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Here's a thought. If colonists are able to carry a spare meal with them, then why not other things as well? If a colonist could, say, have a backpack (new item idea, Tynan?) then in their backpack they could put their food and maybe also spare clothes. In this way, a colonist could decide that their vest is slowly wearing out and decide to put a spare one in their backpack. When the one they're wearing dies out, they'd put on their spare one immediately. I guess Tynan would need to enhance the inventory system to cater for something like this, but I imagine it would open a lot of possibilities regarding the way colonists manage themselves. Joy from finding and keeping shiny objects? Carry a few grenades for throwing during combat then fall back to shooting? Carry medkits for in-field dressing of wounds? What else?

Started work on arbitrary area restrictions for colonists: basics, designators, icons, drawing, selection for colonists, coloring, feedback on inspect pane.

Yes! I tend to only fire up the game for a few rounds of play every few alphas so I don't wear myself out on the game before it's even had a chance to blossom. But this is definitely makes the next alpha a candidate for me in that regard

Fair enough. Was just curious is all. I'll arm wrestle you over your assertion that XML is cleaner though.

Hey Tynan, why'd you go with XML over JSON? XML is so... verbose... and... 10 years ago!

<SerializationFormats>
    <XML><Bloated /></XML>
    <JSON><Clean /></XML>
</SerializationFormats>

{
    XML: 'Bloated',
    JSON: 'Clean'
}

In my mind if you aren't drafting 90% of your colonist and voluntarily micromanaging them to defend the base in desperate time, you have been using killbox for too long.

Right now raid are one of the main event but myself I would like them to be far less frequent.

Hence, even if I had over 10 colonists I would micromanage them, especially since I'm hoping Tynan will make a way to change into combat clothes. We don't want our colonist to live in Power Armor all the time.

What you say is sort of true, but still doesn't take away from what I suggested. There is fun micromanagement, and tedious, repetitive, unnecessary micromanagement. i'm advocating the former and suggesting ways to avoid the latter.

I know there are various messages scattered through the archives about this kind of thing, but I'm curious if anyone knows what the current plans are regarding the following (with full appreciation that the game is alpha and there is still a lot of work to do):

1) Stopping my idiotic colonists going out to do hauling/harvesting things and in the process wandering across battle zones, completely oblivious to the danger they're in. To me the obvious solution is a simple alarm toggle that tells all colonists to return to the home zone and prevents path finding outside of said zone.

2) Allowing me to assign a set of colonists to a squad which I can draft instantly and assign to predesignated defensive positions. I know micromanagement is part of the game, but having to pause the game, cycle through my colonists one by one, try to figure out which ones are the soldiers, draft them individually and send them to their standard defensive position is kind of tedious, as is having to draft my non-combat colonists and force them to go hide in the kitchen while the battle takes its course.

I think both problems above are best solved via a new "safe" zone type. You could designate as many of these as you like, just like you can with other zone types. Any colonist could be assigned to any number of safe zones, either from a zone's interface (allowing you to add many colonists in one go), or from the colonist's own interface (allowing that colonist's preferred zones to be set, if desired). Ringing the alarm bell would force all of your colonists to go to the nearest active safe zone that they are assigned to. To help with combat, you'd designate some additional special "safe" zones that you only assign your soldiers to, which means ringing the alarm would cause your workers to run to the nearest civilian safe zone and your soldiers to run to the nearest safe zone you've created for defense purposes. Once your soldiers are restricted to their safe zones, you could easily select them all as a group and draft them with one click. I can envision assigning a bunch of single-tile safe zones behind defense pillars, with one soldier assigned to each zone, giving the effect of rallying your soldiers to their assigned defense positions, ready for incoming enemies. The home zone would be the default safe zone if a colonist is not assigned to any, and you could temporarily disable certain safe zones as needed, depending on the situation. Clicking the "alarm" button would also play some kind of "red alert" sound effect too maybe? I can totally imagine building a few bunkers around the map and setting them as safe zones for colonists to hide in if they're out on a field trip and unlikely to make it back to the base safely in time.

The bottom sculptor's bench (there are two) in my base doesn't work. It has a bill, but the bill doesn't show up, and clicking to add a bill does nothing. Sometimes when loading the game, I get a popup debug box with errors saying something about the bench, but it didn't happen on the most recent occasion, so I don't have any error text to paste here. The bench still doesn't work though. Save game and world file is attached.

[attachment deleted due to age]

Just thought I'd drop this in here.

Cassandra blessed all my shooters with an outbreak of malaria and then not a minute later, dropped a siege into an area with basically nowhere that I can get any decent cover from. I outfitted my two remaining healthy colonists with the best gear I could find laying around, then when I got to the siege had them hide behind a tree and a rock, and both were promptly taken out in succession - and i mean literally first shot taken on both - (one had his head destroyed, and the other was shot through the chest) by a single sniper with only 9 shooting skill.

Tynan, if you're still keeping up with this thread, it'd be interesting to know what sorts of plans with regards to building out the A.I. of the storyteller's own decision making process for what to challenges to present the player with, and when and how those challenges should be paced, particularly with respect to chronologically-adjacent challenges. I know you talked about making the way raiders behave more intelligent, and improving the types of challenges that we can be presented with, but I really can see a need to need to look at the logic and heuristics of how challenges are selected and paced. Would it be difficult to do something like build a score around each colonist's capacity to do a given thing, project that towards the base's general capacity to achieve a given thing, and also weigh that against those generalised base-level scores as they exist both before and after a given challenge has been met and triumphed against? Assessing the unbiased calculation of how well the storyteller expects the player to succeed against a given obstacle, as compared to how well they *actually* faired would perhaps allow further calculations to be weighted. I think there's a lot you could do with that idea anyway.

My experience of having the storyteller first incapacitate those who are capable of defending my base, immediately follow it up with a siege, and then one-shot kill both of my last-ditch attempts to fight off the siege, makes the blatant randomness of the current system quite visible.

Surely the interpretations of the game dev are broadly irrelevant.

If your end goal is to enjoy the game then the optimal difficulty has nothing to do with the game dev's intentions for you.

It's the difference between playing Chess and using the Chess pieces to construct imaginary battles between castles and goblins.


My original point was that you're deliberately hamstringing yourself by trying to intuit what the game dev's intentions are and then proceeding to assume that the dev knows what's best for you in terms of your enjoyment - which is crazypants.

You are massively overcomplicating (and misinterpreting) what I'm trying to convey. I do not want to construct fancy bases and "safe" preconstructed scenarios of my own choosing. I would play in basebuilder mode if that were the case. Or Minecraft. Or something else.

I want a challenge. I don't however want it to be an insanely unreasonable challenge. I don't want to play in carebear mode. I'm ok with losses and bad things happening. I'm ok with being forced to think and strategize if I have any hope of winning. I'm ok with the unexpected. I'm NOT ok with Cassandra mass-murdering my citizens without me having any chance to rise to the occasion and defeat the challenge (even just barely) and then having some vaguely-reasonable period to recover.

So yes, I do want a challenge. Challenges are fun. Nailing all of my colonists to a wall and executing them is not fun. See the difference?

Optimal difficulty is a level of challenge that you'll have to work at to ultimately stay on top of, but which you'll feel rewarded and satisfied for having done so. You'll feel like the work you put in was worth it, and had a purpose. An optimal challenge takes into account what you're capable of and pushes you to the edge to try and defeat said challenge. That is what should be optimised for by the designer, and what should be implied by "100%". 100% isn't just some fancy big number put there to sound scary. It is relative to something, and in this case, it is relative to some baseline difficulty that has been optimised for by the developer. If you think it means something else, you need to back that up with something Tynan has said, because otherwise you're just just making assumptions and preaching those assumptions irrespective of how correct they are.

I don't understand where the notion that "100% = normal " comes from when the setting is listed as " Challenge "

You're getting caught up in one particular semantic interpretation of the word "challenge". These words are all relative. Does it mean "I like a bit of a challenge" or does it mean "holy crap, this is going to be challenging"?

When choosing a game difficulty mode in any game, going somewhere around the middle, perhaps erring slightly on the difficult side of the midpoint, you're usually saying "yes I want a reasonable challenge; I don't want things handed to me on a silver platter", not "i want you to challenge me in inhuman, tortuous ways I haven't even dreamed of, and then some". The real problem here is the use of percentages. The alignment of "100%" to a particular difficulty mode suggests that the standard level of difficulty, manually-balanced by the game designer, is aligned at that level. Saying that a given level is only 60% of that suggests that you're choosing to tone down what the designer originally intended. More than 100% suggests that you're trying to make things harder than what the designer originally intended.

Your problem is that you're assuming that your interpretation of a word is the same as everyone else's. What I'd really like to know is what default level Tynan thinks the game is designed to be played at, and then we can decide whether he's a sadistic madman or a fluffy toy enthusiast.

Thanks for the replies.

I do try to accept reasonable losses. Originally I was trying to play it as a roguelike, with no reloads at all, but sometimes Cassandra would still be just utterly unfair. I mostly limit my reloads to cases where my guys die due to stupid A.I. such as an accidentally non-drafted colonist running through a wall of bullets. I admit sometimes I reload in the heat of irritation though, such as when an enemy brawler gets two one-hit kills in a row and not even a scratch, but hey if Cassandra is trying to keep me under control, maybe that's the "story" I'm supposed to let happen. I guess the problem for me is that because it's alpha, the number of types of challenges to overcome is quite limited, so my ability to perceive a loss as part of the greater story is undermined by the limited number of things that can actually happen. We're not anywhere near a level where true emergent behaviour is really being noticed. Credit where credit is due though. Tynan has not been working on this for ten years. yet

... then again maybe I just suck and should have done a better job of making my base into an insane super-fortress before Cassandra decided to punish me for not keeping up.

I get this bug a lot, given that my colony has 4 leg amputees lying around wasting my other colonists' time. What happens is they get food poisoning, throw up all over the floor and then, because they're not technically in bed anymore, need rescuing, which involves me manually sending another colonist up to tuck them back into bed.

Perhaps the semantics surrounding the difficulty level need to be reassessed. 100% of normal challenge mode sounds like "normal" difficulty. More than 100% suggests you're ramping things up. Less than 100% sounds like you're chickening out a bit. So I choose 100% because the balance of difficulty suggests to me that I'm playing "at par", so to speak. If 100% of challenge mode is actually supposed to be really difficult, I'd suggest reorienting the percentage to align with what "par" difficulty actually should be.

Now, if 100% difficulty is about what it's supposed to be right now... well holy crap. Let's see.

• 4 of my 8 colonists have had their legs shot off... what's the game's obsession with incapacitating my colonists in this way?
• 9/10 trade ships that come by are weapons traders. Occasionally I get an exotic goods trader, but only 1/10 times does that trader have any kind of prosthetic leg. How am I to fix my colonists at this rate?
• The only way to stop a siege is to proactively go and stop it, which ultimately puts at least 25-50% of my colonists in a medical bed afterward. I'm now having to get each one out of bed to heal his friend, then sending him back to bed. Meanwhile, nobody's collecting food, so starvation is kicking in.
• With starvation and infections to try and micromanage my way out of, well hey, why not throw in a psychotic cobra and an outbreak of malaria? yay!
• Now that my colonists are on the brink, hey let's throw in yet another mechanoid attack?
• And having barely fought them off using my last able-bodied but sick, wounded and infected colonist who happens to have a rifle, why not throw another siege my way? Because naturally now I am easily going to be able to fight it off, having been given all of 13 seconds to recover from the mechanoids, infections, starvation and malaria.

This happens every time, in one form or another.

This is alpha, so I want to acknowledge that. There's lots of work yet to be done- I get it. But I figured I'd report this anyway, as Cassandra really does seem to have a sadistic, maniacal side where after a while she deliberately throws literally so much at you that you just can't keep up, no matter how hard you try. My last few colonies were lost in this same way, despite having awesome kill tunnels, masses of defenses and so forth. She hits you hard, then while you're trying to recover, she hits you again. Then she laughs in your face by making everyone sick. Then she has SNAKES smash down STEEL DOORS and kill your prisoners who you're hoping can replenish your colonist numbers, and then she spits on you with psychic drones and mechanoids.

*Sigh*

I'm very much hoping that the "A.I. story teller" gets better at creating stories, as opposed to creating unwinnable situations. These games keep ending in me feeling helpless, defeated and angry at the game for doing its utmost to screw over a colony I've put a lot of effort into holding back the tides of incoming problems. I welcome a challenge, I really do, but Cassandra really should take stock of my capacity overcome a challenge before just randomly smashing the challenge pinada all over my lawn.

I know I'm a bit late to the party regarding the discussion on price modifiers, but just food for thought- why not think about the item *irrespective* of the material and use that as the baseline, with the value of the material then becoming the modifier?

e.g.
This ring is poorly crafted - $5 - oh but it's made out of $250 in gold, so the price is $255.
This ring is very well crafted - $50 - but it's made out of $4000 in unobtainium, so the price is $4050.
This statue is the most beautifully crafted statue in the galaxy - $7500 - and it's made out of wood, which adds an extra $10 to the price.