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Not far into my game yet, so this is just something that has bothered me with the generation of some of the new features:

Swamps should be able to spawn in mountain and large hills. I feel like the terrain shouldn't restrict the biome, not a fan of being restricted that way (I like being able to mix and match what I like playing). It's also realistically possible, think of swamps at the bottom of mountain valleys. It also creates those really odd looking maps like this https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/867366889705726022/33E27688B46AFCCB988A0D8E12578484B83C19CF/

It's possible to cheese outputs quests with just a handful of colonists equipped with sniper rilfes; enter the outpost and stay at the edge, shoot hostiles until they get in range to shoot back, leave area and rejoin it immediately and repeat the whole process until they start to flee.

* The caravan requests after the patch now seem just fine in terms of request/reward ratio in general. Perhaps travel time should be taken into account? I'd travel 2x2 days for some rewards, but certainly not 2x8days.
* Rivers and roads are pretty cool addition, but could use some adjustments
* Caravan joy probably shouldn't be at 0%. Could just assume they got some enjoyment from seeing some more of the world then just that base
* Not sure if this is intentional, but I've noticed you need to build walls next to doors now or it can cause annoying bugs. If you have a large room with small bed rooms (2x1) and don't extend the walls to the door and you mark some of the beds prisoner it causes the entire area with other bed rooms to become prisoner after a while.
* Human leather should probably be worth a little more again, since the mood penalty you take for acquiring it is pretty serious.
* Dislike the season/month names, but there is a topic with good discussion on this
* I like the smarter raiders

TL;DR: The infection rate at the moment is if anything, lower than it needs to be. Just make sure to treat your colonists in time, and clean your damn hospitals.

I don't have any significant problems with infections when I reach a late-stage game. The problem is the inverse difficulty curve, where even a scratch can doom your colonists in early game, due to having limited medicine and poor accommodations. It's still possible, sure, if you micro-manage every single treatment right on time.

I'm with ttgg on this, infection right now are more undertuned then anything else (and i'm on cassandra extreme). Before it was patched it was overturned, but now it seems to weak, in particular with those conditions you mentioned. I was able to avoid infections just fine without having a proper hospital, and the infections that I did get went almost too well given I was just on herbal medicine. And besides cleaning the blood/dirt of the rooms hurt people were in there wasn't really a whole lot of micromanagement needed.

I think it's a pretty acceptable degree of micromanagement, there are much worse offenders like being unable to prioritize jobs in a particular area without removing all others orders (like constructing a segment of wall, hauling the harvest you just got, etc), but that's not really A17 related.

[cross]

First off I think it's a great addition to the world. It makes it seem much more alive and reinforces idea that the planet used to bear some sort of more advanced human civilization in the past.

1. Rivers that "branch" out currently do not generate those branches when you settle on them
I guess this an oversight since roads have intersections when generated. In any case it should be represented when settling there.

2. Rivers going through mountains shouldn't really have overhead mountain on top of them
While underground rivers exist I don't think it makes sense that every river going through mountain is one. I think there should be no overhead mountain at all, instead the river should "carve" a small valley into the mountain; so basically you have the mountain to the side, then 1-2 tiles of mountain-ground and the river in the middle. The side mountains would have 1-2 tiles thin-rock roof and then overhead mountain.

3. The effect of roads on movement should be immediately visible
While you can see the benefit while traveling on your pawns, the tile description should show the effect of roads on movement.
For example:
"Current Movement time: 1 hour (road: 0.5 hours)" (added to existing line)
or "Current Movement time on road: 0.5 hours" (new line)

4. Rivers should impact movement
Just like roads, rivers should impact movement. The larger the river, the slower it should be to cross the river. With the exception of a road leading across, that should nullify any penalty and just give the road bonus. For the biggest of rivers perhaps even impossible.

5. Different impact of road types versus biome/tile type
Right now it seems any type of road just halves the move speed time by 50%. While I appreciate the bonus, I don't think it makes any sense that a dirt road (which resembles a road barely) has the same impact as some ancient highway that is still somewhat intact.

In addition I think the road's impact should be bigger depending on the terrain type. Basically flat terrain is already easy to traverse, so moving along a road here shouldn't have a big impact, while mountains are extremely difficult to traverse and since the roads tunnel right through the mountain tiles the impact should be very significant (bringing down from 12h to 2h for example).

It's a similar case for biome - when you think about traversing a forest for example, traversing a road instead should be much easier since there is not much stuff in your way. Even when the road isn't in the best shape, i would be still much easier then going right through the forest.

So to implement that I think it would be better to give traveling along a road a new base cost instead of using the terrain/tile cost and then adjust it depending on the biome/tile instead of the other way around, so for example:

A highway could give a base movement time of 0.25days (being the most intact and "best" tile), while a dirt road only gives 0.9 days (being barely better then no road).

Those days would then be multiplied by tile, again for example:

• 0% for flat
• 25% for small hills
• 50% for large hills
• 100% for being on a mountain tile

That would still only be 0.5h on a highway in a mountain, but I think it's reasonable. You have tunnels bypassing the highest mountains avoiding a lot of climbing and difficult traversal, and only have to deal with having to travel upward at some point (and downhill at another) and being careful. Hills the same story, but to a lesser extend of course.

Temperature should probably have a higher impact then biomes: snow&ice obviously would be very hard to traverse as would be traveling through blazing heat, as it would be very taxing on the pawns and animals.

Biome next thing, since temperature is already covered I think the impact should relatively low, if any at all.


Overall the result would be a much lower travel time on roads. I can see this might be a bit too strong, but I also have an idea to offset the benefit of the roads. I'd make it so that you're much more likely to be attacked by raiders while you are on a road, thus while it would give you the benefit of getting everywhere much faster, you'd also be taking a risk of your caravan being raided. That you have a higher chance to be raided should probably be reflected in a tooltip somewhere (perhaps on the tile tooltip when you hover over the "dirt road" etc)

I may still rename the quadrums, but my sense of it is that it's going to end up being 4 quadrums (with whatever names).

The key advantage of the month-mashed names is that you can tell what they correspond to in real life. Names like "Teritus" are totally abstract and don't leverage any pre-existing knowledge the player may have. When is Jugust? North-hemisphere summer, obviously. When is Secundus? Heck if I know.

That said I think the Latin names sound cooler in a way. They're nicer aesthetically but worse informationally IMO.

Regarding seasons, I think that communicating the date is a different problem from communicating the season. These things can't both be solved in one system. So the latest update of the game communicates season more prominently on the date tooltip, and I'll be checking to ensure the "season X has begun" messages are firing correctly. But the real takeaway is that there isn't a way to make one system that communicates both date and season.

I think having two systems, one for dating and one for giving information about climate would be best solution.

I don't think re-using our calendar is a good idea, it's based on the earth and conveys too much extra information depending on where people live they might expect the months to mean anything when they're just portioning the rim world year into sections.

It might be good to plan ahead for potentially allowing variance in the length of a year when naming things. For some strange reason every rimworld is the same currently, but considering it's an alien planet it would make sense if there was some variance - for example, on some rim worlds a year could take 120 days, on some 60 like now, on others only 30. Not sure if this planned to be added in the future, but I think it would be a nice touch and make for interesting game play. (longer or shorter hot/cold seasons).

For that reason I would not use the word "quadrum" as a replacement for month as it always implies having fourth sections. Not sure what a good replacement would be though, perhaps month would/do still, but it still has the same problem that people associate our current date system with it. Though some more educated people might know that there actually are different types of months.

Latin ordinal names (OP's option 5 here) might be good solution for the name of quadrums/months/etc since you could extend them as needed and they don't have much extra meaning attached to them other then being first, the second, etc. Or just numbers instead of names.


As for climate, I would add a separate tool tip/section below the date that denotes the current climate(s). Something like hot season/cold season/growing season/rain season/summer/winter/etc. I think the advantage here would be that you can always specifically show the current climate(s) the player is in depending on the location of the player and how long they'd last. So people could see that they have a very long cold season in Boreal Forest, and only a relatively short warm season.
Overall this adds more flexibility to the system as well. For example if there was be an option for a rotation locked planet (one side faces always the sun) in the future, it would always be hot (always day) on side of the planet and cold on the other side (always night), resulting in mostly year-round seasons.
 
I specifically mentioned multiple seasons in case there might be some interesting overlaps. For example climate-cycle enabled stories, it could show the planet is currently going through a cold/warming up/hot/cooling down period in addition to the regular seasons.

I can confirm this, just had the same bug in version 0.17.1530. Same thing, placing cooler over wall, building room, room doesn't get cooled anymore.