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Messages - Teiwaz

#1
Bugs / Colonist friendly fire
June 02, 2014, 01:23:58 AM
This one is sort of on the line of "bug" and "feature request," but it's having a very negative impact on my play so I'm putting it here.

Colonists don't seem to understand that it is a bad idea to open up with a chaingun at an injured friend who is in a fistfight with a squirrel. When I'm fighting tribals or psychotic animals, I often lose more colonists to the reckless spray of bullets from other colonists than I do raiders. I'm having to micromanage every target selected, and big fights grind to a halt as I pause every few seconds to make sure that one of my guys didn't pick a target on the other side of a bunch of friends.

It doesn't seem like it'd be a huge deal to work likelihood of hitting friends into target selection or whether a colonist decides to fire at all or not. In the long run, it'd be neat if this was affected by traits, personalities, and even maybe colonist relationships. But for now I'd just be happy to have them not shoot each other, at least not automatically. (Manual fire orders should probably override this.)
#2
The other thing to keep in mind is that this isn't just a kickstarted game. It's also an alphafunded game. The reality is that the game is playable now, and people are paying for it now, and it is probably going to be in development for quite some time.

I've seen far too many cases where "pre-alpha" is used as an excuse for messed up priorities. The 9,000 pound gorilla in the room is Dwarf Fortress. I love Dwarf Fortress. But *years* of development are put into stuff like world generation and bee keeping, while all along the interface sucks, sieges can be completely negated by a drawbridge that costs 8 stone to build, and basic features like military training still don't work worth a damn.

I can't get friends to even try Dwarf Fortress. The justification for not having a proper interface is that "it's still in pre-alpha." Well, I've been playing it since the 2D version, so that's at *least* seven years, and if anything, the interface keeps getting worse as more stuff is bolted onto the game. There comes a time when you have to recognize that "pre-alpha" is the state in which your game will be experienced by most people, and it's the state that it'll be in for the foreseeable future, and you need to make the effort to keep it playable. It's a choice that Tarn has made, and it seems like he's comfortable with what he can pull in from donations, but it's also a choice made while he has been insulated by a community that says just this: "don't worry if it's barely playable, it's okay, it's pre-alpha, we'll live with it" and he never even sees the thousands of people who try it and give up, or are scared off by the incomprehensible screenshots, and never even have a chance to become a customer. With its headstart in the genre, its internet-fame and buzz, Dwarf Fortress could have been a Minecraft. But it's not, because "pre-alpha!"

Rimworld is already in a much better place than DF has ever been in terms of accessibility. But I know I, for one, already have a hard time recommending it to anyone that isn't a bit of a glutton for punishment. When I describe the game - especially before Chill Callie - it's one where you are hanging on by your fingernails under constant raider attacks, where every minute you're just barely holding on to life, and eventually you die anyway. That's not an experience that a lot of players want, even when they otherwise would be very open to a deep town building game: something which captures the spirit of DF without the catastrophic interface. Also, now that the game is playable, there are Let's Plays and forum posts and reviews going up every minute. Those things aren't going to go away, and in the future when people are looking up Rimworld, they're going to find descriptions of how the game plays and feels *now.* It all comes down to the fact that you can't have your evangelists warning people away.

While it's impossible to maintain a game in a fully polished, playable state while it's underdevelopment, if you ignore keeping it as playable as is reasonably possible, you do so at your own peril.
#3
While it's true that this isn't a great point in development to be "tweaking," more open testing revealed some pretty fundamental problems that meant the game wasn't playing as it was supposed to. Rimworld isn't supposed to be tower defense, but that's how it has been playing due to the effectiveness of turrets, the ineffectiveness of sandbags, and the frequency of raider attacks. Defense is currently the, by far and away, dominant consideration when planning a base. Trying to address that issue isn't a matter of "tweaking," it's a pretty fundamental design issue. Being aware of it - and whether or not it *is* just an issue of difficulty, or is tied to more fundamental problems - will shape how development proceeds, and so it worth addressing early.
#4
Ideas / Re: AI Director between friendly and classic.
November 08, 2013, 07:23:10 PM
I played a couple hours on the new director last night.

The step down from Classic Cassandra certainly helped. My Colonists were able to fare much better on their own even though I was playing without turrets (perhaps because I was playing without turrets, causing slower raid ramp-up) but ultimately I was still forced to move entirely underground within a couple hours. (Fortunately my underground refuge was mostly done, and while the raiders burned my surface town to the ground, my colonists mostly survived and just had to make do with doubling up in the partially-completed underground bedrooms while I finished them.)

The attacks still seem pretty frequent, and I still don't see how an above-ground colony is feasible against raids as often as they are and in the strength they are. I suspect that some of the idea that raids are really frequent is due to the fact that I often end up playing on 3x time acceleration, and then swap to 1x for raids, which means the raids feel three times longer than they actually are. At the moment, they still don't feel as "important" as Dwarf Fortress... Even though it's easy to just pull up the drawbridge in DF, making the raids meaningless, their much lower frequency just makes them feel like bigger events, somehow. But given that the raids already are quite dangerous, it's not like just having less frequent, but more major raids is a realistic answer.

I think one solution might be to have larger, but less frequent raids, but also make combat less lethal. Guns are almost always fatal at the moment, which means that it tends to be the case that either a raid fails utterly, or it completely destroys your colony. You'd have to make it harder to recruit raiders to balance this out, but I don't think that's a bad thing at this point, as I quickly end up with colonies of entirely ex-raiders, which seems odd.

The other issue is that the underground approach is just hugely superior to surface colonies. The game is pretty good about not letting you just move underground right away - you have to survive long enough outside to get hydroponics up and running, and find enough geysers underground to move to geothermal power, but once you do the game is pretty much "won." I think I'd like to see some more influences pushing you to maintain a surface presence. Something to make it so that an underground refuge bunker makes a lot of sense, but just going down there full time and becoming mole people has more drawbacks. That way the game could be rebalanced to support the gameplay it seems to be intended to have - defending a town with an armed militia of citizens ala "Firefly," rather than defending an underground tunnel with machinegun turrets ala "Aliens."
#5
Having done the swap manually, what appears to happen is that changing out the storyteller effectively resets the storyteller. When I changed my big, friendly mode game over to Cassandra classic, the first raid I got was one dude with a pistol. The second raid was like 20 guys including the dreaded snipers. So saved variables don't come into it, it's just like starting a new game except you have a lot more colonists and buildings already.
#6
General Discussion / Re: Anybody else decentralize power?
November 07, 2013, 02:33:39 AM
My most recent base had an entirely separate electrical system for just the defenses. That way, if I ended up overtaxing my electrical system from adding a new building, the lights and doors would shut down but my turrets would stay operational. The defenses also got the geothermal power station, whereas the other things relied mostly on solar. That way I could be sure that my colonists wouldn't run down the batteries on the turrets during an eclipse or something.
#7
Ideas / Workaholics, and happiness vs fear.
November 07, 2013, 02:20:10 AM
Just another thought form my last couple days of playing:

It would be nice if colonists took care of their happiness in the same way that they do their other needs. There have been a couple times where my colonists, especially when working on major excavations, have worked themselves to near mental breaks because they won't take time off from environments that they hate until they have to go eat or sleep. I end up having to disable their mining job entirely to get them to go have a rest or do something they like more, such as farming. I don't think I should have to micromanage job settings minute to minute like this, it doesn't seem like that is the intended use of the jobs screen, correct?

However, I'd suggest that they only take breaks on their own if their fear level isn't enough to keep them loyal. This way, if you're running a horrible slave colony where everyone is loyal through fear, they'll work harder and be miserable. But if they're there because they're happy there, they should be more free to take breaks when they get unhappy from working too much.
#8
Ideas / Difficulty curve tweaks
November 07, 2013, 02:04:54 AM
I just wanted to share my thoughts about the difficulty curve. (Most of my experience has been Cassandra classic)

It seems like Cassandra does a fairly linear ramp up in difficulty. Part of the fatigue of fighting her is that every attack is a nasty one, and usually tougher than the one before. I'd suggest, rather than a linear progression, a more of a short geometric increase to a climax, followed by a sudden drop in difficulty which then builds again towards another local climax, with a linearly increasing overall difficulty. Like so:


(I'd actually rotate the graph 180o, this was just the closest thing I could find to the right shape. The time between minimum and maximum should increase as the game progresses, as should the difference in difficulty between the starting low difficulty and the climax difficulty.)

This is the classic game difficulty curve, and the AI directors should be trying to replicate it. (They may be already, but if so, it needs to be more pronounced.)

The other thing I'd suggest is made possible by moving to this pattern. Right now, it appears that the difficulty of Cassandra's raids are tied directly to some combination of the player's military strength and the time elapsed. I've run games where I've built a lot of turrets, and I always get more enemies faster in a pretty direct relationship to the defenses I build.

The problem is that the number of colonists and turrets aren't a great measure of how defendable a base is. An underground colony with one way in and which has 6 turrets is hugely different from a colony out in the open in the middle of the map with 6 turrets. Additionally, the relationship seems clear enough that I sometimes avoid building lots of turrets in order to keep the raids easier, which seems wrong.

What I'd suggest, is to use earlier, small raids to evaluate the defenses. During a raid, track how much damage the raiders cause, and the number of colonists they kill, and use that to inform the strength of the next wave (rather than how many defenses are there at the start of the attack.) If the player beats off the raiders with no problems, send a stronger wave next time. But if they suffer a lot of losses, don't ramp back slightly, do a full reset back to small waves and then build up again. However, at some point, the player should be able to "beat" a major raid, and cause it to reset and get a breather even if they kick its butt. Think of each of those climbs in difficulty like a campaign - a slow start, probing attacks, build to a big attack which pushes the player to their limit (based on their performance in the probing attacks) and then pull all the way back to give a breather and room for the next buildup. I'd also put a significantly longer period with no attacks at all between the crescendo attack and the start of minor raids again. This will help get away from the "war of attrition" that Cassandra inflicts on you currently, where the raiders seem more like tower defense enemies than people showing up to try and take your stuff where every attack is unusual and kind of a big deal.

One last note. It'd be nice if the raiders actually had an objective. Like, if they were trying to get to your stockpiles and will steal resources, or loot your weapons lockers, and would then leave when they manage that rather than just being bent on genocide like they are now. You should be able to lose a raid, and pick up the pieces with the survivors, because they're after your stuff, not after your colonists. (Unless they're slavers, in which case they shouldn't be shooting everyone. Nonlethal weapons would be nice.) This has happened to me once or twice while playing, but it always feels like it was more a matter of a timer going off or the AI having issues pathfinding to my survivors than the raiders actually having accomplished their objective and leaving. (The message says something like "the raiders have given up and are going home," which implies it's not "the raiders have what they came for and are going home.")

I'm really liking this so far, though. This game has a huge amount of potential.
#9
When preparing defensive positions, it's often best to alternate between walls and sandbags. Position your troops behind the walls, and they'll lean out around the corner to shoot over the sandbags, which is greatly superior cover to just the sandbags alone.

Controlling range can also be important. You'll often run into groups of rifle-armed bandits who can standoff outside the range of your pistols and turrets. Build your defenses so that the line of sight to your turrets is shorter than the turret's range to prevent enemies form killing them from out of range. T-intersections are good for this.

Flanking is useful! Time your move order to just after the enemy shoots. Move from cover to cover between the enemy's shots. Advance with troops who aren't being actively targeted by enemies.

In the early game, don't worry about fortifying everything. Sandbags can be built quickly after the enemy lands but before they attack, allowing you to tell what direction they'll be coming from.

I'm not sure on this one, but I don't think sandbags help turrets. I've never seen enemies miss the turret due to the sandbags. But often they'll charge the turret and use the turret's bunker for cover, which is counterproductive. Sandbags around turrets are also dangerous for your troops, as the turret explodes when killed.

Plan an escape route. Cycle combatants off the front line as they become injured. Have fallback cover ready if your main line gets molotoved. Enemies can be lured out of cover by retreating from them: break line of sight, the enemies will advance, and then pop back around the corner to catch them in the open.

Check what your enemies are armed with. Plan your defense accordingly. Shoot raiders with molotovs and grenades first, before they get in range!
#10
Left-click on your troops to select them, right click on the ground to move them there. They have to be recruited (R, the crossed swords button will be red and their name underlined) to allow this.

Note that if you right click on a spot that another soldier has already been ordered to move to, the order will fail.
#11
Thanks.

For other people trying this, the savegames are in a bit of a funny place. Took me a little while to locate them. They're in:
\users\<username>\appdata\LocalLow\LudeonStudios
File extension is .rim
#12
I'm finding the classic AI director's constant swarms of raiders unfun, but the friendly director is just a bore. Has anyone found a way to change the AI director, by editing the savegame, or something? I'd love to build an established colony in friendly and then sic swarms of raiders on it with a classic-hard director.
#13
Ideas / AI Director between friendly and classic.
November 06, 2013, 10:42:22 PM
I'm finding that Classic is too grueling for long-term play. (Attacks get nearly constant after a few hours, and the game end up playing more like tower defense than a town builder). However, friendly is just boring - attacks never seem to get tougher than 3 raiders and they hardly ever attack.

I'd like an AI director between Classic and Friendly. Closer to Classic than Friendly, but significantly slower than Classic, which gets silly. Right now that's just a huge gap, and I want to play somewhere in the middle of it.