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Couldn't you just set the cannibal cooking bills to dump to a specific stockpile in your freezer, and the non-cannibal meals to a different stockpile? Then restrict cannibal and non-cannibals to zones that allow them to eat or not eat those foods. It's at least less micro-management than forbidding certain meals.

I can do a lot of things to achieve the things I want, but should a player really be forced to make an entire spearate fridge just to make management easier when a dev can easily add in the options to have the colonists sort themselves out? Imagine this scenario: You want ONE fridge. The fridge is to be filled with simple, fine, lavish, and human meat foods. You want all cannibals to eat the regular meals and NOT eat human meat while it is being prepared into a meal to prevent poisoning, and everyone else to eat simple meals. When specific people are feeling bad you want to allow them to take fine or lavish meals. CURRENTLY, the cannibals will always go for the human meat which is nice, but sometimes you want them to not take that. The only way to get certain colonists to eat specific meals is to forbid the fine and lavish meals and monitor the sad colonists and force feed them the special meals when they get hungry. Literally the only thing that the dev needs to do is add a diet tab along with the clothing and drugs. If there's something technical stopping that from happening I can understand, but from what I see it should be a simple add.

But really I just tend to not eat people.

Why do you even bother playing this game?

Pawns are reasonably good about not eating things they don't like and it's been getting better over the patches. But you still have to be careful. If they go for 3 hours without a full course meal, they'll dig into the long pork like it's the end of the world.

It is true that they have gotten a lot better at eating the foods they like, but sometimes I want only a few guys feeling more depressed to eat lavish meals for a few weeks etc. I feel like this is a level of control the player should not have to micromanage. Perhaps now we are in love with this game so we don't let stuff like this bother us too much, but I still remember when I started rimworld I was really put off by how little control I had over my pawns (especially with getting them to finish mining a block without having to redo their work schedule just to get a component). Perhaps this isn't a necessity because we can force it to work with micro, but its a very good quality of life aspect that shouldn't be too hard to implement that will be another small step in making new players feel like they have control over their pawns which is very important. So many of the people I knew were almost convinced not to play this game just because of little details like this. In fact I'm surprised there isn't a way to really take full control of a pawn without having to draft/updraft them. Plus this will allow implementation of specific diet traits without any further pointless micro when you're still in the middle of cooking meals and they run straight for human meat like you mentioned.

We have a tab where we can control chemical usage and clothing, why isn't there a tab for a diet? Makes it much easier than making a separate zone for human meat on your cannibals. Furthermore it allows the introduction of simple negative traits like vegan and carnivore. The game could stand to have a few more negative traits so all the high roller pawns don't all come with the same traits like pyromaniac. (Let's be honest, pyromaniacs aren't this common irl XD)

That's really helpful, thanks Greep!

If I recall correctly the bugs prefer rocky ground and darkness, thats why theres such a high chance in that area. Bug hives used to die under -21C  by the way, dont know if thats still the case though.

Yeah I tried to light everything up with lamps except that room. So when you say rocky ground, do smooth floors have a difference vs rugged stone floors or do they both count as rocky for spawning purposes? Or did you mean rock chunks increased the spawn chances? Also I believe bugs have a better range of temperature tolerance in one of the patches in 1.0, but I'm not 100% sure, just remember someone mentioning that.

https://imgur.com/a/sivnnP2

So I've done some research and have learned quite a bit about infestations. One big question is, why does the giant box to the left of the base have such an uneven distribution for infestation chance? Also why do the rooms to the right still have an infestation chance despite being lit up and such? Is this a result of being deeper in the mountain or because those rooms are recently dug out and still need cleaning? Is there any way I can force the infestation to be completely in the big room without sacrificing comfortable temperature? Currently I've forced temperature in the big room to be much higher to test some stuff so don't mind the lack of heaters to keep it warm.

Edit: This is for the latest 1.0 updates.

hi - you improved a lot and fast! Gz on the successful run.

With respect to ease - well, you are an xcom player and pretty good one at that, that's almost unfair compared to this community. You already have the desire and attitude to learn, and have innate talent at games, I think a player like this should be able to graduate to merciless within 2 weeks (I have maybe 2/3rds of that, so it took me an extra week).

I think that especially on merciless its always going to be an arms race between balance changes and new ways to asymmetrically demolish the AIs in somewhat unintended fashion. The major axis on this fight is tactical wealth destruction, but there are other things in development as well.

Hey again didn't know you frequented these forums! While perhaps I do have a background in harder games, I do also believe that this game has the potential to cater to players like me. That's what the difficulty should be for I believe. I've only played merciless so I can only speak for this difficulty, but I feel like this is what I'd expect from rough difficulty. I can definitely see how on this difficulty it is an arms race between the balance changes and how much a player is willing to do to win. I do think the AI definitely suffers in a way that can be fixed largely to provide a much more engaging experience to the player rather than the optimal strat be to avoid contact with the enemy ever through outranging/door strating. To be fair trying to fix this can be difficult; if they make a pawn dedicated to destroying a door after getting peeked, the players will find new ways to abuse this behavior. One thing that will become a problem is that since 1.0 is the final supported release, the arms race eventually is going to end with the players finding one solution to getting a 100% winrate in the game and that's where it'll start staling the game once this method starts circulating. Whether its some sort of killbox or some method of abusing AI, as it stands, the method to do this is present in the game.

Both a congrats to the OP and a long quite agreement with his post.

The "wealth axis" has issues, not just in end game.  It is a central mechanic that would be hard to remove.  It can certainly be "smoothed" out a bit.  As is, it mostly seems to create additional micro tasks, which I don't think adds "fun".  I poke at it often, because I think it can be improved.  That said, I don't think it is the most important thing.

I suspect success in "balance" is making sure that there is more then one way to play the end game.  If the answer is always a killbox plus turrets in your interior, that is fail.

If success requires you to choose a few methods out of turrets, traps, terrain, animal hordes, drugged out berserkers, killboxes, controlled fires, IED's, laboriously crafted masterwork+ gear, clever walls, caches of close combat weapons in your compound, competent micro, allies, terminators, massed mortars, cultivated hives as a distraction, and/or a one shot weapon arsenal and then pray to the RNG Gods it goes your way, that sounds pretty epic to me.

I suspect that is where Ty is aiming.  The challenge is making sure all these things are useful tools in end game AND don't break the early/mid game ... while listening to us whine that it isn't realistic or the story we want to experience or the way it was that other patch where I felt so clever after I came up with ... I am not telling because you might nerf it ...

It's a hell of a game. 

One of the things I love a bunch about this game is how raids scale with your wealth. If you're rich and armed to the teeth, you'll draw the attention of stronger pirates, I love that. I'd love to see some pirate strongholds and outposts armed really well also. Currently its mostly just some thugs with a solar panel and a room full of beds. It would be cool to see them with a fortress and auto cannons/uranium slugs down the line. I do agree 100% on the fact that multiple strats should be viable. Killboxes should be a thing, but not the only way. Personally, I think killboxes should work to some degree, but not allow the player to avoid all interaction. Spacing out the traps and requiring replacement is a good start. But the problem is when I was just starting out playing rimworld and getting destroyed, I was making one big mistake: Setting up combat vs enemies. The moment I started avoiding contact and just outranging/peeking doors, the game trivialized so quickly. I think this does show a lot about the game when there is such a huge discrepancy in results due to a difference in playstyle of that magnitude. Even the few times I did decide to meet the enemies in combat, it resulted in brain headshots twice in the colony. I definitely undestand there's difficult balance decisions to make, but one of the first and best places to start is the AI abuse.

I just finished streaming my very first Rimworld victory on max difficulty Randy with no savescum in the past week and I'll be typing out my thoughts on the adventure both positive and negative in the hopes that the game can become even better than it already is. So to start off, I'll just state my opinions on many things and then go into detail about them in this post. Keep in mind my opinions will be based off of someone who plays games on the hardest difficulty all the time and tries his hardest to find everything possible to win games. Just recently played about 300 hours of the game in the past 2 weeks to give an idea of how much of the game I've experienced. And to make it clear, I love this game. My focus on harsh input is because I really feel like there are improvements that could allow the game to be even better.

So I believe the game is too easy on Merciless Randy. Raids come by too little, and when they do, they aren't exactly very strong. When I first started playing, the raids were brutal and I'd easily lose all my colonists and get them kidnapped. After learning the mechanics of the game a little, the game suddenly became a cake walk. This says something very important about the game's difficulty; the game is artificially difficult until you learn how to abuse the AI. One of the most popular things to abuse that I discovered while playing is door peeking. I discovered this while trying to deal with manhunters, and then found out from viewers that it can be used on raiders. The raiders upon seeing you will scramble to cover while you get free shots, and by the time they got to cover the door closed and they started wandering out of cover again. This comes with the cost of everything outside of a room/wall getting lit on fire, but its a small price to pay for a perfectly safe colony. Especailly because you can make sure all coolers and power generators are safe behind a wall. AI should definitely react better to that, perhaps they just become determined enough to attack the door until its open despite being shot at or something, but that definitely needs to change. I believe even Warren333 (a big rimworld streamer) feels similarly. During this entire run I lost more colonists to uranium turret friendly fire than raids. In fact, the only 2 people I ever lost to a raid was when low shooting skill enemies ( 2 and 3 skill) head shot through the brain with a bolt action, minus the RNG everything else was easy to handle. During midgame, once the walls were built and we could door strat everything, sieges and sappers would be the next problem. I dealt with sieges and waiting raiders by range. Distance is an incredibly powerful mechanic in rimworld. I know a lot of people talk about how crazy melee is in 1.0 with guns being unable to shoot at point blank, but to force enemies to cross a distance before they can get to you is very powerful. Bolt action rifles outrange everything except sniper rifles. Most siege and waiting raiders have only one or two bolt action guys on their team. I gave everyone I could a bolt action and just set up a firing squad right at the edge of our range and focused down each bolt action guy until none remained and abused the rest of their team. Whenever they ran at us, we backed off until the raiders lost interest. In a game called XCOM (specifically a difficult mod called Long War), one of the most powerful things a player could do was break line of sight with the enemies. Its a problem because the AI just didn't handle it very well. The AI should really learn to handle losing line of sight (this also ties in with the door strats). Especially because all the player had to do was deal with half the enemies before they fleed. On that note, raiders fleeing shouldn't be a condition as simple as half their numbers going down. I once sent 3 people to fight 8 enemies at an outpost. This was when a guy had his brain shot out from safe cover and things looked grim. Another got downed and I had 1 guy left, but I figured all I had to do was kill one more guy. Thus 4 enemies armed with good weapons ran for their lives away from 1 guy trying to stabilize his downed teammate. Perhaps there should be a number proportioned with the amount of downed colonists during a fight to make them run. Back on the topic of the base, to deal with sappers we eventually set up uranium slug turrets and auto cannons around the entire base. I never had enemies breach the walls besides from drop ins after that. I can't say for sure how op uranium slug turrets are just because I've only done one run, but during this run, almost everything was 1 or 2 shot. Including my own power armor colonists lol. I had about 10 of them surrounding my base and was able to replace them when they broken and had plenty of ammo for the 15 days waiting for ship reactor on year 6 to offer some perspective. I'll let the devs decide if that's a good number. Perhaps the costs or capabilities of the turrets need to be adjusted. As for drop in enemies, I put a whole bunch of mini turrets and auto cannons into the hallways and that allowed us to win all our fights there. I personally find the internal drop raids most exciting because there's the most at stake when this happens.

On some other notes, there has been much discussion on how kill boxes has been getting nerfed, and how traps have been getting nerfed. I believe this is a very good thing, and many people might disagree. "Why nerf anything in a single player game" is one of the biggest arguments against reducing op strats in a game. From a development standpoint, its very bad for a game to have one easily abusable strat. newcomers to the game will be quickly turned away when the viable strats are to build a box where enemies die in a maze before reaching your people. "Play your own way" isn't a good argument here because you're literally telling people who want a challenge within the game's boundaries to just not do something that the game obviously allows. If anything the game should just be tuned to a lower difficulty if people wish not to fight raids. Something I think would be cool is if the AI adapted to the players base. If raiders dropped from one side of the map saw no easy way in, they'd make their strat to be sapper instead of just walk in etc. I'm not too knowledgable about how AI strats are determined, but AI adapting to counter your base is a very fair thing. Thus the player is forced to constantly change and evolve his base layout to avoid a campaign stagnating into a resource gathering run. In a popular game called slay the spire, the player builds card decks to clear 3 levels in a rogue like fashion. They could make a quick low cost card deck where they spam attack cards for a win or power up using power cards. The 3 final bosses each countered a type of deck really hard so a player couldn't just make what they wanted, but they had to adapt their deck based on the challenges ahead. Of course a super strong speed deck could still beat the boss that countered that deck, but they'd have to make it really strong etc. Same thing goes for Rimworld, players should be under pressure to adapt their builds to face different incoming threats as time goes on. This is one of the best ways to get past a boring lategame and prevent players from not wanting to finish a campaign. Anyone who wants to be able to relax and do what they want regardless of the game still has the option of a lower difficulty. If they get bored of the difficulty they can change the story teller and difficulty mid way through.

Overall this was a really fun experience. Moments like trying to decide who to use a resurrection serum on or whether or not to take care of a guy with a broken pelvis are great. My favorite part is how this is a story generator that creates a story regardless of victory or loss. I really just wished the end game story wasn't just little small stories of how our colonists got into fights and mentally broke while sitting in the safety of the base. Regardless of how much input from this post is taken, continue making this awesome game better!