, get your ass handed to you, and never touch them again. Bad for newbies, irrelevant for everyone else.
3. Much of the game mechanics are wasted. Since only 3 or 4 strategies are even viable, we've got whole game systems supporting strategies EFG which aren't really being engaged by players.
4. There's not much choice. If you want to do really well you pretty much have to use A and B. If you want to survive at all you can do a few more things, but you have to force it.
5. Strategies A and B are really easy, so you don't really have to engage the game much to play them. Not much risk, not much drama, not much thought.

Overall it's not a great situation. But how to remedy this?

Well, we could power up the challenge level to 9. Then strategy A would be nice and challenging, solving problem 5. But we've now totally obsoleted all the other strategies even more. There's even less choice; problem 4 gets way worse.

It's impossible to power all the strategies up to 9; there are inherent constraints in the game that make this impossible in some cases. E.g. if one strategy is "open field melee combat", it's almost inherently symmetrical between player and enemies; there's no elegant way to make this favor the player more. There are other constraints like, "does it make sense thematically" or "is it intuitive", etc. All these constraints are the fundamental challenge in balancing.

What I've tried to do is rejigger things so it's a bit more like this:

1.0
Challenge level: 5   <--- reduced slightly
Strategy A strength: 6    <--- nerf but still OP
Strategy B strength: 6    <--- nerf but still OP
Strategy C strength: 6    <--- the rest are unchanged
Strategy D strength: 5
Strategy E strength: 4
Strategy F strength: 3
Strategy G strength: 2

Some observations on this:

1. The old strategies that everyone loved are now nerfed! But...
2. The whole game challenge level is lower to compensate, which means...
3. A bunch of previously useless/newbie trap strategies are now viable.
4. It's still not perfect because it can't be due to the abovementioned constraints. We can't freely turn these dials. Some strats are still better.
5. But, overall, there's more choice, more variance. The player can, for role-playing, situational, or personal preference reasons, succeed in more ways. There are more ways to design your base, more strategies, more variant stories.

Basically what I'm getting at is that sometimes good game design really does require nerfing stuff that players previously liked to do. But if you evaluate the game from the point of view of a new player, instead of from the POV of someone who had a valuable strategy taken away, it's obviously a better game.

---

Looking at other specific cases:

---Turret maintenance is a targeted resource sink for late-game killbox-heavy colonies. The idea is that killboxes remain perfectly viable, but they are now an *economic* solution to *military* problems. Which I think is interesting.

Another goal with this was to minimally affect colonies who use fewer turrets. This is why I didn't just debuff the turret straight up. I want turrets to be useful even when there's just one, but without some other cost there's no way to do that without making turrets OP in large numbers.

So the turret maintenance is quite cheap, and takes several battles to even kick in for the first time.

Another goal was to make it possible for us to put in more powerful turrets (autocannon turret) without totally breaking the game. The mini-turret was already OP in B18, there's no way we could add an autocannon turret and keep it balanced without some sort of structural disadvantage. So turret maintenance allows more powerful turrets, further emphasizing the economy <-> combat relationship.

Finally there's a high-level issue with late-game colonies getting super ridiculously rich. Turret maintenance forms a long-term late game resource sink. Also note that the ship is a lot cheaper to build now, which opens space for this.

-Like I mentioned, animal training maintenance is a targeted change specifically to bring the "mega animal swarm" strategy somewhere in the neighborhood of a reasonable level of effectiveness.

It also addresses the late-game resource overflow issue. You can eschew turrets and instead us an animal mega-swarm, but now you need some good handlers and a good amount of food to keep all those animals trained and healthy. Again, perfectly viable, but no longer trivial.

And now, since the overall challenge level is lower, some more basic strategies should become more viable. I'm talking about things like "build sandbags and just fight them in a gunfight" or "draw them indoors and melee their asses".

Other changes relate to that too. For example, armor is now a chance-of-damage-cancel instead of a damage reduction. This means there are less wounds, but the wounds you get are significant. But, medicine is spent per wound, so this reduces time and medicine spend tending wounds, which on the econ side makes straight-up combat more viable. It also means that if you can get some really awesome armor, sending melee fighters to actually fight should be more viable since there's a real good chance you can win without getting hurt, as opposed to previous builds where you might win but you'd have a bunch of damage-reduced (but still bleeding) wounds - possibly on your eyes or brain.

There's a million more relationships like this too.

----

There's lots more to write. In fact I could probably do a book (https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Games-Guide-Engineering-Experiences/dp/1449337937) on this (har har) but I figured this is enough for one day. I don't think everyone will agree with my thinking, but I figured everyone would at least understand the portion of it I'm capable of writing down here. Please do keep on with the feedback!

Quote from: Tynan on June 19, 2018, 06:06:57 AM
-snip-
Other changes relate to that too. For example, armor is now a chance-of-damage-cancel instead of a damage reduction. This means there are less wounds, but the wounds you get are significant. But, medicine is spent per wound, so this reduces time and medicine spend tending wounds, which on the econ side makes straight-up combat more viable. It also means that if you can get some really awesome armor, sending melee fighters to actually fight should be more viable since there's a real good chance you can win without getting hurt, as opposed to previous builds where you might win but you'd have a bunch of damage-reduced (but still bleeding) wounds - possibly on your eyes or brain.
-snip-

In practice this means the Feral Nailgun from Rimsenal no longer will lobotomise my fighters as long as they got armor!

Though it looks very odd to see normal clothing deflect attacks.

Quote from: ChJees on June 19, 2018, 06:25:00 AM
Though it looks very odd to see normal clothing deflect attacks.

That was one concern about the damage deflecting system, for sure. I decided to leave it in for now for simplicity's sake and because it's hard to think of a better alternative that doesn't jam complexity into the game for very little benefit. Besides just zeroing out armor for soft clothing, I suppose (which also isn't satisfactory).

Quote from: Tynan on June 19, 2018, 06:28:57 AM
That was one concern about the damage deflecting system, for sure. I decided to leave it in for now for simplicity's sake and because it's hard to think of a better alternative that doesn't jam complexity into the game for very little benefit. Besides just zeroing out armor for soft clothing, I suppose (which also isn't satisfactory).

I have 2 points:
- Maybe make the cloth damage reduction only
- Even tho your long post has a point, I cant help but to feel that it was an excuse to plug in your book.

Quote from: Tynan on June 19, 2018, 06:28:57 AMThat was one concern about the damage deflecting system, for sure. I decided to leave it in for now for simplicity's sake and because it's hard to think of a better alternative that doesn't jam complexity into the game for very little benefit. Besides just zeroing out armor for soft clothing, I suppose (which also isn't satisfactory).

What if different layers of armor could work in different ways? Like bottom layer softens damage while medium/top layer deflects it.

As alternative: change graphics/sound for it so devilstrand shirt deflecting damage does not act like bullet just hit metal wall.

I really don't think it bumps up complexity too much to just SPLIT armor and clothing into two different categories, it even makes sense in a way. Good clothing (think hyperweave) can reduce how severe wounds from bullets and other weapons are - kind of like silk or Kevlar. (Silk could let you survive a duel with guns back in the day when those were a thing).

And armor can outright protect you from injury, at least on the body-parts it protects.

More importantly - what does this mean for the player?
Clothing:
1. Avoid the "naked" debuff
2. Help with temperature
3. Reduce wound severity on basically every body part
It makes perfect sense, because even low quality, bad material, worn-out clothing does #1. Good material, any quality clothing (wool) does the #2. But for #3 you need high quality, rare material clothing.

Armor:
1. Protects vital body parts

So if you have important pawns -> Get them armor asap. While clothing is more of a slow upgrade process from "not being naked" to "actually helps with combat".

This might be silly.  I've always wondered if you had the time to play several games yourself for each version, and how long your colonies typically lasts?

I know you got your reasons for all the changes you do. I usually question those changes if I don't agree with them but all I can do is speculate.  So I appreciate that you took the time to share your perspective on some of the changes you made for balancing.  Yes, you should get on that book sometime 😉

Sorry, not sure how to word the this topic below so apologize if I ramble. pretty tired hehe

Could you give some insight on how you'd expect colonists skills/traits/health/capabilities to be generated or acquired and why?
I've seen skill decay.  I'm more interested in the time it takes to level up skills, and if those stats make significant changes.

In previous versions, my colonists skills took very long to improve without neurotrainers.  Pawns being incapable in multiple fields were frequent too; making micro a bit annoying. Incapable of violence is a neat one but...I swear, I come across them way too often. I would build ships for them if I were to come across them once every 2 games IF that was the case.  I had no regrets in stripping them in the lake they crashed in to bleed and drown in b18. This does not match with how I treat my colonists, and how I imagine their colony to behave.<--my main issues

We  have all that going on, but stats in skills don't guarantee much, or not consistent in previous versions.. Such as furniture quality, shooting etc.  Then we have other things affecting those jobs they're supposed to be good at, such as sight, manipulation etc.
My main point is that I feel things are getting overloaded in this area.  I imagine you try to make all these stats to intertwine so the pawns feel organic, but my experience is that most of them feel the same... I mean, if a pawn's stat is around 14 then I immediately look at their age, most of the time they were old af or almost useless.. The incapables are taking over, and I'm getting disinterested with my pawns cause of that.  I wonder if you made any changes in this update, or if there are any plans to do so.

Quote from: Alenerel on June 19, 2018, 07:19:48 AM
- Even tho your long post has a point, I cant help but to feel that it was an excuse to plug in your book.

FWIW, I make basically no money off my book. There's zero chance that the effort to write that post was worth the cup of convenience store coffee I might earn from related book sales. This is about RimWorld and the RW community.

I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to write such an informative look inside the design process. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I have always been envious of your designs, and I hope for more articles like these in the future.

Hey Tynan,

I personally really appreciate when you take the time to write stuff like this out. It makes me more likely to trust that you have reasons for the choices you make, even when I don't understand them, and it helps me to understand them. It also helps me to know what to concentrate on when I'm playing, so I can give more informed feedback.

One note is that I'm personally going to keep theorycrafting; I think it's likely everyone will, but for me, I often have long periods of time to browse the internet but not to play, so it helps pass the time and keeps my engagement high. But since you pointed this out, I'm going to start explicitly labeling any theorycrafting I do, as well as the actual play feedback, so that when you do come across my comments, you know what to ignore and what to read.

When it comes to armor, why not just use both systems at once? It's fairly common in RPGs that a piece of armor has BOTH deflection to avoid damage completely and some damage reduction to soften the impact when a hit does actually land.
It'd make picking materials to craft armor more interesting, too.

I'm not gonna pretend to understand everything Tynan just wrote. I'm not a game designer, he is. But I appreciate you explaining your reasonings, even if the minor details escape me.

I also think that we should point our problems in the 1.0 thread, instance of clogging this thread about what we think we should do. I trust Tynan would do what is best for Rimworld, even if I myself don't agree with it.

Thank you Lord Tynan for your thoughtful post and insight.

This is really insightful and I appreciate it.

I'd like to note one inconsistency - early in the thread you correctly point out how dangerous theorycrafting is.  It gets especially more dangerous as more mechanics interact with each other too...definitely not easy.

On the flip side, it's not so easy to assign numerical values to strategy A vs C or G for example.  Lots and lots of players relied and likely will still rely on turrets. 

As a Randy/extreme/tribal/1 pawn start player on B18, I wouldn't grade turrets as a 9 strategy.  I'd have placed them closer to "newbie trap", something ~4 or maybe a 6 if used as a mobile distraction.  Research burden, power burden, mathematically not much better than steel deadfalls in terms of steel consumption : raid size defense.  There were (and remain) options with substantially less resource cost and, if you micro well, equal risk.  That was true early (years 0-1), mid (years 2-3), and late (years after 3) game.

When I see a turret nerf, I see a 4 strategy getting nerfed as if it's an 8 or 9 strategy (I have similar feelings about mountain vs field bases, perceived strength vs actual strength under decent optimization is massively different).  While the compensating nerf to raid size in general might still leave it as a ~4 strategy, the fact remains that perceived strength vs actual strength is pretty disparate.

There is a possibility my own estimates are off in terms of numbers, in fact this is likely to at least some degree and there are almost certainly better players out there than me.  However, there is evidence to support my position in this case: experience using alternative strategies that cost 1000's less steel/dozens fewer components to defeat the same raids with the same damage taken on the game's highest difficulty level, consistently.  This evidence is why I have some confidence in the assertion despite the B18 ubiquity of turrets. 

Melee remains a serious challenge to fix in my mind.  Shield belts faster/easier certainly helps, but the fact remains that on high difficulty where you're badly outnumbered there are multiple raid types where it's not viable (mechanoids, sieges, to a lesser extent sappers)...and the fact that all raid types can be handled by good gun play micro at all difficulty levels with high consistency puts this in an awkward spot.  This seems particularly hard to solve - I can't even imagine a solution to this that won't break things even at a theorycraft level, and that's usually more optimistic than actual implementation when it comes to one's own suggestions!  But I'm more of a mechanical system breaker than creative, so perhaps someone else can do better.

I've not played that long in 1.0 but I can already feel that the deflection on cloth items needs to be changed a bit.
Nothing feels more frustrating than having a colonist with armor and an autopistol get downed by a tribal raider with a club and magical cloth duster that deflects BULLETS

Quote from: Tynan on June 19, 2018, 08:47:45 AM
FWIW, I make basically no money off my book. There's zero chance that the effort to write that post was worth the cup of convenience store coffee I might earn from related book sales. This is about RimWorld and the RW community.

My reply was a joke but it failed cause it wasnt written in joke-y manner... Now you are mad at me and will never talk to me again...

Quote from: Tynan on June 19, 2018, 08:47:45 AM

Quote from: Alenerel on June 19, 2018, 07:19:48 AM
- Even tho your long post has a point, I cant help but to feel that it was an excuse to plug in your book.

FWIW, I make basically no money off my book. There's zero chance that the effort to write that post was worth the cup of convenience store coffee I might earn from related book sales. This is about RimWorld and the RW community.

How much is the book.

Quote from: CrowSR on June 19, 2018, 11:39:52 AM
I've not played that long in 1.0 but I can already feel that the deflection on cloth items needs to be changed a bit.
Nothing feels more frustrating than having a colonist with armor and an autopistol get downed by a tribal raider with a club and magical cloth duster that deflects BULLETS

There are cloth-like materials that do give a small chance IRL to deflect bullets.  If you put a round dead center torso it won't, if it's glancing it can make a difference.

Considering that Rimworld folk have a tendency to aim like blindfolded fish shooting at skeet while riding backwards on a station wagon, the occasional glancing blow is arguably more plausible than some of the surrounding mechanical interactions :p.

I agree with this 100%. I hate the idea that in most of my games I felt like I had no choice but to build a kill box early on in extreme because there wasn't time to build an actual base yet. The pace of the early game feels just a bit too easy but definitely on the right track.

From out the gate I can play this game in my style which is almost turn based strategy where every building has a way to defend  from it and navigate to flank. Plus punishing raiders with traps on the corners of my buildings being used as cover. I really really want the ability to reinstall traps because they are a thing built after studying behavior. A chance to detect traps would offset their opness as well. Instead of gauranteeing deaths they can be used to deny cover for the enemy or influence their pathing.

The animal thing really had to be done. I accidently built a swarm of 100 labs before. One time I just left my tamer and 1 other person behind while the rest were doing a quest. I sent like 80% of them in an animal zone outside of my base just to see what would happen and it was insane. All raiders dead with maybe only 25% losses.

Awesome.

Thank you, for actually balancing the game instead of leaving it a broken casual mess because of the pushback you would inevitably receive from the broken casual majority population.

I never liked the idea of newer or more casual people in any hobby, that try to reduce the depth, complexity and/or general challenge of the hobby to suit their personal level, which is generally pretty low. People cater to this in the gaming industry alot because it obviously leads to more $$$ for reaching more of the broken casual majority market. Thank you for not being one of these sellouts.

I understand it psychologically, it's even a recognized thing in Retail - that it sucks to have something taken away rather than added to, like when weighing meat at the deli counter etc. It sucks to have OP toys taken away, but is necessary for the health and longevity of a game.

As soon as i found out about just making "killboxes" to completely negate any semblance of challenge whatsoever, i stopped playing the game. It was a huge letdown. People say "Just dont do/use X or Y" but it just doesn't make sense logically - having a player restrict themselves from certain parts of game design, instead of fixing said game design and restricting yourself like that arbitrarily is not an easy thing to do.

It's great to see these things are being not only addressed, but with more thought than beyond simply as you said for example just "nerfing turrets" which then has other unintended downsides like making using just a few not very useful.

Taming and Turrets definitely needed some balance, but so do traps. Any intention of trying to fix the trap corridor that purposely exploits enemy AI and makes it so you get all the strengths of traps without the weaknesses? (your own pawns potentially triggering them, etc.) Especially when just 2 or 3 traps can kill an enemy and you don't need many in turn to send entire raiding parties away. Most overpowered early game.

Don't mind the afore mentioned broken casual (even if-) majority player base - they are only wanting to have the game revolve around their very basic level and in turn don't care about the potential, health and longevity of the game, so let them be upset all they want.

For as almost as many of them as there are - there are others like me who really appreciate your direction and thought process behind the decisions as well as decisions themselves, even if we aren't as loud about it :P

Thanks again.

Perhaps have damage deflected off of "hard" stuff types (such as steel) and reduced from "soft" stuff types (such as cloth)

Quote from: Whiskiz on June 19, 2018, 12:50:06 PM
Awesome.

Thank you, for actually balancing the game instead of leaving it a broken casual mess because of the pushback you would inevitably receive from the broken casual majority population.

I never liked the idea of newer or more casual people in any hobby, that try to reduce the depth, complexity and/or general challenge of the hobby to suit their personal level, which is generally pretty low. People cater to this in the gaming industry alot because it obviously leads to more $$$ for reaching more of the broken casual majority market. Thank you for not being one of these sellouts.

I understand it psychologically, it's even a recognized thing in Retail - that it sucks to have something taken away rather than added to, like when weighing meat at the deli counter etc. It sucks to have OP toys taken away, but is necessary for the health and longevity of a game.

As soon as i found out about just making "killboxes" to completely negate any semblance of challenge whatsoever, i stopped playing the game. It was a huge letdown. People say "Just dont do/use X or Y" but it just doesn't make sense logically - having a player restrict themselves from certain parts of game design, instead of fixing said game design and restricting yourself like that arbitrarily is not an easy thing to do.

It's great to see these things are being not only addressed, but with more thought than beyond simply as you said for example just "nerfing turrets" which then has other unintended downsides like making using just a few not very useful.

Taming and Turrets definitely needed some balance, but so do traps. Any intention of trying to fix the trap corridor that purposely exploits enemy AI and makes it so you get all the strengths of traps without the weaknesses? (your own pawns potentially triggering them, etc.) Especially when just 2 or 3 traps can kill an enemy and you don't need many in turn to send entire raiding parties away. Most overpowered early game.

Don't mind the afore mentioned broken casual (even if-) majority player base - they are only wanting to have the game revolve around their very basic level and in turn don't care about the potential, health and longevity of the game, so let them be upset all they want.

For as almost as many of them as there are - there are others like me who really appreciate your direction and thought process behind the decisions as well as decisions themselves, even if we aren't as loud about it :P

Thanks again.

Claiming that turrets are strong in B18 and then calling out other players as casual is pretty inconsistent with reality :p.

If we're serious about using empirical reality to nerf anything in terms of raid defense in Rimworld, the single most important construct to nerf in the game is doors...and it isn't close.

Speaking of books though, is there any chance that you'll write about the journey that led you to make Rimworld, and the process of making it?
I can't help but think that it would be a fascinating read. Not just a book full of empty quotes, but the entire history, from start to finish.
As much as I'm interested in the book on design, I can't help but think that there are thousands of books like it out there, that all cover pretty much the same stuff.
A detailed journey of the whole process of making the game would offer so much more to the reader. Not just the design part, but also the programming, the business side, what went right, what went wrong and so on.

Quote from: Tynan on June 19, 2018, 06:06:57 AM
Other changes relate to that too. For example, armor is now a chance-of-damage-cancel instead of a damage reduction. This means there are less wounds, but the wounds you get are significant. But, medicine is spent per wound, so this reduces time and medicine spend tending wounds, which on the econ side makes straight-up combat more viable. It also means that if you can get some really awesome armor, sending melee fighters to actually fight should be more viable since there's a real good chance you can win without getting hurt, as opposed to previous builds where you might win but you'd have a bunch of damage-reduced (but still bleeding) wounds - possibly on your eyes or brain.

I think armor could really use some kind of small flat damage reduction(on top of the % ones).
Clothing deflecting sniper shots and the weakest firearms/squirrels penetrating power armor both look silly.

Maybe use deflection ranges, for example normal devilstrand duster:
- guaranteed to reduce cutting/blunt damage by 2/1
- further reduces damage by up to 10/6, or has X% chance to reduce damage by 10/6
That way you can still have the deflection mechanics and avoid absurd situations.
Think Fallout 1-2-Tactics, I think a similar system would work very well here.

One other thing I dislike is that weapons are somewhat normalized, higher end guns could get some kind of maintenance or ammo cost and be made slightly better compared to primitive/weak ones.
With the flat armor reduction outlined above high-powered weapons could potentially lose some raw DPS for better penetration, so SMGs/pistols and the like are a bit better against soft targets up close.

I'm very grateful for all of the updates.

Tynan, you have created and are continuing to improve on one of the best, if not, THE BEST, game I've ever played.

I tell my friends at work about this game. They are blown away by the stories your coding has helped create.

Keep up the amazing work- if not for the money, than for creating the most enjoyable rts/colony builder/survival/rpg/simulation ever created.

99% of games come and go these days- Rimworld has been in my arsenal since the day I touched it two years ago.

Quote from: Alenerel on June 19, 2018, 07:19:48 AM
I have 2 points:
- Maybe make the cloth damage reduction only
- Even tho your long post has a point, I cant help but to feel that it was an excuse to plug in your book.

1. Making two different type of systems that effectively accomplishes the same thing is just like tynan said, unnecessary complex.

2. Plugging his book? what? I didn't realize he even had a book until you pointed that out.

Quote from: Whiskiz on June 19, 2018, 12:50:06 PM
Awesome.

Thank you, for actually balancing the game instead of leaving it a broken casual mess because of the pushback you would inevitably receive from the broken casual majority population.

I never liked the idea of newer or more casual people in any hobby, that try to reduce the depth, complexity and/or general challenge of the hobby to suit their personal level, which is generally pretty low. People cater to this in the gaming industry alot because it obviously leads to more $$$ for reaching more of the broken casual majority market. Thank you for not being one of these sellouts.

I understand it psychologically, it's even a recognized thing in Retail - that it sucks to have something taken away rather than added to, like when weighing meat at the deli counter etc. It sucks to have OP toys taken away, but is necessary for the health and longevity of a game.

As soon as i found out about just making "killboxes" to completely negate any semblance of challenge whatsoever, i stopped playing the game. It was a huge letdown. People say "Just dont do/use X or Y" but it just doesn't make sense logically - having a player restrict themselves from certain parts of game design, instead of fixing said game design and restricting yourself like that arbitrarily is not an easy thing to do.

It's great to see these things are being not only addressed, but with more thought than beyond simply as you said for example just "nerfing turrets" which then has other unintended downsides like making using just a few not very useful.

Taming and Turrets definitely needed some balance, but so do traps. Any intention of trying to fix the trap corridor that purposely exploits enemy AI and makes it so you get all the strengths of traps without the weaknesses? (your own pawns potentially triggering them, etc.) Especially when just 2 or 3 traps can kill an enemy and you don't need many in turn to send entire raiding parties away. Most overpowered early game.

Don't mind the afore mentioned broken casual (even if-) majority player base - they are only wanting to have the game revolve around their very basic level and in turn don't care about the potential, health and longevity of the game, so let them be upset all they want.

For as almost as many of them as there are - there are others like me who really appreciate your direction and thought process behind the decisions as well as decisions themselves, even if we aren't as loud about it :P

Thanks again.

sorry for disturbing your majesty, Mr Hardcore Player, but IRL by game design your able to rape, rob or kill people, even eat them. But somehow (i hope) you didn't do this. So your argument about not using "exploits" in game is invalid.

^ Doing those things IRL has costs, and not just the immediately obvious legal ones.  It's not a refutation to his argument, even though said argument is still nonsense (nerfing a 4-5 strength option on the premise that it's a 9 despite that evidence doesn't support that conclusion).

And here I am just hoping the fear system would return.

I feel for you Tynan.  I've had these discussions myself with my players.  It's never pleasant and you always get yelled at for ruining the game and other fantastic hyperboles.  It must be much worse at your level with thousands of users giving feedback compared to my experience. 

Quote from: Probe1 on June 19, 2018, 03:48:59 PM
I feel for you Tynan.  I've had these discussions myself with my players.  It's never pleasant and you always get yelled at for ruining the game and other fantastic hyperboles.  It must be much worse at your level with thousands of users giving feedback compared to my experience.

At worst, one can always dry the tears with $$$ :p. 

More seriously, nobody is going to be perfect, and this game gets more right than wrong.  At lot of the changes are unambiguously good/QoL, and a quite a few beyond those are uncontroversial.  This type of thread will always have a bias towards pointing out mistakes, which are comparatively rare in Rimworld and have a pretty good track record of being addressed.

Why not use both armor systems? Tone the reduction down a bit on heavy armors and add a new stat that allows armor to specify which body parts it has a chance of blocking, and how high the chance is.

I think this framework could be used to add a lot of depth to the armor system. For example, simple metal helmets would provide no reduction but have a decent block chance. Bullets would usually bounce off, but if they penetrate the helmet, it's good as going straight through. On the other hand advanced helmets could provide a bit of reduction.

I'm envisioning a tier of armor existing between power armor and devilstrand clothes, something like "kevlar" or "light combat armor", that would provide good reduction but low block chance, similar to B18 power armor.

A somewhat wider variety of armors could then also be added, to specifically protect certain body parts. For example, helmets with visors. They would extend protection to the eyes, at a slight cost of resources, and more importantly, vision. Armour would then come with very specific trade-offs.

It sounds complex, like something better suited for a mod, but I'm only proposing 8 items be added:

- Light combat helmet
- Light combat armour
- Light combat pants

And alternate versions of:

- All 3 helmets w/ visor (trade vision for blocking on eyes)
- Reinforced light combat armour (trade manipulation for blocking on hands + arms)
- Reinforced light combat pants (trade speed for blocking on legs + feet)

The tradeoffs would be greater for power armour, but the blocking effect would have full coverage.

Vests already provide coverage for the body, and the advanced helmet could provide coverage for the ears. Armour would have more variety, it would be fairly intuitive (Visors protect eyes. Hard things block, soft things absorb. etc.), and IMO this system would provide an excellent framework for modders to add more armours, and have them accurately reflected in the game.

Of course, I'm just theorycrafting.

QuoteThat was one concern about the damage deflecting system, for sure. I decided to leave it in for now for simplicity's sake and because it's hard to think of a better alternative that doesn't jam complexity into the game for very little benefit. Besides just zeroing out armor for soft clothing, I suppose (which also isn't satisfactory).

QuoteI've not played that long in 1.0 but I can already feel that the deflection on cloth items needs to be changed a bit.
Nothing feels more frustrating than having a colonist with armor and an autopistol get downed by a tribal raider with a club and magical cloth duster that deflects BULLETS

One idea to fix this might be to have armor penetration values on the various weapons, which basically ignore a certain amount of armor value. Wearables like cloth T-Shirt would have lower armors, that can still deflect attacks with a low armor penetration. A jacket might have an armor of 7, a club might penetrate 4 armor, so it will do a bit less damage to a jacket wearer than if they were naked. Basically 3 damage 'spills over' after armor penetration is taken into account. Swords would pierce clothing relatively easily compared to clubs with their higher armor penetration values, but high level armors could still resist sword blows. This allows clubs to do high or near equal damage as swords to unarmored targets, but have trouble applying damage to heavily armored targets.

A tribal cloth might have an armor of 2 or 3 - it will deflect some fist blows, sometimes, and mitigate a tiny bit of damage but not much else. Pistol Bullets would have a high armor penetration like 100, so unloading a pistol into a cloth tunic provides higher amounts of damage.

Power armor might have an armor of 200, so would deflect pistol bullets, but sniper rifles might have an armor penetration of 250 and so still occasionally pierce through etc.

Just an idea and numbers only as examples, but may provide a way of having both clothing and armor work a little more realistically, where they can all provide some levels of protection against some things, but it depends on the attack type, so bullets don't get stopped by a tshirt. I imagine all of this would happen after the hit/miss calculation as part of the damage calculation.

I don't know if this was already mentioned and people are going to kick me for this but I think a cool idea for animal taming would be to increase it if other wild animals are close to them, making them wild themselves faster.

So tamed animal not very wild close to tamed animal very wild would increase the speed of degradation of the less wild animal.

And wild animal close to any tamed animal will increase the speed as well, faster than above.

Lastly this is an idea I have seen on reddit, is to give a trait to animals born from tamed animals, that would make them easier to tame or less wild themselves.

Thanks for the post T! Not a lot of game developers, especially from AAA companies obsessed with lootboxes and making several editions of the same game, even take the time to explain their changes to their game let alone address feedback given by the community. A lot of people are very passionate about the game and that passion fuels their posts, even if it does come off as negative, and I think that's a very good thing. I appreciate you for making the post and I think you for your efforts.

There's a lot of things I loved about this patch and I like the vast majority of it. Forcing the player to have a few dedicated beastmasters, as you stated, is a great change simply for the fact that it provides a constant flow of experience for a pawn that dedicates themselves specifically to that craft. I think that you should reward a delegation of certain skillsets towards different individuals and this change allows a constant flow of XP to combat the XP decay you're going to get from having a high animal skill. So any changes towards that front is welcomed. And the adding of a maintenance cost to turrets in order to curb excessive usage on that front is another welcome change, as it is simply a way to avoid risks in battle and automate raidfighting and as a player I can't understand how that makes the game any more fun. At least now they have to maintain such a strategy! And that in itself is a good thing, nudging the player to use turrets as a supplementary tactic with the other defensive measures in the game instead of a whole solution.

I've spent a little bit of time in the new Beta and I'm on my new colony, 3rd attempt in the bare naked start. I've run into some issues along the way and I feel that combat still needs a little more balancing if we are going to go ahead with this new system. And the biggest issue I feel is that a lot of attacks by the wildlife and by most major can now simply one-shot your colonists despite efforts you try to counter it. Think about it. The neck has 10hp. And that's a very low total that many enemy mobs in the game surpass with a single attack. So at any point in the game you could have a colonist out there, roaming around in full power armor and a chain shotgun, and a bear is liable to just run up on him and rip his head off in one shot because the bear was hungry and he got a lucky roll.

I've always been against things that you cannot counter as a player and this is one of those things in mind. There's no counter to a bear coming up to you and ripping your head off. You can take steps to make it less likely. You can give him a full plate armor that will make the roll where he rips your head off less likely to happen. Power armor. Anything. But if he rolls that roll and he targets your neck, your head is coming off. There's nothing after that you can do to curb the damage. Your pawn is dead.

It was the same way used in this example prior to 1.0 of course, but I feel as if 1.0 did a much better job in balancing the game. Especially when you put the changes side by side.

Prior to 1.0

• Each point of armor from 1 - 50% reduces damage by 1%.
• Each point of armor between 51 - 100% provides a 1% chance to not take damage.
• Each point of armor beyond 100% reduces damage by 0.25% and gives a 0.25% chance to not take damage.
• Total protection is capped at 90% damage reduction and 90% deflect chance (i.e. 260% armor).

Post 1.0

• Each point of armor gives a chance to negate damage completely.

I'll just be honest. I prefer Pre-1.0 far more than I did 1.0 as far as calculating damage is concerned. I haven't tried this yet and my testing of 1.0 is still pretty early in its stages, but this new system would likely take strategies such as equipping a few strong melee colonists with power armor and shield belts and rushing centipedes, thumbos, and great sloths off the board because whether your colonist lives or dies is based purely on luck. The magic percentages. A degree of chance. And I wouldn't risk a melee colonist I've put several hours of training improving his stats on such an ordeal when a single or a couple bad rolls could break any one of his limbs or kill him completely without any means to counterplay. Against Raiders? Probably. They don't do enough damage to break vital limbs. But against the toughest mobs of the game? Their standard attacks do far too much damage for me to risk it. 20 damage for centipedes for a blunt attack? 22 damage for Thrumbo/Megasloth? A thousand nopes. Not gonna risk it. Not when a single bad roll unleashes all of that damage all at once upon a single body part. It's far better to take your changes from range. You can just kite the melee enemies after you do enough damage with the first hail of bullets and slow their movement speed enough so that your pawns can outrun and shoot.

It doesn't break the game by any regard, but I did enjoy playing the game in that fashion by overriding the fact that I was effectively applying medieval knight tactics to modern warfare through extensive preparation. And when you have that kind of mindset, that of an autistic barbarian that rushes any foe before him wearing a full suit of power armor, it's tough to turn off that switch.

I fear that if a new system isn't designed soon...

...innocent pawns will die.

In all seriousness though, this is but a small criticism upon a vast swath of new additions in 1.0 that I really enjoyed. Hopefully my small criticism will not outweigh the sentiment of my vast enjoyment of this patch. Thanks again!

As someone who abused the overpowered zero-maintenance boar-swarms, it is my civic duty to try the new some-maintenance boar-swarms and report on whether they are still OP, fair, or useless.

Well boars don't haul so they are kinda useless anyway besides just general defense and a different way to store meat I suppose. I'd do that test of yours with labs or wargs.

Been playing with ideas for a new armor system.

Since it's not an RPG, I've been really afraid of complexity for a long time. The idea is that with an RPG you're focused on one character, so you care enough to think about complex calcluations. But in RW, you maybe don't want to do that do so many people.

But I'm thinking maybe it's better to just let it happen. At the end of the day, newbies still know the non-numeric version: thicker armor is better. And some RPGs have party sizes bigger than RW colonies.

The design notes. Still under consideration. This is not a promise it's just an idea, one of many I'm considering:

---

Weapons have an armor penetration stat. By default, AP is the weapon's damage amount as a percent. The AP stat can be overridden if set directly on the weapon (but no immediate plans to do this for any of our weapons).

Armor has a damage reduction (DR) stat. DR is how many points it'll remove from incoming damage. DR is calculated from armor rating by the formula: armorRating * 0.15 rounded. DR cannot be overridden specially.

• Subtract the weapon's armor penetration from armor's armor rating (this effect also applies to the armor's damage reduction).
• Incoming damage amount has damage reduction subtracted from it, to a minimum of 50% of the original damage. This value is rounded randomly using RoundRandom, if it goes to zero damage is cancelled and the deflected effect plays.
• Roll for damage deflection based on armor rating. If it passes, damage is cancelled and the deflected effect plays.
• There's a chance to convert sharp damage to blunt: 100% at 2dmg lerping to 0% at 12dmg.
• Armor takes damage based on the original weapon damage.

After this is done we'll have to rebalance some weapons (specifically weapons with weirdly low per-shot damage, like the assault rifle and LMG, and extremely armor-prevented now. They need to change from ~7 to ~11 damage per shot. Charge rifle should go from ~11 to ~13.) Alternatively we could look at just forcing AP on some of these weapons, but I'd prefer to keep things "pure" if possible and use direct AP definition only for really special weapons.

Here's my spreadsheet analysis (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT_PsKIHCkM-5XEvgBKFNN9T679rfjDVUhkVMHp-G_koPFgJVH8i7BPih2c-sG2ImrDa10BKLUBiOnU/pubhtml).

While you're tinkering with weapons, have you thought about making the shotguns shoot multiple smaller projectiles instead of just a big large one?

Quote from: NiftyAxolotl on June 19, 2018, 07:54:04 PM
As someone who abused the overpowered zero-maintenance boar-swarms, it is my civic duty to try the new some-maintenance boar-swarms and report on whether they are still OP, fair, or useless.

I look forward to your report!

I kind of like current 1.0 simple mechanic of armor just blocking things with certain probability. A lot more actually than DR based one from Beta. Adding armor penetration and damage reduction over it, feels way too complex. Plus as you said, that d require revising damage on weapons towards being more deadly (which is always in favor of pirates more than you :P).

Also i sure hope clothing retains its ability to also shrug some hits off if the pawn was lucky enough. Clothing made from advanced materials especially.

Regarding weapons and armor I prefer the simpler system of just one value. It communicates clearly what to expect and how much the armor will impact incoming fire.

Another alternative for armor penetration:
Give the weapon an armor penetration value of 1 by default and higher values up to 2 or maybe 3 for advanced weapons.
If a shot hits armor, the armor deflection value gets divided by the armor penetration value. This means you could still create weapons with a high chance to punch through heavy armor while not dealing too much damage.

Armor penetration has to be at least 1 to work properly though.

I really like that new armor system design idea, hope it turns out to be decent and not too heavy on the performance.

Whatever the outcome, conversion from sharp to blunt damage is a good idea and should be included in the final design, it always felt wierd to recieve bleeding wounds from a wood shiv despite wearing a state of the art piece of power armor ;D

The impact on the medical side of things is gonna be interesting though, I guess that blunt and sharp damage are equally painful? Else a good piece of armor would mean you go down faster to low damage weapons :D Or maybe I havent thought far enough, at this point Im just speculating.

Quote from: Albion on June 20, 2018, 02:27:26 AM
Another alternative for armor penetration:
Give the weapon an armor penetration value of 1 by default and higher values up to 2 or maybe 3 for advanced weapons.
If a shot hits armor, the armor deflection value gets divided by the armor penetration value. This means you could still create weapons with a high chance to punch through heavy armor while not dealing too much damage.

Armor penetration has to be at least 1 to work properly though.

To made it too simple, we don't even need the difference between blunt/sharp anymore.
But i don't think this don't like the most people.
It would hard to explain why a blunt weapon could have an armor penetration abilitity.

The spreadsheet looks pretty nice! I think I would welcome a DR/AP system based on armor/weapons. Just the idea of it sounds pretty fun. My major concern with 1.0 is the late game mobs with high melee damage one shotting a melee pawn just because they had a good roll. You don't feel that as much with ranged pawns because you have the chance for your enemy to miss due to proper cover on top of the deflection given by your armor. Plus ranged weapons are sharp and the 1.0 armor system really protects against that.

I especially like the part about the partial conversion of sharp damage to blunt damage as well and the damage to armor.

Quote from: Tynan on June 20, 2018, 12:06:47 AM

• Subtract the weapon's armor penetration from armor's armor rating (this effect also applies to the armor's damage reduction).
• Incoming damage amount has damage reduction subtracted from it, to a minimum of 50% of the original damage. This value is rounded randomly using RoundRandom, if it goes to zero damage is cancelled and the deflected effect plays.
• Roll for damage deflection based on armor rating. If it passes, damage is cancelled and the deflected effect plays.
• There's a chance to convert sharp damage to blunt: 100% at 2dmg lerping to 0% at 12dmg.
• Armor takes damage based on the original weapon damage.

After this is done we'll have to rebalance some weapons (specifically weapons with weirdly low per-shot damage, like the assault rifle and LMG, and extremely armor-prevented now. They need to change from ~7 to ~11 damage per shot. Charge rifle should go from ~11 to ~13.) Alternatively we could look at just forcing AP on some of these weapons, but I'd prefer to keep things "pure" if possible and use direct AP definition only for really special weapons.

Here's my spreadsheet analysis (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT_PsKIHCkM-5XEvgBKFNN9T679rfjDVUhkVMHp-G_koPFgJVH8i7BPih2c-sG2ImrDa10BKLUBiOnU/pubhtml).

Definitely functional, but I think it's favors deflection too much compared to reduction.
If you are shot by a greatbow/bolt-action, have decent/strong armor and deflection doesn't trigger there isn't much difference compared to being naked(guaranteed 15/16 cut).
A chicken pecking 1-2 blunt through the best available armor isn't threatening, but looks really silly.
With these kinds of chances definitely still wouldn't use direct combat unless I'm completely unprepared.

I think the "to a minimum of 50% of the original damage" part  is unnecessary.
Could decrease deflection chances and raise DR instead, lerped 50%-100% of DR is used against every attack.
Even reworking deflection to work as a 10%-100% DR roll could be fine(and easier to understand).
That way really weak weapons vs strong armor scenario is more consistent and heavy weapons aren't all or nothing.
I understand that occasionally taking big hits is a design goal, this system still allows that.
They just won't come from shoddy bows :)

I'd honestly be in favour of an occasional 'AP multiplier' stat for weapons like the charge rifle and assault rifle simply because they're very good weapons as they are, especially the latter. If their damages were to be buffed, they'd become quite overpowered; other weapons like the LMG would be made completely redundant.

Quote from: Tynan on June 20, 2018, 12:06:47 AMThe design notes. Still under consideration.

I just want to point at the one system that I find reasonable and working. It is from Fallout games (original one... Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics have the same). There armor has two stats: threshold and resistance. Threshold substracts it's value from incoming damage and might even turn it to zero. Resistance reduces it's % from damage. There is also "armor class" thing, which basicaly gives better chance to dodge.

I still remember how good and correct armor felt in that game from leather jacket to power armor. Leather armor would not save you from damage (since it had almost no "threshold"), but it had some resistance ang great dodge. Metal and combat armor could ignore some light damage from knives and pistols. And to kill a dude in power armor you would need some high-end weapon because of both high threshold and high resistances.

Hello.  Long time lurker and player.  I'd like to make a few comments.

I really do like the way this 1.0 is going.  There are a few things I think could be different.  For weapons, what you could do is make it so there's a separate stat for weapon penetration.  The armor would have a ratio of say, 10% up and down.  As long as the penetration is 1% above the (armor - sharp), it will penetrate and leave a bleeding wound.  The median will offer 50% damage and stop the projectile.

For example:

2 raiders fight a man wearing an armor vest with 0.50 Sharp Protection.  One has an autopistol with 0.46 penetration and the other has a survival rifle with 0.54 penetration.  The survival rifle hits him in the torso, penetrates the vest, and does 90% damage and causes a bleeding wound.  If it had 0.55 Penetration, it would do 100% damage.  The autopistol hits him in the torso, is stopped by the vest, but bruises the pawn for 10% damage.  If it had 0.45 penetration, it would be stopped by the vest and do 0% damage. 

The reason for this is because the vest is 0.50 (Armor - Sharp) with a 10% gradient up and down for defense.  10% of 0.50 is 0.05.  This means it technically is a vest that protects from 0.45-0.55 but is perfect from 0.45 downward.

This adds a gradient to armor.

Also, completely unrelated to this but, I'm a huge supporter of what you do and have also bought your book.  It feels like it's very much created for people in the scene and I've brought it with me on my travels to Europe.  Thanks again for all you do.

Can someone do a TL;DR of the new system Tynan just proposed? The technicalities alude me.

Quote from: Mihsan on June 20, 2018, 06:58:49 AM
I just want to point at the one system that I find reasonable and working. It is from Fallout games (original one... Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics have the same). There armor has two stats: threshold and resistance. Threshold substracts it's value from incoming damage and might even turn it to zero. Resistance reduces it's % from damage. There is also "armor class" thing, which basicaly gives better chance to dodge.

I still remember how good and correct armor felt in that game from leather jacket to power armor. Leather armor would not save you from damage (since it had almost no "threshold"), but it had some resistance ang great dodge. Metal and combat armor could ignore some light damage from knives and pistols. And to kill a dude in power armor you would need some high-end weapon because of both high threshold and high resistances.

Yep, I like that system myself and others mentioned it, too.
Also really simple, Rimworld is a pretty casual game so I think that's a big plus.

I like the DR/DT system. It's also used in UnderRail, which we were looking at.

There are some downsides though:
-Weapons with zero effect on a given armor. If enemy has such armor, it may be frustrating. If you do, may be boring. Can anyone comment on experiences in Fallout with this?
-Spam. Assuming any damage occurs, a high DR means that attacks may end up doing lots of tiny bits of damage. It's fine in some games but in RW each damage is a separate wound, and if they're spammed it can look bad and cause other issues.

Still thinking on it.

Quote from: Tynan on June 20, 2018, 09:40:13 AM
I like the DR/DT system. It's also used in UnderRail, which we were looking at.

There are some downsides though:
-Weapons with zero effect on a given armor. If enemy has such armor, it may be frustrating. If you do, may be boring. Can anyone comment on experiences in Fallout with this?
-Spam. Assuming any damage occurs, a high DR means that attacks may end up doing lots of tiny bits of damage. It's fine in some games but in RW each damage is a separate wound, and if they're spammed it can look bad and cause other issues.

Still thinking on it.

Having played both UnderRail and all of the fallout series, I know of this. UnderRail especially is guilty of heavy weapon imbalance due to the enemy either killing you instantly or barely scratching you no matter what they do. I think part of the issue is that you're just one man and it's make or break in every battle, the other part is the lack of armor degradation.
This would introduce a problem in Rimworld, as if armor degraded heavily during the scope of a single battle (in order to actually kill someone in a bulletproof suit by simply overwhelming the suits HP with a craptonne of bullets) your own colonists would go through vests and power armor like nobodies business, even with a minor skirmish.

Honestly, however, i don't see that as unsolvable if armor could be repaired without having to make the whole thing a-new from scratch.
Repairable armor would mean that during the scope of a single battle, your vest may be eventually riddled with holes and barely protect you anymore, but in time for the next encounter you could patch it back together again at very little (or no) resource cost. Each colonist could do this automatically at some pre-determined point in the day, or as ordered, or even instantly (magically) when combat ends. However, just like in Diablo (IIRC) your armors max-durability would be reduced.

This way you could overwhelm bulletproof enemies with enough bullets, just like bulletproof materials IRL, rather than just punching through them right off the bat with a high caliber sniper rifle.

But, of course, this would introduce yet another layer of complexity into the whole deal.

Thanks lancar, it does sound like it has some of the issues one would expect.

OK, Piotr brought up some issues with my previous system (it requires 3 stats for multi-stuff weapons since stuffs affect blunt/sharp/heat damage differently). I wrote another candidate system. Still thinking on this. Here's the latest candidate. I kind of like this one.

----

Three-way roll armor system:

Armor has an AR (armor resistance) stat the same as now. AR maxes at 200%. Also same as now: There is separate AR for sharp, blunt, and heat.

Attack has an AP (armor penetration) stat which defaults to the damage as a percent (e.g. 11 damage ->  11% AP), but which can be overridden by a stat definition for special cases.

When armor interacts with an attack:

1. We subtract AP from AR.
2. We generate a random number from 0-100.
   2a. If it's over the AR, the damage applies directly.
   2b. If it's under AR but over AR/2, damage is diminished. This means:
      2b1. Damage amount reduced by 50% (rounded random; if this round to zero we treat it as a deflect).
      2b2. If damage is sharp, it converts to blunt.
   2c. If it's under AR/2, damage is deflected entirely.

Analysis:

We'll have to balance armor ratings up a bit (to exactly 4/3 of current), but that's okay. Power armor will have almost exactly 100% protection, which is nice and round.

100% AR will not let almost any damage hit directly, but blunted damage will hit. Direct damage will only happen due to weapon AP stat.

200% AR cannot be damaged at all except due to weapon's AP stat. Or, until the armor itself is destroyed.

If I read that correctly there can be 3 outcomes:
- full damage
- 50% damage
- no damage

With the distribution depending on armor AR and weapon AP.

Optionally, the 50% damage reduction could be changed to an armor based DR value. Either as a percentage or as a flat value.

At risk of adding even more complexity, I'd really like to see a way to repair armor, and have damage mitigation do damage to the armor at a rate that scales with the damage mitigated; when a shot is completely blocked there's still a cost because a ballistic plate may block a sniper rifle round, but it's probably not going to do it more than once. This would also add a time/materials cost to maintaining your armor, and armor could still get destroyed during a long, intense battle, so you'd still have to replace it from time to time, which was, I recall, your reason for not implementing a repair system in the past.

A similar system on weapons would also make sense; Minor damage (<5-10%) would require time only to fix, reflecting general maintenance (cleaning/honing, generally) but greater damage would require materials, and would be in line with your barrel-replacement mechanic for turrets.

Why do you want an Armor piercing ?
You can have an Armor resitance from max 200%, but 100 to 200 is just buffer and has no deflection chance.
Damage done = Int (Weapon damage  * (1 - AR) )
At 100% AR no damage is taken. But the Armor HP get lowered by the absorbed Damage.

But if you like it complex why not using the CE mechanic ?

With your latest candidate: against 100% power armor heavy weapons still have a decent chance to do full damage.
Potentially taking full powered sniper hits through power armor discourages direct combat.

A somewhat similar 3-tier system with a bit of a cushion:
- armor has a damage reduction value
- reduction is subtracted from damage, in case result is <=0 it was a complete deflection
- if remaining damage is <reduction it is halved and converted to blunt
- otherwise simply apply remaining damage


In Fallout 1-2 heavy armor did make you invincible to small arms(barring some crits IIRC), but heavy kinetic weapons with AP ammo did get a decent chunk through it even with dermal implants.
Don't think having a similar dnyamic in Rimworld would be a problem as heavy firearms, blunt melee, fire and explosions could all deal with armor pretty well(for players there are always deadfall traps with the 30+ damage).
If you get a raid where somehow nobody can damage you that could be a nice power trip. Still, even tribals have clubs and there will be possibly expensive wear&tear.

Since only strong weapons have a chance getting through in the first place there wouldn't be that many wounds. If that's a concern you can do a roll for DR on every instance of damage.
That way DR can be overall higher and the variance means that some small instances fall below DT, large ones kill you so they don't accumulate :)

Weapon AP could reduce DT/DR by x/y, if damage is <2xDT the part that gets through is blunted.

Personally I hate the idea of armor that makes combat less risky. I like the idea of armor that scales with weapons more. I want the risk at all times if I don't play properly colonist will die. I like the fact that I have to struggle through the death of my colonist.

Quick question Tynan with your new system:
If I get legendary power armor with 200% sharp protection. Am I invincible?
Because the way I read it means that unless someone shoots me with a gun that has more than 100 damage or 100% AP it is impossible to roll for anything else than deflect which means all damage gets negated.
I could probably still get damaged by heat or blunt but any bullets will be negated.

Doesn't any hit, even deflected, would lower the Armor HP ?
Then after a while the legendary power armor becomes holes, and you will take damage.

Armor and weapons doesn't lose its properties based on its hp level now. So until its destroyed with that new mechanic legendary armor will grant you invulnerability. Can't say i like that. Well unless i get it all wrong about this new candidate mechanic.

I still more or less vote for simple percentage to block mechanic based on if the part is covered by armor layer or not. I certainly understand people getting annoyed by their colonist's eyes getting eaten out by squirrel through power armor, but the example with bear snapping someone's neck - thats still plausible and this new block chance still offers a decent armor quality based probability of survival.

Quote from: Tynan on June 20, 2018, 09:40:13 AM-Weapons with zero effect on a given armor. If enemy has such armor, it may be frustrating. If you do, may be boring. Can anyone comment on experiences in Fallout with this?

Fallout had:
- Random damage output
- Random damage types and many weapons with them (bullets, plasma, laser, fire, electric...)
- Random critical hits that could bypass DR/DT
- A way to deal critical hits more often (i.e. strike areas like eyes / head / groin) by wasting more action points (i.e. making much less hits but)
- There were also different types of ammo (AP/JHP), but they never worked really (JHP was better against everything while beign cheaper)

So when you had DT=15 (power armor) and was shot with very common hunting rifle that deals 8-20 damage - you still was not 100% safe. High-end plasma and Gaus weapons were pretty common on endgame stages and they would always pass DT on any armor. Some foes had attacks that ignore DT at all (like poison or radiation). There were couple of early game weapons and foes that could never pass that DT, but they were still dangerous because of possible critical hits. Also I always saw partial invulnerability of power armor as "working as intended" - I love that thing about Fallout (both for me and my NPC foes) much more than what we have in RimWorld when rat can bite through legendary power armor. As for other armors: RimWorld armored vest has partial coverage, which even at infinite DT would not make wearer 100% safe; and medieval plate armor should not have too high DT from the start (just to stop arrows and such); something like devilstrand shirt in Fallout would be more about DR rather than DT.

One of the changes Tynan announced was that apperal armor rating won't get affected by its hp anymore. Therefore as long as my legendary power armor has at least 1 HP left I would be immune to bullets.

Do deflected bullets even deal damage? I'm guessing not very much.

I think the proposed mechanic would work, though to me power armor is literally like wearing a tank, meaning it is OP by definition.
Therefore it should definitely allow you to withstand small arms fire to some degree.

For gameplay reasons, I understand that may not be desirable though.
I would suggest making sure that each tech level has a weapon heavy enough to counter it.

Quote from: Albion on June 20, 2018, 11:19:32 AM
Quick question Tynan with your new system:
If I get legendary power armor with 200% sharp protection. Am I invincible?
Because the way I read it means that unless someone shoots me with a gun that has more than 100 damage or 100% AP it is impossible to roll for anything else than deflect which means all damage gets negated.
I could probably still get damaged by heat or blunt but any bullets will be negated.

Not invincible. For every 1 AP the weapon has, there's a 1% chance of taking some diminished (blunt) damage. So a normal bullet or arrow has a 10% chance of bruising you, a sniper has a 25% chance.

And of course you can get hit in uncovered parts or have your armor destroyed.

However, in any case, I don't anticipate adding any 200% armor in the game.

As long as current blocking system stays as it is (flat percentage to shrug off hits) i am fine with additions like armor penetration and damage reduction. And i actually quite like the "some blunt damage goes through" thingy. It definitely should be a thing for high caliber weapons like sniper rifles. Really feels right, because you know - you'll feel it a lot if you get hit even by a light caliber bullet through a bulletproof vest. Bruises are more or less guaranteed.

I would expect blunt damage to have zero risk of infection, but I don't know if that's the case.

Is this so?

In that case having damage converted to blunt is still a great benefit.
Well... unless it kills you anyways.

Quote from: Akyla on June 21, 2018, 07:09:30 AM
I would expect blunt damage to have zero risk of infection, but I don't know if that's the case.

Superficial blunt damage doesn't have an infection risk, though blunt damage on organs will add the 'Crushed' hediff, which does have a small infection risk.

Quote from: Akyla on June 21, 2018, 07:09:30 AM
I would expect blunt damage to have zero risk of infection, but I don't know if that's the case.

Is this so?

In that case having damage converted to blunt is still a great benefit.
Well... unless it kills you anyways.

I dunno how Tynan's going to balance it, but big bruises can absolutely get infected, IRL. It's considerably less likely than an open wound (which, let's be honest, it's almost guaranteed without antibiotics) though.

Well, it was already near guaranteed to get infection on a bleeding wound even in B18, unless it was a medical bed in a sterile hospital room and the tend was of high quality. And in 1.0 changelog says infection chance was upped even more. So i really hope there won't be infection chance for bruises.

Also now i am really looking forward to playing 1.0 with Medieval Times mod. I wonder how Vindar will balance his Brigand faction, which always sends armored ass tin cans. Now they can shrug off shots too! Scary :D

Quote from: Tynan on June 20, 2018, 12:06:47 AM
The idea is that with an RPG you're focused on one character, so you care enough to think about complex calcluations. But in RW, you maybe don't want to do that do so many people.

Uh, there are plenty of party based RPGs where you manage your current party and even a roster of companions that stays in some place when you don't take them on missions. Granted, not as many as in a large Rimworld colony and you are more attached to them than a RW pawn, but RPGs are hardly all about a single player character.

Quote from: Madman666 on June 21, 2018, 08:00:08 AM
Well, it was already near guaranteed to get infection on a bleeding wound even in B18, unless it was a medical bed in a sterile hospital room and the tend was of high quality.

What? No way. In B18, I don't even break out the meds for most wounds, bleeding or not. As I recall the early days of B17 (which I took active part in; With B18's launch, I had other stuff going on, alas) the infection chance was crazy high, but by the time B18 rolled around, it seemed a little too easy. As it stands with UB1.0 I still don't break out the meds that often, unless an infection occurs, or something else like disease (or most recently, a case of muscle parasites, followed not a few days later by plague; I'm not sure how I'm going to manage the plague with less than 20 meds..., esp. with Doc down for the count; Second best-doc is 5 points lower, so I'm thinking self-treat, but I'm not sure). Infection chances are definitely up from B18, but they're not unmanageable at all.

Caveat: I'm playing Some Challenge. If you're playing higher then that would explain why you're seeing worse infections.

Quote from: Serenity on June 21, 2018, 08:29:51 AM
Uh, there are plenty of party based RPGs where you manage your current party and even a roster of companions that stays in some place when you don't take them on missions. Granted, not as many as in a large Rimworld colony and you are more attached to them than a RW pawn, but RPGs are hardly all about a single player character.

I suspect Tynan meant RPG in the original sense; Paper and dice on a table top, not CRPG. While troupe-style TTRPGs exist, they're not incredibly common. You typically have one character per player, and any hirelings that may exist are often managed by the GM, without a whole lot of detailed thought.

Quote from: DariusWolfe on June 21, 2018, 09:20:53 AM
What? No way. In B18, I don't even break out the meds for most wounds, bleeding or not. As I recall the early days of B17 (which I took active part in; With B18's launch, I had other stuff going on, alas) the infection chance was crazy high, but by the time B18 rolled around, it seemed a little too easy. As it stands with UB1.0 I still don't break out the meds that often...

Either you were lucky then, or i was unlucky, but pretty much every early game fight in B18 with bleeding injuries ended up with infections for me. And thats with herbal medicine treatment and me furiously cleaning the room to hold cleanliness high, since it affects the chance of infection.

Plague is just deadly without proper medicine... If you have a decent doc and plenty herbal medicine and micromanage treatments, so that it wasn't left unchecked at any point - its doable. However if its your doctor, who got the plague - you're more or less hosed. Even proper meds often won't be enough.

I checked back in to my UB1.0 game, and they're both doing well, actually; About 15-20% ahead on immunity, using regular meds (as I do for disease) in their own bedroom, still with rough-stone floors and walls, but clean otherwise. What difficulty are you playing at? If you're playing at Rough or higher, it could be that the difficulty amounts to more than we'd expect. I don't want to jinx anything (or have Tynan make anything any harder...) but it's easier than I expected, honestly. Of course, I also just got a Toxic Fallout too; I thought you were supposed to space these things out, Phoebes!

Infection chance is a significant debuff to melee, even as other things buff it.  This game gravely penalizes taking damage and that directly nerfs any defensive setup where taking damage is a reasonable possibility.  On higher difficulties it's pretty skewed.

I play mostly on intense or extreme. But i didn't find any mention anywhere, that this difficulty affects infection chance. As far as i know it only alters raid sizes, frequency and probability of bad events and diseases, lowers harvest sizes, also lowers or eliminates initial "Low expectation" moodlet. Unless wound infection counts as a disease "event" it shouldn't be affected by difficulty.

Quote from: Madman666 on June 21, 2018, 09:27:48 AM
Either you were lucky then, or i was unlucky, but pretty much every early game fight in B18 with bleeding injuries ended up with infections for me. And thats with herbal medicine treatment and me furiously cleaning the room to hold cleanliness high, since it affects the chance of infection.

Plague is just deadly without proper medicine... If you have a decent doc and plenty herbal medicine and micromanage treatments, so that it wasn't left unchecked at any point - its doable. However if its your doctor, who got the plague - you're more or less hosed. Even proper meds often won't be enough.

You were just unlucky, last time I played on Randy intense b18. Same experience as DariusWolfe, didn't bother getting hospital beds for years and only used herbal medicine.
Infections were very rare, even with backup doctors only having 5-ish medicine(neither infections nor diseases were a threat, always at least ~10% behind immunity).
The cases I did see were mostly captured raiders, seems like the time spent laying in the dirt and not getting any medicine are bad for wounds :)

Quote from: draba on June 21, 2018, 11:26:35 AM

Quote from: Madman666 on June 21, 2018, 09:27:48 AM
Either you were lucky then, or i was unlucky, but pretty much every early game fight in B18 with bleeding injuries ended up with infections for me. And thats with herbal medicine treatment and me furiously cleaning the room to hold cleanliness high, since it affects the chance of infection.

Plague is just deadly without proper medicine... If you have a decent doc and plenty herbal medicine and micromanage treatments, so that it wasn't left unchecked at any point - its doable. However if its your doctor, who got the plague - you're more or less hosed. Even proper meds often won't be enough.

You were just unlucky, last time I played on Randy intense b18. Same experience as DariusWolfe, didn't bother getting hospital beds for years and only used herbal medicine.
Infections were very rare, even with backup doctors only having 5-ish medicine(neither infections nor diseases were a threat, always at least ~10% behind immunity).
The cases I did see were mostly captured raiders, seems like the time spent laying in the dirt and not getting any medicine are bad for wounds :)

Anecdotally, I too have found the same, B18 wasn't too bad for infections for me. I have actually had worse luck with plague in early game. Nothing that I would consider too high though, just a couple bad games in a row. Luckily in one of those games I had a couple of super-immune pawns that mostly just shrugged it off.

Well infections themselves aren't that bad really, its the fact how often they happen and that it disables a pawn from participating in combat and working is whats bad. Plague and malaria are downright nasty, but luckily they aren't nearly as frequent as infections.

Quote from: Madman666 on June 21, 2018, 12:37:17 PM
Well infections themselves aren't that bad really, its the fact how often they happen and that it disables a pawn from participating in combat and working is whats bad. Plague and malaria are downright nasty, but luckily they aren't nearly as frequent as infections.

I meant getting infections in the first place was already very rare for me, that way downtime is pretty small.
Getting pawns in almost immediately, only herbal, clean room but no sterile tiles/hospital beds, 5-15 doctors.
If conversion to blunt is meant to be a bit more than flavor infection chances on nasty cuts could go up IMO.

Well, i don't know why exactly you guys don't get infections all the time, but my guys always do. Sometimes even in sterile hospitals even, hilariously enough. I don't really mind upped infection chances in 1.0, since i ll get my infections anyway. But I sure as hell don't want for bruises to be possible to get infected. Thats for sure.

Quote from: Madman666 on June 21, 2018, 11:20:08 AM
I play mostly on intense or extreme. But i didn't find any mention anywhere, that this difficulty affects infection chance. As far as i know it only alters raid sizes, frequency and probability of bad events and diseases, lowers harvest sizes, also lowers or eliminates initial "Low expectation" moodlet. Unless wound infection counts as a disease "event" it shouldn't be affected by difficulty.

Infection rate was increased globally regardless of difficulty.  On extreme, you have more enemies.  This disproportionately penalizes any defensive strategy where pawns take injuries that can cause infection.  Fighting "as intended" is a fool's errand resulting in inconsistent outcomes.

Simply put, with the addition of point blank gunshots in melee and increased infection rate, patch 1.0 nerfed melee, buffed the strongest defensive moves in the game (AI manipulation via doors), and left middling strategies like turrets and traps about as competitive as before, if a little pricier when scaling up.

I know it was increased. We were talking about infections in B18, some seem to have way better luck with infections in that version than me. To the point they felt infection chance was too low. Dunno why anyone would think like that.

About other two things i kind of agree - in 1.0 direct confrontations should've become more forgiving, so as to encourage player to avoid using killboxes and walling up, at least that was the intention. But for now i don't really see it that way - it still incredibly deadly to try and take on raids without proper defensive set up. Maybe if you're all armored up - then yeah, possibly. But otherwise - screw that, i ll either use turrets or some other cheap ass tactic like dividing them and picking off one by one.

And yeah - melee is only for AI now, since it doesn't care about its pawns. I am not sending anyone into melee, when they can get a bullet in the face point blank. Not to mention suicidal grenadiers chuck nades right under you in close quarters now, which is complete and total bullshit :)

I feel like rate of infections/illnesses should scale with wealth and cap off. Early game it is really unforgiving and can cause scenarios that offer 0% chance of success. Late game yes it is deadly. Yes fighting any type of battle where your pawns can get injured is deadly but the great part of rimworld is that your colonist are suppose to die on higher difficultis. You are suppose to get set backs so you feel great when you climb out of the hole. Recruiting is balanced well enough that you can almost loose a colonist every season and still gain another one to take their place. Odds are you won't loose that many people and odds are if you invest in better jails and rescue quest you could even recruit more people.

In beta 18 I hit 20 colonist at one point on extreme and started feeling the need to banish and recruit as I found better people because I didn't like having more than 20 and I barely lost 1 person pure a year or two if even that. 

I hope you're joking. Late game diseases disable 3\4 of your colony and you want to tie frequency to wealth factor? God, no.

Quote from: Madman666 on June 21, 2018, 06:57:25 PM
I hope you're joking. Late game diseases disable 3\4 of your colony and you want to tie frequency to wealth factor? God, no.

You missed a key word. Cap off. If it capped off to the rate the game is at now the over all difficulty of the early game can be increased by raids and lowered by taking away illnesses.

Yeah, I guess i did. Sorry about that. I guess that would be fine in that case, though i doubt such a mechanic to diseases will be added.

On the one hand, infections are more of a problem when they appear in 1.0, but on the other hand they get tended quite promptly now that it's possible to tend before the current tend wears off. Tending slows down the progress of infection quite significantly.

Quote from: Madman666 on June 21, 2018, 04:50:00 PM
I know it was increased. We were talking about infections in B18, some seem to have way better luck with infections in that version than me. To the point they felt infection chance was too low. Dunno why anyone would think like that.

About other two things i kind of agree - in 1.0 direct confrontations should've become more forgiving, so as to encourage player to avoid using killboxes and walling up, at least that was the intention. But for now i don't really see it that way - it still incredibly deadly to try and take on raids without proper defensive set up. Maybe if you're all armored up - then yeah, possibly. But otherwise - screw that, i ll either use turrets or some other cheap ass tactic like dividing them and picking off one by one.

And yeah - melee is only for AI now, since it doesn't care about its pawns. I am not sending anyone into melee, when they can get a bullet in the face point blank. Not to mention suicidal grenadiers chuck nades right under you in close quarters now, which is complete and total bullshit :)

Centipedes and power armor are pretty cancerous to fight.  Like one power armor raider can walk through 10 steel deadfall traps and live strong.  Centipedes are even worse.  I hit it with > 100 revolver bullets before one centipede died, though of course not even half of those actually did damage.

Stuff shooting point blank has to go or melee is dead, far more dead than B18.  It's gone from a 3 strat to a 1 strat.  Player could always fire point blank in earlier patches, that should go too.  Right now point blank gunfire completely ruins the melee vs blunt gun damage trades up close.

Fighting centipedes, you ought to use their speed movement against them. Do you have an idea how to kite?

Quote from: TheMeInTeam on June 22, 2018, 03:07:04 AM
Stuff shooting point blank has to go or melee is dead, far more dead than B18.  It's gone from a 3 strat to a 1 strat.  Player could always fire point blank in earlier patches, that should go too.  Right now point blank gunfire completely ruins the melee vs blunt gun damage trades up close.

I don't know that I agree, but it does seem to need some serious rebalancing. it seems to me that the problem with bringing a gun to a knife fight is that you're going to have your shot interrupted a lot, and shots are going to go wild as often as not since the melee fighter will have a chance to redirect the weapon.

Isn't melee skill supposed to give a dodge chance? It seems like that should be applied to ranged weapons at close range, as well as having a good chance to interrupt the firing cooldown. Those changes by themselves might go along way toward balancing ranged weapons in melee range without completely removing it.

I actually like that power armor wearing guys actually feel like they wear power armor, not cardboard imitations. So they should fairly effortlessly go through trapped hallways. Centipedes... Well. They definitely could use something to counter them with. If you get several at once, fights tend to get atrociously long.

As for melee - yes, with point blank shots being allowed its useless and harmful to ever send someone into melee. Aside from expendable combat pets. I second people complaining about their colonists shooting point blank when trying to beat some sense into berserked pawns. Its annoying to have to drop weapons first before attacking someone with fists. That should go.

I disagree however with completely banning player from forcing poink blank shots for colonists. Because shooting instead of using melee is the only chance for a stray pawn to survive an attack from wolves, lynxes and cougars, that sneak up on them without any warning. I cannot count the times my pawns pulled through a wolf attack because they used shotguns and rifles point blank instead of fists.

I don't know how to balance it right, but i know one thing for sure - the only point of melee in RW was always its capability to completely negate ranged weaponry. Ambushing ranged raiders was the only efficient way to use melee and it was a vallid tactic. Now its mostly gone - i don't see myself ambushing anyone, if they can still shoot even with much lesser hit chance. They ll still hit someone with missed shots anyway.

I made a whole post on why centipedes are 100% broken in the early game. You have to be at the tech level for some form of combination between sniper rifles, emp, or motars.

I believe shooting while in melee with small guns like a revolver and pistol is 100% fair. Being able to do that with a rifle, shotgun, minigun, grenade  and launcher is 100% broken. I always read on the forums how people hated brawlers and found them so useless in beta 18. I chuckled because I loved using melee guys in very tactical ways to shut my enemy down.

Now in 1.0 melee fighters are 100% worthless. There is no strategy with using melee fighters that isn't going to cripple/kill them extremely fast (besides just shield bet door openers...). There hasn't been anything game breaking in 1.0 until I discovered how melee works against heavy weapons. Now I am praying to hear from you Tynan to tell me this is all just a bad dream.

The thing about shooting point blank vs a wolf or something.. I don't find it needed imo. If they are around your territory consider the same value as a raid and take them out before they are hungry. If you want to tame them, consider working your way up the food chain. Grab something like a boar, turtle, or turkey and have a few of those types of grazing animals walk around with your animal tamer to design it that they can actually kill the predator before it turns on you while taming it. (those animals were just an example for thought process not actual selection).

Hey the shooting-melee thing is getting removed!

This was discussed in the main thread on 1.0 unstable (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41766.0).

This thread is really for my original article, so if another reply has to do with that please post, but for general discussions of 1.0 let's concentrate the discussion in the main thread linked above so we don't have to duplicate discussion.

Thanks for the ongoing feedback everyone!

Well thats good news! I was getting worried point-blank faceshots will be a permanent end for anything melee oriented. Good stuff.

Quote from: Tynan on June 22, 2018, 05:41:53 AM
Hey the shooting-melee thing is getting removed!

This was discussed in the main thread on 1.0 unstable (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41766.0).

This thread is really for my original article, so if another reply has to do with that please post, but for general discussions of 1.0 let's concentrate the discussion in the main thread linked above so we don't have to duplicate discussion.

Thanks for the ongoing feedback everyone!

One thing that I have been wondering about since I started playing Rimworld in A15 - what do you think about the balance of the different terrain types: Flat, Small Hills, Large Hills and Mountainous?

I know there are some mechanics in place (infestations) to make mountain bases weaker, but I still feel there is a great difficulty difference.

Whenever I play a flat map, I feel starved for ores, because there is very little rock on the map and thus very little ores. The more "hilly" the map the easier it gets, because the rocks create choke points and you have more ores to use. The only appeal of flat maps is more useable land and being able to pretty freely design your base.

There is also the huge advantage of mountain maps that enemies can only come from around 66% of the border, because one side and about a third of two sides is blocked by the mountain. Simply being able to tell where enemies are coming from makes it a lot easier because:
1. You can prepare your defenses accordingly
2. Since it's a mountain map there is probably natural choke points everywhere
3. You have a lot more preparation time - because you don't have to build in the middle of the map, but can build on the mountain side, the map essentially is twice as large. Add all the rocks that make pathing to your base even longer and enemies need 2-4x as long to reach your base versus flat maps.

Is it your goal to balance the four terrain types and provide different experiences, but with roughly the same difficulty level or do you accept the difficulty differences and just allow players to use it kind of as a third difficulty choice? (First being the actual difficulty, second being the biome).

As for the ore thing - I originally believed that amount of ores are the same for any terrain type. Naturally that would mean the density of ores is pretty extreme in flat maps and very low in mountain maps, but I think that's not the case. Maybe that would be a good balancing tool to at least decrease the difficulty gap? I strongly believe mountain maps would be a lot worse (but still enjoyable) if you had to really tunnel a lot to find resources.

My 2 cents coming from someone spending tons of times preparing a mod and devising ways to diversify the current armor/weapon pool: Combat Extended adds a lot of concepts that official Rimworld needs to have.

- Armor damage reduction needs to stay. I like the concept of deflecting attacks, as well, but its the solution is simply to assign armor DR to "soft" armor, like clothing, and deflection to "hard" armor, like vests and power armor. This way, lets say, a 10%/30% armor has a 30% chance of deflecting, and those that go through only do 90% damage.

-Armor penetration. Bullets go through things easier than a dagger, but bulletproof vests stop the first, not the latter. Make a stat called "armor penetration" and make it appliable to weapons. It should deny DR or Deflection, or both.

- If none of above are possible, then combat will not change much. Bleed rates were never quick enough to incapacitate melee pawns in the first place.

I really hope RW won't have CR aspects integrated. Its fine as an optional mod content, its well liked by a lot of people. But I for one, like RW's own combat system way more than one of Combat Realism. Theres way too much realism around you, to also seek it in games. Whats fun about short deadly fights, with pawns mostly just being oneshot?

Quote from: Madman666 on June 22, 2018, 08:26:53 AM
I really hope RW won't have CR aspects integrated. Its fine as an optional mod content, its well liked by a lot of people. But I for one, like RW's own combat system way more than one of Combat Realism. Theres way too much realism around you, to also seek it in games. Whats fun about short deadly fights, with pawns mostly just being oneshot?

You didnt understand that Ive simply asked for a few of the concepts to be integrated, and all of them would do the complete opposite of what you're concerned with

QuoteOne thing that I have been wondering about since I started playing Rimworld in A15 - what do you think about the balance of the different terrain types: Flat, Small Hills, Large Hills and Mountainous?

Flat maps definitely have less above-ground ore.  Maybe with the deep drill nerf it's different, but once you get to that on earlier patches standard stuff like steel and such wasn't an issue.

In terms of raid defense, the difference is overblown.  Base compound with perimeter wall should be very close to mountain base in defense strength.  You don't get insta-gibbed by bugs if they happen to spawn on you, and the moment you get your hands on mortars sieges don't mean very much.  I'd take a drop pod raid defense over an infestation any day - better loot + actual grace period to move before you're being attacked (hives spawn a few megascarabs instantly).  Outdoor bases have easier electricity management too...less centralized, possibly no conduits (so no zzt then).

I'm not convinced that mountainous is significantly easier than flat.  If it is, the reason is the resource availability post deep-drill nerf more so than ability to defend.

Since the purpose of this thread was to share your insight on why you made the choices you did for the changes in 1.0. What was your reasoning behind making food poisoning crippling? Since 1 bad meal could potentially end the rich traveler scenario or brutal naked.

Quote from: ashaffee on June 23, 2018, 01:46:13 PM
Since the purpose of this thread was to share your insight on why you made the choices you did for the changes in 1.0. What was your reasoning behind making food poisoning crippling? Since 1 bad meal could potentially end the rich traveler scenario or brutal naked.

I think that he didnt like that the old food poisoning was meaningless, so he made it to have an impact. Problem is that it is too much now.

I think there should be different degrees of poisoning. The old one and the new one. I mean, you can have a simple stomachache or you can be in bed dying through your butt.

I think -50% consciousness is a pretty serious debuff. And food poisoning sounds more like an event along the lines of "stubbed my toe", if you know what I mean. I never minded the current implementation, aside maybe from how to prevent it.

Basically having a good cook is mandatory and even then you get a poisoned stack of food sometimes. If you could somehow minimize the chance without having a good cook I would be okay with the debuff being even worse. Like having a clean storage/kitchen.

Otherwise it's basically just a random serious debuff you get with a chance depending on your cook (which you don't have much influence on if you aren't the "reroll 100x type") - which feels random and punishing, not difficult.

^ Agreed, main issue is the disproportionate lack of counterplay on some of the things introduced by a couple new things in 1.0.  From a pure balance perspective, it's normally expected that literally perfect play is rewarded, not given massive penalty/killed.

Even the previous food poisoning was pretty significant to early game progress, when compared against the options available without reroll spam/prepare carefully to stop it.

Reroll is more important than ever, for example if you start tribal you can have instant game over to heatwave if you don't have 4 construction, kind of cheap.

Quote from: ashaffee on June 23, 2018, 01:46:13 PM
Since the purpose of this thread was to share your insight on why you made the choices you did for the changes in 1.0. What was your reasoning behind making food poisoning crippling? Since 1 bad meal could potentially end the rich traveler scenario or brutal naked.

As Alenerel said, it was simply ignored by players. People didn't register, people told no stories, made no effort to prevent it.

Now it makes a difference, so it can introduce unmistakable story elements (e.g. our soldier couldn't fight the rabbits because of food poisoning he got because Johnny's an incompetent cook).

Food poisoning is affected by cook skill as well as the kitchen cleanliness.

We're going to make the game report the reason for food poisoning, because people don't seem to be registering that it is mostly controllable. E.g. people have their butcher next to their cook, spraying blood everywhere, then complain about bad food. Needs to be made more obvious what's happening.

Still don't you think, that disabling a colonist with "max 10% consciousness" penalty for whole day is a bit much for not having a great cook or failing to force people to clean a kitchen? I mean you can't always micromanage, so cook cleans the kitchen first, then starts his job. Often you ll learn that your kitchen is dirty only when people are KOd already. And i assume cooking skill plays the most important part in it, so even if the kitchen is clean, if you didn't get a good cook at the start, or lost him along the way - you're kinda doomed.

All it will result in - early game, when its most brutal - it will be even more unforgiving. Mid to late game when you have decent number of people - it ll be less significant, because you won't get your entire colony disabled and couple cases out of 13-16 people isn't something to mull over, so it will be once again ignored. So please consider either making it non-incapacitating problem, or at least let us treat it at initial stage, preventing a KO.

Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:50:40 AM

Quote from: ashaffee on June 23, 2018, 01:46:13 PM
Since the purpose of this thread was to share your insight on why you made the choices you did for the changes in 1.0. What was your reasoning behind making food poisoning crippling? Since 1 bad meal could potentially end the rich traveler scenario or brutal naked.

As Alenerel said, it was simply ignored by players. People didn't register, people told no stories, made no effort to prevent it.

Now it makes a difference, so it can introduce unmistakable story elements (e.g. our soldier couldn't fight the rabbits because of food poisoning he got because Johnny's an incompetent cook).

Food poisoning is affected by cook skill as well as the kitchen cleanliness.

We're going to make the game report the reason for food poisoning, because people don't seem to be registering that it is mostly controllable. E.g. people have their butcher next to their cook, spraying blood everywhere, then complain about bad food. Needs to be made more obvious what's happening.

Rolling a 6 skill cook, making a small room with campfire + wooden flooring and micromanaging to clean this before cooking = still got food poisoned 2x in first 15 days.  That's completely oppressive, the only kind-of equivalent % work shutdown that shows up this early is a fast disease proc of plague or malaria, and for one pawn starts that's game over.  And even those can be countered by making an early luciferium run, food poisoning powers through even that! 

I suppose making passive coolers require 4 construction means lacking that can be instant "flee the map or game over" too, but I'm not particularly keen on hard stat limitations like that for this reason.  It narrows the number of "non-ideal" pawns you can realistically use without risking RNG game over.

Players that ignored extended periods of 50% consciousness on previous patch were leaving a lot of work on the table.  You're not getting a lot of talk about scar procs from animals in the first 5 days, but that doesn't mean they need to apply -80% manipulation for a day or something :p.

Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:50:40 AM
Now it makes a difference, so it can introduce unmistakable story elements.

We're going to make the game report the reason for food poisoning, because people don't seem to be registering that it is mostly controllable. E.g. people have their butcher next to their cook, spraying blood everywhere, then complain about bad food. Needs to be made more obvious what's happening.

So the main reason for the change is that it doesn't create memorable experiences?

I don't think the problem here is that the cause isn't obvious enough (that is definitely an issue, but the main problems are above that). Simply put, avoiding the awful debuff of food poisoning is too difficult, too tedious or not enough in control of the player. Micro-cleaning the kitchen every time is very annoying and not a fun gameplay element. Having a good cook is either time-consuming if you reroll, or if you are the type of player who just takes a random bunch of guys then it's random.

In different words: Even if you knew what the problem was, you probably couldn't fix it, because micro-ing your cook to clean is not easy and annoying and having a good cook is something you don't really have agency over.

The other problem is the debuff itself. Maybe make it so the affected pawn is out (max 10% consciousness) for a few hours (6), and as the food poisoning wears down his consciousness raises gradually again to 100%. This way the pawn is completely out for a relevant time (especially if some other event happens simultaneously) and not that useful for a while afterwards.

Another way to address it would be to make it work like a disease instead. As in, a single bad meal would poison an entire stack (like it is now) but with a much higher chance. So 1 poisoned meal in a stack of 10 wouldn't give a 10% chance but maybe a 50% chance for each meal to poison pawns - in other words "infecting" the other meals. Once eaten it would take a few hours before the effects show up and suddenly you have 3-4 pawns who are out for a few hours and will be significantly impaired afterwards.

The story aspect here is that a few pawns suddenly drop unconscious wherever they are 2-3 hours after eating and need rescue, while being unavailable for a short time as well.

The last thing that is required is a counter for the player to use. E.g. you could make affected food emit barely visible green particles and every food item gets a new interaction option "throw away" which deletes it, so the player can get rid of poisoned meals. Then it's fine to leave the sources a bad cook and a dirty kitchen, because even then the player can do something about it. It doesn't make a good cook or clean kitchen worthless though, because you don't have to watch for bad food all the time.

I think a Fallout-like damage threshold system would serve Rimworld the best.

Some of the problems with straight up %-based reduction are squirrels scratching pawns to death through power armor, each additional % being more valuable than the last, and all weapons being equally effective against armor.

DT-system also has problems, but I have a few solutions in mind to solve those problems. The biggest problem is infinite invulnerability. If your enemy has no weapon that overcomes your DT, you're invulnerable in that battle no matter what. Some solutions other games have posed are a minimum damage percentage that always passes armor ( Fallout New Vegas ) or critical hits bypassing armor ( Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics ). The problem with the former is, again, throwing pine cones at power armor will eventually kill the pawn. The problem with the latter is the unreliability of armor and sudden instant kills. There were so many times in Fallout games where a minigun would do 0dmg to power armor a few times in a row and then suddenly instakill the player with an armor bypassing crit doing ludicrous 800dmg to a 150hp character. It's not a fun mechanic.

I propose a system of limited invulnerability where armor takes damage at a highly accelerated pace compared to current Rimworld. It should be viable to wear down heavy armor with continuous fire enough to allow smaller caliber firearms and lighter melee attacks to partially pass through. Let's say you have 15DT armor and you're shot with a 11dmg revolver. No damage passes through, but once you've hit enough times to bring the durability down to 50%, the armor would only have 7.5DT left and the revolver would be doing 3.5dmg per hit. There could also be a system in place that would increase durability damage to armor considerably if the attack penetrates the armor. A hole in an armor is certainly more problematic than a dent. This would allow softening up high armor targets with sniper rifles and charge lances before the lighter caliber firearms move in for the kill.

One problem this creates is losing armor durability too quickly, and the hassle of constantly replacing armor. As a solution I would propose an armor repair system, something with a low QoL impact. Armor should never be able to repair to full condition though, so there should be some permanent damage as well. For example, 50% durability loss would reduce the armor's maximum repairable condition by 5%. This would keep the long-term wear and tear Rimworld currently has, while facilitating short-term dismantling of heavy armor in combat. This may cause a problem with procuring good condition enemy power armor too easily, so there may be a need to adjust enemy power armor wear and tear to compensate.

This would make power armor much more powerful than it currently is. There should be a limit to how much power armor is available to avoid all pawns having power armor in the endgame. I think that currently the plasteel economy works pretty well up until the point ground penetrating scanners are available. Plasteel is rare and expensive and you have to make real choices where to apply it. After the scanners though, the availability of plasteel skyrockets and it's easy to procure thousands of units in short order. I would propose a considerable nerf to plasteel availability from drilling. This would slow down power armor appropriation considerably.

However, eventually the player could still be able to field too much power armor. To address this I would propose power armor to consume a fuel source. Uranium fits well thematically and is appropriately rare and expensive. This might be balanced so that it's mechanically similar to Luciferum. You'd typically be able to have a couple of pawns on Luciferum without worrying too much about it running out, as long as you go around with Caravans and buy all the Luciferum you can find. Similarly, there should be just enough Uranium to field a maximum of two power armors consistently. The repair cost for power armor might also be fairly steep, as an additional way to curb power armor prevalence.

Yes I do agree that buffing food poisoning would make for more interesting stories. Although I do believe the way it currently is just feels rng grief that can stack with the normal storytellers rng grief for unwinnable scenarios. I like the alternative if it was a huge loss in consciousness that slowly increased instead. Their for you had a strong motivation to keep drugs in your colony like wake-up to counterplay those moments but risk addiction if you don't solve the underlying problem.

Quote from: ashaffee on June 24, 2018, 11:22:37 AM
Yes I do agree that buffing food poisoning would make for more interesting stories. Although I do believe the way it currently is just feels rng grief that can stack with the normal storytellers rng grief for unwinnable scenarios. I like the alternative if it was a huge loss in consciousness that slowly increased instead. Their for you had a strong motivation to keep drugs in your colony like wake-up to counterplay those moments but risk addiction if you don't solve the underlying problem.

It'd have to be reworked.  Right now it's a x .1 multiplier on consciousness.  This allows it to drop you without killing the pawn outright, but it also means that if you take a drug that gives 50% more consciousness, you will have a consciousness value of 15% and still be face first on the floor during "major" food poisoning cycle.

If you make it additive, food poisoning can become even more lethal.

It's a tough spot to balance.  Compared to reality it's super common, and mirrors severity only rarely seen.  The main problem is that for several of the starting scenarios you don't have a way to avoid it.  Make wooden or flagstone floors, keep the room 100% clean, put nothing but the stove in this room...still poisoned, still losing a ton of work time.  Worse still, it appears that with cooking values < 5 making a simple meal gives a higher proc rate than eating raw food, which is awkward.

Crash landed can power out nutrient paste, but the one man scenarios don't have the manpower for this.  The question remains: what other skill/task is this asymmetric in terms of potential to survive?  Should any stat be so vital to early progression?

Best and most simple way to handle food poisoning would be to just allow us to tend to it, either speeding up recovery several times with a good quality tend, or just supressing the major stage, thats drops your guys flat, leaving 50% counsciousness penalty there. If you absolutely must make it so harsh - at least give us other means to fight it, than babysitting your people in the kitchen or rolling stats into oblivion at the start of the game to get non-crippled, non-addicted, non-half incapable cook. Medicine is quite a valuable resource, so it would be a fair trade off.

For food poisoning, adding an alternative to simple meals at the start of the game could work, with less nutritional efficiency but with no risk of food poisoning, no requirement for mixed ingredients, and available at a campfire.
Similar to how meat is often cooked for much longer in v.hot countries or in countries where food QC isn't reliable; a lot of the nutrition goes (and in my opinion, it's not as tasty) but it's probably safer.
Then you would want to set-up a good kitchen and a safe cook but would have an alternative if that wasn't possible.

Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:50:40 AM
Food poisoning is affected by cook skill as well as the kitchen cleanliness.

We're going to make the game report the reason for food poisoning, because people don't seem to be registering that it is mostly controllable. E.g. people have their butcher next to their cook, spraying blood everywhere, then complain about bad food. Needs to be made more obvious what's happening.

Is there a piece of interface that I'm completely failing to see that communicates the chance of food poisoning as a result of kitchen cleanliness?

Medical beds for example communicate the infection chance multiplier from the room they're located in but as far as I can tell Stoves don't.
---


Also.. I put my stoves and butcher tables in my hallways which are gigantic.. as a result each piece of dirt/blood ect has a relatively small (bordering on non-existent) impact on the overall cleanliness of the room.
Given that there's no indication that cleanliness has an impact on food poisoning that certainly explains why I've never noticed any correlation. Food poisoning still(to me) seems like it briefly affects a colony until someone gets 6+ cooking skill and is then forever irrelevant.

Quote from: Boboid on June 29, 2018, 06:08:30 AM
Is there a piece of interface that I'm completely failing to see that communicates the chance of food poisoning as a result of kitchen cleanliness?

There is now, at least as of this latest build.

I've rarely had food poisoning even with moderately low cooking, so long as I've made an effort to keep the kitchen clean. Once you get to smithing you can use metal floors which give a small bonus to cleanliness. Small rooms are also easier to keep clean; Your large hallways reduces the impact of each individual bit of dirt or blood, but it also vastly increases the number of tiles which can be dirty or bloody, and the amount of work necessary to keep it clean. A small kitchen, separate from your butcher's table with clean floors is your best bet to avoid food poisoning.

Quote
There is now, at least as of this latest build.

Is there? Really? Because I've just triple checked that I'm fully up to date and there's no piece of interface that I can see on stove or room description that displays this.
You apparently now get a reason given for why someone got food poisoning on the event when it appears but that's not what I'm talking about at all.
Could you please point me to a piece of interface that directly shows the correlation between food poisoning and cleanliness?

Quote
Small rooms are also easier to keep clean; Your large hallways reduces the impact of each individual bit of dirt or blood, but it also vastly increases the number of tiles which can be dirty or bloody, and the amount of work necessary to keep it clean. A small kitchen, separate from your butcher's table with clean floors is your best bet to avoid food poisoning.

Kind of? My stove and butcher table are literally in the main thoroughfare of my entire colony which gets the most foot traffic and I haven't had food poisoning be a problem for quite literally hundreds of days. The blood generated from butchery is totally negligible.

In a 6x6 room(36area) 1 piece of dirt adds -0.14 to the cleanliness scale.
In my 196 area hallway each piece of dirt adds -0.04.

It literally takes 3.5x more dirt to reach the same level of filth and that also means that the effect of any one filth-generating-event is massively diluted. It's been literally years since I've had a food poisoning event with a mediocre 8-12 skill cook (Transhumanist colony, no passions)

Quote from: Tynan on June 19, 2018, 06:06:57 AM
Other changes relate to that too. For example, armor is now a chance-of-damage-cancel instead of a damage reduction. This means there are less wounds, but the wounds you get are significant. But, medicine is spent per wound, so this reduces time and medicine spend tending wounds, which on the econ side makes straight-up combat more viable. It also means that if you can get some really awesome armor, sending melee fighters to actually fight should be more viable since there's a real good chance you can win without getting hurt, as opposed to previous builds where you might win but you'd have a bunch of damage-reduced (but still bleeding) wounds - possibly on your eyes or brain.

Sorry if it was already answered but i'm curious how more powerful weapons like sniper rifle will enter in this math. It will be even more binary in the  realm of if it hits is a kill, if it miss you wasted time?

I dont know if this is the place, probably is, but, there was any reason something like Dubs Hygiene Mod was never implemented to vanilla game ? I mean, its a colony simulator kind off, no bathrooms and other hygiene needs seemed like a must for me :(, i had hope till the last minute for the to be added to the final version of the game :(

Quote from: Tynan on June 24, 2018, 12:50:40 AM
As Alenerel said, it was simply ignored by players. People didn't register, people told no stories, made no effort to prevent it.

Now it makes a difference, so it can introduce unmistakable story elements (e.g. our soldier couldn't fight the rabbits because of food poisoning he got because Johnny's an incompetent cook).

I don't disagree that food poisoning is a somewhat forgettable "event", but I think you may be falling into the same trap as most devs who make games with "survival" elements. Every major change towards higher difficulty only affects the early game and does little to nothing to increase the end-game challenge.

Food poisoning isn't an issue when you have a high skilled dedicated cook with sterile floors and 3 pawns with nothing better to do than clean the base all day. It's an issue when all you have are 3 pawns eating berries off the floor. Co-incidentally, this is also the point in the game where having a pawn out of commission for an entire day is a major problem.

Does the latter scenario create interesting stories? Possibly. If you get attacked or desperately need the sick pawn for some reason (maybe he's the only doctor) there's story potential. Otherwise, you just lose that pawn for about a day.
I actually find the current version of food poisoning more interesting at its core. Because the pawn is still mobile, they're going to slowly drag themselves across your base, vomiting and possibly mental breaking (I have yet to experience berserk + food poisoning but it sounds hilarious) all over the place.

To me, that opens up a lot more story potential than simply confining them to a bed for a set amount of time.

Quote from: Madman666 on June 24, 2018, 01:13:53 AM
Still don't you think, that disabling a colonist with "max 10% consciousness" penalty for whole day is a bit much for not having a great cook or failing to force people to clean a kitchen? I mean you can't always micromanage, so cook cleans the kitchen first, then starts his job. Often you ll learn that your kitchen is dirty only when people are KOd already. And i assume cooking skill plays the most important part in it, so even if the kitchen is clean, if you didn't get a good cook at the start, or lost him along the way - you're kinda doomed.

Paste dispenser exists for a reason - if you have no good cook (and/or ability to make clean kitchen) use it until you can.
Also, instead of getting rid of mechanic (food poisoning being something you should care about), I think we should simply make AI better at handling stuff. It this case example being cook cleaning kitchen before cooking - or making it a toggle like self healing for doctors, so you can decide whenever cook wastes his time cleaning, while you have a dedicated cleaner.

I say lets expand mechanics  - not get rid of them.

Also: the read up about balancing - I give 10/10.
I'm used to reading people complaining about cheesy strats getting nerfed and saying that it ruins fun or whatnot. Maybe some people like this will get better idea about what balancing is about, and that sometimes nerfs are required it order to create a more complete and varied game.

I've not seen much issue with poisoning since it went through a few tweaks.  It was pretty awful when this thread started.  Maybe I've just been lucky.

That said - ignoring food poisoning has been poor play in Rimworld for years.  When your pawn count isn't high taking that kind of penalty on them is a significant detriment to colony productivity early game, and that's when you least need such a hit from something you can control.

Food poisoning is nasty, but there's multiple ways to mitigate it, so I don't see it as a problem.
I've been playing 1.0 unstable since the .1950 build, and a lvl 5-8 starting cook and here's what I've had to do.
1) Build 1950-51 or so. Ignored the problem, with my kitchen out in my growing/workshed area within 2 spaces of butcher table and dirt. Some poisoning, but still not very common. Just really bad when it happens but only ever 1 pawn at a time.
2) Put tiles down to improve walk speed, never got 1 space under the stove tiled for some reason. Still not an issue, just every once in a while.
3) Build 1953-Current. Woah! Big change or just RNG smacking me. Multiple days of "Food poisoning: dirty kitchen" and "Incompetent cook" despite them all being over lvl 10. I let that go on for a few days and figure it won't stop.
4) Build 1954+. Set up a hospital like room. Sterile floors, new isolated room without any stockpiles, butcher table still elsewhere. Food poisoning disappears from the colony.

-----------
What I want to know is how to fight freaking lancers if you don't have shields+maces. I've had multiple instances of Flak jacket+pants+vest+simple helmet, behind sandbag+wall having appendages blown clean off from single shots. If it's an arm/leg it disintegrates and they go down. Torso/head usually kill them flat out. "Sapper crumpled due to lack of a head"

It's a very all or nothing mechanic right now. Armor doesn't help (I check the combat logs after lancer fights, and can't find any reflections like I see for other arms fire). Pets don't help (can't breed huskies/wargs fast enough so I can sacrifice two for every lancer I need to kill to get an un-shielded melee in range).
Can't turtle in the base, because that poison is killing half my crops or psychic ship is driving everyone mad....so I save-scum until every sniper fight goes perfect. Overwhelming firepower and lucky shots work for me as well as they do the lancers.

If you can't use walls/micro to engage lancers in melee before they get shot just fight them in a way that lets you shoot them without firing back like usual.  It's not like they have revolvers or auto pistols that fire almost instantly.

Quote from: Grimelord82 on July 05, 2018, 12:34:04 PM
What I want to know is how to fight freaking lancers if you don't have shields+maces. I've had multiple instances of Flak jacket+pants+vest+simple helmet, behind sandbag+wall having appendages blown clean off from single shots. If it's an arm/leg it disintegrates and they go down. Torso/head usually kill them flat out. "Sapper crumpled due to lack of a head"

It's a very all or nothing mechanic right now. Armor doesn't help (I check the combat logs after lancer fights, and can't find any reflections like I see for other arms fire). Pets don't help (can't breed huskies/wargs fast enough so I can sacrifice two for every lancer I need to kill to get an un-shielded melee in range).
Can't turtle in the base, because that poison is killing half my crops or psychic ship is driving everyone mad....so I save-scum until every sniper fight goes perfect. Overwhelming firepower and lucky shots work for me as well as they do the lancers.

Turret covered by sandbags in front of your firing line makes a great decoy. But this requires half-decent setup, which is too expensive if your base is on open. Well, and turrets, OFC. In my current crashlanded playthrough it took 110 days to recruit a pawn with at least a single flame research passion. Would take several more seasons to get to turrets - she has passion, but no actual experience.

Turrets and batteries can both be repositioned, pretty quickly too.  As tribal you'll never get to them during the time the game is most challenging though.  Animals can sub as a distraction if you have the food, though who knows how such tactics get evaluated.

Open bases nearly guarantee extended periods of hiding against manhunters.  There's not a lot of counterplay for 40+ deer other than pathing manipulation to kill them or hiding until the extreme late game...and hiding w/o perimeter walls means lots of inefficient hauling or significant risk of mental break --> wander to death.

So typically one just bites the bullet and does pathing manipulation.

I appreciate both replies. I listed the problem with a very narrow scope, and those are both good suggestions for JUST that issue.

I've never really tried pistols, but have some laying around.

Half the save scumming is due to what pops out of the ship. Centipedes of any variety make close engagements impossible until they are plinked down to being useless. As do scythers, but at least traps work on them.

I don't really have enough steel for sacrificial turrets right now. Or maybe I do and I just need to build a few of the damn things and stop hoarding.

Quote from: TheMeInTeam on July 05, 2018, 02:01:32 PM
Turrets and batteries can both be repositioned, pretty quickly too.

Only micro ones.

Quote from: Oblitus on July 05, 2018, 02:17:35 PM

Quote from: TheMeInTeam on July 05, 2018, 02:01:32 PM
Turrets and batteries can both be repositioned, pretty quickly too.

Only micro ones.

Of course, but when sappers breach you they're creating a choke, in a spot you can anticipate prior to breach.  If you actually have turret tech (with tribal starts it would be years 2-3 at earliest for me) you can definitely slap a miniturret positioned on a way that will cause raiders with guns to want to stop in the breached wall.  Depending on the 1.0 iteration this will literally cause a raider to block other raiders and minimize firing potential.

I do think movement in 1.0 needs to be fixed though.  It's kind of janky that you get green circles that don't consistently represent where the pawn will actually stop.  How much pawns and raiders are allowed to path over each other was a *significant* change to 1.0 and I don't know what the intended functionality is.  Since the stuff is inconsistent and stacking is still technically possible I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that how it is right now is still not completely WAD.

Quote from: TheMeInTeam on July 05, 2018, 02:40:36 PM

How much pawns and raiders are allowed to path over each other was a *significant* change to 1.0 and I don't know what the intended functionality is.  Since the stuff is inconsistent and stacking is still technically possible I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that how it is right now is still not completely WAD.

AIUI the idea is that pawns can path /over/ (not necessarily stacking) friendlies (at a reduced movement rate?) including animals, but not hostiles. This makes sense to me, but how neutrals are calculated WRT pathing I have no idea

@Tynan: what was the thought behind the latest research tree adjustments?
First you limit the point multiplier to industrial so tribals will always pay double and normal dudes research with the given value. This reduced various research points costs for outlanders.
However with the latest build you increased points cost by a lot for advanced tech meaning tribals need even more time to research the ship and fabrication bench than before.
Why not move back to the old system of multiplying by tech difference? That way tribals will still need to invest more research (50% more for spacer tech) than outlanders but not double the amount. It was a penalty but not a super heavy one.

Quote from: Tynan on June 20, 2018, 09:40:13 AM
I like the DR/DT system. It's also used in UnderRail, which we were looking at.

There are some downsides though:
-Weapons with zero effect on a given armor. If enemy has such armor, it may be frustrating. If you do, may be boring. Can anyone comment on experiences in Fallout with this?
-Spam. Assuming any damage occurs, a high DR means that attacks may end up doing lots of tiny bits of damage. It's fine in some games but in RW each damage is a separate wound, and if they're spammed it can look bad and cause other issues.

Yea, this was a massive issue in the original Fallouts, especially 2.
A lot of it was the stuff being bugged though: in fallout 1 the "Armor piercing" rounds didn't actually have any modifiers, nor did the hollowpoints; they all functioned the same. In fallout 2, the AP rounds would ignore ~30% of the DR (but *not* the DT), while having the base damage cut in half, the HPs had the opposite, so the APs were just strictly WORSE against armor.

But regardless, what you said is a big problem: many weapons become useless. This was again less of a problem in fallout 1 because the main enemy was super mutants, who didn't really have armor, just hp. In fallout 2 though, the Enclave has the best power armor known to man, with things like 90%DR+20DT to Lasers. Now, this was implemented badly, because it would do the DR, *then* the DT; a 40 damage laser would get reduced by 90%, then have a -20, making a big fat zero. Critical hits could overcome this, but that's just a lot of boring min-maxxing; for the most part you are forced to use the handful of super high powered weapons to do anything at the late game, while a lot of guns become obsolete really early, some way before you can even actually obtain them.

So, perhaps Rimworld could use a DT+DR system, if DT happens first, then the DR, you'll have less zeroes that way. But All-in-all I don't like that system, but I figured I'd give you the personal experience. I think the current unstable system is pretty damn good, just needs more tweaking with penetration values and such. The "clothing shouldn't deflect bullets" thing I don't care much for, because 1. it's such a small chance when you factor in penetration, 2. like someone else said about realistically there is some merit because rounds can glance, and 3. it's a video game, plenty of stuff isn't too realistic, Balance > realism
Still thinking on it.

Quote from: MoronicCinamun on July 15, 2018, 12:57:49 PM
Yea, this was a massive issue in the original Fallouts, especially 2.
A lot of it was the stuff being bugged though: in fallout 1 the "Armor piercing" rounds didn't actually have any modifiers, nor did the hollowpoints; they all functioned the same. In fallout 2, the AP rounds would ignore ~30% of the DR (but *not* the DT), while having the base damage cut in half, the HPs had the opposite, so the APs were just strictly WORSE against armor.

But regardless, what you said is a big problem: many weapons become useless. This was again less of a problem in fallout 1 because the main enemy was super mutants, who didn't really have armor, just hp. In fallout 2 though, the Enclave has the best power armor known to man, with things like 90%DR+20DT to Lasers. Now, this was implemented badly, because it would do the DR, *then* the DT; a 40 damage laser would get reduced by 90%, then have a -20, making a big fat zero. Critical hits could overcome this, but that's just a lot of boring min-maxxing; for the most part you are forced to use the handful of super high powered weapons to do anything at the late game, while a lot of guns become obsolete really early, some way before you can even actually obtain them.

So, perhaps Rimworld could use a DT+DR system, if DT happens first, then the DR, you'll have less zeroes that way. But All-in-all I don't like that system, but I figured I'd give you the personal experience. I think the current unstable system is pretty damn good, just needs more tweaking with penetration values and such. The "clothing shouldn't deflect bullets" thing I don't care much for, because 1. it's such a small chance when you factor in penetration, 2. like someone else said about realistically there is some merit because rounds can glance, and 3. it's a video game, plenty of stuff isn't too realistic, Balance > realism
Still thinking on it.

DR/DT in Fallout 1/2 style is great. Sure, you can get invilnerable agains weak enemies if your armor is good enough. And? Tribals with clubs and bows shound not have any chance against power armor and heavy weapons. This is how progression works. I mostly hate Fallout 4, but there is one thing done almost right - power armor. They managed to make it feel like something that makes a difference, while in F3/FNV I always preferred light armor. In F3 there was literally no difference between power armor and top light armor, and in FNV said difference fallen in a gap between automatic weapons with weak per shot damage and powerful one-shots, so decent light armor with a few perks was enough to protect against any light weapon while letting you use stealth and granting movement speed boost.

Current Rimworld system is like one from F3, where any armor always would let 20% of damage through. You can get a power armor and pulse rifle, but a pack of manhunting hares would screw you up with ease. And this is just wrong.

I don't know. I wouldn't bother so much about edge cases, @Tynan. These sandbox games are there to do all kinds of ridiculous things. Is natural for people to invent crazy things and unleash them. No need to chase minmaxers meta - there will always be one. Though I agree on the variety part - it should always be encouraged to try different things.
But I don't play unstable, I still have to catch up on the last version.

Quote from: Oblitus on July 15, 2018, 01:39:22 PM
(snip)

Yea, I have to disagree on some of that. I'm not sure what you mean by "current system" being like fallout 3's. if you mean the base game, yes, you're right. The 1.0 unstable, nah it's a lot more like the first 2, and it is a big improvement overall. Unless I'm misunderstanding you (which I tend to do a lot), it sounds like we both agree though that the current stable's armor system is pretty silly and the 1.0 is a vast improvement, just could use a little more tweaking.

Sure, *realistically* if you have power armor you shouldn't be hurt by clubs and rabbits, but that's not engaging in a balance sense, and as stated the balance of the game is way more important than power armor. That kind of progression system works in an rpg, but I'm pretty sure it's not really in the spirit of Rimworld. Of course the fact the armor will degrade when hit does balance a lot of that out, it probably would have made Fallout 1/2 much more in-depth too. And Tygan already expressed in this thread how while he kind of likes that idea he doesn't want to make stuff too complex.
I suppose I did say in my own post though that the OG fallout system but tweaked might work nicely. That system wasn't inherently bad, it just had some truly unbalanced/untested numbers (like the AP rounds which were strictly worse at everything, especially armor penetration lmao).

To be honest, I don't think Rimworld's power armor is like your typical Fallout/WH40k/etc. of big bulky suits, that's not the vibe it gives me. It isn't strength enhancing servos and plates but rather this neuro-mimetic stuff that allows it to be firm yet flexible; in other words it's less heavy by every definition of the word.

Have to say I do agree with you on fallout 4's power armor, I dare say the best depiction in any game I've ever played, seen, or heard of.

Quote from: MoronicCinamun on July 17, 2018, 11:54:36 AM
Sure, *realistically* if you have power armor you shouldn't be hurt by clubs and rabbits, but that's not engaging in a balance sense, and as stated the balance of the game is way more important than power armor. That kind of progression system works in an rpg, but I'm pretty sure it's not really in the spirit of Rimworld.

Why? We already have a spectrum of enemies from tribals with sticks and stones to pirates of all sorts to AI-controlled mechanoids. It is enough to make a progression. But currently game just have no progression. They all are just differently flavored, but generally the same. When tribals and mechanoids are on the same danger level something is wrong. When a rat can force a walking tank with a minigun to stop shooting and moving just by getting into melee it is absurd. When you actually prefer to fight said walking tank rather than a dozen rats...

So I know this has been mentioned before, and kudos to you guys doing the code digging, you're the real MVPs: melee still feels odd to me, still  better than before at least.
So, here are my observations + questions. Also let me know if I'm wrong about anything, with the constantly changing nature of the Unstable it's highly likely something I say either isn't or soon won't be applicable anymore.

• People keep bringing up the fact that Mechanoids get insta-killed by stabbing weapons, and boy does that sound dirty and exploitative. I sure hope this gets fixed, not sure how though. The complex solution would be to just give the mech's more "internals", maybe something like external plating and internal plating, no idea. 


• It appears the melee weapons are getting slightly more fleshed out, like I noticed the last time I checked that knives and swords have a shorter cooldown with a slash than a stab, which is nice. But at the moment I am very confused about the long blades: the Spear has a higher listed dps than the longsword (and is arguably even better than that with the aforementioned stab exploits), and yet still requires less material, work, and skill to make, so what is the longsword meant for? It just feels like an expensive bastard (pun-intended) that's not really better than anything, just a bad jack-of-all-trades


• For those code diggers/makers: how exactly do the melee attacks decided "what attack" to use (i.e. stab, slash, bash, etc.)? A good chunk of the melee seems kind of balanced on that, which is probably a part of why the spear's listed DPS is higher, it has less possible attacks which keeps the average higher. The worst is when a pawn will punch with the offhand while using a melee weapon, like just why? Maybe the chance of that could go down with higher skill or something, or it should just be removed?

I think maybe the melee weapons could be further tweaked into having niches, at least as far as the long blades go: it might be better to have the spear be stronger, but slower, a good choice for "stabbing through armor", while the long sword swings faster in a way it has more or about even dps (this is how it used to work isn't it? It's been awhile since I've played vanilla-stable). The Ikwa feels like a worse gladius as it probably should, but maybe it could be handled in a similar manner: Ikwa is primarily stabbing and thus is better at that, but the gladius has more speed/versatility.

The only other possible balancing factor I can think of is giving the sword-types (gladius + longsword) a bonus to melee dodge chance, to represent them being used to "parry" and whatnot, which is pretty much what the sword was made for after all; if you wanted to hack down a foe with one fell swoop, you'd grab an axe or polearm of some sort.

Also minor request w/ argument: some kind of 2-handed hammer with the "long blades" research (guess you'd have to change the name XD) would be great, and would probably make the balancing easier; a large reason why maces aren't used much is because they're "basic", they're just not at the same tier of a longsword or spear, introducing a smashing weapon that is at that tier could make that dicthonomy of sharp = good against flesh/ blunt = good against armor very clear cut and established; for example I read one player's testimony who said overall longswords were still better against armor than a mace, where maces really shine is when used en masse to keep foes "stun locked", which doesn't exactly seem like you were going for as tweaks keep getting made to make armor more vulnerable to blunts yet still the sword and spear come out on top.

Well that's enough for now, keep up the good work, this unstable truly is a massive improvment!

QuotePeople keep bringing up the fact that Mechanoids get insta-killed by stabbing weapons, and boy does that sound dirty and exploitative. I sure hope this gets fixed, not sure how though. The complex solution would be to just give the mech's more "internals", maybe something like external plating and internal plating, no idea.

yeah anything that makes melee not a joke option sounds pretty exploitative to me! (seriously there's like 1-2 other niches where melee isn't a terribly suboptimal choice)

Pre-shield belts regime you are dealing with significant risks (even after, brawling scythers is subjecting yourself to super high variance of the limb losing variety), since HCB and inferno cannons both have warmups of <2s ticks, which means you need reasonable EMP or LoS control to not eat a downing / fatal full HCB volley (generally 6-10 x 15 damage shots) at point blank range.

Even then, there are stronger ways to deal with centipedes. So everyone will just default to those (hint: they are a bit boring). At least right now you can take higher variance in melee for faster kill speed.

but that is the beauty of this forum, you can write whatever you want on balance without the knowledge to back it up

Quote from: bbqftw on July 17, 2018, 12:43:51 PM
yeah anything that makes melee not a joke option sounds pretty exploitative to me!
...
but that is the beauty of this forum, you can write whatever you want on balance without the knowledge to back it up

See, your first line is truth to me. Your last line is not, but it's also kind of irrelevant to my purposes. It's not how balanced or not it is that bugs me. It's the fact that it's intended to be balanced. (melee vs ranged, that is, and only firearms, really; you're not going to be using bows in melee range.) Tynan's going to make choices I disagree with, this just happens to be one of them; So with that in mind I have to accept that and try to give feedback that helps with his goals, while continuing to make my stance (I mean, sure, as one of what, thousands of players?) clear. He'll either keep it in mind as a representative opinion, or he won't; either way, I'll try to give him useful data, same as you.

In my b18 experience, the biggest balance issue was not traps vs animals vs turrets, it was about caravaning vs no caravaning.
This regards risk management for raids/deseases as well as economic questions of wether it wouldn't be better to just produce wealth. In b18 it was usually better not to go.

This might of course be entirely a result of playstyle (I like to defend with pawns).

I hope this has been looked into or is being looked into.

Quote from: ChiefBigFeather on July 23, 2018, 09:32:26 PM
In my b18 experience, the biggest balance issue was not traps vs animals vs turrets, it was about caravaning vs no caravaning.
This regards risk management for raids/deseases as well as economic questions of wether it wouldn't be better to just produce wealth. In b18 it was usually better not to go.

This might of course be entirely a result of playstyle (I like to defend with pawns).

I hope this has been looked into or is being looked into.

This is a really big thing IMO. The game can push you towards being a pawn-focused, down and dirty brawling match with lots of urban warfare, or it can push you towards trying to use caravans and spreading outside of the confines of your starter map, but it can't really do both.

Quote from: ChiefBigFeather on July 23, 2018, 09:32:26 PM
In my b18 experience, the biggest balance issue was not traps vs animals vs turrets, it was about caravaning vs no caravaning.
This regards risk management for raids/deseases as well as economic questions of wether it wouldn't be better to just produce wealth. In b18 it was usually better not to go.

This might of course be entirely a result of playstyle (I like to defend with pawns).

I hope this has been looked into or is being looked into.

Bedrolls, foraging and fairly cheap drop-podding has made caravanning reasonably easy now. You can send them out without too much gear and if a caravan gets into trouble you can drop-pod them food and meds to get them out of trouble. The foraging system means it's much easier to send pack animals without having to send them with half their carry capacity in kibble.

The fact that caravan manual resting is pretty broken and joy management is practically nonexistent makes caravans feel clunky and Russian roulette ish on higher difficulties, where you choose between wasting 10+ meals because your pawns didn't actually rest or you enter encounters at the edge of major break because recreation is low and they are tired

Quote from: Eterm on July 24, 2018, 02:54:47 PMBedrolls, foraging and fairly cheap drop-podding has made caravanning reasonably easy now. You can send them out without too much gear and if a caravan gets into trouble you can drop-pod them food and meds to get them out of trouble. The foraging system means it's much easier to send pack animals without having to send them with half their carry capacity in kibble.

My comment was not really about the people going on the caravan, it is more about the weakened defense back home when you take your best shooters.

I think the foraging system is not the best idea. Food management was one of the fun challenges of caravaning. The unfun being mentioned by bbqftw.

Yes funnily one of the more reliable methods of caravan mood management is enforcing minor breaks on the road and then doing the important stuff with catharsis.

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned, but why not have both dodge chance and damage reduction on armour? That way you can have light armour have high dodge, heavy armour have high damage reduction, and late game armour have both.