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Messages - Modinstaller

#1
Basically if I had to TL;DR my post : AI sucks in this game. Colonists are dumb as fuck, in many, many ways. It's a super fun game, has some troubles with balance imo, but otherwise really addictive to build your little colony and face the rimstruggles. But the fact that your pawns keep wasting time and that there is usually no way to adress structural flaws in your colony other than getting mods or micro-managing to extreme levels where it becomes unfun, well ... that just sucks.

Example : cleaning area = firefighting area but if you want to firefight around your power conduits that lead to a geothermal generator, you'll need to clean there as well, so instead you micromanage every time there's a fire there by adding and removing little home areas - nobody could call this proper gameplay.

Another one : your cook for some reason keeps walking into your freezer, hauling 10 meat, making a meal, and hauling the meal back. Stupid. So, you create 2 storage areas near your stove so that the cook can use meat directly next to the stove and place the product directly to the other side of the stove and transform into a super efficient cooking robot. But then you've got piles of meals and meat rotting next to the stove. So, you micro-manage the meat storage so that when your cook's not cookin', the meat goes back into the freezer. But your hauler's stoooopid and won't touch the damn meat that needs to be moved 3 feet from where it is, and would rather haul some clothes from low-storage to high-storage or re-stack some steel even though it doesn't matter at all, so you manually tell him to move the damn meat. But yet another problem arises : your hauling guy is still dumb as fuck and when your cook's cookin', he will keep restocking 10 meat to your meat pile and hauling 1 meal back to the freezer. Back to square one. Eventually, you have to de-assign re-assign your hauler all the time, or manually tell him to haul those damn components that have been sitting at the edge of the map for weeks, or restrict him to an area which includes everything except your cooking stove areas so that he can finally stop wasting time. I don't think anybody would call this proper gameplay either.

But coding good AI is annoying and difficult and I understand why you'd just let it be because "it works, kind of". And maybe you could even consider it "added flavor". Like "hey you not only have to face freak toxic fallout events and bands of half-naked mace-wielding psychopaths but you also need to do all this while managing a bunch of imbeciles that have no idea how to do their job !". The "bug or feature" question, basically.

In any case, I agree to the fact that pawns spending half their day just hauling stuff around terribly inefficiently is mind boggingly frustrating ... at least to me. I caved in and installed pick up and haul a while ago, because I couldn't take it anymore. I don't know about fairly minimal time investment but I agree that the game would benefit greatly. Another question is "if a mod already does it, does it really need to be added to the official version ?" and I'm not sure what the answer is.
#2
Ideas / Some counterplay against drop pods
January 16, 2019, 06:48:18 AM
As it stands now, there's nearly no counter for drop pod raids. Your colony has 10 pawns scattered around doing their things, 10 mechanoids suddenly drop in your workshop or your storage and start destroying everything. If you try to fight them, you risk getting one-shot (that's even with marine armor + marine helmets) or losing limbs. If you don't try to fight them, your base gets ransacked.

If you prepare and make sure you have the right weapons and armor, half of your base is already gone. And chances are they'll take a few shots at your pawns right after landing before they have time to vacate, so it forces you to always equip armor, just in case, which slows down your pawns all the time just for one specific event. Even when you have armor equipped with a bunch of weapons good at countering lancers and scythers, any mistep could cause a death. You basically have to get your pawns as close to the lancers as possible and engage them in melee combat where they're weakest (unlike you want some pawn to randomly get one-shot through 130% sharp armor), and do it fast. The more time your pawns take to close the distance, the more chances of one-shots happening.

You can see that it's impossible to prevent loss like this, especially when the mechanoids outnumber you and you can't even engage all of them in melee. Not to mention that outfitting all your pawns with melee weapons will leave you vulnerable to a full scyther raid. There's just no winning. The only thing you can do is rig your whole colony with dozens of turrets everywhere. That's the only counterplay that I've found. How about something more engaging ?

And one of the most infuriating ways for colonists to die in this game is death by drop pod. Your augmented best guy just got killed by rng, aren't you having fun ? That's another part of drop pods that should change imo. (I know you can get generally get res serums, but it's too rare, slow and inconvenient in sea ice - but maybe it's just sea ice being unbalanced, idk)

Here's an idea : some device that needs to be researched and built, which draws power, and can detect drop pod raids in advance. Say, you have 1 minute or 2 to react to it. It tells you where it's going to land, and that's it. You can then outfit your pawns, move them out of the way so they don't get crushed, move some turrets, and get ready to fight.
#3
Back again with a suggestion for pick up and haul : pawns load pod launchers slowly, using the vanilla hauling behavior (hauling items one by one). It'd be awesome if they could use pick up and haul's behavior.
#4
In reply to Electroid, food is not always so cheap. It is if you play in a biome where you've got an excess of soil to farm and good temperatures, or if you have a lot of resources to build basins and time to research them. But sometimes, you don't (ice sea), or you simply didn't plan things well enough. At this point, it makes no sense for colonists to keep chugging food down as fast as they can : it's become a very, very precious commodity and needs to be rationed. Adding a way to ration food is great, in my opinion. It keeps everyone happy (don't want bad mood ? don't ration), it's coherent, it adds a bit more depth to the game, and it's not terribly hard to program compared to other suggestions.

I've been trying to play in ice sea, and every single resource matters over there. I have to cut corners into everything (I literally have to cut corners into my buildings to get 4 walls' worth of resources back) so that my colonists don't starve, die from raids, or have mental breakdowns. It depends on how much steel the game gives you with random events, but when it doesn't, colonists are on the verge of starvation all the time and actually need to eat raiders.

@5thHorseman Yeah an option for tables would be good too. Something like "range to seek a table" so that if you really want them to, they can always eat at a table, and at the very least you can tailor their range to your base's layout. And then another option to "ration food" so they only eat at .1 hunger or lower instead of .25 or lower.
#5
I have a pawn running around two different stockpiles wasting time right now, and it wasn't just the first item. He's hauling clothes around, some are tainted, some aren't, and I have two different stockpiles for tainted and not tainted. The non-tainted stockpile is the one in the smaller room to the right, the tainted stockpile is the one outside the walls, to the bottom left http://i68.tinypic.com/24oaf6e.jpg

Seems like the sort algorithm doesn't take into account tainted vs clean. I can't remember noticing it with anything else than clothes, but it might be something else altogether ...
#6
Releases / Re: [1.0] Animal Food Restrictions
December 23, 2018, 11:56:55 AM
In reply to Jo The Veteran, the sole reason I'm using this mod is specifically because my trainers will keep feeding raw food to my animals when training instead of using kibble which is more efficient, so I'd like to keep this functionality. I agree that better UI would be cool though.

Anyway I'd like to point out a shortcoming : since live plants (crops or unedible plants like psychoid leaves) can't be forbidden in the food restriction menu, probably because it wasn't intended for animals, my animals will keep eating food directly from my hydroponics basins or eating drugs intended for refining. As such letting my animals loose so that they can haul is still somewhat of a hazard for my food situation. Any hope for a fix ?

Thanks for your work by the way !
#7
This might have been the problem. I'll watch more closely and report if I find anything more. Thanks for the quick answer !
#8
Releases / Re: [1.0] Turn It On and Off
December 23, 2018, 03:24:02 AM
Hi there

The long-range mineral scanner still drains 500W when nobody uses it

Thanks for your work !
#9
It seems that pick up and haul isn't 100% optimized for hauling efficiency.

In my game, if a pawn has to haul 4 stacks of item X and 4 stacks of item Y, and those 2 items have 2 different storage areas far from each other, it's possible that the pawn will run to storage X and deposit 1 stack of item X, then run to storage Y and deposit 1 stack of item Y, then run back to X etc... instead of just depositting everything in X and then in Y, resulting in 8 round trips instead of just 2.

Has anyone else run into this behavior ? Is there a way to fix this easily with 2 storage areas far from each other ?
#10
Ideas / Re: priority Food etc
December 02, 2018, 10:18:58 AM
Yeah probably used google translate to help.

Anyway he does have a point for the sowing priority. Idk about repairing, but sowing will almost always be preferrable to harvesting. Yes, if your colony is starving harvesting will be a priority at least to get them some meals, but does your colony starve that often ? Even if it does, you can already forbid sowing, so you could solve that problem pretty easily. But if you're trying to optimize your colonists' time so that you can grow as much food as possible in as little time as possible before the next winter, there's no easy solution. I guess you could delete your growing zones and remake them a bit further, but if your crops are walled or you've got hydroponics basins, or are using a limited rich soil area, then it's not ideal.
#11
Wasting .15 nutrition per meal may not seem like a big deal, but it absolutely is when your colony is running out of food. There should be a way to enforce colonists to ration food and eat only when starving, even if it decreases morale temporarily.

Not sure if it'd make sense to also have the option for animals (unless you could ask for your colonists to feed them rather than just let them feed themselves).
#12
Ideas / Re: Make bedrooms with multiple doors viable
December 02, 2018, 06:46:56 AM
Since both doors could be used every day (like, one leads to the dining room, the other to the crops area and the wilderness), with 10 colonists with 10 bedrooms, it would become unmanageable very quickly.
#13
Ideas / Re: Issues that I found when I played RimWorld
December 02, 2018, 06:33:17 AM
Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMThere are no ways to 'banish' an undesirable colonist without the other colonists feeling bad from that colonist dying; they seem linked even through the world map.

The pawns losing morale when somebody they don't even know dies or gets banished makes some kind of sense. If someone randomly shows up and wants to join, especially in the context of this game where everyone is kind of in the same undesirable situation of wanting to leave the planet, it does make sense to feel bad for refusing them. In some cases it could almost be a death sentence. What doesn't make sense is that (in my experience) colonists don't lose morale over refusing a refugee chased by people. Their behavior isn't really consistent.

As for the hivemind problem, I started assuming that they're all always in contact. Cases where you send someone out unprepared, he gets sick soon after, and you have to send a doctor to help him wouldn't make sense if your colonists couldn't communicate over long distances. It's weird but not impossible. The same way other factions can send you messages before you've built orbital comms, or some survivors or refugees can ask for help from a distance.

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMPawns that are incapable of hauling can still haul items to their work, complete the work and haul the finished product.

Pawns that can't haul still haul for their job, it is indeed pretty stupid but then again if they couldn't haul anything, ever, they'd be completely useless. You'd have to assign them to mining, farming and gathering. Imagine if they'd refuse to haul medicine or food to their patients !

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMSetting the output of a particular production bench to a specified storage space would be good.

Your suggestions with storage space are already implemented. You can specify where to drop products, and at which range to look for materials. I've configured my smelting and stone-cutting to "do forever", but in a limited range so that when I want something cut, I can order chunks to be hauled which will get done mostly by animals, so that whoever's assigned to crafting can avoid wasting time. If you were talking about choosing where to drop products for a whole bench, then sure, but if you've managed your colony correctly you shouldn't create new crafting orders that often and when you do clicking that "where to drop" button isn't too much of a hassle imo.

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMLetting pawns automatically sort deteriorating items by item health. (or making a machine or mech do it)

Sorting items is possible, kind of. You can make several storage areas with different restrictions and priorities. For example if you're dumping your clothes in a big area but want clothes you've just crafted and which should be worn by colonists to be closer to a wall, you can make two different areas, one which will accept all clothes at a low priority, and another one which only accepts 100-100, untainted clothes at a higher priority. It doesn't solve everything, for example you can't restrict storage down to which material an item is made of, but I'd say it's in a good state.

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMGraves are marked as part of the home area, but what if you want to make a graveyard far from your buildings so pawns don't look at it?
   (They will still clean it and put out fires in that area, reducing their mood)

Graves are only in the home area if you want them to be. You can manage your home area and even disable automatic expansion (I always do). One problem with cleaning that you touched on is that everything in the home area gets cleaned, but you also need your home area to be on or around stuff so that people fight fires there. I don't want my storage area to be cleaned because it really doesn't matter, but if I don't set it as home area and a fire starts there, I'll have to add it until the fire is out and then remove it again. Same thing for power conduits far away from the base linking to geothermal generators. We really need a specific "cleaning area", or "firefighting area", one or the other or both.

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMElectrical shorts happen randomly without taking into consideration the builder's skill level

Yeah it's pretty stupid. The first time this event happened, I checked to see if conduits were "awful" quality or something, but no. It just absolutely has to happen. I don't think it's going away, though. Having quality levels on power conduits would create another problem entirely : quality level is random. Even a colonist with 20 building skill will eventually make a "normal" conduit. Then you'd have to click on each power conduit one by one to spot those which are poor quality, even two clicks for those below walls or furniture ! Maybe only if awful conduits did that, but you don't always start with a skilled builder, so the "click each conduit" problem remains. It seems you've had a lot of problems with this event. I didn't, because I never built batteries. I just used geothermal generators which always supply a constant stream of electricity, so no need for batteries. That way, the event only caused fire and not explosions.

As for your other suggestions for disease and eclipses, I think this simply is not what the game's made for. Calculating planet, moon and sun sizes and rotations is way too much work just to make one event realistic. And then the results would have to be skewed anyway since a normal planet would never have 5 eclipses at the same exact spot in 4 years. Same for disease - and you don't really see insects or know how many of them there are. There's more chance of disease in swamps and tropical forests but it still needs to happen in other biomes or the game'd get boring faster.

I'm not sure whether I had malaria, but it doesn't sound that much worse from other diseases like the plague (which I've had). Just have medicine, a good doctor and let them rest. If you want them to get better sooner, use glitterworld medicine, hospital beds, sterile tiles and all that. You could also just use the disease preventing drug (forgot the name) every 5 days. As a last resort, there's always the very rare and overpowered resurrection serum or healing serum.

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMColonists cannot provide food to animals when they are starving without that animal needing rescue.

Colonists will never feed animals unless they're training them. I found this weird too at first, but it's not too much of a problem if you manage your storage areas correctly. Make some kibble for your animals and if you can't make it, feed them meals or raw food. I also feed them bandits :D

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMColonists don't keep their skills at max level even if they are repeatedly trained in that skill again and again.

This is controversial. Some people think skill decay shouldn't be in the game, some don't. I don't. Without it, colonists would reach 20 way too fast and you'd have super-colonists. This is just a way to make the game harder and I'm okay with it. There's a mod for it though I don't remember the name.

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMThe 'story generator' seems to be more of an event generator instead:

I completely agree. My interested was piqued when I read that this game was a "story generator". But really it's not, in my opinion at least, or else every single procedural generation game ever could be dubbed as such. It's just a survival game with building, crafting, strategy and gestion elements. It's a story generator for people with enough imagination, but for me it's a challenging strategy/survival game.

I also agree that a lot of stuff seems randomly mixed together, but that's just the nature of procedural games. Maybe it could be done better. It doesn't bother me too much at least, that's something that I've accepted is just part of the game. It seems like Rimworld's universe is really crazy, so it makes sense to me. Take a look at this https://rimworldgame.com/backstory

Quote from: _Rainbow on December 01, 2018, 06:41:23 PMPawns that barely met each other can instantly be rivals or hate each other. (seems a bit hyper-realistic).

I agree this is weird. I don't take it as them actually being "rivals", more as an indicator that they don't like each other. You have to admit that there's a good chance somebody "staggeringly ugly" is going to take more shit than the average person, even in our society. It's just a hard truth. But there should also be some people with specific traits that make them care less about appearances. Seems weird that two ugly colonists would dislike each other, you'd figure they'd at least find some common grounds and be able to relate empathically. Maybe something that increases relations between two persons that have the same traits ?

As for vehicles, why not but seems really hard to implement. Stealth just really doesn't seem like it'd fit in Rimworld, and also way too hard to implement.
#14
Ideas / Worker restrictions on blueprints
December 02, 2018, 04:58:45 AM
There are worker restrictions on crafts, so that your unskilled crafters can work on stuff with no quality levels, e.g. bionic limbs and your skilled ones can work on stuff with quality levels, e.g. weapons, but while the same system applies to construction (walls and doors have no quality levels but beds do), you can't assign a specific worker or a minimum skill required for your blueprints.

If this was implemented, players who're looking to optimize everything could have less stuff to micromanage : order a royal bed to be constructed, set minimum required skill or worker, and let your colonists handle it for you. Right now, without this, you have to be careful about who builds what and use manual priorities and forbidding, which is somewhat bothersome.

I reckon it's not an easy thing to implement since blueprints don't really have any ui for this. I think a global setting with its own ui window would do the trick : the same kind of layout from the crafting window but which affects all your constructions. If I set it to 10-20 skill, only 10+ builders will work on blueprints with quality levels like couches, beds, etc...
#15
Ideas / Make bedrooms with multiple doors viable
December 01, 2018, 08:19:24 AM
Right now if you make a bedroom with several doors for convenience, there's a good chance that your colonists are going to move through them when someone's sleeping.

It'd be nice if colonists were smart enough not to disturb someone's sleep just to get 2 seconds faster to their objective, but another solution would be to allow the player to draw out areas that colonists should avoid if possible while moving, while still being allowed to move there when something needs to be done (repairing, firefighting, cleaning ...). Not perfect though since your cleaner might disturb someone's sleep, but better than nothing.