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I could swear I had a toxic fallout event that lasted two months...

How about a basic rock paper scissors style of weapon advantages, where pawns have an advantage or disadvantage in melee depending on what they're matched up against? It puts some control into the player's hands while still allowing melee combat to be as automated as ever

I think the real issue comes down to how animals pick their prey. You have your chickens next to a wall inside your base. A hungry predator outside your base searches for food, and sees that there is a tasty chicken only 5 tiles away. It then decides the easiest way to get food is to run 100+ tiles around your wall, enter your base, and kill your chicken. Surely there is food that does not require 100+ tiles of movement...

If your chicken was undefended in the open, tough luck, working as intended.

Very true. Line of sight (lack of) is an issue that hopefully will be overcome but I imagine it would take a substantial amount of coding to overcome current game logic. It would improve other areas of the game, too, like flanking enemies/being flanked.

Auto targeting predators makes them too powerful, there is a reason they are not designed to function this way. But its perfectly reasonable to shoot predators and lure them back towards turrets

[absolutely]

See here's the thing. You're talking about building outside of mtns on a mountain map. I'm talking about building on the plains with no mtns. On the plains, I really struggle to get steel and components (I usually run out of steel before I can even construct components).

No, actually I'm talking about building on the plains with no mountains, or very few hills. I mostly play on flat open land because I don't like mountains, but even those maps still spawn with a number of modest hills. Steel is not entirely hard to come by if you're careful and make your way towards Deep Drilling as one of your main priorities for research. I have occasionally been short on components, but trading for components is a lot easier than burning up all of my steel in the early to mid game, and I'm careful with where I spend them to begin with.

I don't even understand your comment on mtns having limited space. If you're running out of space, you just mine more. Now you have more space and resources.

This misunderstanding may be the result of assumption since neither of us was on the same page about which map we were discussing, it's not a matter of "mine more" it's a matter of "I've reached the end of the mountain" but again I was talking about flat plains or even sometimes hilly plains, where mountains are not huge and sprawling.

Power, agriculture, and livestock... these are trivial issues easily solved with proper base planning (multiple walls with turret decoys and traps inbetween). Heat can be an issue... that is once again solved by even a modicum of planning.

But at this point it's not much different than playing 100% outside in my opinion, and you still have the added risk of infestation for very little reward.

As for kill boxes... I use killboxes with plains and mtn bases. Kill boxes are just another fancy way of saying shooting the enemy from all sides. Some designs also incoporate traps and ways to slow down the oncoming enemies but the core principal is really the same. You might sneer at that, but late game, when you're facing 100+ raiders, using a kill box is the only way your 18> colonists are going to survive.

On some level you're correct but I have never taken that long to beat the game, so I do not encounter such massive raids.

As for you not using a perimeter wall, well you've just left me baffled. How do you stop enemies from lighting your vents/ac units on fire? How do you protect your workers while manhunters are swarming? How do you control where enemies go?

You've misread my post, I absolutely use walls, I stressed the importance of having a well defended wall to keep fire out of the village and keep enemies at a distance, but I don't use some massively thick wall with only 1 kill box entrance, my walls often have 1 or 2 entrance at each cardinal direction, they're just well defended. Two turrets out in the open near every entrance to keep raiders from approaching (because they will stay outside of the turret range and try to attack it) which gives my shooters enough time to set themselves up behind what I can only describe as Battlements and begin firing on raiders with long range weapons. It's about as well defended as you can get while still using pawns. I also try to keep all the trees and debris clear within a certain range of my entrances so that raiders have no cover to hide behind, this is helpful as well.

Finally, the reason I don't use wood at all for any of my structures any more is because of mechanoids. I've used fire breaks like you've said and in the end, it doesn't save me. Those inferno cannons...

Fire Breaks are only meant to prevent fire from spreading from one building to another, and also the use of floors prevents Grass from growing which is the only type of flammable ground (even wood floors are not flammable so even wood works for fire break) Remember that embers can drift 2-3 tiles away even over walls and start a new fire, so it's important to put breaks on both sides of your outer wall defending your village. By the time I have to deal with mechanoids I've usually gotten Plasteel walls on my important buildings, but again I put Deep Drilling as one of my higher priorities.

I wouldn't exactly say choosing to play outside is choosing to play a harder difficulty, I would say it's choosing to play with a different set of challenges. Playing outside is easier, to me, because there are so many limitations to mountain bases, limitations that are easily overcome when playing with an open colony. It does honestly come down to play style for most people, I think. 

I still think most people play in mountains because its "easier" to defend against a lot of things, but that isn't why I choose not to use them, out of some sense of superiority. I just prefer civilization, sprawling farms, roads, and dynamic growth (and freedom to expand)

I also think mountain bases are ugly haha

What are those limitations? I enjoy playing on the plains too and I agree, mtn bases are fugly, but it's pretty clear to me that mtns are much easier. You need much less building materials, have more materials, and have an easier defense. Meanwhile, you avoid having to build a massive perimeter wall to protect your farmers from manhunters, having to aggressively eliminate mortars, and generally having to rely on trade to get metal and stone.

A few things wrong here, nothing says that players who don't use mountain bases are reliant on traders for stone and metal, it's perfectly acceptable and even common to mine out as much stone and metal as you need and then leave the mine open (since distant infestations are not an immediate threat) or fill the mountain back up with wood. You can also set up turrets to fight off infestations that happens to spawn inside of the old mine. Personally I fill the mines back up if I bother with them at all.

In my experience mountains are primarily limited in space, and their chaotic nature means space is often wasted on weird shaped edges, leading to funky shaped rooms or shoe-horning things into spaces that are too large or too small to be effective. The space limitation also means having to try and squeeze as much as possible into the pre-defined space, which affects things like having individually spacious rooms with clearly designated room roles, which by extension prevents the positive mood buff for having impressive workshops, rec rooms, etc. And if you want to change anything or redesign the layout inside of a mountain base it is a slow, careful process of making sure that no one gets killed. Buildings in a village can be torn down and rebuilt much more quickly, in the event that your needs change.

Space limitations also lead to issues with farms and livestock, particularly because you either have to do hydroponics which present power issues, or you have to venture outside which can become difficult to manage, too many exits and your swiss cheese mountain base is not as easily defended, not enough exits and you have to spend extra time to do ANYTHING outside, whether it's farming or harvesting wood or recovering drop pods/wounded spacers.

Speaking of power, all of your major power generation MUST happen outside, which means you have key structures outside of the confines of the base that need to be separately protected. If the raiders feel like getting into your base is too difficult, pathfinding might send them to your power, which can be costly to deal with and requires you to come outside to deal with it.

Space limitations also mean that power distribution is likely going to be on a single circuit, where a village layout has the luxury of individual buildings that can have individual circuits attached, meaning smaller battery banks on each circuit, meaning much smaller explosions from Zrrrt events, and also meaning the entire base doesn't go dark because only one building has lost power.

Heat management can also be an issue, and mountain stone cannot be repaired meaning your base is effectively deteriorating slowly until you replace damaged walls with stone brick walls, which is more of an annoyance than anything.

Mountain bases also seem to rely on kill boxes which to me is just cheap and boring. But that is a personal preference more than anything, and plenty of walled cities have kill boxes, too.

It's possible that some of what I'm saying is less than accurate because my experience with mountain bases is limited, frankly I dislike them so I've spent far less time trying to force them to work for me. It's possible there may be solutions to some of what I'm saying, and I'm just not aware of them.

Also as a side note, I don't mind a perimeter wall, it can be somewhat resource intensive but it's never been an issue for me. A well defended wall eliminates the need to construct main buildings out of stone, so ultimately you actually spend less resources on a wall than you do on buildings. Stone walls keep outside fires out of the village, and separating power circuits for individual buildings makes fire much less deadly or common. And with stone roads acting as fire breaks (and preventing any and all flammable grass from growing) even things like dry thunderstorms or flashstorms are not a concern for fire, so you can feel free to build literally everything out of wood. By the time raiders or robots can drop into the middle of your base you should have deep drilling and replace everything with plasteel, anyway.

A second thought I had and one that is somewhat more beneficial to villages than compounds/mountains would be the currently implemented system of room roles, and how a number of specific types of furniture in one room allows the room to be classified as a kitchen or workshop or rec room, etc.

These individualized rooms with their specific roles allow for colonists who utilize/pass through them to experience positive mood buffs and have thoughts like "Wow we have a really nice rec room!" this sort of thing is FAR easier in an open layout because it takes a considerably larger amount of space to keep every type of room separated, beautiful, clean, spacious, impressive, and wealthy. Tightly packed compounds and or mountain bases are less likely to afford the player with the space and diversity necessary to accomplish this effectively, and the "one room schoolhouse" approach makes it impossible.

The mood buff from effective use of Room Roles is really important to keeping colonists happy and effective, so this type of thing CAN benefit all play styles but is more likely to benefit villages.

There is a type of UI tool in Unity that will automatically arrange items into an array or array of arrays, I feel that tool could be useful for automatically sorting the new research screen into tiers regardless of whether or not new additions have been made. I'm sure we will see this improved in future updates

I wouldn't exactly say choosing to play outside is choosing to play a harder difficulty, I would say it's choosing to play with a different set of challenges. Playing outside is easier, to me, because there are so many limitations to mountain bases, limitations that are easily overcome when playing with an open colony. It does honestly come down to play style for most people, I think. 

I still think most people play in mountains because its "easier" to defend against a lot of things, but that isn't why I choose not to use them, out of some sense of superiority. I just prefer civilization, sprawling farms, roads, and dynamic growth (and freedom to expand)

I also think mountain bases are ugly haha

Light absolutely has an affect on Infestation chance, I'll show you.

http://imgur.com/a/gtJEr

I put together this handy little experiment to show how light affects infestation...

@ schizmo - That's a really helpful visual explanation you've put together there. So helpful in fact that I've bookmarked it so that I can link to it whenever a "how to stop infestations?" type question comes up. Thanks for posting it, and for taking the time and effort to create it.

You're welcome, I'm happy to help. My one regret is the final caption gets cut off but I can't edit it because I didn't upload it with an account. Just pretend it comes to an abrupt end because I got eaten by bugs.

Just a quick note, rain already washes away blood.

You should use the search function on the board and see of any of these suggestions have been made before (most have) and also make seperate threads for different suggestions.

I think stone tiles should offer a modest speed boost and priority to pathfinding as a result. This would probably benefit all types of structures but villages with paths and roads would especially benefit

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches should give bigger mood buffs than the most lavish of meals

This is the first and only suggestion of this type that I actually think is decent, because you understand that technology like this is inherently Glitterworld tech and not something that a bunch of farmers could scrap together with pieces from Radio Shack. I might even say stick an AI core in there, too. After all, something has to "control" the casket.

+1