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Smooth stone floors and rough rock walls can be pretty beautiful:

http://photos.amazingezone.com/art/amazing-art-work-at-the-stockholm-underground-metro-stations

Hacking them to turn against the colonists would be really annoying and suggests some pretty high-end  equipment on the part of the enemy. However, having a turret go haywire could be quite amusing. If it just started randomly shooting at anything in range, say, pirate or colonist or turret or animal, or if it started spinning round, firing single bullets at a constant rate. This way, it doesn't become an enemy, just a battlefield hazard.

Cross your fingers and hope some locals pass by before you all go nuts. If they do, wait till they are close and then free the beasties and see if the visitors can soften them up for you.

Lots of ideas... but overall I think this is really a matter of incident design, not so much trying to make the storytellers do more with their currently very limited palette.

How reactive to colony conditions are the storytellers? I know they keep an eye on population, for instance, and wealth, but do they take into account any other markers when picking an event?

I was just thinking that some of the more subtle statistics for a colony might be  good markers for interesting plot devices. So, for instance, should a colony be too heavily invested in a particular crop (I have been known to try and corner the Devilstrand futures market) there could be a blight that affects only that crop, a blight which is slow and a cure for which must be researched before the last plant dies or that crop becomes forever unavailable.

Also, combining events might be interesting so that if you get an eclipse, say, in the first three months, local tribes become convinced that you are responsible and launch an immediate raid.

You might also use sub-species of some current events. The alphabeaver threat, as one example, could be mutated. So, instead of alphabeavers, perhaps a migrating herd of muffalo happen to be en route and you have planted your crops in their path. The won't stop for walls, they'll just bulldozer their way through, eat your crops, and destroy every man-made obstacle in their path. Or the local tribes turn up as winter falls to hunt every animal on your map; do you starve or go to war?

The other thing I was wondering was whether you could add a couple of story-tellers whose challenges stem from starting conditions. So maybe one is set on a world where electrical devices are unusable, so that your survival depends on the more rustic (campfires only, no refrigeration) this storyteller might not have mechanoid attacks but have more tribal incidents. Or, you might have one on a world where your colonists arrive in power armour and with charge rifles as space marshalls sent to sort out a planet that no longer has tribes but does have one lone outlander settlement and lots and lots of pirates or mechs.

Of course, I am fully aware that my airy suggestions fail dismally to take into account any of the effort and grind you have to put in to this.

I think it's an oversight, but herbal medicine would not be a good way to make money even if it could be sold. It takes a long time to grow and only yields 1 pack of medicine worth $5, while rice grows 3 times faster, has better bonus for rich soil and yields $8-$12 worth of food when harvested.

Personally, I think this an oversight. True, I don't know how society has changed in the future, but, to date, I have never received unsolicited mail telling me I can improve my staying power and the size of my penis through rice...

To be able to capture prisoners, make a room with a couple of beds in. Once you have done so, click on one of the beds and you should see a couple of options at the bottom of the screen. One of them says 'Set for Prisoners'. Choose that and the room is automatically set as a cell. Once that is done you will be able to capture any enemies who are wounded.

Smoothing is great for your construction skill, though. Because there are no breaks to fetch materials, it becomes a constant experience task.

It'd be great if we could put concrete on top of mud. The description for it says we must first dig out a hole for the concrete to go into anyway. This way, silly things like this can be circumvented:
http://imgur.com/gallery/sEkhfar/

Isn't that just showing red because of the lack of resources in your stockpile? You should still be able to click it and lay a blueprint, I think (although I am, notoriously, prone to imagining things).

Eventually, I would like to see breakdowns have more interesting, and possibly more challenging, symptoms. Unfortunately, my colonists are generally not too unstable, so I only ever seem to get them wandering, bingeing, or, in the case of prisoner fails, going berserk. However, I think there is room for some occasional 'special' psychoses. For instance:

A colonist who goes through a cathartic experience might, in a small number of cases, get a permanent low-level increase to their artistic skill - or a massive temporary skill-boost or a temporary halving of their ability if they are normally very artistic.

A colonist might develop an obsession with only eating raw food, say, for a couple of weeks or, even worse, only one type of raw food (usually whatever you could grow but aren't).

A colonist might develop a  week-long, burning hatred for one species of animal and insist on melee attacking any they see during that time or, for real high stakes, might do the same with members of your friendliest neighbouring faction.

A colonist might temporarily 'defect' to the Mechanoid cause the next time they feel the psychic drone of a crashed ship-part.

A colonist might insist on wearing no clothes for a week and sleeping outside - which could be a real problem in the tundra.

I just think that, with a limited number of colonists, mental health could have a much more interesting role in providing minor, but not normally colony-threatening, challenges between raids.

Don't forget carpets. I suppose they might slow movement by a miniscule amount but increase beauty and maybe even have a minute comfort buff.

The problem with the separate stoves route is that the task is reset each time a meal is completed. If, as I do, you have a central freezer for meal deposit, then after that first run-through, the cooks will prioritise their choice of stove based on which is nearest to the cooler and not on which one they used to cook the last meal. Therefore, the only thing to do is have a spot for deposit that is right by the stove and either micromanage the hauling or waste an extra pawn's time by using them as a dedicated meal hauler. Add in to this equation the fact that they have to go get the ingredients from a stockpile and the fact that different cooking times for meals based on quality and the cooks' skill levels, and the mechanics become really complicated.

Crikey, I started this reply to make a logical point and all I have done is highlight to myself how mind bogglingly complex just one little AI decision process can be from Tynan's side. Goodness only knows how he can wrap his head round the game mechanics for the whole project.

How about just renaming them to 'leggings' or 'legwear'? Since you can't actually see them, both terms could cover any variety of lower garments you'd care to imagine: chaps, chinos, jeans, greaves, kilts, shorts, flares, purple velvet loon pants...

It would be awesome if cooks could be prioritised to choose butchery over brewing if there are no meals billed for production. I mean, they have to walk past the pile of carcasses on their way to the distillery, you'd think they would do something about them before they rot. This would take a major bottleneck out of running an efficient experiment umm.. colony.

Similarly, and I think this might be slightly more difficult, would be if there was some way growers could give precedence to harvesting food crops before drugs, hops, or textiles when presented with two ripe plants. Sometimes, starving victims um.. colonists are to be found determinedly reaping devilstrand when a field of strawberries glistens juicily in the afternoon sun just yards from their feet.

I know I'm a newcomer, and I apologise for butting in to this, but I really don't understand the argument that's going on. I would assume that any FoW mechanic would be something that one would be able to activate at the point of choosing a story teller, not that it would be a mandatory condition for all game starts. If so, there is no reason to take a dogmatic stance against it.

Personally, I love RW for the base-building more than the combat, so I would be very unlikely to choose to use FoW in my games, but I see no reason for it not to be included. Or, if it is an option, I'd quite like to see it as off by default on Phoebe and Cassandra and on by default on Randy, since that seems to suit.

I suppose, the real divisions are two-fold. Firstly, you have the base-builders, for whom combat is one of the necessary obstacles to their creations, versus the strategists, who see the creation of their base as one of the necessary tools in their conflict - both seem to have reflexive stances on the principle of FoW, almost as if it is a moral decision that must be resolved. Secondly, you have those who really feel the need for an ending or a target and those who are more than happy simply to potter along, until they get bored or have a brainwave, and don't care whether there is a sense of completion or not.

I'm sure, eventually, some form of FoW will be introduced, and I will welcome that additional feature as I welcome all the others. However, I don't believe that, at it's current stage of development, RW needs FoW more than it needs other aspects of the game tweaking. I'm sure that many of those who are eager for FoW will agree that their gaming experience will be improved to a greater extent through things like improved AI and better use of melee rather than simply flinging a blanket over the fighting as it exists now.

When it all comes down to it, there are fundamentally different ways to approach RW, either as a combat game or a sandbox builder. I suspect that most players fall into the mess in the middle and love the game all the more for it. For me, it's to the credit of Tynan and everybody else who is helping realise this game, that RW can appeal to both camps and that it can provoke such impassioned debate.

Sorry, I'm a sententious git at times.

I've been thinking about the possibilities offered by the power conduit system and thought there might be potential for an extension to it. This would involve introducing new research possibilities as well as new functionality. The way I am imagining it, research projects would unlock new types of conduit that it would be possible to overlay on sections of the power network. Each upgrade would require an extra resource as well as a previous research completion and, of course, the cost of the basic conduit.

1) Underfloor Heating
Requirements: Geothermal Power
Cost: 1 plasteel per length.

The heating conduit would have to run directly from a geothermal power plant to be effective, you can't just put in isolated pockets. The heat provided would be set from a core thermostat at the power-plant end.

2) EM Field
Requirements: Ship Power Plant
Cost: 1 Uranium per length.

EM Field Conduits would have to be directly linked to your ship power plant by normal conduits and would have to be placed outside. Their effect, when engaged, would be to strip shields from anyone passing over them. They would not do any damage at all. The idea here is simply to give one a fighting chance against overwhelming melee raids.

3) Remote Turret Control
Requirements: Communications Console & AI Core, Plasteel Turrets
Cost: 1 Gold and 5 Silver per length.

The plasteel turrets would need to be directly linked to your communications console to become aim-able and a colonist will have to man the comms. All connected turrets will now be independently aim-able.

I imagine that the conduit view would be the same as normal (grey/blue) but with a toggled overlay for the 3 upgraded types so you can see their respective paths and networks (in my head it's red for 1, green for 2, and gold for 3).

I don't think any of these ideas would be game-breakers, and I've tried to ensure that they would only be possible at later stages in the game, and would like to know what people think.

I should stress that I have no idea how difficult or simple this would be to implement (everything Tynan does seems like magic to me), so please be gentle when you point out any problems with my blithely ignorant approach!