Messages

I think the visitor beds is a nice idea, and if you set no fee, they can just randomly leave a random amount of something like silver or food, or metal behind for you as a token of their appreciation and they may even come back.  You could also convince them to stay with your warden during their visit, if you set the warden to do that, just like prisoner, except with a visitor tab instead.  Maybe instead of savage beatings and such, you could have an option that lets you capture as slave.  This would make them move slow at all times, unable to hold a weapon, add to their stress till they are released or die or go insane (going insane while wearing hand cuffs would be kinda hard.  xD)

I also like traders by land, small bits of trade, maybe a workshop where you have someone go work at who takes stone or stone blocks and builds gifts for your colony or visitors.  Visitors would leave money for you, which would add to your colony stock pile.  Colonists would just go there for something to make them happy, an invisible item that doesn't go anywhere.  So they just go in and get the status "Got a souvenir" and that's add to their happiness for a while.  Possibly an item icon in their window indicating they are holding a souvenir already which will somehow break or be lost after several days, so they'd have to go back and get a new one every once in a while.

If you set up a mini shop thing like a kitchen sized table with a shop keep, you can attach a zone to it and set it up for supplies you want him to be able to sell.  Maybe he will take care of all negotiations and you can't set prices yourself but you'll get random money from each thing he sells.  You could even set up a visitor kitchen so visitors can request a meal and wait for it.  The request meal would have a higher threshold than "needing to eat right now before I starve" obviously, giving them time to wait.

I'd like a chief of the colony, who will help the mentality of the people while he's there.  Preventing mental break downs of people who are angry because of sleep or food or even just afraid of the dark like little pansies.   This would depend on his social skill as well so preventing a mental break wouldn't be 100%.  A chief dies, and the entire colony is stressed by this and will lose loyalty and faith, maybe even have fear for a while or just more stress. Same for if the chief goes mental, though it should be harder since a chief would need to keep his cool under most situations, so maybe he'd always have a +5 or +10 on him "Acting Chief"

With a random chance of visitors deciding they want to stay of their own free will, this would be a good way to get new colonists as well.  So after a visitor stays for a few days, he may decide to stay and become part of the colony.  You'd need to make him a new room or convert his room into a colonist bed.

Too many zones.  Too many doors.

open would just be nothing, no zones.

residents only might be a good one but then, travelers have never traveled through my base before.  Maybe just a door setting to prevent travelers.  Like the buttons on graves, just click animal icon or visitor icon and only colonists icon would be there with a green check and that would keep travelers out of your base, unless a colonist lets them in.  If you uncheck the colonists button, then you can lock your colonists inside or outside, such as during a raid where you don't want them leaving the base.  This would be your locked door.

A prisoner zone would be good, this would let your prisoners feel happy faster for letting them have a small fenced in area to run around in. So you could build a stone wall outdoors and have prisoner hall ways that let them go outside for a while.  Socialize with each other and enjoy being semi-free.  Increasing the chance of getting them to join your colony.

I also like tough doors.  Maybe just a class 2 door over our current which is stronger, thicker, and takes more power to use automatically, but is to heavy to open (or close) when there is no power.  Adding to the fact that you'd need batteries and such. During solar flares though, you're pretty well screwed.  I don't like solar flares because they effect even equipment deep underground.  Should be changed.  Anyhow, a thicker stronger door with higher power requirement would be good.  It'd be harder to break through for raiders.

If you are rich, raiders will want your stuff much more.

I like the idea of seeing enemy bases on the map, super strong well turret defended with sniper tower (for increased sniper range of one sniper raider) so that it would be nearly impossible for a player to take out unless they build up a colony, these raiders would then attack periodically and drop in new waves.  Of course, this means you can take them out before they build their base.  They can set up a base with the same schematics each time, and just perform whatever orders are nessicary, like dig out any rock within a certain area around their base to place walls and turrets, they'd have infinite resource stock piles of their own only usable by raiders, but they'd still need to walk to the stock pile and take 75 at a time to structures and start the building.  Once they have the coms array, they can call reinforcements and then once they have the turrets and sniper tower, you're pretty much never gonna get rid of them. 

I don't like the idea of z-index used for multi-level building, but I do like it in terms of removing a mountain, or digging a moat.  No one should be able to build or enter other levels.  -1 would be the lowest, and that'd be a moat.  There'd be no max height, it'd just be mountain. 0 is the level everyone is on, 1 is sky, 2 is shallow rock, 3 and up is high rock.  2 would turn into 1 if there is nothing under it supporting it.  Something like that, I posted a topic in suggestions about it. 

Yea, it's quite silly to have a tiny turret with the same size explosion.  I think he's trying to make turrets so bad that no one wants to use them.    They are already useless against snipers and random grenades that get close.

Maybe if a turret is detected, a sniper is always spawned with the wave and the wave waits behind the sniper till the turret is down.  Would be one new strategy for waves.  But then again small rooms like you've made, a sniper would be useless in.  Maybe the ability for the enemy to make new holes in rock. Tunnel into your base from another location.

Which was 3 days ago.  I didn't come out of my room for 2 days!  I forgot to eat, I forgot to drink, I forgot about literally everything.  xD  This is definitely my type of game. 

A friend gave me a copy of the previous update, the one just before Alpha 2, so unfortunately I don't own it, but now that I got the chance to try it, I definitely intend on buying it, at some point.  If I ever have money.  xD  I mean wow, 2 whole days of constant playing, only a break once in a while when I really really needed 'to go' and just stuck a few bits of food in the microwave for 30 seconds just to eat in between 9 hour long play sessions.  I don't think I've ever had a game distract me so very much.  xD  I wish I had stable income so I could buy it immediately.  xP

I'm just curious, where is the game saving names of people you edited?  One colony, the first colony I started, I named a scientists "Vas" "Vadum" and 2 other characters, and now every so often, they seem to pop up out of the blue.  Or just Vas as a Merc.  Maybe it's just coincidence that someone else has the nick name Vas?

Anyhow.  Once I do get the game, and can participate in the updates like Alpha 2, you'll be seeing a lot more suggestion and talk from me, as I am very creative with my ideas (as you may have already noticed) and think outside the box.  For example, my landing pads.  People were trying to find a way to make launchpads better, more efficient.  I thought of a way to change them into something entirely different and optimize it at the same time.  Fixing a few issues with it all at once.  Though I haven't gotten word on if the devs liked that yet so, I don't know if it was that good yet.  Just an example of how I think outside the box, rather than improving an existing object, I invented a new one to take it's place, and I am always as detailed as possible while planning out game balancing before I post.  One example of this is my Starbound mods.    Some of my server goers hate me now because I balanced out the uber op parts of my mods and the other mods on the server, making it a little harder on them. xD

What happened the first time you played Rimworld?

Yea, it does kinda suck when a mountain can't be removed because it's in your line of fire and has an infinite height to it.  Each layer should be numbered till it reaches 0, which is sky.  Metal roof and shallow rock would be 1, and anything higher would be 2 and up.  Then at least you can remove mini mountains easily since they won't likely be over 3, you'll just have to set blast charges and remotely blow them up till they fall and repeat and watch it fall once more then mine the remaining mountain and boom, it's a clear flat area which you can now shoot through.  It's better to not give the raiders anything to hide behind, otherwise they sit behind a wall and chunk grenades that kill absolutely everything at you.  1 grenade versus turret, dead turret, 1 grenade versus wall of sand bags, well there goes most of your sand bags and leaving your mostly damaged colonist feeling naked as he takes 20 bullets to the chest with no cover.  If they can't hide behind a mountain, they are doomed.

Then again you can always set traps, like leave one single piece of mountain block there holding up the top layer, then when you shoot it enough, it collapses and kills everyone hiding behind the wall piece in a single shot, more effective  that land mines, because it cleans up the mess for you

I'm not exactly sure  I like this set of music for the game.    Some of it is too techno for the game which is a more Firefly type game after all.  I think an older times, hardship, struggle for survive themed music would be better. It's hard to describe what kind of music I'm thinking of I suppose.  I'm sure they have a plan for music though in the end game. 

Z levels?  As in height?  I didn't mean make the mountain climbable.  I mean make it so it eventually dies out.  This would mean if you dig the same spot over and over and it keeps caving in, eventually you'd just have sky with no roof.  No going up and down in height, just to be able to remove roofing in an area where there is more than shallow roofing.  Like how shallow rock roof turns into rubble and high roof drops more dirt blocks, except it would eventually end.

If this is a no, why is that? 

Wouldn't it be nice if your planet wasn't such a barren wasteland?  I mean it rains almost CONSTANTLY, and there is no water, anywhere!  A small pond, a lake, or something?  Come on!  Maybe you land on a planet which has a lava lake too?  A small pool of lava either somewhere inside the mountain (magma till found, duh), or even just a surface lava pocket.  This would be useful for any number of things really.  Perhaps even a lake filled with tar, or poisonous water.  Both could be used, one for poison weapons, the other for paved roads for much higher speeds of movement or even making of goo weapons that slow the enemy down rather than doing damage or tar pits where an enemy walks over it and falls in and unless rescued, they die (Rescued via rope).  The lava lakes would be used for either filling a moat with lava (only way would be to tunnel it into the moat and build a bridge over it) or geothermal generators at a higher efficiency than steam vents.

So we have Water,
Drinking, putting out fires, increasing crop efficiency, and just generally very nice looking.

Lava,
increased geothermal generator efficiency, lava moats, random accident of finding and getting seriously hurt or dying in a deep deep mountain.  Making it more risky to excavate deep into a mountain.  Certain warnings in the rock would tell you that you are near lava, if you are paying attention that is.  This would make blasting the rock the way to open a magma pocket rather than mining into it a better way to mine in some areas.

Poison Lake,
Creating poison darts, poison traps which make a poison gas, poison grenades, and create a toxic atmosphere around the lake it's self which hurt your people the longer they are around it, can be purified into water if you have proper tech upgrades and proper tech.

Tar,
Tar pits, paved roads, speed reduction weapons or terrain.  Making terrain covered in tar would slow movement down in it much more than rocks and debris would, up to 50% or more.  Raiders would much rather avoid this terrain and go around it if they can.

What other liquids can we think of?

This is actually a bit better than my idea which I replied on another topic.  xP
http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=2182.msg20142#msg20142

So yea, to include some of my ideas from that post, an option for your people to be set to what they will do during an alert, either combat medic or rescue, front line defense, secondary defense, hide in a hole somewhere.

This is good, but maybe even a basic option for your colony could work too.  A single button you can click to set everyone on military mode, while each person will have 3 options, front lines, secondary defense, and hide.  You click this button and everyone goes to their designated zones.  If you have a front line zone, the people will attempt to get to the front lines or shoot any enemy in their way.  Same with secondary, for secondary zones.  This would be like inside your base in bottle neck locations that you set up for them.  People with pistols who aren't as effective as your front line people with grenades, incendiaries, and snipers.  The hiding people would be hiding in a well defended hole you build with several beds and a few lights and maybe even a stock pile of food so they don't go mentally insane while waiting for the battle to end.  They can still eat and sleep with a mild fear increase due to the military mode and stress would go up because of that.

Things like cameras and other technology that helps defend and alert people should be researched or gotten through trade.  Maybe you have a reverse engineering station to figure out how stuff works or you can just trade and get a new blueprint for how to build a technology.  This would be stuff like cameras to improve automated mini turret aim, sirens to alert people when raiders are near a certain area.  Like if you have multiple entrances to your very large base, you may be focused on one area and not even notice the other entrance is being penetrated with no resistance at all.

Still, a simple button to click to put everyone in military mode would be great, rather than trying to click everyone and set them, sometimes it just says varies and won't let you select R for drafting and then you have dumb people running out there to clean a speck of blood in the front lines.  Oh, maybe 4 modes by the way.  Instead of hiding, secondary and front line, a 4th option for healing/rescuing.  Nurses / doctors set aside to run out into combat and pull people in to help them or heal wounds while in combat (combat medics).  Then I could set all my useless people to rescue team so I won't lose anyone important in case they fail.

But yea, an option on each person to be able to set them to which of the 4 tasks they do when you click alert mode or military mode would be good.  I don't want to pause the game then look all over my map to make sure I find everyone and set them all to hide somewhere and hear "starving, mental break soon, mental break imminent" all fight long, then realize I forgot one important guy who was way out there in the field moving a stack of metal who gets 20v1ed because he was all alone out there when the raid began.

Wouldn't it be great if a mountain wasn't infinitely tall?  Maybe each level should have a number indicating how much more is above it.  So if the mountain caves in anywhere, the roof drops one level rather than just remaining "deep" or something.  I removed a tiny mini mountain outdoors once where it maybe had 13 squares total of high mountain.  I figured I could just re-dig what fell and get rid of that mountain all together, but that didn't end up happening.  It just dropped more mountain and infinitely kept dropping more.  The more cave-ins you have should cause the mountain to become more and more shallow in that spot till sky is revealed.

On the other side, we could have the ability to dig a moat, the reverse of a wall.  If there is a lake or ocean you can connect it to fill with water, or even get people to fill it using buckets by hauling large amounts of water.  Moats can have bridges built across them and present another choke point which raiders can't just shoot down.

A very basic idea that I thought about when I kept caving in a mountain for a while before realizing it was infinitely tall. I assume this may have possibly already been planned though?  At least the roof bit where each cave in reduces it's height.

Another idea I have fresh in my mind that I don't want to forget.  Since the game currently has no victory settings, I think a few of my victory methods might help in planning future methods for winning.

1. Victory by Escape.  You have enough science research done, enough metal and food, and whatever other supplies you'd need, to build a space ship and leave.  This requires you to have the proper research done, and build the space ship.  If you have 10 colonists or less, you only need a small space ship, a 2x2 sized ship, or maybe 2x3 sized, anyway. If you have 25 or less, you need slightly larger, 3x3 or 3x4 (the extra square would be for engine on both of these), if you have 50 or less, you'd need a larger ship, 4x4 or 4x5.  50 or more and you need the largest ship you can get, 5x5 or 5x6.  Each one taking increasing amount of supplies.  You can always get the research done, and build 5 small ships, or kill off some of your colony to leave behind corpses resulting in a dishonorable victory.  But if you do save every colonist, you get a victory.  I guess it'd need to detect if a colonist died of starvation or other methods that weren't raider kills or accidents to tell you dishonorable victory, but anyway.  That's one method of victory.

2. Survive for one year, 365 game days.  This would result in a window popping up and saying "Your colony has survived for 1 year on this wasteland of a planet.  It is likely that it can continue on without your help any further, you have achieved victory today.  Do you wish to stay and continue anyway?"  Of course this won't disable the story telling AI, maybe things will just get more difficult, or maybe you can even select "Yes, make things more difficult" in the options of continuing for another year.
This also comes in alternate forms, where you must survive 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, whatever.  To let the player choose when they want to claim victory.  You can even set the victory options in creating the new colony, if you choose 3 month, then raiders will get progressively harder towards the 90 day mark.  Which they already do.  Hah.  Same with the other options.  One year is quite a long long time after all.

3. Successfully negotiated alliances with merc groups or raiders.  This means that you'll have achieved victory by convincing mercenaries to defend your fort for you, or even blast down raiders before they can even land on the planet.  Or maybe you convinced raiders not to come back anymore, in any number of ways including fear, bribery, or are a really good smooth talker.  This victory method won't work till after day 50, so you have to survive at least till day 50 before you can get a merc leader to randomly appear or even a raider leader.  It'd require you to send someone out as a diplomat, unarmed but maybe you can possibly set him up a suicide vest just in case.  Killing the raider leader would either inspire revenge or fear.  75% chance of revenge, 25% chance of fear, resulting in a victory if fear.  Resulting in an ohshit mess if revenge as 3 times more raiders show up and join the frey.