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embrasures make sense conceptually but the current AI has no way good way of dealing with them. the current embrasure mods which act as wall which you can shoot through all just destroy the difficulty of raids and man hunter packs. So while they make conceptually their is no way I can see of implementing something like them without destroying the difficulty of 2 red events, and greatly reducing the difficulty of the other red events.

Thing is, I see that as a flaw of the red events, not the embrasures.  As stated in the description of the game on this site's homepage,

RimWorld is not designed as a competitive strategy game, but as a story generator. It's not about winning and losing - it's about the drama, tragedy, and comedy that goes on in your colony.

Forcing characters to hold idiot balls in order to increase the difficulty of strategic challenges does not make for a good story.  If the game relies on hamstringing my colonists by preventing them from using common sense solutions in order to make certain events pose a threat, then those events should be reexamined instead of removing their ability to build walls with small holes in them while allowing them the ability to build interstellar spacecraft.

For raids, give them siege weaponry like covered rams to help get close and smash down walls/doors/embrasures, and the ability to pull firearms through embrasures with melee attacks to deprive defenders of their firearms.  Add in weapons like catapults to attack walls directly from range and breach your defenses, instead of blindly charging in or destroying everything they ostensibly want to steal with random mortar strikes.

Manhunter packs should be removed, in my opinion.  All they do is necessitate a large perimeter wall that contains all your fields and such, preventing them from being a threat, and if they wander into your defenses, a huge surplus of meat.  Now that hungry carnivores will naturally attack colonists with they are the best source of food, I wonder if we even still need Manhunters in general.

[poorly. What I actually said was]

But it is too easy. ... We need more events like infestation (not necessarily of this strength) instead of fewer.

You're exactly making his point with this response; it could be summarized as "you shouldn't be able to play the game that way".

It could be summarized like that, but poorly. What I actually said was that you should be able to play the game that way, but it should be harder than in Dwarf Fortress. Humans are not dwarves. They're not burrowing animals. They're not short, stocky, muscular and used to hard work. In Rimworld, most of them are effeminate, fussy, overweight, traumatized or full of themselves. There are many backgrounds like cooks, artists, empaths, doctors, scientists, sex slaves, housemates, medieval lords, spies, clerks, social workers. Very few are miners, oafs, or other physical workers.

The mechanics ? Cabin fever is absolutely trivial. Serious cabin fewer is mitigated by a 2 minute (in-game time) visit to the outside. It's actually the opposite ! There are mood bonuses for indoor areas (spacious indoors, impressive dining room, decent bedroom), penalties for working outside, but no bonuses whatsover for having a nice park or a picnic table. To the point where the most effective outside colony is one that mimic an underground base. Build your base like a termite mound, a single building with rooms sharing walls.

Outdoors is a hostile, hostile world where enemies fall from the sky and bears randomly decide to hunt your farmers. Underground bases with their infestation problems still look cozy by comparison.

Personally, I think that if embrasures were allowed, tunneling under a mountain would suddenly become a lot less popular.  Modern open cities are just that, modern.  Go back even a few hundred years, and you'll find that most towns and cities had walls with things like arrowslits, crenelations, and other means of allowing defenders to protect themselves while fighting off attackers. 

An interesting set of battles to look at are the two big ones described in this video between the British and the Zulu, the first at Isandlwana, and the second at Rorke's Drift. (I am using this for two reasons, as it was a video easy to find that gives a good overview, and it has a small group with a significant technological advantage defending against a massively outnumbering enemy force armed with low-tech weapons, which is a very common situation in-game.)

https://youtu.be/KG_mbCgp_zU?t=3m36s

The first battle was approximately 20,000 Zulu against about 1,800 British, the latter with firearms but no defenses, ordered to form up in a line. The second was about 4,000 Zulu against about 140 British, with the latter having defenses consisting of makeshift sandbags, barricades (that they could fire through), and embrasures.  The first battle ended in a total defeat of the British, with few survivors, while the second ended with 17 British dead, about that many wounded, while about 850 Zulus were lost.

When the discussion turns to building outside, and to how combat is "meant" to work, the impression I usually get is that situations like Isandlwana are desired, given all the talk about forcing colonists to go outside their defenses to fight off enemies, instead of intelligently using the defensive structures we are allowed to have. (All the complaints about things like killboxes are part of this as well.)  I've seen it mentioned that the mods that add embrasures completely wreck game balance, something that I am completely fine with given how effective these sorts of defenses were in real life, which is why using them was standard practice.


Honestly, if we lost the ability to build auto-turrets, in return for gaining embrasures, I'd be perfectly fine with that.

I'd prefer a "carrot" to encourage building outside of mountains, instead of a "stick" to punish building into mountains.

It really feels like a quite a few of the things in this game were added or changed as sticks to punish certain playstyles.  Infestations for mountain bases, sappers for killboxers/heavy trappers, the removal of the ability to set targets for autoturrets, ect.  They all punish the most successful playstyles without addressing the reasons why those playstyles became dominant while others faded away.

What about the portion of energy derived from the chemicals absorbed by the plant?

Sorry, didn't understand that one.
AFAIK usual plants don't utilize much of external chemical energy. They are autotrophic.
If you mean fertilizer, it is not about energy (plants except carnivorous and parasitic ones cannot digest organics) but about salts containing (among other important things) nitrogen and phosphorus - it is extra building material.
What exactly do you mean?

Sorry, it has been a while since I thought about plant growth, and I misremembered how it works.  After doing a bit of googling, it appears what I was thinking of was the respiration portion of the plant growth cycle. My bad.

Also, plants apparently grow faster at night than during the day, so the game is portraying it completely backwards.

I'd like to have the option to use alternate materials to roof my buildings. The different materials could allow for different heat retention, and different room beauties (or building beauty, if the colonists can be made to look at buildings as a whole.)

This, in conjunction with the addition of a glass material, could be used to make actual greenhouses.

Good thing.
But the law of energy conservation should be in place.
So that you can't grow organics for refinery using sunlamp and then produce chemfuel with more contained energy (if put into generator) than it was put in by sunlamp (+hydro if the process was sped up).
There should be a loss.

What about the portion of energy derived from the chemicals absorbed by the plant?

That said, I'd love if we could build actual greenhouses, with glass walls and roofs. Actually, going to make a thread for a that.

We will need manhunter sharks too then.

Manhunter landsharks, that can chase you even when you get out of the water.

I'd like to suggest two potential uses for chemfuel:

Powering fueled generators.

Powering fueled stoves.


I can't recall if there are any other things like those, that can only take wood as fuel, but if there are, chemfuel should be viable as a way to fuel those as well.

I posted this in the comments on the blog, as I had somehow forgotten about this subforum, so I am reposting this here, with some tweaks:

Watching the video, here's an idea I had for something else that could be done with encounter maps: Outposts and Caravanserai. (Which would basically be the same thing, but used for different purposes.)

For outposts, lets say you've exhausted all your surface steel, and don't have access to deep drilling. To get more steel without needing to buy it, you'd send a caravan to a nearby mountain or hills hex, and set up an outpost. That would just create a semi-permanent encounter map that you'd be able to mine in, then bring what you'd gathered back to your home base.

Caravanserai would be the same, but instead of being intended for resource gathering, they'd be supply drops and semi-secure places for caravans to rest and heal, or relay points for drop pods.  For example, instead of the people at your home base always knowing exactly where caravans are to send drop pods with food or meds with drop pods, they would instead target the caravanserai, send the supplies there, and the caravans would know where to head to resupply. (That lack of knowledge would be an RP thing, I'm not suggesting a fog of war or anything like that.)  Perhaps once the system is made a bit more complex, AI caravans could head for your caravanserai as well, and two caravans could meet up and trade with each other.


These wouldn't be full bases, just encounter maps that stick around until you decide to abandon the outpost.  Abandoning it should be more than just having all your colonists leave it.  I'd love to be able to leave a mining outpost in fall with the intent to come back in the spring, only to find that it has been ransacked while I was gone.

This mod allows you to draft any pawn. Note that it does a bit of code injection, so it doesn't work with other mods that modify how drafting works, such as Defensive Positions.

Useful for setting up scenes for screenshots or for cheating! Thanks to Jorlem for the idea!

Stream download: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=780868988
Stand alone: http://merthsoft.com/DraftAnything.zip

License is WTFPL.

Thank you for making it!

Good news, my friend! I made a mod to allow you to do just this:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=26830.0

Enjoy! And thanks for the cool idea!

Awesome, thank you!

Does anyone know if there is a mod available that would allow me to draft animals, so I can position them manually?  I'm trying to pose pawns to illustrate a scene, and it would be very useful if I could pose the animals as well as the colonist pawns. 

I noticed an oddity/bug when setting up a few characters to illustrate a a scene.  Specifically, if the biological and chronological ages are set to the same value, the chronological age is reduced by one:






Also, is there a way to spawn new prepared characters into an existing save?  Or will I need to start a new landing whenever I need to add more actors?

Thing is, the OP was trying to stay low-tech(if you actually read it).  Gimmicks are what he was looking for.

I doubt threats stay low-tech even if the player does.  Probably was going to rage-quit eventually.

Nah, I knew I'd get wiped out sooner or later (likely sooner), I intended this colony to be a "how long can it last" sort of thing.  I was just really frustrated when a mechanic I thought worked one way, didn't.  When my door got smashed down, I thought that the mechanic had just been changed to allow the manhunters to attack doors freely, or there was a bug causing that behavior.  Now that I know that they only attack doors that they see people going through, I can plan for that.  Had I known that earlier, I probably would have sent the last colonist or two to hide in one of my houses, or one of the other outbuildings, instead of going to the central commons building.

The door was wooden, but the last person went through the door while the boars were still offscreen.  Not really a fan of this.  Shouldn't the change made to punish abusive gameplay only occur when a player is actually doing so?