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drones are cool, i wont say no to drones. Good balance though, doesnt come by adding more an more mechanics to your system. you have to identify why your mechanic isnt working and then solve the problem. if the problem for commando power is that there arent enough bodies for them to shoot at... well, thats a strange problem to have tbh

the issue with commandos isnt the amount of pawns you have to kill them :\ they come equipped with all of your goodies, so nerfing them aint a good idea either. just increase the cost of spawning them, so instead of giving the player more troops to attack them with, you give the commandoes less commandoes.. it also happens to make them actual commandos, solo operators an such.

even then though, the apb weapons are really rad, but the game isnt balanced around them at all. has anyone tested whether low flammability stuff actually helps keep pawns from running around like loons? couse if they it does, you just need to add a bunch of insulated items to your mod to balance out all the flaming death weapons

Its expensive because Tynan believes thats what its worth. I agreed, and so i spent thirty dollars. You apparently agreed, and spent 30$. Thats it, thats what makes it worth 30 dollars. If you dont think its worth 30 dollars for 400+ hours of content then A) yer daft and B) tough titties, you already paid an said "yeah, thats worth it" an in future you should do yer research. games are worth what we pay for them. If we want them, and the developer charges more, and we still feel ok buying it, then thats what its worth. Welcome to capitalism. Its also the same place where bread can sell on ebay for 100's of dollars and shitty mechanics can charge you more for something better mechanics would charge you less for. Its really that simple.

however, i would point out that since you did actually get 100's of hours of value, thats like 4 cents an hour or something ridiculous, so dont expect anyone to think you were hard done by :\

I have a suspicion that hot and cold biomes from marvinkosh seems to conflict with this mod actually triggering on game start, does that sound right?

(id assume its because it changes map gen in some way but i have no idea, just checking in)


Also, im really loving this btw. Its brutal as... though.. admittedly, its maybe a bit to unpredictable. Mainly because ive player three rounds now that all ended in about 5 minutes with no survivors from the crash.. at all. Maybe have the three starter dudes turn up in their escape pods and then rain the rest of the explodey death ship on them or something. Not that im complaining, its a riot. Just some feedback on the curve of the game

could be a rad perk of ironman mode... run the game to the end, help give you an insentive to grit your teeth through the worst parts.

ed. "oh fuck, everyones dead cept this one guy.. fuck it... but.. i want others to see my rad colony... ill keep going, hell probably starve".

i mean, that may even cause the colony to recover, an all they needed was that extra push for radness

fiddling with the scale is probably something in need of work.. but hey, its alpha an it works. i can understand why the scale is off atm... i just hope thats not intended :\

not wanting to simulate stuff because it might add complexity to the game is daft.

every alpha adds complexity, and the game has only improved with every alpha. water as a resource could be annoying to implement, but it adds a bunch of depth to the game. so does all that other stuff. as it is, i spend large chunks of time staring at a screen with very little of import happening... things happen, they just arent all that important. the decisions making is the fun stuff, and you cant make decisions without depth.

admittedly, if were gonna add complexity, pawn pooping probably isnt at the top of my wish list lol

if were talking about wall digging, it seems like a rad thing to happen during sieges. Every now an then while a siege is active, a raiding party forms. If over the time its existed it discovered your colony is a mountain home, then the siegers would dig a big ole hole to your base an stop one tile short, then the raiding party can dig it out. sounds like a laugh

let the mud slinging commence lol

As a designer, i couldnt give a toss as long as it works. My programmer on the other hand has lots to say on the subject, an it mainly boils down to "xml is gross" lol.

i love how the start of this thread requests everyone to try and avoid creating "sides" to this conflict, and immediately that falls by the wayside(and i wont lie, i am biased to one "side", but id like to think i give the current iteration of RW a pretty solid pass just by spending words on saying its rad but can be better. many many words). Im even more amazed by how much longer the thread got O.o an all the mud slinging is kind of amusing as. I mean, its not making us smarter than monkeys, but its amusing

still, there is a lot of mud slinging, especially at keg. Lets leave keg alone, on other topics his opinions are objectively correct, an hes pretty nice. It took me a few weeks of forum hopping to see, but its true.

I still think that FoW brings more to RW than it takes away. Theres nothing i can say though to prove it. An thats actually what i wanted to talk about for a moment. Its the resource cost of A FoW system. First, we need to identify two different parts of the system. Theres Fog Of War(FOW), which is the thing obscuring stuff in some way(this btw is also similar to walls and other obstacles), AND THEN there is Line Of Sight(LOS) which is the pawns actually seeing things. They are two different systems but they work together. An to make matters more complicated, you can have an LOS system without FOW but you cannot have FOW without LOS. At the moment, the pawns do not have a LOS, but FOW does exist in game, an its weird. For instance, the FOW exists over closed rooms. The minute that room is opened, its unveiled and we can see everything. The LOS system is literally our ability to see the world. Its not particularly resource intensive, but it feels a little odd. Just my opinion though.

My point though, is when we discuss implementing FOW we are talking about two systems that will need fleshing out. thats two whole systems that will need implementing and tying into the game. I mean, LOS will have to actively be tied to eye objects, and to sight sensors an anything else that provides "sight". The thing is, it will probably also have to be tied to things like scent and hearing as well. This is because LOS systems are complicated, and they are best done not by Wargames, but by stealth games. Shocking, i know, but thats the truth. Stealth games have LOS systems locked. Both from a player perspective and the npcs. They just do it better, an if RW was to implement FOW it would need to draw from stealth games LOS. that, by itself would make it a very different beast to your average wargame. Its also a lot of work. huge amounts of work. And talking from experience, its alot of work just designing the damn system. Before you can even implement it, it needs to be designed and looked at from all sorts of complicated angles. Its a long drawn out process. An the thing is, you cant half arse it without breaking verisimilitude. If you can see and you have ears, players ask why they cant hear. If you can see an hear but you have a nose, players ask why they cant smell. In RW though, these systems actually add a lot for all the work though. Imagine colonists that hate the smell of something and get neg mood mods from it, or some lonely colonists get neg mood mods from hearing couples shag in the next room. that would certainly make them feel like people. Also takes time to implement. Which might be the single biggest negative. Not the loss of stories(because there isnt one), not the sudden extra work(its a management game anyway) and not the lessening of the survival aspects(because thats blatant hyperbole). its the dev cost. Its a monster of a cost. Its iterative as, an it takes monumental amounts of time to balance. An it needs more work on other systems to make it work.

I still think its worth it, but i can understand why some people wouldnt want to do that kind of work. Its long, involved, and just blatantly difficult. It requires some serious design chops to boot, an a solid programmer. It takes ridiculous amounts of effort is basically what im saying.

thems my additional p's and q's.

Edit: typos

i am currently very frustrated with the storytellers. which makes it hard to write objectively about them.
However, i think we need to have a chat about them, because they are always making me frustrated, regardless of what day it is or how long or short i play with them or which ones i play with. An if that isnt an indicator to me of a problem, i dont know what is.

An i see my constant frustration as a problem because A) I cannot be the only one and B) no good story was ever told that involved the teller being furious. We arent talking about Dark Souls here. RW isnt a specifically hard game to grasp, and difficulty is created by the way enemies interract and the number of them and the way the actual world behaves. However, if thats true, then the AI Storytellers shouldnt change the way they create challenge depending on what difficulty they are on, and my frustration isnt caused by how difficult the challenges are. Its caused by the way they appear, the frequency with which the more infuriating ones are thrown, and the way in which they are thrown at the colony.

For instance. I get that the ship piece is a difficult challenge. its supposed to hurt a colony... but it isnt actually able to kill one. Since colonists dont leave colonies they are unhappy at, it just sits there being a constant annoyance(making them shittier an shittier until they break, fall unconscious, rinse repeat. not actually fun though). An so you go out to kill it... except it just so happens to be loaded with the most powerful enemies vanilla has to offer. Thats sort of shitty, considering the ship itself cant actually kill a colony, it only makes the damn things a pain in the arse to try and run, an it makes the annoyance a pain to get rid of. Of course, it gets better though, because if you kill the damn thing after all that teeth grinding pain.... its very possible the story teller will just drop another one on you five minutes later.. which sort of takes the novelty out and highlights the problem with the event itself. An the thing is, you could just cheese the ship. Build a stronghold around it to give yourself an advantage, but is that really the story you want to tell. The rad colony pissed itself when a chunk of metal fell out of the sky. Built a bunch of walls and all sorts of ridiculous stuff around it, an then they poked it with a stick. Not before though, An they did all this while also trying to kill each other because they walked to the other side of the map to do it. Thats not really that interesting a story though is it :\

Its the same premise as if a solar flare happens when you are trying to grow long form crops, or if many sieges are spawned in a row. The Storyteller has no idea of arcs in its challenges, an it certainly doesnt care about giving the player breathing room. An that could be interesting, if it was a specific type of event that dumped a bunch of painful stuff on the player in quick succession. Its not though, its the status quo. Its how they behave all the time.

An thats a  problem. I think its a larger problem than the combat ai. I think its an actual serious mechanical flaw. The Storytellers in some ways are the selling point of the game, an yet atm their design makes them an infuriating mess. They need more nuance in their decision making than "is the colony rich an is it currently in a bind, if no launch problems". An yes, i am including Randy in this. I know hes the random guy, but hes also apparenly the way the game is meant to be played, an hes possibly the most obnoxious one of the lot. I mean, its great that he lets you have lots of colonists, but otherwise hes a shitlord. Its not interesting to just have the random guy be all "lol random jk hahaha". He still needs to actually make some decisions about the challenge hes about to throw at a colony an whether its actually appropriate and/or interesting to do it.

Which brings us to the other side of this coin. The events need a pass. There isnt enough variance, and that exacerbates the problem. On top of that, the "good" events just arent that interesting.. or that good. Im sure there is situational goodness to them "oh thankgoodness, i was starving and food fell out of the sky" but lets be honest, does anyone actually get excited about the fifteenth time stone falls off a ship in your backyard.

ATM id say that events come too fast an too furious, and that they as a rule arent all that interesting. I dont mean this to be rude, but it needs to be said.

An since id be a jerk for saying this an not adding something constructive to it, ill provide some basic solutions i can see fixing the issues.

The storytellers obviously differentiate between very bad events and bad events, but that isnt nuanced enough. They need a grade, and they need some events that scale up by grade(so if its a nice mild event, it drops a few berries, a medium event drops a bunch of different berries, and a super great one drops a boatload of food types as well as meals). This extends then to the bad ones as well, and id want the scaleable version too. So a ship event thats mild is just the ship, no guards. Maybe it drops multiple pieces of itself or some such. A medium one is the ship plus guards, but for the love of jebus give them behaviour that makes them attack a colony if its only down to a few members(put us out of our misery or force a confrontation) an then with the final stage dump a bunch of parts, set the scream to superduper and have a boatload of mechs charge. An i would then apply difficulty scaling after this stage scaling. It means your events go a bit farther. you could even use five stages instead of 3. Point is, variance via code rather than having to create each individual event.

On the side of the storytellers, they just need a bunch more nuance. Atm they obviously decide what they are doing via looking at how many colonists are standing and how "wealthy" the colony is. The problem is that RW doesnt really lend itself to tiered play. So, the colony may be "wealthy" but it might also have no guns. Since wealth includes how much medicine the colony has an what its made of etc, the storyteller gets a false picture of how well the colony is doing and sends challenge that doesnt fit. As such, id create more variance in what the ai tracks and why it tracks it. It might look at wealth of a colony, and offensive power, and then decide it needs to send a raid that steals stuff. Setting the objectives of the raid after checking the numbers. It needs to track more, but it actually needs to use those numbers to monitor what its doing. It needs events that mess with beauty, so it needs to track that in order to make a decision about how much to mess with. It needs to actually look at a colony an decide if plague is appropriate( i mean actual plague that infects everyone, not the one shot cold). Thus, it should avoid sending siege after siege, because it should already note that it sent one five minutes ago. It needs to track what it does as well as what the players have, so that it not only varies things but actually gives room for a denoument.

Having said that, another thing i would look at creating are event 'groups' or 'series'. Basically, rather than one event, it creates a bunch that launch over time. So a raid might send scouts first. Thus, the numbers on your colony will change over time and the storyteller can adapt its strategy to compensate(so a low weapons colony might suddenly gain a bunch from the scout mission, making them able to deal with the follow up fight better). Then the storyteller sends a raid party, and another, an so on. The staggered approach to the events keeps it varied, while giving the player a little breathing time. an the storyteller, now knowing its sending multiple groups, wont necessarily send other ridiculous things at the player. Id also get the storyteller trying to send good an bad things at the same time everynow an then. since i assume a visit from neighbours is a good thing, itd go a long way to providing help if the storyteller goes to far.

Really though, at the end of the day, failure in this game needs to be fun. An atm its not. Too many of the events feel like a kick to the nuts insead of being a fun novelty. So failing stops being about the rad story and more about how you just got fucked by algorithms.

honestly, i cant compare them because i cant be buggered learning a whole new visual language just to play DF. Which is a serious flaw in the design regardless of how much extra development it may allow. Doesnt matter how clever your mechanics are if people dont see them.

Id argue though that im not the only one that says "bugger that" on seeing  DF, an that just that there alone means RW is a more well thought out game

so chalk that up as a win over the 14 year old juggernaut if thats your thing

a firebreak is a space that the fire cant cross. in some cases its a big trench dug as quick as possible, in others its just making sure trees dont overhang your house, but the premise is the same.

I dont necessarily want to have to drench everything in water and hide my colonists in a bathtub, but atm fire spreads slow, doesnt care what its burning, doesnt care about how hot or cold hte temperature around it is and just generally doesnt behave like fire. Id expect temperate and boreal forests at a minimum to have enough fuel on them to feed a quick super hot blaze that should strip a small to medium level in a day or two. instead, they barely spread and the storyteller puts them out two days later. its kinda silly.

i actually feel like its kinda pathetic atm. im playing in a forest. forests have fires every few years that burn them basically to the ground(its because they build up the fuel in them.. its actually part of a forests natural cycle)... in RW they barelly get bigger than my common room before the storyteller says "nope" an washes them away.

Maybe its just that i live in Aus, but id actually like fire to be as threatening in the game as it is in real life. Fire is deadly if you dont plan for it, an it kinda feels like RW is trivialising something that people in scary places face every day of summer(If youd like some real world examples, look up Ash Wednesday).

atm, fire isnt a threat or a risk, its a thing i barely think of. I dont even worry about it when sieges turn up with incendiary mortars... an im supposed to worry about it then :\

Heya, not sure if this has been posted before but i couldnt see it on the top of the page so ill post.

every now and then while playing the sound will cut out. The game continues to run with no issues, it just has no sound. At first i figured it was my comp, but the same thing happens on the laptop, with two completely different installed versions of the game, and has been happening for me since A9. Its not really a problem, in that restarting the game fixes the issue, its just a thing ive noticed. As yet i cant ascertain a specific thing that triggers it and i as yet havent been able to recreate the bug. it just happens lol