Messages

I have just discovered a way to get past the melee blocking for colonists.  While one colonist is blocking the path and fighting someone, set the other colonists to work on a construction project on the far side of the enemy...then when they are on the blocked square, draft them.  You can thus have an arbitrary number of melee colonists on a single square.  May work with commands other than construction.

Personally,  I think tiles with overhead mountain roofs should have a temperature shift towards the climatalogical annual mean temperature.  This would provide a normalization of temperatures that would, I think, solve many of these sorts of problems.

I am in favor of FoW.  I don't think the vision cone is necessary, as it requires tracking individual pawn heads.  It doesn't take much to swivel around and look in all directions and adds a complexity that doesn't add much to the effect compared to adding FoW back in.  That said, prepare to be flamed by the FoW hater.

Just a hint for you next building plans.
You should build a roof support every 10 spaces away from a wall or mountain. Same inside a mountain, you need a roof support every 10 spaces.
This mean you can build 10x10 rooms without support.
But when you want to build a 11x11 room (for an indoor plant room with sunlamp at example) you need a 1x1 pillar near the center.
a 19x19 room just would need a single pillar at the centre of the room.

That has changed with time.  You can now build 12x12 rooms without interior support.

I don't think that this is a bug so much as a UI design issue where people do not easily understand what is going on. 

What happens:
1) Animals die, some (inside the home zone) are unforbidden on death, some (outside home zone) are forbidden.  Novice players do not recognize the distinction of what is in the parenthesis.
2) What players expect to happen is that either all should be forbidden by default or all should be unforbidden.  A subset expect that all animals that are marked for hunting should be unforbidden when they die by means other than being killed by a hunter explicitly hunting them (they may be marked for hunting, but killed accidentally in the crossfire of a hunter hunting some other animal).

This is a tricky issue because on the one hand, you don't want your haulers to suddenly run all the way across the map without your consent to pick up the squirrel corpse that a bear just killed, but on the other hand there are times that you really don't want to micromanage unforbidding corpses.  For example, whenever a hunter has finished going after a herd, there usually are one or two corpses that died because of wounds not received while some other member of the herd was being hunted.  These corpses need to be manually unforbidden.

One possible solution is to have it so that all animals marked for hunting would be unforbidden when they die no matter how killed.  There are a few corner cases where this would not be the desired behaviour, but generally I think it would be an improvement.  The only downside I can think of is that there might be animals whose corpses you do want to haul on death, but don't want to hunt (think predators).  Another option would be to add yet another flag to animals: Haul on Death, which could be set independently of the hunting flag.  I would likely set the Haul on Death to automatically be set when changing the status of an animal to hunted.  The downside is, of course, increased complexity in the UI.

I am not sure this is the consensus, but it is my sense of the issue.

Social skill does effect prices, but not much.

This is an old idea that has not been supported in the past because of the number of improvements that were still on the books for the single colony map management.  I do think that having the ability to send people on raiding or trading expeditions would be nice.  As a first step, I would implement it where you do not see the actual combat/trading.  Simply place an expedition zone which can be loaded up with goods, people, and pets, then specify what you are seeking (people, silver, food, etc...) and finally send them on their way carrying whatever supplies they can from the zone.  Presumably, you would want to send them with food.  This could be upgraded by adding the ability to select a space on the world map.  The farther from your home zone, the longer the trip takes, but the more likely they will be to find what you are looking for.  Also, it could take into account whether the territory you are traveling through is friendly (trades), unfriendly(raids), wild(random encounters).  You might even be able to research pod launchers which would allow you to send instant raids (or trades w/ communication) but would still require a return trip, effectively halving the total expedition journey time.  Finally, in the distant future, it could be upgraded to include switching maps to realtime battles/trades when encountering another village, then switching back when all your expeditionary force has fled/been killed/left with goodies. 

I think the first step I have outlined could be modded now, if in a somewhat kludgey way, while the rest might need changes to the base RimWorld code.

I think targeted raids would be a huge improvement.  Especially if you don't know what they are targeting until they get there.  So some raids would be for silver, food, steel, or statues.  Another raid might be to destroy your capabilities, so burning fields, destroying sources of power, kidnapping people or even killing a specific person that they really don't like.  That said, retreating needs to be improved so that when the goal is reached, those carrying off people or things are not left behind by everyone else but rather protected as they take the loot.

I do think that it would be nice if pawn speed was sufficiently effected by the gear that they are wearing so that lightly armored pawns will move faster than heavily laden pawns.  Thus, when fleeing and not just leaving, pawns would do things like drop their weapons or other gear if they recognize that the gear is slowing them down to the point where they can't get away.  Currently the only effect seems to be on pawns carrying other pawns and not on the gear that they have.

It is not surprising that any proposal that hints of FoW brings out the usual highly vocal suspects of FoW haters.  Let me advise you that it is useless to try and argue with them.  Rational arguments will fall on deaf ears.  They are unable to recognize that games like chess can and have been successfully modified to include FoW.  The question of FoW is largely one of preferred style, but they are unable to imagine any style other than what they have experienced as adding anything to the game.  To put it succinctly, they fear the unknown.  The only way to ever convince them of the playability of FoW is to actually implement FoW.  I suggest that if you wish to discuss your ideas that have any FoW related features, that you completely ignore those who will declare its evils no matter how much text they vomit up.  Do not try and argue with them and just carry on as if they are a crazed Muffalo attacking Raiders outside your sphere of knowledge.  To do otherwise is an exercise in futility and will let them derail what might otherwise be an interesting thread.

While I like the idea of smooth walls option as detailed by erdrik, I would go a step further on placing walls on as yet unmined border stone.   I would like to see the ability to place any blue print down in any unmined square.  Obviously these could only be built once the area is mined out.  Pawns would not automagically mine areas with blue prints on it, so it would not be a one stop mine and build here option, but rather an option to lay out a room, set it to be mined, and have pawns auto build things as the opportunity arises.  Maybe color the blue prints that cannot yet be built red to indicate that they still need to be mined out.

There is a technical glitch to get around this.  If you go into their gear tab and right click on the weapon and tell them to drop it from there, it will not interrupt their current task, even sleeping.

I believe that kills made outside of your home zone are generally auto forbidden.  Those inside are unforbidden.  So if you want everything auto unforbidden, set your home zone to the whole map.  Of course, then your colonists will fight every fire anywhere on the map.  Overall, it would be nice if there was a better way to specify this.

I think balance wise, bionic parts could be extractable, IF, they were not healable.  Thus, if your bioinic arm takes 5 of 20 hit points, it will operate at 1/4 efficiency loss until you replace the whole arm.  You could extract an arm from a corpse, but there would be some possibility of damage (depending on medical skill).  Alternatively, perhaps they could be repaired if you had sufficient components and other supplies and an advanced bionics manufacturing table.  Maybe the table could patch clothes as well ;p

It would be nice to be able to set the meals for all colonists, not just prisoners.  Then Greedy and Jealous can apply to meals and not just rooms.   Why waste fancy meals on happy asectic optimists?

I just noticed that released prisoners are still in restraints.  I am not sure this counts as a bug, but I think that they probably ought to not be in restraints once released.