Messages

I would like to see improvements in some areas of the game : 
-Task ownership does not work in some cases, for example when fighting a fire. It is extremely stupid to see your colonist leaving fire cells alone (so they will burn and spread) and go back to sleep because some other colonists on the other end of the map has claimed these tasks. 
-combat : that's a big one. while the rest of the game is dedicated to indirect control, here your colonist becomes pawns. I am not sure I am convinced by that approach. It feels too different from the rest of the game. Also, while auto targeting works well for ranged fighters, it is a pain for melee ones. The most common cause of death in my colonies is when I forgot about a melee fighter for 5 seconds during a battle and a raider (that would be an easy prey) shoots him/her from 2 squares away.  Even if I ignore that part, combat feels very rough and it could use more meaningful development choices (moveable cover, traps, guard towers, ....).
-trading : introduction of trade caravans, removal of the necessity to have your tradable goods around a trade beacon.
-more varied threats. IMO, exponential waves of ennemies is an extremely boring way to lose your colony. I would like to see more DFesque situations (floodings, diseases, wave of depressions, ....).

I just hope that the skill decrease is not too aggressive. Seeing your colonists loose skill is very infuriating. 

A possible way to fix it could be to floor the decrease at skill level decrease (so the colonist loses his/her progress to the next level, but not his/her level) or maybe at max attained level - 1 so you can't decrease that much.

Hmmm, very interesting. A pop idol wandered in my colony and (social 15, art 15) and I have been able to buy a crafting neurotrainer in order to transform another colonist into a lvl 15 crafter. 
So far, I have been making them create steel sword, woodeen spears and random art, but it might be wiser to put that gold and silver to good use.

I think we need a better way to assign certain workbenches or bills to their own colonist. I want to train up one crafter on stone blocks or wooden swords while my best crafter gets to make the statues and silver stuff. 

I know, you can micro it already but that will become tiresome soon. If you could assign a bill to a colonist, that would be awesome!

I feel the same way. Actually, I fear that some of the game systems are starting to stop scaling with the game complexity ( crafting and hauling in particular) and that it might be time to go back to the drawing board and redesign some of these systems from the grounds up.

I get that hauling must be complicated to get right, but at the moment, it is one of the weakest parts of the game.   

I must regularly forbid items too far in the map because my colonists spend ages in order to go fetch items one at a time : first a gun, then a parka, then a pair of pants. I can see why it works that way, but it feels very broken. 

Not to mention colonist that miss perfect opportunities to haul some objects, like when they cross the whole map in order to get that shiny survival ration but can't be bothered to bring the rest of the stack with them.

I have been playing outdoors for the last couple of alphas. 
Outdoor bases are just funnier to build to me an living in a cave looks like a nightmare. 

Sieges are not that bad : if you hit the besiegers very hard while they have just landed, they are not going to be able to attack your colony. 
My first assault is sometimes not enough, but even in that case, the siege weapons are so imprecise that I can heal my wounded before attacking again. Snipers are especially useful in that situation, as well as using the terrain to my advantage. 
Enemies snipers are the real enemies during sieges. My snipers can prevent the besiegers from building mortars, but only if they can get close enough without getting a bullet through the head.

I think that one thing that could be implemented in order to make both day/night cycles and underground colonies more interesting is a more advanced management of light and darkness. 
If accuracy becomes way more dependent on the light conditions (right now I have not seen major differences between night and day battles), it will bring many interesting variations : 
-during the night, you can only clearly see what is illuminated, so you can bring things like torches that allow to detect enemies, or even automated lamp 'traps' that light up when an enemy is nearby, allowing your colonist to more easily focus their fire on him. 
-tunnels are obviously in the dark, so permanently have to deal with visibility in subterrean colonies, which should help balance in vs out colonies. 
-muzzle flash should vary from one weapon to another. You can shoot arrows during the night while staying almost undetected, but not so much with a minigun. 
-Snipers can assault colonies (or raiders siege camps) during the night and use the darkness to their advantage. Even if the muzzle flash betrays them, they can move between two attacks. 
-it also allows surprise attacks against colonies at night (a variation / replacement of the drop pods falling on your colony).
-Equipments (miners-helmets, night vision goggles, ...), traits, specializations (assassins and miners should have good night visions, researchers not so much), mutations and eye implants could all play a role in this.
-Lightning makes everything visible for a couple of seconds. A fire lights up its surroundings, making the flare gun (sorry, I have forgotten its official name) very interesting tactically.

The big downside of this is that it might need a lot of work on the engine if the current lightning system does not support these features.

I don't think the interface is THAT bad. 
Silver should probably work as a sticky header (showed as the first item and stick the to top when you scroll down) as well as already selected items. 
What really bothers me with how Trading works is that it encourages you to build a big central open-air stockpile. 
What I would love to see : 
you can trade any item in one of your stockpiles. 
When the deal is accepted, you have a limited time (let's say a couple of days, it should not be too constraining) to move all the traded goods to the trade beacon (automatic task for haulers).
When everything is here, the goods beam up and what you asked for is beamed down. 

Alternatively, The trading ship could land (or land a barge). That would look very cool but would mean a lot of extra assets.

It would be very nice to have a strong darkness modifier, making it hard to hit anything during the night,  but with many modifiers :
-Night googles, bionic eyes and even a specific 'race' like assassin could negate/weather light variations. 
-automatic light sources that estinguish themselves around your colonists but light up when an attacker is nearby. 
-throwable torches / glow stick applying the same bonuses. 

Of course, a raider would be very hard to detect if he snipes at your colony during the night.

I am not sure the current light system could support this though

A melee lvl 16! brawler first arrived in my colony, so I decided to give hand to hand a go. Soon I got another brawler to complete my shock team, both equipped with short swords, helmets and power armors.
They are delicate to use, they definitely require to pause the game and micromanage them. 
Used optimally, they can be an huge asset : When I am getting assaulted, I always make them hide in the building closer to the attack line. 
Here, There are multiple possibilities : 
-They can very effectively protect gunners from a close assault. You need to be very cautious of friendly fire in that configuration, but they can very effectively eliminate such a threat. A
-The enemy snipers usually lag just behind the first assault wave. A sniper can't fire if he is engaged in hand to hand combat. so, used efficiently (ie, by not making them cross an open field), brawlers can massacre them, letting my gunners deal with the regular ennemies.
-They can very efficiently dispatch of an enemy trying to outflank my colonists. 
-I tried to use my lvl 16 against a centipede (unless I am mistaken, in alpha 6 they did not have a melee attack. It started well enough, the sword caused some cracks on the centipede armor, but then it turned around and one hit killed my melee colonist. I am not complaining, it makes sense and seems to leave the door open to an hit and run tactic. 

Now, it also causes task priority to jump two by two : 4 - 2 - 0 - 3 - 1 - 4. 
If we did not have an odd number of priorities, that part would be totally broken . 
It looks like the situation is getting worse, I don't remember encountering the priority issue in previous updates. 

Yeah, this is a known issue and I've gone to hell and back trying to fix it. I can never find a fix that doesn't break something else. Seems to be a Mac Unity bug, unfortunately.

That's too bad, those are the worse bugs. I hope you (or the Unity guys) will find a fix.

I am reporting this bug for alpha 7, but it was already present in alpha 6.
Each click appears to count as double on MacOsX, meaning that for example, each time I try to build something, I get an 'identical blueprint already exists here' warning, coupled with an error sound.
It is not a game breaking bug, but it is very unnerving to hear this error sound every time you click.

Maybe ... the shadow on the screenshot does look like it could be created by nearby trees creating a roof but I would have to reproduce the bug in order to be sure.

I have discovered an issue with the way the name handles its path : 
On OsX, if I name its folder 'RimWorld - Alpha 6 / 532', the game always fails to launch. It works fine if you name it 'RimWorld - Alpha 6 - 532', so it looks like the '/' is confusing the game. 

I had a colonist stuck in a building just after finishing building it. The building had a door, but there was a tree directly in front of it. 
It may qualify as 'working as intended', but it would probably be a good idea to put up an alert when a colonist is stuck like that.

I have notived a couple of graphical issues on the last build of RimWorld (cf the attached screenshot): 
-Trees do not properly clip each others or other objects. As you can see, the wall covers the neighboring trees, whereas it should be the opposite. Same issue for two vertical rows of trees. 
-There are crazy shadows at random points of the map, they don't seem to be generated by any point on the map.

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