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Messages - nnescio

#16
Quote from: ShadowDragon8685 on November 30, 2013, 03:32:58 AM
Does anyone else do this - keep a prisoner around to have your social monkeys (the nobs and courtesans and con artists, assuming you don't do as I do and put the con artists to work at hard labor,) gab at them, spamming "friendly chats" to grind up their Social abilities?

I've got some poor schmuck of a male con artist locked up in my fortress (which has been since the beginning a girls-only place, just for the hell of it,) and he's constantly being gabbed at by two nobs and three courtesans.

I wonder what the poor bastard must think. (Or what they're doing to him. Bwahahahaha. He loves this place, he's happier than all of my actual colonists.)

Also, if you can stand having someone's labor missing for a bit, the best cure for the sad and grumpies is to be thrown in jail and gabbed at until your loyalty is maxxed out. There's something fundamentally wrong, in a funny, hilarious way, when throwing someone in irons to cure an imminent mental break results in them getting out of your prison happier than they've ever been before.

Yep, I do both. I always think of the latter as mandatory psychiatric treatment (with straitjackets as restraints).
#17
General Discussion / Re: How to Increase Happiness???
November 29, 2013, 08:23:41 PM
Quote from: ShadowDragon8685 on November 26, 2013, 03:29:01 AM
Quote from: nnescio on November 24, 2013, 03:30:20 AM
Pots block movement, but offer no* cover.

(*Or maybe it does, but it shows up as 0%)

They don't need to offer cover. The wall offers cover. The pots just need to be there to prevent hostiles from pathing through the sandbags and getting into melee.

If you have sandbags adjacent to a wall, they both provide cover (assuming a colonist is near both).

Still, the flowerpot method would work. Just use...


P P P
WSWSWSW

instead.
#18
General Discussion / Re: How to Increase Happiness???
November 24, 2013, 03:30:20 AM
Quote from: ShadowDragon8685 on November 24, 2013, 02:10:18 AM
Quote from: Merry76 on November 23, 2013, 04:51:34 AMIf you want happy & loyal people, you have to plaster EVERYTHING with carpets and line the walls with flowerpots. Seriously, my bases look like gardening stores sometimes.

Can people path through flowerpots? If not, it seems to me that flowerpots would be better than sandbags at the old WSWSWSWSWS pattern. Especially if you set up a firing line where there was no cover whatsoever and raiders had to either beat on pots or doors to get at your colonists, and double-especially if you set it up so colonists could leg it through doors when their pots were almost destroyed.

Pots block movement, but offer no* cover.

(*Or maybe it does, but it shows up as 0%)
#19
General Discussion / Re: Minimum room size
November 23, 2013, 07:55:17 PM
Quote from: Cryotech on November 23, 2013, 06:39:44 PM
What's the minimum room size you may create, without colonists feeling claustrophobic?

<7 walkable tiles: Very cramped (-10 happiness)
<27 walkable tiles: Cramped (-5 happiness)

So, the minimum room size is 7x4 (interior dimensions), with room for one flower pot, or 6x5, with room for three flower pots (or one flower pot and one equipment rack).

If you want to save space, go with 3x3 rooms with two flower pots. The beauty bonuses help cancel the "cramped" penalties. Flower pots are more effective in smaller rooms due to their ridiculously small effect radius (roughly two tiles).
#20
General Discussion / Re: How to Increase Happiness???
November 21, 2013, 11:00:33 PM
Quote from: iReaperzxz on November 21, 2013, 09:50:29 PM
This is the only thing that I have run into that I do not know how to fix?
What helps happiness and gets rid of fear?

Nothing gets rid of fear (other than removing conditions that cause fear without a set duration, like darkness). Or, in other words, penalties to fear are nonexistent.

The standard method to raise happiness is to carpet rooms and put potted plants in them. This raises the "beauty" ratings of the surroundings and increases the colonists' happiness. Unfortunately, the happiness increases don't last a set duration, and disappear immediately when your colonist leaves the room.

(Flower pots only have a effect when a colonist is within 2 tiles of them. This is ridiculously short, making them impractical except in the most frequently visited areas, like bedrooms and dining rooms. Also, the bonus to beauty seems to disappear when a colonist is sleeping, as they can no longer see the pot.)

There are three other bonuses to happiness. These actually last for a set duration, unlike beauty bonuses. The first is the "new colony bonus", making it useless except for your first three colonists, and only on the first ten days. The second is the "social chat" bonus. Colonists will occasionally chat with each other, which grants this bonus, stacking up to three times. Colonists with higher social skill seem to grant higher bonuses to people they chat with (but not to themselves). This is hard to control except by building your base to include common work areas and dining rooms. In theory you can "force" you colonists to chat by drafting them and ordering them to stand together, but this method is highly impractical and should be considered as only a minor, incidental bonus.

The third method is via chatting with the warden. This method is usually only applicable to newly recruited prisoners, 'though it lasts for quite some time. You can actually use this on your colonists though, but it involves arresting them and recruiting them again (just think of it as psychiatric therapy). This can be quite useful on large colonies when you already have a large workforce, and gives the warden sizable boosts to his social xp.

Chatting with the warden can stack up to forty times, giving rise to ridiculous bonuses, especially when you have a warden with a high social skill. I've personally witness overall bonuses of >100, 'but that was on a previous version and may no longer be true in v254b.

That said, psychotherapy can be impractical when you have a low colonist count, as imprisoned colonists can no longer work and may take some time to be recruited again, especially if your warden's social skill isn't high enough (<10).

As you can see, none of the methods for raising happiness are really reliable. As such, the best method to maintain happiness is to avoid penalties to them. To do so, frequently-visited areas should be kept clean when possible, and kept lit to avoid darkness. Carpeting also helps here to cancel out potential penalties for ugliness. Rooms should be at least "cramped" (and not "very cramped"), which require a minimum of 7 walkable tiles and beds (the pillow part) to not be located at a corner wall, with flower pots to increase the beauty level. Alternatively, you can go with non-cramped rooms (minimum of 27 walkable tiles) if you don't plan on using and maintaining flower pots (flower pots are less effective in bigger rooms, due to their small "beauty" radius). In any case, try to avoid housing colonists in a common bedroom if you can help it, to avoid the "sharing a bedroom" penalty.

Also, try not to let your colonists go hungry (or tired, but that is less of an issue). Keep backup power in batteries to prevent paste dispensers going offline in eclipses, and try not to haul all food into the stockpile so that your colonists still have something to eat in a solar flare. Keeping some wild plants near your base can also help here.

(You can 'cheese' the nutrient paste dispenser by drafting and undrafting doctors/wardens to make them drop food on the floor, creating an artificial "stockpile" for a later date in the event of a solar flare. Colonists will sometimes eat dropped food when they don't have anything else to eat.)

Of course, even with most precautions taken, your colonists can get unhappy really fast when they see corpses. This is nearly unavoidable after battles. At that point, fear is the only thing keeping your colonists from suffering a mental break. Colonists gain bonuses to fear when they are wounded or if they witness somebody (colonist or raider) dying.

Which brings up another point, you can maintain loyalty far easier through fear than happiness. Unlike happiness, they are far more sources of bonuses for fear, and nothing subtracts from fear itself. If you choose to do so, you no longer need to clean or beautify any rooms, and you are free to house all colonists in cramped quarters, saving significant space. Darkness now becomes an advantage, allowing you to save power. Gibbet cages also require less maintenance than flower pots, and their effects last for quite some time (instead of expiring immediately, like flower pots).

In any case, even if you think that the fear mechanic is 'cheesy', you may still want to employ fear to keep your colonists in line, as they become unhappy too quickly after combat. In extreme circumstances, you may want to purposely wound colonists (order another colonist to shoot them with a pistol, or order the depressed colonist to melee wildlife if there aren't any friendlies nearby), which raises their fear substantially, preventing mental breaks. This can be roleplayed quite well, especially when the colonist doing the shooting happens to be a commissar.
#21
Ideas / Re: Rain
November 20, 2013, 07:05:32 AM
Quote from: Adeelos on November 20, 2013, 04:14:18 AM
Is it intentional that rain starts no matter what after x number of tiles are covered in fire? I want to go clear out areas of all the brush and bodies without all the manual labor, and found that every time after the fifth or sixth molotov went off rain started almost immediately and put out the fires.

I'd love the ability to start a wildfire and let it rage across the landscape away from my base. If the above is true, perhaps change rain to always be a random occurrence?

This appears to be the case on most storytellers except for Randy Random, yes.

I suppose this is done to alleviate excess CPU load due to raging wildfires. Also, on previous versions fire tends to be a bit overpowered, especially when colonists couldn't put them out.

But yes, this is kinda annoying when the player wants to burn stuff.
#22
General Discussion / Re: Early Raider Attacks
November 18, 2013, 06:02:38 PM
Quote from: barry_scot on November 18, 2013, 05:55:39 PM
Every time i try to make a base on randy random, trying to get a large population, i get attacked within the first 3 days when i have hardly anything but a few turrets and a pistol. The annouying thing is that i haven't been able to learn from my mistakes because the raider parties keep getting bigger; the last game i started got attacked by 7 raiders on day 3.

So i guess my question is; is it possible to survive this and if so how?

Yes. Rush blasting charges.

Alternatively, try to collapse roofs on their heads, 'though that tends to use more resources.

Also, don't build too many turrets. The storyteller will send more raiders in response.
#23
General Discussion / Re: Where are the Events?
November 16, 2013, 08:22:16 PM
Quote from: That_One_Guy on November 16, 2013, 04:58:12 PM
I have been playing Rimworld for quite some time now, still on my cycle 15 world. The problem is, where are all the trading vessels, travelers, cargo drops, etc... It appears that as soon as I hit my 11th settler, all of the events just suddenly stopped. Is this normal? If not can you fix it?

Which version are you playing? What you have described was a known issue with Cassandra Classic in v.250. (where most events stop happening when a certain number of colonists is reached). This has been fixed in v.254b.
#24
Bugs / Re: Geothermal Vent Bug?
November 16, 2013, 06:44:56 PM
Quote from: Tynan on November 16, 2013, 05:05:46 PM
Yes. Can anyone think of a name better than "connected rate"? It's the extra/debt in the power grid which is adding/subtracting from the batteries.

Surplus power? (with negative values indicating a deficit.)
#25
Ideas / Re: Fire-related AI
November 16, 2013, 05:17:00 AM
Quote from: Kender on November 16, 2013, 04:48:42 AM
Quote...while a pack of angry rodents chases them.

Fire alone won't kill your colonists, boomrat won't too. Friendly fire will,
1) one kind of friendly fire is due to the low accuracy when shooting at a distant target, and since boomrat will be at the heel of your colonist (lost control due to 'on fire'), that colonist probably gonna get killed. and,
2) the friendly fire that colonists shoot each other in their back when they are lined up.
'cuase boomrat is very fast, once they charged into melee range with your line of defense, this kind of friendly fire will cause heavy casualties on player's side.

Also, shooting a small target like a boomrat suffers from a target size penalty, further lowering the chances of hitting boomrats and increasing the chance of friendly fire.

#26
General Discussion / Re: Deleting buildings or furniture?
November 15, 2013, 06:36:52 AM
Quote from: Galileus on November 15, 2013, 06:20:38 AM
I myself really like this distinctions. Cancel allows you to cancel construction/mining tasks when you need your colonists elsewhere, and you don't need to bother going tile-by-tile if you ordered them to build a carpet.

Also, cancel can be used to cancel mining/cutting/harvesting/hauling(debris/slag) tasks.

Quote from: Kender on November 15, 2013, 06:04:49 AM
Just being curious, why not simplify those two button into one? since there is no real difference between 'cancel' and 'sell' in the gameplay.

That is, no offense, a terrible idea. As mentioned, the cancel command has other functions, and being able to mass cancel designated constructions (or other orders) without accidentally selling structures/furniture in the area is quite useful.

I suppose both cancel and sell can be combined together by using a shift-key-modifier to differentiate between the two (so, say a held down shift key would change the command from cancel to sell), but accidents can happen and it is somewhat less user-friendly to new players.
#27
General Discussion / Re: Farm Designs
November 15, 2013, 12:12:20 AM
Quote from: Stickle on November 14, 2013, 09:58:23 PM
Quote from: nnescio on November 09, 2013, 10:57:00 PM

Since the above is symmetrical, you can rotate the whole thing:



Are you sure that's right? I just built two adjacent standing laps against the short edge of a growing area, and the far tiles (6 tiles away) are not brightly lit and won't grow. But according to your graphic there, they should be...

Hmm... strange. I could have sworn it used to work. Maybe the lighting has changed a little between versions. It looks like the outermost edge doesn't get promoted to "brightly lit" despite being in the overlapping areas of two standing lamps.

I'll doublecheck things and draw a new template when I figure things out. Thanks for the heads up.

Edit: So the "brightly lit" area template seem to change slightly depending on when, where or how (the order) of how I build the standing lamps, even when I built them in the same relative positions (one left and one right). Fiddling around with the wiring seem to change the lighting radius rarely. I can't find any rhyme or reason to what causes what changes. Maybe there's a background lighting value and not all "dark" tiles have the same lighting value, and far away light sources can affect this by a tiny amount.

Sometimes I get a symmetrical lit area. Sometimes I don't. I'm getting a bit cross-eyed here.

All the changes seem to be very slight, however. Maybe I can identify the "stable" brightly lit areas.
#28
General Discussion / Re: Dead Bodies Everywhere!
November 14, 2013, 05:41:35 AM
Quote from: Ric on November 14, 2013, 05:25:28 AM
Frag nades for Rubble/dump areas.
Molotov's for graves.

Stick with this & you'll clear stuff up easily. :)

Personally, slag/rubble are too useful to dispose of.

They are like free sandbags with no upkeep! And movable!
#29
General Discussion / Re: Dead Bodies Everywhere!
November 14, 2013, 03:17:56 AM
Haul the corpses onto dump sites or into graves. Draft a few colonists and equip them with molotovs. Now set fire to the bodies.
#30
Mods / Re: Modding Info Database
November 13, 2013, 06:27:00 PM
Quote from: Tynan on November 13, 2013, 01:57:53 PM
Nudity mods will be unnecessary.



My eyes! It burns!