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I don't imagine that realism is the goal here. If you want realism, you'd have to handle sharp melee, blunt melee, bows, and firearms differently, and obviously there's no realistic answer to worn-out sci-fi weapons. I'd assume it's to make weapon management more accessible, so you don't need to check the individual stats on weapons when deciding what to equip, possibly with a spreadsheet open on the side. That's fine with me, but I'm a more casual player than some. I can definitely understand the desire for a more detailed system, which would also be fine with me.

If I were doing it with realism as the goal, I'd probably set sharp to do more damage but lose penetration, leave blunt unchanged, have bows lose accuracy and damage, and make firearms have a chance to not fire equal to the damage%. Sci-fi weapons I'd make explode at the damage% rate, mostly because I'm a jerk.

In any case, a regular duster isn't giving much protection against a charge lance.

Maybe. I'm not sure how the duster will interact with pants. Does the duster get figured first and pants second, or do they stack in some way before reduction?

Just to make sure we're all on the same page here, here are assembled screencaps of excellent jacket and duster stats for lizard, devil, and hyper. Another image of an awful and legendary charge lance, since the issue came up, lancers can spawn with varying quality weapons, and I had dev mode open already.

https://imgur.com/a/5cVj0vD

As you can see, dusters and jackets are identical except for leg protection and insulation. Lizardskin is far worse than devilstrand in every way, so I don't know what people are excited about there.

I don't know how armor penetration works, especially with multiple layers of armor, so I don't really have an opinion on duster v. lancer.

I've euthanized colonists who had a usefulness-ending injury before, and I've killed pawns resisting arrest, but never "executed" thrm per se.

Duster(iguana Skin)(Legendary 100%) ->
Jacket (Iguana Skin)(Superior 100%) ->

Quality matters here.

Looks like they're identical for armor, including heat armor, except a duster protects the legs. Duster of course is better heat insulation, jacket is better with cold.

Release means they will attack (specifically) their master's current target

No, a released animal will attack any enemy it can see. You can test this (as I just did) by spawning a pacifist and another pawn in dev mode, along with a release animal set with the pacifist as master. Trigger a one-man raid and hide the pacifist until the enemy attacks the other pawn. Release, and walk the pacifist over until the animal can see the enemy. It will attack.

In the animals tab, you got your training checkboxes for obedience, release, rescue, and hauling. Then the next two checkboxes are for "follow while working in the field" and "follow while drafted". (Then there's the slaughter checkbox.)

To release animals to attack, you need to have release trained and "follow while drafted" checked, and their master must be drafted. Then when you select the master pawn, you'll have a "release animals" button available to send the wargs a'chomping.

They definitely restock and change their wares. I think it happens annually but I've never gotten around to checking the timing out carefully; it might be a bit less, or have a random element. It's not longer than a year.

Now you know my pain

That'd be great, if you could ever come up with a savegame from *just before* the problem occurs. I'd really appreciate it.

Here we go. This isn't -quite- on the nose, but White is on forced-priority to treat Fedosia and on his way. Before he gets to her, a couple patients get into the hospital and she gets up to treat one, letting White go on to other tasks. She's on priority one patient and doctor and currently bleeding, but in no immediate danger. If you use dev mode to cut her until she -is- in immediate danger before this happens, she immediately gets up to harvest devilstrand. :/

http://www.filedropper.com/thearistocratsmedtest

I disagree with the OP that training an early pet is tough on food (except in no-vegetation biomes).  A few berry/agave plants harvested covers training early, and with only 1 starting pet (or even 3 on tribal), its not a serious imposition.

- I actually like the new trade requests.  I have had a few i WOULDN'T fulfill, but i have not yet noticed one i COULDN'T fulfill.  Getting faction relationship for them is nice, and knowing the value of the request and compensation is great too.

I dunno, man, I went back and counted berries to see if maybe I was imagining things. Of course I was just giving my highly-subjective impressions from playing at the time, as are you. I counted a little more than 30 berries every couple of days for training a husky. Made into simple meals, that's about half of your crashlanders' combined food budget! If they use rice, that's what, 15 tiles of rice on normal soil to train a husky? Seems like a lot to me even looking at the actual numbers.

And don't get me wrong - I love the randomness of the trade quests. When I said "charmingly ridiculous" that wasn't by any means negative feedback. Trade quests to me are fairly low-risk, so I love that they may be weird or useless, or may be sudden motivation to craft en masse. I do find it odd that they never seem to ask for pemmican or grain, but it's not something that bothers me, as such.

(I'm also questioning my own impression of needing a good cooking skill. Next time I start with low cooking I'm'a try using pemmican to train it. Never occurred to me before, but I saw a passing comment to that effect.)

For what it's worth, I'm finding gourmands become trivial in the mid game, when you can schedule less sleep time and not be destroyed by a couple of binges. It's become my least-favorite starting trait but later I'd rather have one than a slowpoke or depressive.

The problem is that being both a doctor a patient are considered jobs, and pawns prioritize their needs over their jobs. This is why patients get out of bed to play horseshoes at bad times, and why doctors go to bed instead of treating serious wounds.

Yeah, but there's a little more going on here, and I suspect it involves the interruption mechanic and job segmentation. Normally needs don't interrupt tasks, and normally higher-priority jobs don't get dropped for lower-priority jobs. I think something's happening where the patient vomits or the doctor gets shoved that causes them to look for their next task instead of continuing "patient", which in turn makes the doctor seek a new task.

It's really hard to pin down though, because it's  hard to reproduce reliably. I think I'll try setting up a bunch of doctors, patients, and cleaners all working in a dirty hospital with some flu victims and bleeding wounded, see if I can get lots of interruptions happening.

Hey, thanks for the reply. I'm a little embarrassed that I never noticed the mortar settings.

And of course I said to myself, "No problem. I can recreate the exact circumstances of doctors breaking off being treated to treat others, save incrementally, and post the save." But, uh, but that didn't work. Or, that is to say, everything worked. So I see your point.

I'm going to keep trying that a bit tomorrow evening, though, and failing that I will try to save periodically when there's about to be significant hospital stuff going on.

Not that I can anyway (I'm not using Steam), but I was concerned I was missing out on something still playing b18... but from what you describe, there's no real advantage to switching and definitely some downsides.
. . .
Does b19 address cooking micromanagement at all? 

Oh, no, I love the changes overall. The caravan improvements, the stockpile settings, the social interaction flavor, the simplified quality levels, the turret interplay, the AI, the reworked mechs (except for the snow camouflage), the multidirectional and themed raids, the stack merging and "pre-building", chunks from deep drills. . . there's too much good stuff to even think of in one go. Most of my complaints are just things that, in my opinion, need adjustment, not massive problems that make it unplayable or even unpleasant.

I can't say kitchen micro is a big problem I have, though. I guess I've always been big on cleaning, which helps.  "Cleanliness is next to god mode" is a phrase I've been known to use, and it's even more true now than before. I do feel like trying to train up a poorly-skilled cook early on is a problem.

Otherwise, I just do the regular kitchen stuff. Chair at the stove, shelf of veg next to it, bills set to drop on floor, sterile tile when able, autodoor to the freezer when able. Now I use another shelf of psychoid leaves for tea and have to research tile, but otherwise it's the same. I sure wish there was a better way to rotate stock on shelves, though. In the freezer I can use tiered zone priorities to keep stock rolling toward the front, but without two stoves I can't make them use the far side of the shelf without forbidding the near side - I guess that's kitchen micro, now that I think of it. But fairly trivial micro, and the worst case is a little cuckoo clock telling me that some rice rotted on the shelf.

Overall I do recommend upgrading. I despise Steam myself but I launch it to update then kill it again.