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That is exactly what happens, I think it is a bug that prevents the visitors from leaving once they have been fighting: in my games at that point they all scatter around and stay there until they die. I had serious lag spikes for some ten-fifteen minutes due to this problem, until they all got killed or starved.

I think it is just a flaw in the coding that reads packaged survival meals as "the best option" in terms of food sources.

There is only one group, from one single faction

So, I am playing with Randy in Challenge mode (threats set at 100%), and I'm at the point when both allies and enemies come in quite large groups. The problem is that, when visitors come to the colony, all of a sudden they start fighting with each other and they end leaving like 60% of them dead or dying on the ground before leaving.
Since I play with 3x speed I can't really see what causes the fight, but I assume that one or more visitors have a mental break and go on a rampage, and the rest of the group just shoots them down. This has happened to me three times in a row, and it is quite annoying: I have to clean a lot of dead bodies from the ground, my colonists' mood suffers from seeing all the bodies, and worse, if colonists is wander around while the fight happens they have a high chance of getting injured, incapacitated or killed.

I am playing the latest (0.6.532) version of Rimworld.

That is the annoying part about hauling, at the moment haulers pick up the closest thing, that means that if you have a farm at your base the haulers will be stuck in that limbo pretty much 70% of the time because every time a grower drops a potato they will try to haul it and by the time they have dropped it in the stockpile there is the same problem again. It's fun to whatch, but not very efficient

Since the mortars were just added last update i'm sure they will get some more tweaking but I do think they should focus on structures rather than your colonists assaulting their encampment but on the other hand, it does make sense that they would being that they are seeing you as the biggest threat, plus they have better accuracy at a shorter range.

That's true but artillery isn't made for targeting people, I mean raiders are like 15 people with guns, it's their PURPOSE to defend the position while the mortars do their job to the Colony. And, you know the proverb "Offense is the best defense": if mortars keep targeting the base even when colonists try to attack, the player has to worry about both: if the offensive fails and the colonists need to retreat, they will find a wrecked base and they wouldn't be able to recover from the fight.

Yeah I know I were quite off topic there, sorry, it was just an idea that came to my mind.

About the raids, I think it is a great idea, especially if you think that raiders are from other settlements on the planet: it is logical to suppose that they don't attack you for fun (well, maybe a little) but because they need resources and such

I though about this just today, but I focused more on friendly visitors: currently there's just the "visitors from x are visiting the colony" event, and it involves a (usually) gigantic group of people that come, talk to each other for a while and then leave. I understand that the intent of this event is to give help if there are enemies around, but why don't take it further?

Example, let's say you just had a fire and quite a lot of your structures is damaged: in this case, with a chance proportional to the goodwill you have with the faction visiting, you could have a window popping out and saying something like "The visitors from [visiting faction] notice the bad shape of your colony. They offer to help you repair some of your structures." and you could either accept or deny.

Another time, maybe, the message could be "The visitors from [visiting colony] look pretty worn down. They tell you about the famine in their lands and ask if you have any food to spare with them". In this case, accepting would increase the goodwill with the faction.


And so on: there is really an endless list of sub-events like these, if you think about it.

Well, the planning tools have been added quite recently: before when you needed to add a new room you just paused the game and worked around with walls and furniture and stuff until you were satisfied, then you just hit play again.
Planning is useful because you can lay out things looking to a future expansion. I never felt the need for more than just the little white square to be added, but reading your sentence about different symbols for furniture and so on made me think: what if you could place the items with left click of the mouse and PLAN THEM with the right click?

Let's have an example: you select the item you want (for example the research table) from the Architect menu, but let's say you haven't dug out your beautiful research lab in the side of the mountain yet. The research table is a 2x4, sure, it's easy to remember, but will my colonists have space to work on it? Where should I put the light? Let's say I want to shrink in a comms console, too: where do I put it? Currently, the only way to tell is digging out the space FIRST, estimating the amount of space needed (and I get it wrong like 4 times out of 10). But using this planning system, you could plan your room BEFORE digging it out, having the minimal waste of time and resources.

What do you think? Is it like the idea you had in mind?

Sounds okay. I'd move 'colonists' to below 'valuable structures' on the priority list, though. Really, siege weapons are made for buildings.

That is what I thought, too: that's why I find silly that mortars target the closest enemy (usually people). But, as in real life too, sometimes artillery IS actually used to target infantry, in the case of large groups of people, that's why I included them in the list of "valuable targets": a mortar shot well placed on a group of colonist would certainly do quite a lot of damage. But because there would be quite a lot of programming to do (the AI would have to define what a "group" of people is, decide whether it is "big enough" or not, order it in the priority list...) I think it would be ok to have colonists at the very bottom of the list like you suggest.

The ship reactor is an "Antimatter reactor", but I find it disappointing it actually doesn't require any resource D:
I hope they'll add antimatter in the future, maybe as a rare resource you can only get disassembling mechanoids for their power cores (makes sense, doesn't it? Very advanced pieces of technology, they must have a very advanced power source)

Talking about uranium, nuclear reactors would be amazing (the underground base of your dreams without need to worry about finding underground geysers or having solar farms exposed outside!) but because they could be placed anywhere there would be the need of a counter to this. The logical thing I can think of is having nuclear reactors as quite big multi-structures: 5x5 "Nuclear reactor core" with at least two 1x2 "Advanced cooling systems" (the more you add the greater the power output) and a 1x3 "Nuclear reactor console", for example: 5500 or so research points to unlock the parts and 2000 or so metal to build the complete structure, sounds reasonable for an ultimate power source, doesn't it?

Just a little list of suggestions regarding the micro-management of your colony and the AI of both allies and enemies:

-Possibility to set preferences to haulers (example: "Haul only metal / Haul metal first", "Haul only items inside/outside home regions")

-New order in the Orders tab, "Prioritize": the selected elements will be marked and the colonist will take care of them first (for example to have your builders concentrate on the defense systems before working on the other stuff)

-Possibility to schedule the sleep of your colonists: selecting a colonist and right clicking on a bed will display the option "go to bed". The colonist will sleep until woke up by the player or by an urgent threat (enemies attacking him/her), until his/hers "Rest" bar is full or until his/hers "Food" bar is low

-Sieging mortars will try to shoot most valuable enemies and not the closest ones: they will concentrate on enemy mortars first, then on large groups of colonists or on valuable structures (power generators, nutrient paste dispensers, auto-turrets, communication consoles).

Let me know what you guys think, I know litterally nothing about programming but I think these are classified as "small" suggestions: they're little changes that I would personally find useful when playing

Since we're on topic, I think Overview menu should also have different tabs, one could be "jobs" (the one that's already in the game), one could be "equipment", where you could view the weapons of each colonist, one could be "find" (the useful one ) where you could view a list of all the names of the colonists with the action they're doing at the moment, and clicking on the name of a colonist would set the camera on him or her.

I had a similar idea: normally haulers follow a default priority while collecting stuff (I think it is like food->metal->bodies->guns->debris; I'm pretty new at this game so I'm probably wrong), this means that it doesn't matter how much metal you have lying around, if there is only one piece of food out of place in the colony the haulers will go there.
To avoid the problem, you could assign each colonist a list of priorities regarding the jobs they're doing: for example setting a hauler on metal first will allow him to collect all the metal he can find before concentrating on other stuff (this would be pretty helpful while having lots of metal mined), objects with the same priority would be hauled starting by the nearest. This also applies to other kinds of jobs: wardens could concentrate on a single prisoner, builders and repairers could choose among the various categories (working on security objects first, for example) and so on.
What do you think?