Messages

OK, got it. So you were disagreeing with me just to agree with me in the next post afterwards and your disagreement was contrary to your initial suggestion, which was in agreement with mine.

In case you haven't figured it out, I also think they should not check food by default. Stop playing devil's advocate with me or whatever you're doing; it's tiresome.

I think you're conflating Mr_Fission (who has consistently agreed with your position that the player should be able to disable the auto-load feature) with rinin (who disagreed with Canute, but otherwise also held the position that there shouldn't be one overarching algorithm automatically assigning food to caravans, because each player and colony has different needs for their caravans).

Both of them seem to have held the same general position you do: that the player should be able to set the auto-loading of food to default to off. rinin gave his own specific set of rules as an example of why a set of rules designed for Temperate Forest wouldn't be applicable to an Ice Sheet colony, not as a prescription of what the "proper" set of rules should be. Mr_Fission was clarifying rinin's position based on his reading of the post that you seemed to think was disagreeing with you, but was actually agreeing with your general position.

[whole]

I use none of those mods. The way that a pawn's mood is represented in the colonist bar in vanilla works for me, coupled with the Break risk notifications in the lower-right. If you need a colonist to do something *immediately*, then you can always forbid other tasks in that category. I'll often have large blocks of construction planned out in blueprint form that I've left forbidden because my constructors are working on something else.

They are clearly not "essential" for everyone.

The Trade Caravan interface is absolutely bad, though, I'll give you that. Especially with transport pods: if you want to add a last-minute object to a transport pod, you have to cancel the whole loading process and start over. Seriously: just letting us add objects/pawns to the loading manually (like you can with regular caravans) would fix a great deal of frustration.

[onto]

Unlike every other piece of furniture in the game, IED and Spike Traps require your pawn to step onto the same tile as the trap in order to reinstall/uninstall it. This means that every time you want to move a trap, you risk a ~1% chance that the trap will instantly kill or seriously maim your colonist.

Our pawns should know full well how to disable and move their own traps. There isn't a 1% chance that your pawn accidentally burns themselves on a heater while moving it, there shouldn't be a similar chance for moving IEDs and spike traps. Just make traps work like every other structure in the game and be uninstalled from an adjacent tile.

[not]

- Rimworlds are supposed to be at the edge of the galaxy. Earth is only 2/3 out, but it is worth noting that the "rimworld" may actually be more central than we realize. Imperial fleets and independent trade companies come by all the time, so it's not exactly out of the way. Clearly this world is central enough to be a pit stop for traders.

Rimworlds are not on the edge of the galaxy. The setting primer has this to say, "Today, mankind is smeared across a region of the galaxy about 1,200 light years wide. Our best models indicate that there is a general trend towards greater population density towards the center of the this region, where the stars were colonized earlier. At the edge of known space lie the rimworlds, drifting alone with few inhabited neighbors, mostly unvisited."

Humans occupy a very small part of the greater Milky Way Galaxy.

[primary task]

Did *you* ignore the parts of my post where I laid out specific, measurable ways in which mortars were made less  effective at their primary task in 1.1? Namely, that mechanoids literally ignore mortar attacks, where previously a mortar could be used to force a confrontation by attacking the thing they are ostensibly there to protect?

Your advice of "mortar batteries" is also completely tone-deaf: having more mortars does not at all help fix the problem outlined in the OP, in which a full stack of High Explosive Shells (representing multiple days' worth of mining, refining, smithing and hauling, not to mention research and the labor required to produce the production facilities) completely failed to destroy a single, stationary target. Firing twenty-five shells in succession is no more or less accurate than firing five five-shell barrages from a battery: in fact, if you looked at my original suggestion, you'd realize that I wasn't asking for a way to fire shells faster, but in fact asking for the option to sacrifice rate of fire in exchange for even the most basic level of accuracy.

*Snip*

Predators will also continue to hunt living prey (including your colonists, but also random herbivores) even when there are available corpses left over from their own previous kills. This is especially noticeable in cold biomes, where the map will eventually be littered with perfectly good "forbidden" animal corpses left by marauding polar bears/arctic wolves during the winter. Even come spring, the predators will continue killing new animals (at risk to themselves) rather than eat day-old meat.

This has been a problem since at least Alpha 18, and I reported it during the Beta 19 unstable testing on a purely unmodded save. Never fixed.

[vanilla]

Use mods. The mortars are not inaccurate because of a failing on the dev team behind them. Mortars have been tweaked several times and this is where they want the to be. If mortars are accurate, then you can turtle up in your base snug and safe and shell things to peices, ESPECIALLY with the mech clusters being introduced. That's not eventful though. There's no drama. Of the many tweaks to mortars they have had their damage lowered and their accuracy scattered to make you less reliant on them. You're not supposed to be able to shell the map. You're supposed to be shelled and find different tactical solutions to deal with seiges.

There are mods, expecially Mortar Accuracy, which fixes values to mortar accuracy. Depending on your setup you can use shooting, intellectual, or both. That's the only way, though, you're going to get accurate mortars. They're not going to be changed again in game. This isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Remember: Mech Clusters don't exist in my world, so making reference to them is irrelevant. I bought vanilla: vanilla should be a balanced product in-and-of itself.

The design decisions made in updating Rimworld to 1.1 directly contradict what you say. It *used* to be that causing enough damage to Crashed Ship Parts caused the attached Mechs to assault your base. Even hitting the Mechs would cause them to take aggressive action (although they would remain leashed to the ship part unless they continued taking damage). Now mechs will simply mill about a ship chunk, ignoring mortar shells until the ship chunk is destroyed. They were made more vulnerable to repeated mortar fire with the 1.1 update, not to mention less responsive to player action (what kind of AI is piloting these things if they aren't able to respond to indirect fire?)

What 1.1 did add was a new long-range Mechanoid, making it even less desirable to fight Mechanoids in the open: if the design decision was to entice the player to fight mechanoids in the open, why add a new enemy that specifically punishes that decision as part of the base-game patch?

And while certain psychic powers may be designed to encourage open-field fighting, I have to emphasize again, PSYCHIC POWERS DO NOT EXIST IN VANILLA. They should have no bearing on the balancing of encounter difficulty in games without Royalty.

There are still MANY in-game threats that Mortars cannot deal with:
-Sappers are too fast-moving for mortars to be effective (especially with a decrease in fire rate).

-Regular raids likewise: raids that attack "immediately" move too rapidly (at least on supported map sizes) to be vulnerable to mortars. Raiders who prepare may be vulnerable to mortar attacks, but honestly, I'd prefer if the "raiders will prepare before attacking" was removed, because the raiders don't *actually* do anything to prepare. It's just an artificial mechanism of allowing the player an opportunity to prepare their defenses.

-Infestations are by definition spawned under Overhead Mountains, which means they are largely immune to mortars.

-Obviously, Drop Pod raids are immune to Mortars: even if they aren't within the mortar's minimum range, using mortars on them involves dropping explosives on your own base.

The *only* raid types that are even slightly vulnerable to mortar fire are Ship Parts and Sieges. Yet in the 1.1 version, the mortar is *so* inaccurate that it takes at least a full day of shelling to destroy a singe ship part, at which point you still have to fight the attendant mechanoids. Sieges are likewise artificially extended by the fact that both the player and the AI are unable to effectively hit the other (although the AI is slightly more likely to hit due to the fact that its target is your whole base).

[were]

If you want them more accurate, try to search for mods.

See, that would be an acceptable response...if development on the game were finished. However, the fact that updates keep showing up with balance changes means that it is perfectly legitimate to argue for balance alterations to the vanilla game.

Now, I know development isn't finished, because if it were, then there wouldn't be updates that make features objectively worse for people who don't have the newest, latest DLC (see: item stash quests no longer display the reward from the World Map: you have to click the Item Stash and then click the Quest Menu in order to see what each site offers. Quest rewards were also massively reduced in the Royalty patch, despite the fact that folks without the DLC don't get the commensurate increase in quests from the Empire). There also wouldn't be regular patch notifications on my Steam page listing various balance tweaks to the vanilla game. Yet there are. So don't you tell me to shut up, even if you phrase it in slightly more diplomatic language.

You'll note that I don't want mortars to be more accurate in their current form. That would be ridiculously overpowered. But their current form is too inaccurate to fulfill its basic purpose (hitting stationary targets with indirect fire), so I proposed an alternative firing mode that sacrifices rate of fire for accuracy.

[not be necessary]

So, I just spent a full 25 High-Explosive Shells trying (and failing) to damage a Psychic Ship Chunk. I then reloaded and tried again, and still was unable to damage it below 25% before running out of shells. My pawns were 15 and 12 shooting, (one of whom had bionic eyes and a bionic hand), and the ship was slightly more than 100 tiles away from the mortars. This level of firepower should not be necessary to hit a stationary target.

I understand why mortars have limited accuracy in their default setting (sieges would be *brutal* if mortars had pinpoint accuracy), but I don't think I have ever, in more than 3,000 hours of Rimworld, seen a mortar shell hit anywhere close to the aiming point.

Therefore, mortars should have multiple accuracy settings: at the cost of extra aiming time aiming time (I'd tentatively propose 3x, 5x or 10x as potential multipliers for Precision Mode), mortars should be able to hit within a guaranteed, relatively tight radius.

If nothing else, mortar shots should become more accurate the more shots are fired at the same location, instead of the current paradigm of "fire randomly in the general direction of the target."

IIRC, Beta 19 changed it so that Legendary items can only be created by a colonist with the "Inspired Creativity" inspiration. You can get inspirations randomly from having high mood pawns.

I usually move my stonecutter's table around the map: it's generally NOT part of my overall "workshop" area, and is instead placed in its own little shack with a couple stone-only Dumping Stockpiles next to it. Here's an example image from one of my Beta 18 colonies (because it's got the Stonecutting Shack in the lower-left corner)


[attachment deleted due to age]

Is this what happens whenever the player banishes a pawn with the "Abrasive" trait?

Be glad you weren't turned into a hat: Rimworlders are known for doing that. :-D

My faction name varies, but some of my recurring base names are:
-Tunrdatown (for settlements in tundra)
-Deserton (For deserts, natch)
-Roadhead (For when I settle at the end of a road and build my base around it, like the world's most well-armed Rest Stop.)
-The House of Black and White (When I settle a place with Slate and Limestone, I try to make the exterior Limestone and the interior Slate, for aesthetic reasons.)

Probably the most-used faction name template is {X}'s (where X is the name of my primary colonist) {Y}s (Where Y is something that alliterates with X). So for instance, Darg's Dregs, Greg's Gang, Chad's Clan etc.

Also, when I'm trying to make a settlement of only clones and robots, I call my faction and initial colonist Horatio (Endless Space 2 callout!)

*Gordon Ramsey voice" What is this trash base? Throw it in the garbage right now, ye twit!

*ahem* Joking aside, you'll probably want to enclose your research bench in a room with (eventually) sterile tiles. Small rooms are easier to keep clean than large rooms (expecially if they're a low-traffic, dead-end room like a research lab), and room cleanliness does effect research speed. Make sure to leave room for the multi-analyzer (and any other modded linkables, since I see you're using the Wall Lights mod and so might have some modded linkables).

I would recommend building a one-tile-wide enclosed space behind your coolers, then setting it to be a no-roof area. I usually build my coolers in the back corner of my freezer, with a one-tile roofless zone. I've attached an example (although nowadays, I usually make sure that I leave a door into the space behind the freezer, because orbital traders like to drop perishable, valuable stuff *right* in that unreachable spot).



On a similar note to the research bench above, you don't want your stove to be in the same room as a butcher's table OR a Sculptor's Table: both of those come with an innate cleanliness penalty, so they should be in a different room than your stove to avoid food poisoning.

What races are those? I think I recognize one as a Wookiee, but what are Lirri, Lana and Yuned?

I generally disable the Refugee, Transport Pod and Man in Black events. If I want more pawns, I have to fight for them (from Chased Refugees or Rescue Quests), capture them (from raids) or purchase them (from slavers). Well, I also occasionally build them, because I use the Androids mod, and eventually, I'll get a colony functioning enough to clone them w/ Questionable Ethics.