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This is why I advocate fighting fire with hand grenades and manually-controlled drafted colonists, instead of using the firefighting job at all.

Fighting fire with fire eh? Works in the real world with oil wells. (Except they use something a 'little' bit bigger than grenades...)

How I've tackled similar problems in past projects is to create a 'job zone' which calls out that it has work. Similar jobs within a set distance to an existing job zone would attach themselves to it.

Job Zones would track who is working them, and send out a request ping if a 'finish efficiency' function returns too low of a value. (This can account for things like distance from heart of colony, a job priority value that the player can set, number of workers and their estimated completed work, etc)

Workers would then pick up on the ping and evaluated whether or not they are a viable option for the job. That function would consider what they are currently assigned to, how far away they are, and how many work actions they expect they can complete before they need a break.

The 'best' worker for the job then picks up that Job Zone, and the zone re-evaluates itself. If it detects it is still below an acceptable point it can ping again and ask all other workers.

The goal of the system is to limit excessive walking of the agents so they aren't hopping back and forth between different parts of the map. Ideally you will never get two people spending 10 time units to walk across the map to handle two different 'jobs', which each take 1 time unit to complete. The first worker will make the trip, complete both jobs, and then head home.

In the case of a large number of jobs, or high risk jobs such as fire fighting (where the fire can spread and spawn even more jobs), workers merely lock on for a job zone and make their way toward it. Only once within a job zone will they actually pick their target job and start on it.

It could also help if things like mining or fire fighting could be hastened by having more than one colonist on each 'job'.

Not to mention that as new jobs within the zone spawn they will trigger a check. Colonist on fire become the highest priority, followed by burning structures, then everything else on fire. (or some variant of that) Then when someone catches fire they can interrupt the current jobs of other colonists (who are already right there) so someone puts them out quickly and they can rejoin the fight.

I just realized that colonists complain about living in a room that would be maybe four or five times the area I have to myself. Hopefully more 'goodies' are added in the next few builds and the 'cramped' can be replaced with some other modifier for an 'unfinished' room with few personal items that you can then improve over time as you increase your colony's ability to manufacture things.

Firing modes really should only matter if we ever see ammo levels as a thing. Selecting what kind of mode to shoot in is just micromanagement, and without the strategic decision of ammunition supplies to account for it just sounds like needless micromanagement. If we don't have to worry about how much people are shooting, reload times, etc, then firing mode should merely be rolled into what role on the battlefield someone is assigned, not me having to go back and tell the idiot sniper that he has to actually try and aim now that he isn't merely trying to put as much lead down range to keep heads down.

For aim types I would much rather see it tied to deployment styles instead, and my suggestions build off of some of what you've already posted. The big difference in my view is a focus on friendly force interaction. I don't think the system should be about purely micromanaging individual units and their actions, but giving the system itself enough power that it naturally builds a synergy between characters. (If done well it also means the system that makes it easier for the human to manage also gives a nice 'free' boost to the ability of the AI who gets to use the same system.)

I would suggest keeping it simple, such as choosing between role options like marksman, cover fire, and suppression fire modes that interact with each other. Hopefully it gives you similar effects to the suggestions in the original post, as well as a more graceful system than just individuals changing states.

Suppression mode attempts to establish a fairly steady level over an area that then forces the opposing units to take cover, and continues to do so.

Cover fire mode will take reasonably aimed shots at targets of opportunity with better odds of killing something in heavy cover, but then lay in with heavier levels of fire if a nearby unit signals they are about to move, are reloading, or beginning a marksman shot.

Marksmen units then take more time, aim carefully, and fire when the target is most exposed, but are less likely to expose themselves to fire. They would sync with cover fire units who lay down shots to give the marksman time to rise out of their full cover and aim, then wait as the cover fire unit has finished their volley so that the opposition rise back from their own full cover before taking a shot.

Integrate this with an improved movement system with at least two modes. Move orders, and force move orders (move order while holding ctrl or something). When just given a move order a unit will wait until they are not suppressed, and suppression or cover fire units have begun their volley. If no volleys are pending (ie, only cover units active near them) then they will send out cover requests before moving.

Units with higher combat skills will of course integrate with each other better, being more effective at their role (Suppression/cover units hit closer to targets, marksmen hit more often, all roles closer to hitting targets which gives nearer misses to force units into a deeper suppressed state, recover from suppressed states, etc), and are more accurate in their timing. (ie, low skill units might move before units are fully suppressed, or wait too long so the enemy is coming out of suppression before they move and before the next suppression/cover fire volley goes off. Low skilled cover units take longer before they start shooting, etc.)

Kinda goes against the story of crashing onto a rim world. It's highly unlikely to be a prison that far out.

in lots of stories, prisoners were sent to stations in space, far away from civillization.  it makes sense.

Lots of History of civilizations sending their prisoners to far flung parts of the world as punishment.

I think another option that could help with some of the issues is a switch to an area-based task assignment.

When a 'job' is spawned on the map it first looks around itself for other similar classes of jobs. If it finds some within a set limit it adds itself to that area. (With some checks for navigation edge cases to ensure pathfinding between elements of the job would not take it outside of the area) If none are found it then spawns a new job-area.

When calculating if a worker should be assigned to a job it can also peek ahead. Who else is working there currently, how long will it take them to finish, and is it likely that there will be any work left by the time a new worker gets there? Currently if you have a few people assigned to the same tasks (ie, building/mining/hauling) while trying to do work in different parts of the map, then they can spend far more time bouncing between sites than they spend actually working.

Job-areas should also be able to grab workers in priority cases (ie, fires) so they can pull the nearest person and interrupt their current action instead of a job being taken by someone who just freed up... on the other side of the map.

It would also allow for the 'over loading' of a job area with workers. Something like double clicking on any job would then highlight its area and other related jobs. You could then flag it for calling extra workers. Mostly useful for things like fires so that you can have extra bodies on their way to deal with the extra jobs that will popup as the fire spreads.


And fire fires: Being able to have more than one person working on a single fire tile at a time might be nice to speed things up.

One thing that I would love to see if enhanced multi-monitor support is worked on is to follow Supreme Commander's lead, and make second/third monitors highly useful and flexible.

Anyone unfamiliar with how it worked, you could have the secondary monitors be completely independent views from the primary. Have one be your focus monitor where all your action is really going on, the other a super 'mini-map' that is zoomed all the way out, or keep one zoomed in on your base while you use the other to stay focused on the front line action.

Few developers really use multimonitor support all that well, in part because it isn't a trivial problem to tackle, and in the past most users had a single monitor. However dual and tri monitor setups are becoming more and more common, so hopefully more people will provide better support for them.

Barring something funky having been done to cover an edge case, such a feature (at least the save file generation) shouldn't be an excessive change over and above the existing save and auto save functionality.

Doesn't sound like something I would use myself, but possibly one other players would be interested in.

If characters were given more personality traits (that actually had a real effect on the game) then I could see traders 'requesting' you to take a problem crew member off your hands.

Expanding personality/mental state stuff could give us more for scientist types to do. Psychological evaluations to identify 'hidden' traits before you just add a former prisoner to your colony.

There are a number of ways that adding new members and new prisoners can work while maintaining the whole idea of it being far away from civilization.

There should be more things to worry about than just raiders. But the game is at such an early development phase that I'm not worried, I think we'll get much more to think about, all in good time!

This was kind of the entire point of putting this thread up. Going through the forums most of what I got was raiders, RAIDERS, raiders, guns, raiders, Raiders, Guns!. Conversations were getting overly focused on improving the game by improving raiders, not by discussing what other elements could be added and improved to make the game more interesting, offer more challenges, and make the game different from yet another strategy/tactics game.

I am a strong supporter of the idea of 'more challenges', but they all need to balance. Building bases under ground shouldn't be hard just to stop building bases underground. Building bases under ground should be hard because building a base in general is hard.

Various stone types is a good place to start, which make it more interesting to begin digging out underground. Air circulation is another interesting thing that could be added, and have it affect both above and below ground structures. (After all, nothing says the air above ground actually as to be safe. Maybe you've landed on a moon with a mostly toxic atmosphere and need to maintain a sealed environment with scrubbing equipment? Best not to step outside without your space suit, or allow people to wander too far from a recharge/supply station/cart.)

I've also spent months at a time in confined environments and not seeing the light of day. In parts of Canada they also call that "Winter". I like to assume I've kept all of my sanity after those expeditions. But that does give us another point to expand upon that would add more flavour to the characters. Just think of having a claustrophobic crew member on a tainted air world? Would make the player have to work extra hard to provide things like 'artificial windows' and improved lighting to keep that character's sanity up.

Side note: The average human on earth can produce something like 1000 units of vitamin D a minute in good weather with a reasonable amount of exposed skin, and needs around 200 units a day to maintain good health. Peak production is found at a few narrow bands of UV light, and you can actually produce it in a safer and more controlled manner with artificial UV lights at those specific bands, rather than broader spectrum light as from the sun which will dose you in lots of radiation at a low efficiency level.

I strongly support adding issues like water to the game. For starters just having water, its collection and storage, and colonists requiring it.

Further developments with it could include things like portable water (producing bottles of various types. Cheap and simple ones don't carry much, are heavy, and risk breaking. Harder to produce ones are lighter for the same volume, and are less likely to break, etc.)

And then you could take it even further with issues like water quality and contamination. Issues of germs, toxins, maybe radiation, etc.

Another feature, possibly best discussed in another thread on its own, would be one of knowledge and 'advanced tools'. An oaf with nothing but a shovel has no idea about water safety. Is it clear? Probably safe. An educated scientist with lab equipment could then give you a better idea on if the water is pure, contaminated with heavy metals, swarming with bacteria, or heavily irradiated. While everyone would be able to build basic wells and ditches, more complex filters and such would require a colonist with higher level knowledge. This would play very well with expanding the research system, and making scientists with poor manual labour stats more useful in the long run as they are needed to "Plan/Design" things that the other characters can then build.

On my mac they are in a folder titled "unity.Ludeon Studios.RimWorld"

To get there:

1.Go to finder

2. In the menu bar select "go", then hold down the Alt/Option key with that menu open. It should show you the Library

3. Find the Caches folder in Library

4. Look for "unity.Ludeon Studios.RimWorld"

So far the worst raid I've faced after having time and resources to setup a reasonable choke point defense has been... An insane boom rat, and insanely bad luck.

8 Colonists in all on a kind of an awkward map. Not a lot of ore in the area I ended up settling for the vent and farmland, so mining efforts are a long way away from the main base.

Three miners were on the far side of the map doing their thing, and another three members were headed their way to help out when the boom rat came in. First two heading out were stopped by the boom rat, killed it, and then both of them started putting out the fire on the main defense wall. Then they both promptly caught fire. Didn't notice the third miner that was on his way out walk on past them.

The miners already at the site headed back, and the last two left in the base went to help put out the burning settlers. (Who insisted on running away from help...) They eventually dropped, and the two heading to help them had to carry them back to their beds, which of course are on the far side of the compound from the gate where the fires are.

An insane squirrel waylaid one of the miners headed back, so it was back down to two people trying to fight the cheery blaze, which by this time was happily spreading along my defensive wall and into the grave yards on either side. So they too caught fire before they made much headway.

Then the herd of muffalo found the fire...

Had the rain not rolled in and helped me, I'm fairly sure I would have lost most of the base. Really need to start using more concrete flooring...

[ONLY]

Galileus, let me rephrase this.

The problem with raiders is that they are the ONLY threat. And the problem with gameplay challenge is that at this time there is only one solid solution to reliably deal with them, and this solution renders them rather trivial once you get setup.

Currently nothing else is really all that harmful to the survival of your colony.

So what is the obvious solution to making raiders non-trivial? Well 'obviously' you make them harder to deal with. Make them more 'clever', attack in more ways, etc. However any suggestion that drives development toward a "Better Raider" results in not addressing the main core issue:

Raiders being the only real threat. This is suppose to be a survival game, and yet the only thing to survive that is getting all that much attention are raiders.

Making Good raiders is going to take a lot of development, testing, and reworking time to create something that actually functions well and isn't easy to defeat with cheap tricks. A really good well balanced raider system is going to be at risk of making it that much harder to add other challenging elements to after the fact, as small changes to things can easily through a really complex AI system out of whack, suddenly making it insanely hard again, or overly easy.

Pushing a focus on Raider development Now with all the work, testing, and reworking, just means that you turn around and do all the testing and reworking over again for each new complex element.

Implement more threats in basic forms, then move forward with all of them together. This way adjustments that bring a simple food system to a more complex one aren't at risk of completely undermining all the careful balance work that went into making an exceptionally complex Raider system.


I'm not asking for raiders to be removed completely or improvements to them abandoned forever. I'm asking for a discussion on establishing threats from multiple angles so we have more ways we can probably lose.

So much focus is being forced on the ineffective raiders as a problem that cause boring game play because it becomes too easy that most people are ignoring the ineffective starvation and nutrition problem that gives no difficulty to the game. The ineffective/nonexistent shelter and warmth system that makes the game too easy. The ineffective/nonexistent social interactions that make the game too easy. Etc, etc, etc.


If 99 out of a 100 times the reason the game ends is "Raiders overwhelmed the colony and killed everyone", (and that other 1 game is some random freak accident of back luck such as where my oaf dies and my two nobles who won't do social or manual labour starve to death) then what is the point in playing a sim like this? I will already know how it ends. I'll play the finished game for a week or two, get bored, and probably not recommend such a game to my friends. The world already has tons of games that work just like that.

I'm sorry to be rude, but this idea is a disaster.

Easier raiders are possible on lower difficulty story tellers. But this is a minor part of it, as this does not addresses the other hazards. The main problem with your idea is that id doesn't help the problem - it worsens it. If right now raiders are too easy to fight off with turrets - they will be even easier if they are weaker. Fact, that they won't be for blood changes nothing - and if anything, they will be even more eager to jump under fire and do nothing about it. Not only that, this is not a solution - even if it would work. It's a castration! You don't fix a problem with part of your game by removing it!

I just... no! NO!

I really have to ask how many paragraphs from my post did you even bother to read?

It doesn't matter how you spice them up, strong, frequent, and deadly raiders results in a tower defence like game play in one form or another where the entire game revolves around trying to find a way to exploit the raider AI with something that ends up being a cheap mechanic.

This suggestion also plays into how the development process works. As it stands now there is a lot of discussion and push for making raiders harder to add complexity and make the game more interesting. This is simply a bad direction that doesn't actually address the problem with raiders and the defences against them. Spend a week's development time changing the raiders to be 'better', players/testers will spend a day breaking it and we go back to square one. Either there will be some method to them that reduces raiders to something equally trivial as their current bottle neck, or they will end up as a crushing force. Testers will report it as 'broken', players will complain that it is too easy or too hard, and then more development time gets pushed towards improving raiders because that is what the community is up in arms over.

And I've been employed full time with game development for three years with a third party testing house. I have had my fingers in the pies on alpha builds for hundreds of titles. Trust me, removing something is very much a perfectly valid solution to a problem.


This is a game about colony survival. Raiders aren't even needed to make it complex and challenging.