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Hmm... Oh... wait, is it a game engine issue? MUST all coordinates be expressed in three figures because the engine demands it? But... if so, why does the engine support 3 axes?

Isn't the game done in Unity? If so, it has native 3d support so all gameobjects would require a z coordinate even if it is just a zero.

Right! Exactly! Unity REQUIRES a sacr-- ehh, the Z-coordinate (right?).

Obviously creating multiple levels would be its own challenge but would it wreck the performance? Personally, I don't think so but of course it depends how bigass of a colony the player would build. It wouldn't be any different from building the same bigass colony on one Z-level. The difference would be that the game wouldn't necessarily have to render the action that takes place outside the current Z-level, so having multiple levels could even HELP the performance.

We'd have to consider HOW MANY Z-levels would we allow and how much action do we allow to happen in other Z-levels. At least in the beginning there wouldn't be much action to calculate since air and solid ground are pretty static... Unless Tynan were to add swarms of birds or other flying objects. Liquids are also currently entirely absent, and liquids are a performance killer in Dwarf Fortress.

Then there's a whole other bunch of gameplay concerns, such as shooting from a higher elevation. Realistically height is an advantage in infantry combat but in pure mathematical terms gaining height also increases distance to the target, which in turn "logically" thinking would yield greater hit penalty... when it logically shouldn't. Good luck finding a balance with providing an appropriate bonus from height. And what about weapon range? Should a weapon's range be a strict sphere or should a height advantage enable increased ranges for all weapons? As the shooter gains elevation, what happens to the shape of the "bubble", and in this case "bubble" is a visual representation of a gun's reach. One thing is sure - it can't be a strict sphere. The "bubble" stretches as height is gained.

After that, we'd have to consider if mortar shells would have an actual flight path, and should there be a risk of unintentionally hitting tiles on other Z-levels. Should the pawns be able to target surface objects with mortars if the mortar was at the bottom of a deep vertical pit, but with eyeline to the sky. What if it's a narrow pit with barely enough room to get a non-vertical firing angle? Of course there could be a special case that if a pit mortar has X tiles dug out around it (and everything above it) on each Z-level, it could shoot anything, X being 1-4. But then again, could there ever be a possibility that a blocking tile would appear in the shaft and ruin the whole firing ability?

Also, drop pods. There would always be a chance that their payload would end up on multiple levels but that might actually be just a convenience problem. Double click to select the pod payload? Triple click?

Fall damage, climbing ability, pathfinding, cover from inter-Z-level gunfire, what else am I not thinking of? The existence of inter-Z-level floors which are infinitely thin in Dwarf Fortress?

[m]

What strikes me now is that all RimWorld muffalos are WHITE. IIRC white buffalos do exist but they're extremely rare. Does this mean... Will we... will we see a rare brown muffalo at some point?

[surely]

On the other hand, if you look at a save file with a text editor, you can see coordinates for all the items on the map expressed in three figures, as opposed to two (X and Y coordinates). Now why is that if not for future reservation of Z-axis? 

For example:

Code Select Expand

<thing Class="Equipment">
<def>Gun_M24Rifle</def>
<id>Gun_M24Rifle2267622</id>
<pos>(107, 0, 28)</pos>
<health>100</health>
<forbidden>True</forbidden>

Position 107,0,28?
Oh, surely the 0 is completely redundant. 
Hmm... Oh... wait, is it a game engine issue? MUST all coordinates be expressed in three figures because the engine demands it? But... if so, why does the engine support 3 axes?

You need to evaluate your parenting.

I couldn't decide if I should say
A) Whoa, hey, let's not get off-topic here.
or
B) Yeah, I know, I've gone soft on the kid.

Relax, I have no kids. By which I don't mean I've disowned them, or that I had some until I sold them all to a wealthy Belgian family whose dad shot blanks, but instead I mean I've never had any to begin with. I think I'd make a great dad though. Yeah. I mean, if I had a kid now, 7 years from now we could start playing RimWorld together at which point it should be a pretty matured game, as in hopefully it won't take a week to shoot a Centipede to death and cannibalism will be bit more expanded by then.

Wait, why are you looking at me like that again?

Let's take a closer look at Candice. She is A) prone to anger, B) gullible (and already hilarious at this point) but then she's C) incapable of violence! In my mind she's a more vulgar version of Daffy Duck, who gets fits of (non-violent) rage... with a lisp.

"Yooou thonth of a bitheth. I'll thfucking kill all of you bathdardth for thif outrage. Headth will roll."

Oh, did you know that the word 'gullible' isn't in any English dictionary?

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It occurs to me that instead of placing sandbags in front of the turrets, one should instead place a small stone wall BEHIND each turret. That is to limit their explosion effect. You could then use the wall corners as cover as well. But then again, it comes down to a particular turret - whether we want or don't want it to explode with maximum force. Turrets can be applied as expensive workaround blasting charges. The trick is to catch the invaders by surprise so that they engage the turret at close range.

This appears to be a losing battle, mortars are  to in accurate and your base is a larger target then there mortar then their setup.

Wanna try typing that sentence again?

Anyway, using mortars likely means micromanagement no matter what. However, as I read this, it occurred to me it might wise to make sure the mortar surroundings are beautiful and well-lit, to counter the hunger and fatigue. One might even put meal or berry stockpiles near mortars for quickest possible snack when the colonists finally undraft themselves. Tables? Chairs?

If you go outside against siegers, bring (nothing but) sniper rifles. Siegers never attack you unless they spot you. Approach slowly and carefully and take out their snipers and mortars, whichever ones are closest.

Personally, I don't start bombarding them with my mortars until THEIR mortars have been built. Unbuilt mortars do not explode. Once their mortars have been blasted to bits, it's time to leave the rest of the siegers to rot. Starve, ye bastards.

Turrets use their own gun. That gun's innate accuracy properties and range are identical to the L-15 LMG. Burst size is obviously three instead of LMG's five, and there are other minor negligible differences. The gun data is in Weapons_Guns.xml. Search for 'improvised'. I can only guess what improvised turret's Shooting skill is.

There are two possibilities:
- Turrets have the Shooting skill, same as all humanoid pawns (and possibly mechanoids). My guess it's something between 3 and 10.
- Turrets don't use Shooting skill, and instead they rely purely on the gun's accuracy, or some other auxiliary static number.

I wonder if there is a point to having two cores? Can you build two ships lol? They should be used for something else maybe...or possibly sold for a lot of silver. Maybe we could build robotic workers/soldiers out of metal and an A.I. core?

No point really, unless you want to jack up the colony value. Having the AI core in your stockpile or homezone boosts your colony's value up by several thousands, which in turn affects raid sizes. I noticed its value when I started getting increasingly worried about my colony value and started investigating building and item values. So, out of curiosity, I took the stockpile away from the AI core, forbade it and removed a single homezone tile over it and colony value dropped by thousands. Go figure. I'm sure its exact value is in the game files somewhere.

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with mechanoids. They just stop being fun after a short while. They're totally fun if they cross paths with raiders but other than that they're no different from raiders except that they don't get hungry or demoralized and they don't drop weapons (save miniguns), which is to say they're like raiders except simpler and less interesting. Centipedes are a grindfest no matter what. It's just not fun when you get three or more of them.

It's not so much about the damage they deal but when Tynan decided to cut the healing rate, it added to the overall pain. At the same time, medkits and Medical skill continue to taunt us with their uselessness, which I think is almost an insult at this point, since something like healing (health restoration) is a core element to any fighting game. Meanwhile Tynan fiddles with adding hats and pants, since they're apparently more important.

Mortars don't do jack, not even against groups of Centipedes... presumably unless you have dozens of mortars, an equal amount of colonists to man them, and a huge map so that Centipedes have to spend more time crawling through the terrain to your base (never settle down near the map edge). It would be probably glorious to barrage a group of Centipedes to death with a field of mortars, but in the same vein, when you build mortars, your colony value goes up, which in turn ups the amount of Centipedes that arrive next... Still worth doing? Still worth the micromanagement?

9 Scythers attacking once is a pain, since they outrange turrets. The second time Scythers arrive is just grounds for quickload. I'd rather build turrets and blow them up myself while hurting my colonists in the process than deal with Scythers. Scythers in general deny you the option to have your colony in an open terrain. City wall becomes mandatory unless perhaps one "cleverly" hides his turrets among the buildings and makes sure they don't take out anything valuable if they ever blow up.

EDIT: *coughcough* It appears Tynan had been working on the medical and anatomy aspect for the Alpha 6 all this time. *COUGH* *clears throat*. Don't I feel like a douche now. Remember that time when your kid promised to do something and a day later the thing isn't done and then you start loading your gun and just when you're about to pull the trigger the kid goes "No wait! Dad! I did it! Look! Don't shoot!" and you know in the back of your mind your kid's word is good in that if he says he did something he doesn't talk crap like that but you still kinda want to shoot past him and go like "Looks like I missed, son. You got lucky." because he dawdled and he never came to tell you he got the thing done?

A squirrel went mad and started attacking an exterior powered door. None of my guys went out that door so it never changed target. Every so often, somebody would stop by and repair the door back to full health. After about two days of nothing but tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap the squirrel died of starvation.

Do you still sometimes think you hear something thudding away at your door? Do you regret that you didn't feed the squirrel every now and then, leaving it a portion of your harvest as an offering?

To get excitement, don't kill Centipedes that chill out on the other side of the map.

Solar flares should take R-4 Charge Rifles offline as well.

I had a colonist who's primary occupation was "pop star". She was terrible at everything but art.

I made her butcher animals and mine ore.

Oh jeez yes! I had a pop star once, too. "Sexual deviant" was one of her traits. Couldn't escape the Miley Cyrus mental association. With her Social skill 15 (+double flame), prisoner recruitment was a breeze. At least I THINK it's her Social skill that made all future recruitment easy. Absolutely useless for anything else, though. She played her part until she faced a large bald smelly tribal who was unimpressed by her shenanigans. Hold on, Miley! We'll save you! Quickly! Turn on ALL the turrets! Miley survived the "assistance" but got incapacitated. On top of that, she suffered from starvation and ugly environment. She recovers just enough to get up and soon after decides to "leave". Yeah... no. Nuh uh. Off to rehabilitation you go, Miley! IT TOOK WEEKS to convince her to join back because she was not only my best recruiter but also my ONLY recruiter. All the other colonists were at Social 3 or incapable.

"Oh PLEEEASE, Miley. Won't you PLEEEASE join us again. We WANT you to join us. We NEED you."

- Wave of 45 squirrels. Mowed them down with 6 hardcore, armed-to-the-teeth colonists + 4 turrets. But wait, there's more. Another psychic wave: 30-something boomrats. Hard to tell how many because their corpses burned down afterwards. Needed a reload after that one... Pure insanity and hilarity.

- There's a YouTuber by the name Blitzkriegsler who uploads RimWorld letsplays. Vladimir the Politician the colonist. Blitz had put him to fetch something from an active battlefield. Brave little Vlad dodges and catches bullets like a goddamn action hero, running like Usain Bolt, zigzagging in the midst of the agave plants and bushes. The bullets wear him down to 4 HP. Blitz holds his breath as Vlad runs out of the chaos. Incoming gunfire quiets down as Vlad is getting out of range. Then comes the unexpected sniper shot somewhere off the screen and poor little Vlad plops to the ground, face down in the mud.

- Weirdest character I ever had was a female named Maskinne(?). Once I ordered her to put out a fire by drafting her and placing her next to a fire. What does she do? Nothing. She just stands there and I just stare at her faceless head in shock and it's like she's staring back at me. I'm horrified, as stuff is on fire! A thought occurs to me. "Wait, was she... was she the pyromaniac?" Open character sheet. Indeed she's the pyromaniac I thought I'd seen earlier. I burst into laughter as I thought that's the reason why she just stood there watching stuff burn. Creepy AND funny. However, she was also incapable of violence which was the actual reason why she didn't "attack" the fire. She had no problem putting out fires in civilian mode.

- A few alphas back had an empath go berserk (mental break). "Incapable of violence" my ass. She defeated my best melee fighter. Imagine Deanna Troi raging.

- Tribals decided to pull back from an attack but not before kidnapping my people. One of my incapped colonists got picked up SIX TIMES and every time his would-be snatcher was shot dead. Imagine experiencing sort of treatment. Upsy daisy! OOPH! Here we go! UNGH! You're coming with me! THUD! You look delicious! SPLAT!

- This one time I was placing buildings, got my view zoomed in all the way. To the side is the butcher's table and the animal corpse stockpile. I see in my sideview a colonist drop off a muffalo corpse. "But... no one's hunting... OH GOD!" I had forgotten to turn off the hunting from a fresh recruit, a badass melee specialist. While I was diddlying with wire placement and batteries he had been inserting his fists in a muffalo's face.

- Huge raid. Call for help. Call two factions. Spend thousands on reinforcements and bribes. In a situation like that a person should really check that the assisting factions aren't hostile to each other... *facepalm*