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Messages - entelin

#1
Quote from: Canute on September 08, 2020, 03:04:12 AM
3. Yeah i think too that burglar and murder should give out a warning before they strike ! :-)

We already have that with the "drop on top of you" raids, which are balanced accordingly. I would have no problem with a stealth thief and other such events in addition to what we have. Dwarf fortress had a thief that would try and carry off children for example. I've always thought there should be a thief event that would target undefended items as a counter to large stacks of things left outside in particular. However having normal raids which are not trying to be stealthy come unannounced has gameplay problems as I stated, particularly on small maps.

Mods are great I use a fair number of them, but some things should be standard, like the mood color mod.
#2
I have about 1100hrs in Rimworld, there are some rough edges in the game that cause me to alt-f4 in a commitment game because I feel that it's basically just not my fault. Here are the most common ones:

1. Color coded mood bar, seriously just make that mod official. Someone with a mood so low that they are about to set fire to your antigrain warhead should not be represented by a slightly different shade of grey. Mood management is what everything else in the game revolves around, it should be crystal clear to the player at all times where they stand on this.

2. Luciferium need does not alert you until the pawn is going to go berserk, and at that point it's generally too late. Additionally I've seen pawns not take the drug when on a 5 day schedule. When the drug policy is instead set to take for addictions, I've seen pawns take it when their need bar is full.

3. Raids should (imo) alert you briefly *before* the raiders show up on the map. If you have a pawn or especially animals that happen to be far away they could just be screwed and there was effectively nothing you could do about it. This has a greater impact the smaller the map is. You can mitigate this by keeping everything close, but I'm not sure that's an interesting choice gameplay wise. It makes sense that raiders would be seen coming from a greater distance than what the map represents. It doesn't need to be long, just a few hours would do, and the alert could be more vauge than the final card. "Hostile Drop pods sighted!"  "Hostile ground force spotted!" etc.

4. When a pawn is being followed by a hostile animal or pawn, time should slow to the slowest rate when that entity has gotten within a certain distance that will still allow handling the situation. Currently it only triggers on aggro, and so a melee entity can time accel right into your pawn and then it's too late. This is really awkward and can happen by mistake very easily.

5. Moving lots of stuff: Set home area or stockpile, create caravan packing spot, create caravan, watch pawns pick up everything, cancel caravan, if using animals create an animal spot, manually click twice on every single animal to have them drop their stuff. <---- This should not be in the game as is, it's awful and you are incentivized to do it. There are mods that soften this up, allowing pawns to haul their weight capacity and such, but that's not the only problem with caravan packing. If packing is canceled it cannot be resumed before unloading everything first, and so on, if the whole process doesn't happen fast enough mental breaks are incoming, pawns don't use their beds even when available, pawns who do have a mental break cannot be taken off the map. Caravan packing needs some serious adjustments.
#3
Quote from: johnyoga on November 18, 2019, 10:08:35 AMall the ways to extract Steel from a production table requires...steel!
You aren't intended to get the majority of your steel from any production table. The *vast* majority comes from sources that require no steel input. First look for steel buildings to deconstruct, this is the fastest early steel and is on almost every map, if you are on an ancient highway the objects next to the road also yield steel. Mining of course, In over 800 hours I've never seen any map without a lot of exposed steel, if your map doesn't have that, that's really weird. If you are new enouph to rimworld to be asking this question I would really recommend playing through the game without any gameplay altering mods first, the vanilla game is really very good. Deconstructing ship chucks which commonly fall down also gives you a fair bit of steel. Late game producing things for money and trading for steel is the best way to get 1000+ at a time, keep in mind that you can travel to and trade with towns on the map at any time in the game, and you should be doing this early. Early money can be made by a variety of methods, but killing a large animal and quickly caravan the meat over before it rots can give you quite a lot of quick silver. If your map is out of easy to reach iron, you can make a second "colony" and send people over to mine it as well. Late, deep drilling is an option, but it's not great and causes infestations, so I don't use it personally. Smelting enemy weapons and steel chucks are really the last source you want to be going to, and it also requires research and electricity all of which require steel, it's simply not an early game thing.

I would also advise against tunneling to find more resources on your own map. It provides opportunities for infestations, destroys natural defensive features, and is basically just a waste of time since most of your mining will be just stone, and you could instead get resources from any of the other methods I mentioned above.
#4
Ideas / Re: Killing killboxes.
November 19, 2019, 01:31:49 AM
Quote from: ForeverZer0 on November 18, 2019, 04:14:57 PMA "one tile hole in the wall" strategy might be alright early game.... A melee fighter with other behind him is not going to hold back a hundred or more...
If you are fighting off raids of 100 and needing killboxes to deal with it, then your playing a high wealth game, not necessarily a "mid" or "late" game. With up to around 9 colonists a simple trapped corridor with a corner to a single tile opening with 3-4 melee at the breach and ranged behind one with emp for mechs, molitov for everything else, is very effective and works for base drops and sappers as well. Melee is actually the most effective way of dealing with centipedes in fact since their ranged attack gets shut down. Once you have enough people to do the killbox+chaingun defense then that becomes good to add but only because it allows you to better deal with the kinds of events that will go through the killbox. Killbox's are a double edged sword though because as I said above, they are expensive contributing to raid score, thus also scaling raids that do not go through the killbox.

So all in all, playing without a killbox, when controlling wealth, is in fact optimal, and every single speed run is just a simple corridor with traps. In high wealth games killboxes become an option to consider, but by no means obviously needed.

I therefore decree this topic anachronistic and therefore needless to ever discuss again. Mods, you can close the topic now. XD
#5
Ideas / Re: Killing killboxes.
November 18, 2019, 03:59:16 PM
Killbox's are mostly dead now, not sure why people are still talking about it.

With all the raid types we have now, you need to have a variety of defense strategies. One problem with true killbox's is they tend to be rather expensive, and since they don't apply to every raid, having one makes the most dangerous types of raids even more dangerous. A one tile hole in a wall costs nothing, with melee holding the breach, ranged behind, and animals trained for release is probably safer overall than a full killbox.
#6
That's it, that's the whole idea, it's not the best solution, but I assume it's extremely easy to implement and would close off a really lame mechanic. When the optimal way to play is to just rush the ship with one guy and immediately beat the shit out of it so that raids during the event are comprised of one enemy with a mace, you know something is wrong. There's a video on youtube of a 37 min nakid brutality speed run, where he doesn't grab a weapon or even put on any clothes, he just builds traps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KMfbvfUGWc

Obviously a better solution would be very welcome, I actually have no problem with wealth being the primary factor in raid strength, but the way the value is balanced now is very off. Value gets inflated so hard by material and quality that you are highly incentivised to sell or trash any masterwork or legendary anything. That just feels terrible and is a bit of a noob trap.

However don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, if you're done with rimworld development, just go in tweak the existing formula to use 100% hp value instead of current value and that will close off a lot of bullshit while not changing anything for people who don't know about it.
#7
1. If a colonist leaves the map with a temperature condition, for example "shivering" it will continue to progress to severe hypothermia resulting in death.

2. While traveling colonists will not do *any* recreation resulting in deprivation, and thus recreation starved daze states.

3. While forming a caravan they will ignore sleeping spots (dangerous when it's freezing outside, also see above) but also will not sleep regardless of their bar and regardless of their restriction schedule. Only sleeping at some specific arbitrary time. They will not do recreation, but will still gain all the mood penalties associated with everything they are doing. So it creates a race situation, "get everyone off the map as fast as possible before everyone starts having a mental break".

4. The map exit point appears to be random instead of based on the direction you are traveling. This leads strange situations where colonists will decide to leave the map in the opposite direction of travel. It can also result in them deciding to leave the map through the path of, for example, a siege, triggered ancient danger, or crashed ship, resulting in multiple tries to leave the map in a desired direction.

5. If animals are already packed, but a caravan is not formed, the animals must be unpacked before forming a caravan. And because a caravan will be aborted when the last colonist is removed from it (instead of for example keeping the animals in the caravan but just simply being unable to leave the packing area) the whole process needs to be restarted from scratch every time there's anything wrong.

6. Issues like running out of food cannot be dealt with while traveling without forming a colony. But since colony's cannot be temporarily abandoned, you have the choice of having multiple empty maps running all the time, or an ever growing mess of abandoned "colonys" on the map. To resolve this I propose a "camp" feature, that simply uses the same feature you have already for random map encounters, it generates a small map that you can stay in for a few days.

7. When a new colony is created all animals will dump their stuff right in the middle of the map. This is almost always undesirable. Please just keep them packed so the animals can be moved to where they are desired first. Dumping all the stuff right away causes unnecessary hauling, and a durability hit to everything.
#8
I know that bionic parts add to the raid score, my question is what's the formula? Are the parts added to item wealth despite being listed under people and animal wealth? That seems like an unlikely way to implement it so I assume the raid score formula was changed.
#9
General Discussion / What is the 1.0 raid score formula?
September 07, 2019, 03:44:21 AM
Pawn value now factors into raid score. The formula here: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider#Raid_strength  is out of date. On merciless I verified this by using prepare carefully to create a single full bionic pawn and called a raid, it was 4 raiders. I created a new game and then used the same method to generate a much more normal pawn and the raid was the expected 1 naked guy with a knife.
#10
Quote from: Modinstaller on November 29, 2018, 10:11:38 AM1. I don't know how the wealth system works, actively trying to stay poor for easier events and more morale seems a bit cheesy
Regardless of how you think of the way the game handles event scaling (I happen to think it works reasonably well actually), it's just a matter of gameplay. Surviving extreme difficulty's are hard regardless, and being successful at that means making sure that everything you do is in fact helping you. Stockpiling things for no reason, harvesting tons of food for no reason, etc will kill you. I think it works fine for the most part, but random event's just accumulating wealth all over your map is annoying. Simply having them land unclaimed is a simple fix and opens up some additional gameplay options as well, like neutrals just walking in and taking unclaimed stuff, that's much more interesting imo.

Quote from: Modinstaller on November 29, 2018, 10:11:38 AM2. How would doors work with this ? How do doors actually work in the first place ? Raiders and wild animals can't open them, so I assume your colonists have keys, but uuh ... your animals too. And the visitors and merchants. Anyway if doors wouldn't open as soon as the "visitors" steal your stuff, it wouldn't be much of a challenge, unless they were saboteurs : infiltrate your base in disguise and attack.
Yeah there are some fun things and variety you could add here. A single neutral thief comes in, they steal something, but they are still neutral (and therefore doors work) until you attack. Scavengers would be after unclaimed items outside your base, so they don't care about doors.
Quote from: Modinstaller on November 29, 2018, 10:11:38 AM4. Thought about this too, but how would this work ? If you can camp like this, what's to stop the player from sending an expedition 1 tile away from the settlement to mine, hunt and forage ? And when you leave, does the game have to store its state in memory ? If so it's going to be hard to implement and resource-intensive. If not then the player can just keep coming back to that specific tile and generate a new area each time. Also if you can mine like this, long range mineral scanners are now useless. It would also make events such as toxic fallout way easier : just relocate everyone or send out hunters to gather food. And when you think about it, you wouldn't have any wood, mineral, stone, meat or foraged food shortage until you've cleared all the tiles in a radius around your settlement.
Yes you definitely hit on all the main points here. The problem is all of this is true already. At high difficulty settings you should in fact be prepared to get up and leave if you get a bad combination of events, like you are low on food already and get hit by toxic fallout or something. You can already mine all you want, there's more resources nearby than you will ever use. Live in a desert? Just make another colony in a forest and ship the trees over. Mined out your home area? A colony in the shrublands will fix that for you no problem. Want tons of meat? Go over to your hunting colony and murder all the elephants that live there. So this is already a thing. Random events outside already generate small temporary maps that you can instantly load all the stone into your caravan with as well (kind of broken actually). So this is what the player is incentivized to do right now, but if all you want is some wood or something, should we really have to have a seperate colony instance running all the time? Instead just take the existing code that generates the small event maps, fix the caravan instant loading thing, and have an "encamp" option, useful for treating your wounded as well! Like the existing random event maps, they would not be saved. This doesn't change any existing gameplay, it just makes it work better and cost less system resources.

Quote from: Modinstaller on November 29, 2018, 10:11:38 AMAs for 3, I completely agree and I want to add a few points but also discuss balance.
Yeah, there are tons of improvements to the hauling system that could be done, many of which are pretty annoying. However for the most part, gameplay wise, it works ok. My issue with caravans specifically is that the game incentives us to go through this long convoluted process to use caravans to haul things locally. It's in the game, it's very powerful, and it makes sense that it is, we humans use pack animals for a reason after all. It makes sense that the solution to harvesting large crop fields and other things is to use pack animals, we do this in real life. But the procedure for doing this *sucks balls* and is not at all fun, it's tedious. But the gameplay choice here is either do this awful process and haul it all nearly instantly, or take days upon days of nothing but hauling to move your stuff and have much of it significantly deteriorated and devalued. Everything you pointed out are definitely areas that could use some work, but I see this as more critical because of how overtly unfun it is.

I think the solutions I provided above would polish some important rough areas in the gameplay for fairly minimal time investment.
#11
General Discussion / Re: Multiplayer 4 Rimworld
January 22, 2019, 02:39:06 PM
Quote from: vzoxz0 on November 23, 2018, 01:32:50 PM
@entelin: Incorrect, Stardew Valley did it just fine.

Ludeon is not Chucklefish, however, and they don't really have the resources Stardew does to spend on netcode and such a major change.
Actually Stardew Valley is an excellent example of my point. Notice how I said "to do it right you would have to literally rewrite the game".

QuoteAfter ironing out many of the major conflicts (a process which involved rewriting 15,000 lines of code, according to their blog) the team is now working on implementing their solution to a unique problem: the ability to add multiple people to what was primarily built as a solo experience.
As a gamer and programmer the developer of Concerned Ape is my personal hero. He accomplished something very few people have. The game was almost entirely developed by one guy over years, he taught himself to code, do pixel art, and compose music, not only did he successfully make a game but he then polished the hell out of it to the point that it was a complete experience on release. Without looking it up, I'm guessing all of Stardew probably comes in at around the 30-50k lines of code. So just to begin the process of adding multiplayer they rewrote a MASSIVE chuck of code, along with all the testing and other work that entails. Then they needed to adjust the gameplay to fit coop, and develop all the mutiplayer code, which he hired others at Chucklefish to help with. This was over a year long process, and he did this after his game was successful just to fulfill a promise. Even after all of that work, it's not perfect, it's plenty good enough, but it's not a "solid" multiplayer implementation in the truest sense, the single player legacy of the game still has some impact as seen through desyncs and other issues.

I don't want to understate how significant of an achievement and effort the multiplayer addition to Stardew was, and how grateful the fan base should be for this. For this and the rest he has my deep admiration.

However understand that while Stardew is no exception to the rule I pointed out above, it is an exception in the sense that is was a successful effort. Many developers don't understand network code and assume it's something they can add in later, and Steam is chock full of failed attempts at this. Implementing multiplayer in Rim World would in fact be technically harder than adding it to Stardew and absolutely foolish to attempt, he knows that, and it's not going to happen, there are plenty of better things he could be spending his time on inside or outside of Rim World development.
#12
General Discussion / Re: Multiplayer 4 Rimworld
November 22, 2018, 11:45:45 PM
Any game not originally created with multiplayer with either: Never have multiplayer, or have broken multiplayer. Multiplayer is a fundamental structural design choice, to do it right you would literally have to rewrite the game.
#13
1. I really dislike the fact that random events just automatically add to map wealth. If you aren't going around putting these resources to use (like spaceship chunks, gold, silver, blocks, etc) it just keeps contributing to map wealth and really can build up over time. This is relevant when you are in merciless, and intentionally trying to stay small while researching. So I really think that all items that add to wealth should need to be claimed first.

2. This actually opens up a new possibility for an event as well, scavengers and thieves. You could have neutral characters come and try to take unclaimed items from the map, or mine ore, they would become hostile or run away when attacked. Do do you want that item or not? Another variant of the "a few travelers visit" would be some that would come in your base and try to run away with something, but be neutral until attacked.

3. Hauling in rimworld is a pain in the ass, somewhat broken, and it's not fun. Pawns should be able to haul multiple types of things at once, they should be able to haul as much as they can in a caravan, and they should use assigned animals to help haul just as they do when packing a caravan. Why is hauling broken? The player is strongly incentivized to: put down a packing zone, draw an itemless stockpile zone around items you want in an area, create a caravan including those items, let them pack it, cancel the caravan, assign the animals to an inside stockpile location or wherever you want the items, then either let them be unpacked, or drop the items out manually. For cases where you need to haul multiple types of items (spaceship chunk, psychic/poison ship, etc) or especially harvesting a crop you can get everything hauled nearly instantly at the cost of craploads of fiddling around. Pawns should just do this automatically with animals assigned to accompany on field work. Want to move a bunch of chunks from one part of the map to your stoneworking table? Yup caravan. All the core tools for this are in the game already, it just needs to be polished up.

4. I would like caravan's to have a "camp" option where you are able to generate and enter a small temporary map identical to what you get in an ambush event. This would be useful for hunting & foraging / cooking meals / healing pawns / gathering chucks / mining etc. Without creating a settlement (which then cannot be reclaimed).
#14
Gun Safety

IMO the largest outstanding issue with current gameplay is lack of any firing logic, for three principal reasons.

1. Hunters will just shoot bloody everywhere, if an animal is reachable outside the front door? Yup he will happily gun down everyone that exits the building. Caravan in the way? Congrats you have a new enemy faction. Send out a few hunters at once and they will come back with more bullets in each other than in animals.

2. Caravan's just put themselves anywhere, for example in front of turrets, which will happily gun them down if they are in the way.

3. During battles target choices do not take into account friendlies in the way, for example your melee guys, even if there are plenty of other open targets.

Of course there are occasionally time's when you would want them to not take this into account, for example if a friendly is getting chased by a mob of wargs and is doomed anyway, for that edge case a safety off button could be employed.

I write this just after my hunter decided it was a great idea to put a bullet through my lvl 20 artist's head. But hey he got the rabbit right after....
#15
Ideas / Re: a13: Quality of life recommendations
April 07, 2016, 05:20:23 PM
For those against the plan carefully concept:

There's fun to be had with themed embarks. For example once I did a nudist colony on an ice sheet. Another of my playthrough's I did only sociopaths, which was hilarious because in my turret killzone I'd just never clean up the bodies, invaders would enter and go crazy, my surgeon got lots of practice ;) Another game I played through was "God save the queen", where one of the starting settlers did nothing but socialize, and live in her luxurious room.

Anyway, such a feature should be standard imo.