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Topics - Drewski

#1
This is super-easy to reproduce and I assume it's because the "jump to problem" is looking for the trap, which no longer exists.

(Step 0: Be kind of dumb, like myself. Not strictly required but it helps.)
Step 1: Place any spike trap.
Step 2: Place a workstation such that the work spot is on the trap.
Step 3: Have someone go there to work until the trap is sprung.
Step 4: Open the alert envelope. "Jump to problem" does nothing.
#2
So I really got to get into b19 over the long weekend, and now I have a colony that I've been tending for about 30 hours. I thought I had better get some thoughts down on the changes. I had a few false starts on Cassandra and Randy rough and settled on Randy medium while I get my feet under me, always as crashlanders, always vanilla.

This is pretty random feedback. If a lot sounds critical, that's only because those are the bits that stick in my mind. I really like the game and most of the changes! I'll try to point out some things I really enjoy but mostly I'll focus on what I don't like.

That said, why not start with some good stuff? The new turret dynamic is great and feels very balanced. The raider AI is tricky enough to get me running around in circles and thwart me on occasion. Bed rest finally works right!

But patient does not. Even with 1 priority, pawns will literally get out of bed while being treated to do something of lower priority, such as treating another patient. This causes a big charlie foxtrot of medicine reservations, better doctors moving on to new tasks, and musical beds. They'll also still break off mid-treatment to change their pants or play horseshoes.

The new animal training stuff is mostly fine, although it has two serious problems in my mind. First off, I believe it is now optimal to always slaughter the starting pet unless you're willing to reroll colonists to get a super-high animal stat. Otherwise the trainer can waste days and just loads and loads of food trying to keep it tame very early, and to make it worse, tamers seem to select the least-efficient food available for training. Forget about actual training for a while, or taming other animals. It's also very possible to start with a pet that you cannot keep tame, which is kind of weird. I had that happen with a warg. The second issue is that animals need to stop moving for training now. I watched a tamer follow a dog around for two days to get the opportunity to get hauling back to 7. When it finally caught up, the dog dropped what it was actually hauling, the tamer failed, then started chasing another one. In older versions you could zone animals for training, and you can still do that for the first round of training but it goes pear-shaped when it starts decaying. I'm not going to constantly monitor every animal's training tab to do that for retraining. I'm not.

The early game feels more pressed for labor, what with the new hauling tasks and the increased importance of cleaning and research. I think this is good, but it plays back to "slaughter the pet to save time". I also feel like electricity is scarce enough to be challenging, even into mid-game. Starting with wind turbines and no batteries seems kind of pointless, like it's only to trigger the "need batteries" alert. The increased output means little to me; what matters is that the wind dies out a lot so you can't count on them for anything until you can put that electricity in a box. Still, the overall power dynamic feels good and challenging. Starting with passive coolers is huge and very nice.

I'm gonna join the chorus of "combat RNG feels goofy". One of my early b19 colonies got wiped out by the second raid - a guy with two shooting and an autopistol, standing in the wide open, killed one guy and downed another through a sandbag-wall-sandbag-wall setup, while my 9 and 2 shooters didn't connect at all. My last colonist was a pacifist who already had a scarred eye from an animal attack, and got downed trying to rescue. The man in black came to the, whoops, no, he got killed with one club hit to the noggin.

Mechanoids are really hard to see in the snow. It can feel like a game of Where's Waldo trying to figure out where they've gotten to. Can they be given a splash of color?

I really like the wild man event. I'm disappointed that there's no mood debuff for "we hunted a man down like he was an animal", only maybe with a most dangerous game reference somewhere. Seems like something that would bother the colonists. It would bother me.

The man in black sounds good in theory but doesn't really play well. Consider giving him a shooting or go frenzy when he appears? Or even a special event-specific frenzy that boosts several abilities for a brief while. My only experience with him was disappointing, and so far I've never heard a story of a successful one.

I feel encouraged to be more selective with starting pawns. It's really unsafe to train up cooking and animals from low scores now, and I think gourmand is worse than any other trait in the early game (although later it's no big deal). Research also feels more critical, but as before it grinds slowly early on and blazes along later too quickly to keep up with.

Mortars are still a mess. No multi-select to extract shells, no hotkey either, no way to select ammo except forbidding, so it's pause the raid, select one at a time, click extract for each, unforbid whatever ammo I wasn't using, and changing ammo types mid-raid is even worse. They seem as useful as ever, but also as annoying as ever. Did colonists always list the activity as "manning turret"?

Traps feel more powerful than in b18. The auto-hit and low cost mean they can really tear into most stuff. Perhaps more significantly, their low cost and the ubiquity of stone make it trivial to train and keep a level 20 builder. Only research feels similar in the ability to get someone to max early and keep them there. I had a level 20 builder in the first year of this colony, and she's never slipped since - a couple years later and I still don't have a cook, crafter, or shooter anywhere close (although the last is probably because of all the traps).

Really like the social interaction stuff. Some similar love for the artwork would be very welcome. Most of my art is about animal taming and traps. Haven't seen a (buried_corpse) art piece, so that's nice!

Love moving workstations around. Being able to move a stonecutter table to the chunks in the early game is very helpful indeed, and helps offset the new hauling tasks. In general reinstalling stations makes it much easier to expand my base instead of feeling like a chump while rebuilding them.

Speaking of new hauling tasks, what are my haulers doing when they run over to touch grave blueprints? Sanctifying them? I really like that hauling animals can bury corpses now, though.

The new biome ranges are very nice but may want a closer look. My current colony is in temperate forest, 30 days growing, and getting mid-summer "slept in the cold" penalties each year with daytime temps over 30C. I went from a late spring heat wave to flipping heaters on a week later. The "need warm clothes" alert is super-obnoxious, too, ringing the bell constantly from late summer through the end of spring. My clothes are fine! Devilstrand button-downs, pants, and hats with wool dusters ought to be enough for a temperate climate, and it seems to work okay but the alarm just keeps a'dinging. I understand that someone might start shivering if I send them to stand outside during a cold snap at night. That's okay! Just stop with the bell!

The new hunting alerts are nice, I guess, but as long as animals get revenge I'm sticking to drafted-squad hunting. Stealth, schmealth, more bullets in the air and changing targets a lot is faster (in game time) and safer. Hunters mince around chasing a deer all day in some kind of cleansing ritual or whatnot, I dunno, but a few guys with pistols and bolt-actions can lay waste to a herd in an afternoon. Even aside from hunting, I wish the group formations were better - the game really, really wants to line up shooters to maximize friendly fire. Send four shooters and it lines up three abreast. Send five and it makes a +. It's all very nice and geometric but feels like a gotcha if you don't pause and rearrange them.

Caravans are much better! I was a bear for trade caravans in b18 and I am now. Trade quests are still charmingly ridiculous. Why do they need human leather specifically? Doesn't anyone urgently need, like, corn? To eat? Sorry, I don't have 33 bolt-action rifles laying around in the first summer. I have one. And I'm using it. I'm still researching batteries, guys. You want a rusty steel knife? I have an extra.

Bandit quests still feel not worth it most of the time. Let me select a reward, heh? I don't want your legendary plasteel dining chair. Let me see what you got and we'll talk. Rescue quests feel even less worth it, but at least they make me feel a little guilty when I dismiss them. It is really nice to see at least a general picture of what I'd be facing, though.

That's probably enough rambling for now. I'm just entering what I think of as the late-game, where I'm researching odds and ends before starting ship research, getting deep drilling started (got spiders once already! Nice event but I hope it's not super-frequent and I was just lucky), and generally trying to upgrade equipment and defenses. Looking forward to the new ship sequence, if I make it that far!
#3
Two annoying bugs with mortars. The first is that, when multiple mortars are selected and you press "extract shell", it only extracts the shell from one (the one you double-clicked on, or the most-recently shift-selected).

The second is when you "hold fire", mortars lose forced targeting. I can change operators without losing the target, so it doesn't seem reasonable that holding fire would do so, and it's certainly not intuitive. The phrase "hold fire" has never, and will never, imply "then after that drop a few rounds into the barn".
#4
Ideas / Event difficulty should include all events
July 11, 2018, 06:18:08 PM
I haven't tried the 1.0 changes, and I can't seem to find a comprehensive list, so forgive me if this is addressed in the upcoming release.

I'm new to the game. Cassandra tells me she increases difficulty over time, which seems to hold up for raids. But I just lost a promising colony to a "bandit camp opportunity". I was like, hey, the last raid was a couple guys with shortbows, let's give this a whirl, and I sent my whole colony over. A dozen enemies with chain shotguns, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers were waiting next to where my guys appeared on the map. I instantly tried to flee, and one guy made it to the edge of the map.

This is a game. It should be possible to achieve the objectives the game sets for you, especially when it tells you up front that this will be possible.