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In my current colony I was ill prepared for the "poison atmosphere" event as I never encountered it before.

I just finished my old wild-west wood-buildings city and dug into a mountain to store some batteries, some hay for my alpaca-farm and a prison-cell with 2 beds.

As I soon noticed living with seperated buildings would have been a death-warrant for my colony, so I turned the prisoncell into a dorm room, settled all animals in the battery-storage and turned into full vault-mode.

As time passed I dug out nearly the full interior of my mountain. But due to the lack of farming (and the poison atmosphere killing most of the plants and ALL of the animals outside) my colonists turned to slaughtering and eating their alpacas, then their dogs. And when this meat was used up I had the most unstable ones drop their weapon move into the new "fight club" room and who first hit the floor was designated the next meal.

This lowered my population from 10 to 4 and once the poison atmosphere lifted it left me with completely depleted food ressources, a dead map and a handfull of colonists on the brink of madness.

It´s a great story to tell, but next time I will simply build a radiostation inside my vault and order fresh supplies from passing traders. Mind you I had one built in the village, but leaving the vault was a trip of 2 minutes and would have caused 1% of poisoning ^^

So I loved the event but the poison is way to harmless. It should have more of the "the floor is lava" (or better "the sky is lava") effect, instead of a "smoking can cause severe damage"-effect.
While yes it kills the entire map within days, your colonists can just stay at home, order pizza from space delivery and if the "been inside to long"-debuff hits they can go for a walk in the poison mist for hours before even getting 1% of poisoning (that heals over a nights sleep).

I personally love Z-levels in Gnomoria and DF. Still I think they would not play nice with Rimworld as they would interfere with current designs.

Take attacks for example. Tynan spend a good amount of time combating players "turteling" by setting up narrow death-corridors without cover and full of auto-turrets. He used attacks via Drop-Pods, Sieges with mortars, AI-Shooting around corners and attacking walls to stop players from building large-scale auto-defenses.

If the players could now go underground at ease most of these game-mechanism would stop working and we´d get Vault-Dwellers as the most efficient tactic of survival.

So for Z-Levels to work you´d need completely new game-designs for players to be threatened. Caveins and burrowing enemys for example. You´d need ways to interact between the Z-Levels otherwise you could build Steam-Powerplants on every Z-Levels of a Geyser etc. pp.

I´d rather see if they explored the current "playground" to it´s limits. Water-supply and demand for example is still missing, as well as meaningfull interaction between factions like trade, or maybe off-side raids on bandit-holdouts, etc. .

SO yes Z-Levels would be great but Tynan would have to build/design a whole new game-"mode" as Vault-Dwelling / Turteling with under-ground hydroponics would pretty much make the settlement immune from all current threats.

[best]

I gave a hunter an M16 moments before a travelling party from an (friendly till then) group of Outlanders decided to come for a visit. And of COURSE they had to spawn in the group of deer currently getting hunted. Funny thing is my hunter managed to kill 3 of them before killing the deer, than walked up to the corpse of the deer (while under fire from the 2 surviving visitors), grab the corpse and walk back to the base like nothing ever happened. And he only got one bullet in an arm. I was so amazed to watch this that I did not even draft him (okay i planned to let him die in the retaliation fire for his own stupidity).

Still I would wholeheartedly agree! The AI needs a friend / foe  safety while hunting.

In a firefight during an assault this could be tricky interesting as well because the worst injuries are from my colonists shooting at flanking melee attackers.

Schematic:

xABx   E
xxxx

x= Sandbags
A= Colonist A (Aiming at E)
B= Colonist B (getting a Shootgun load from A into the back)
E= Tribe Attacker with a club charging the funny people hurting themselves with the boomsticks

I really wish the AI would realize that the shortest way (through the brains of a colonymember) is not the best way to shoot an attacker.

What I think, is rubbing people the wrong way, is the way the current population cap is implemented.

You reach 12-13 colonists and then the game stops using several features (No more captures, no more slave-traders, prisoners, wandering colonists). To my mind this is a BAD way to implement the cap.

I understand that the game is focussed on small colonies, and I like it as well, still there should be logical, non-immersion breaking ways to implement the cap.

For example, your crash landed ship could have a water-source for supplying enough drinking water to 12 colonists per day. NOW it is up to the players to make decisions. Do I go over the soft cap, by increasing the number of colonists and thus force the colonists to ration the water and generate a basic level of unhappyness? This up to the point where colonies beyond the number of X would see people die of dehydration.

If some clever player manages to have a colony of 20 and keep them alive with the constant lack of this ressource, great! They chose their own challenge and can play the game they want to. Other players could simply stick to levels around 12 colonists and thus not care about this at all.

This hard-cap is simply FORCING players to do or not do something with NO inherent reason (game wise). You can have enough food, beds, electricity for 100 colonists, but the game stops giving you more after reaching the cap? Of course the sandbox-players call foulplay.

By giving the player a limited ressource you STILL force them to keep colonies at certain levels, but it is the players choice (and thus FUN (in a DF way)) to either live within his means or to manage the downsides of going beyond the limit.

I would have send him to the frontlines during the next raider invasion. Give him the chance to die heroically, maybe take 1-2 raiders with him, and be done with that

Infection when touching the plant, damage over time till death if not treated by an doctor and available medical supplies?

So not the complex behaviour changeing brain-parasite but simply a poisonous plant?

The latter is possible but Tynan asked me to condense it so that we have a starting base mechanic to build from.

Basically, take my ordered brain musings and attempt to structure it into various different stages of implementation into the game. The former whole psychological effect thing would be something to try maybe on a 4th or 5th step, depending on how the alpha progresses by itself as other mechanics introduced for other reasons might hook in nicely with this one.

Okay trying to make this into game stages

• 
  1. Infection: Colonist touches the parasitic tumbleweed as it moves randomly across the map. There could be a hidden dice role to see if the infectionction is sucessfull
  
• 
  2. Outbreak: Short message that a colonist is infected by an unknown disease and needs to be treated urgently.
  
• 
  3. Decay: After the outbreake the colonist will enter his bed and sleep, while losing healthpoints
  Different methods for curing him:
  3.a. Buy a cure from a passing science vessel (Those mediacl supplies already in game). For ammount X of medical supplies the colonist is healed and returns to work and recovers the lost HP as he recovers from gunshots right now.
  3.b. Have a scientis find a cure yourself!
  Create a new researchtopic. Either "Find a cure for [colonist name]" or "Find an antidote agains parasitic tumbleweed". The second option would be a much bigger research-job but would cure the thread of the tumbleweed for good.
  
• 
  4. If the colonist is not cured before his HP reach zero, he turns into a "zombie" (Lack of better name here) and starts meele-attacking everything he sees. So he would break down the door of his living-quarter and start meeleing all other colonists he meets (And each sucessfull atack would pose the danger of infection again).
  
• 
  5. When put out of his misery the dead body could still pose the thread of infection for everyone passing by or carrying the corpse. Thus there would still be a thread to the colony in case the colonist got gunned down by an turret, and still it would make sense to get rid of the corpse instead of having a never ending diseaseherd in your colony.
  

And to have different game stages for Tynan to develope:

• Develope an event that gives colonists a new / hidden attribute "infected" after comming in contact with a plant
• Messages are already developed
• Develop a dmg over time effect
• Develop a mechanism to add new / specific reasearchtopics ("Find a cure for Jonny")
• Develop a new colonist state "sick" where that colonists stays in bed indefinately. Have him get dmg from starvation as well if he is not doctored by other colonists
• Develop a method to replace a colonists character with a differenct character and "melee" behaviour

The rest of the stages seems to be already included in the current prototype.

I think I saw a pirate in one video destroy a wall when there was no way through.  What if the AI could also decide the "open route" will take too long (analyzing terrain speed modifiers) and decide to go through a nearby constructed wall instead?  Why not clear the path with grenades, or in the case of barbed wire, with pliers?  Or maybe using the Fear mechanic, they could see the mass of bodies & blood ahead, and look for an alternate route.  Or instead of coding the behavior (or in addition), approach it through equipment.  If a pirate spawns with bombs instead of a pistol, they will not head into the colony; instead they will go to the closest structure and blow it up.

Yep pirates occasionally destroy walls by setting them on fire. They sometimes even do that when there is a clear path into the colony.

Here some ideas towards this topic I´ve come up with.
Some were already present in this topic, so if some ideas are already present here, consider those supported by me ;-)

1) Have colonists need water (like food now) to be able to survive.
2) Have several ways of aquiring water with different effects
2.a.) Collect rainwater (only works outside, can suffer from long periods without rain (droughts))
2.b.) "Recycled" water (think of the opening scene of the movie "Waterworld" ;-) ) Needs energy and gives a huge minus on loyality (nutrient paste and "recycled" water can lead to tantrums, especially if the colonists get different characters (A pirate should be fine with these rations, but a medival lord, living from P&P (Paste and Piss) should go berserk soon)
2.c.) Watering holes, used by wildlife... "Sure you can drink from the pond, just take care of the 2-Headed-Shark" ;-)
3) Have to use Water for agriculture. Just like the indoor-plants dieing when you switch off the sunlamps have them wither when the farmers dont water them enough.
4) Have some "loyality" influence based on "waterobjects" / hygiene. "Enjoyed a long bath", "Took a shower recently", "Dropped the soap in the men´s shower :-(" (From positive to negative effects).
5) Maybe re-route rivers for moats as a defensive measure? (And fill this moat with 2-headed sharks!)

Infection when touching the plant, damage over time till death if not treated by an doctor and available medical supplies?

So not the complex behaviour changeing brain-parasite but simply a poisonous plant?

Okay what to do about too many guns?

1) Solution: Spawn less guns
Implement some close combat weaponry. This way you would have less guns. Too simple though, as than you´d have the same amount of useless melee weaponry.
2) Solution: Implement wear and tear on weaponry
Have guns degrade by x% every time they fire. This way you get an itemsink into the game.
2a) Depending on how complex you want to design this you could salvage raider-weapons for parts to repair yours (Pretty much the same idea Gnomoria uses when Robobob switched the Goblins weapons from "normal" to "worn weapons" which are unusable by gnomes but can be smelted into metalbars).
2b.) Fallout 3 System: Dont use parts but "combine" two guns at 50% to one gun with 100% state
3) No wear and tear on weapons but salvage excess weapons for metal (and thus ending the problem with metal as a limited "map ressource"). This can currently be archived by selling the guns and buying metal from the funds.
4) Keep it as it is. Guns pile on and can be sold to traders.
5) Implement ammo. This way a pile of guns would be useless. If you would have the ammo only available by traders you could "force" the trade of weapons for ammo and thus lower the weaponstockpiles.

I would prefer the wear and tear with salvaged weaponparts for repair as well as the need for ammo. This way you could start implementing crafting elements in the game (who currently do not exist (Based on Youtube Let´s Plays)).

Hmmm the timescale is measured in day/night cycles. How many hours those days last is not known (to me) but it could be a standard 24 hour cycle (as the colonists seem to drop dead at the break of night ... which they probably would not if a day/night cycle would only last 5 hours).

Depending on the storyteller most colonies last 10-30 cycles (Judging on the available you-toube material) as the raider-waves get really agressive by then.

I dont know if the peaceful-mode is actually so peaceful that it allows you to play forever... but yeah ... most of the colonies will probably die very soon... i.e. no baby would live from birth to it´s first steps, even when born on the day of the crashlanding.

Quote from KickStarter

As it has be said, there's a very neat and deep combat system... what's the point if we can't enjoy it by actually playing it ?

The elephant in the room here is the question: Do we want a settlement-simulator like DF where we macro-manage everything?
Or do we want X-Com where we micro-management everything?
Or a mix-thereoff?

I genereally like the DF/Gnomoria Macro-aproach. Asign your colonists to a squad, have it patroul or guard an area and enjoy the show

Next question, what does Tynan want / what can he create (programming wise)?
That only he knows. But judging from the current state of the pre-pre-alpha I thing we wont see any change to the current system.

I have several plans to make some raiders better at handling choking/funneling strategies. The methods that some players have been using did not come up in testing before this month. Which is fine - that's why it's important to get feedback from real players!

Yes, that's a problem I've seen and that quite bothered me: if you created a tower-defense-like path to your colony, the raiders will follow that path no matter what.
They should be able to (for instance) decide if they see an easy access, and if not, they take down the closest wall.
Then once they've breached that wall, they assess the situation: if there is a colonist/turret in sight, go for it, else look for a visible access, or go for a wall again.
Now if/when raiders' objectives are implemented (like capture a specific colonist), they'll have to prioritize that as well.

this sounds like a good reason to dig your camps into mountains. And if raiders take down mountains than it seems like a good way to get the entire (and limited) map leveled. Currently there is already a lack of map / resources, as the only ressources you have unlimited are energy and food. Once you dug up all the iron you have to depend on trade and watch your colony die slowly. NPC´s destroying the limited landscape we have does not sound like a good idea.

I agree they should go get some cover (though... where would that be ? far out of range ? a specific spot we'd have to define ?), but that should be it.
They shouldn't respond to being attacked, as long as we still have the drafting mechanic.

Well the question here is... do people prefer to micro- or to macro-manage their settlements?
I think after setting up the routine (Raiers land -> Draft colonists -> Move colonists to sand-bagged shootingrange -> undraft surviving colonists) has been clicked the thousanth time people might get a litle pissed

Hmmm in the current game (yeah I know pre-pre-alpha) there probabbly arent melee-weapons, because they would not make sense.

Charging an auto-turret or a guy with a rifle means insta-death. This might be subject to change if Tynan will implement ammo consumption ^^

If you want some German coverage you should contact Gronkh
http://www.youtube.com/user/Gronkh

He is one of the biggest German Youtubers and would provide great coverage for Rimworld.