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Topics - stigma

#1
Hey all,

Any mods for non-lethal options in A17? Preferably something not too OP - but just to give you some options in dealing with for example friendly colonists going berserk. I know there have been many mods along these veins but I can only find outdated stuff - or stuff on steam workshop that don't have non-steam downloads.

Alternatively, if someone who uses steam would like to grab this for me:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=918386239&searchtext=Non-Lethal
(after download it's just a matter of grabbing the folder from inside mods folder, it's not a complex operation)
and send me a PM that would be sweet. Posting it publicly probably isn't cool without the mod authors permission though (hence the PM).

-Stigma
#2
Hey all,

I've had this problem rattling around my brain for a bit...
Assume a wide open flat area of normal soil. You want to plant a lot of stuff - but you also want your pawns to be able to move around quickly. Not only to plant/harvest all those crops but to get around in general.

Now what sort of pattern of roads (meaning any 100% speed floor) and growing plots would be optimal? It's a fairly complex problem - and though you could probably solve this via math for a "correct" solution I'm not setting the bar quite that high :)

Main things to consider I think is:
- The pattern used. A grid of rectangles is the most obvious, but my intuition tells me it is far from ideal. For one it is pretty bad any time your pawns need to travel diagonally.
- The density of roads compared to farming plots. More roads means faster travel, but also less dense farming area - meaning you need to travel more (not to mention needing more space in total for the same yield). There must be a good balance somewhere.

If anyone has good ideas I'm all ears. Also, it does rather seem like the sort of problem that someone good with math has already obsessed over - so if there is a thread or other resource on this you know about - please link it :)

-Stigma
#3
Hey all,

Quick question - What are the rules governing how movement speed is affected by items on the ground? I am not talking about special items like chunks, but just normal stuff like wood, meals, leathers and whatever else.

- Does it slow you down, and if so, by how much? (in a quick test, walking on full stacks of wood seemed to be only 50% of normal speed)

- Does it matter how many items there are in the stack?

- Does the terrain under matter also? ie. is a wooden floor with a wood stack much faster than a marsh with a wood stack? Or is only the worst penalty of the two considered?

- Does the type of item matter, outside of the special exceptions like chunks?

My OCD demands answers! :D

The only thing I can conclude so far is that it seems prudent to leave dedicated walkways free of stuff whenever possible since moving around to worktasks is one of the biggest time-wasters. It also seems like a good idea in general to have walkways everywhere pawns have to travel on a regular basis.
It would be really nice to know more specific information though

-Stigma
#4
Hey all,

Just a few random questions about world and map seeds that I have rattling around in my brain. I'd love it is anyone knew the answers to these:

- Why is it that the same world-seed can generate different worlds? Many times they are quite similar, but many things are different too. Isn't half the point of a seed to be able to re-create the same thing? Is there a way to do that?..

- Is there a way to see a map (map-tile) seed? Is there a way to re-create a map from such a seed? Maybe via the devmode tools or something?

If I find a very interesting map, but then decide I have to re-start because I added a mod that requires a fresh game it would be very nice to be able to just re-make the same map. I wouldn't be too surprised if something like this existed in the devmode (or maybe a mod?), but there are so many functions that it is hard to discover everything you can do with random testing :)

-Stigma
#5
This is a pretty simple QoL improvement idea I want to air.

Hunting is overly inefficient and frustrating to watch as pawns always engage at maximum distance - leading to a lot of misses. The hunting strategy used seems pretty dumb to put it bluntly. Especially with certain weapons that have atrocious accuracy at their maximum range your pawn can spend half the day and a hundred bullets to down some random rat fora trifling amount of reward.

The idea is simply to change that to make pawns close to optimal accuracy distance before shooting (or to within some reasonable percentage of the optimal accuracy range). Should lead to more efficient hunting, less collateral damage, better use of time and less of a compulsion to have to micromanage hunting via drafting.

A slightly more advanced version would take into account the hunted animals risk-factor for revenge and weight the distance with this so that if you are hunting a chicken then you walk close to get an optimal shot and shoot it in the face - but hunting a panther the pawn will stay a bit nearer to max range for safety (a larger tolerance to the % compared to optimal range).

I suspect that the code for determining the range for a decent shot is already in the game since pawns will back off with certain weapons before shooting if they are really close - so it's probably only a matter of modifying this code and forcing them to take better shots at distance (It seems like there is no minimum requirement for accuracy at long range currently)

A final level of refinement would be to check for cover and move to an unobstructed line of fire before shooting - but coding this logic is probably more work for less payback than the basic changes suggested above.

Of course if there exists something along these lines already that I have missed I'd be interested to know about it :)

-Stigma
#6
PROBLEM:
Later in the game movement becomes a bottleneck very fast. You can't really do much far away from your main hub where people eat/sleep/produce because it becomes increasingly inefficient. By the time people arrive to do something at a distant location they will turn right around because they have a need for food, sleep ect.

SOLUTION:
A modified floor-tile you can call "moving walkway". These exist in real life and you have probably seen them at the airport and such. Basically a transport-belt for people.

Compared to a normal floor:
- They would have much higher movement speed (a simple value tweak). Maybe somewhere in the range of 150-200%? To be determined in balancing obviously.
- They require low-moderate electricity pr. tile. (but have inbuilt conduits like a solar panel)
- They have considerably higher cost than any other floor for balance purposes. Probably just steel (or other metal-like materials) I'm thinking. It would be nice to require components too, but I don't see a way to use less than 1 component pr. tile which is too much...
- They require MUCH more work to construct... not trivial to build at all
- Slightly ugly beauty. They are there for practical applications, not to look nice.

The idea is that you can make some high-speed connections for the most important areas - especially those areas outside your core, but the cost in work and resources will be high enough that you have to consider carefully when and where it is worth making them.

Since this is essentially just a modded floor I suspect that it shouldn't be terribly hard to create? For simplicity's sake we assume they can move in any direction, so simply a movespeed multiplier in the XML - and this should work perfectly with vanilla pathfinding.

If anyone wants to make something like this I would gladly help in testing and finding good and balanced value for costs, work ect. and generally assist in any way that I can. I've never modded for rimworld before, but I do some coding now and then.

EDIT: Oh, and if something like this already exists then please let me know. I wouldn't be surprised ... but I have looked and the only references I have found was for very early builds.

-Stigma
#7
I'm just airing an idea here, but I think that what a lot of players get frustrated with in Rimworld has to do with hauling being done in stupid ways.

PROBLEM:
Just as an example, Bob is set to mine, so he goes out and mine 100 steel. Job done.
Now he has cooking to do, so he heads back to base... but he does't bother to carry any of the steel back with him even though the cooking bench is right next to the stockpile. Instead, Alice who has a high priority on hauling has to run all the way out to the mine to pick up the steel - essentially a whole roundtrip wasted because Bob didn't have any common sense.

SUGGESTION:
When any new job A (any type) starts:
If this pawn has hauling enabled (any priority):
check X tiles radius around current location - is there anything set to haul here?
if yes: check if the destination for job A with X tiles radius and see if any of those hauling items are supposed to go there. If yes, choose the item with the least walking distance and haul it first, and queue the original job A to be done immediately after.

- Ideally, make radius X configurable in UI - but a value in XML would be fine too.

- Consider excluding the check for the most obvious emergency-jobs where every second counts - like firefighting.

- Keep radius X fairly low to avoid annoying over-emphasis on the added hauling. Only do it when you don't really have to go much out of your way.

- A more advanced implementation would consider the path to job A and not just the destination tile for it, so that hauling with a drop-point along the way could also be done efficiently, but this no doubt requires considerably more logic.

My thinking is that this should result in more intelligent and efficient use of time and basically get more hauling done almost for free since pawns will carry stuff around while they are doing all their other stuff and running around like ants anyway...

Is this feasible you think? I've seen a lot of tweaks to hauling so far, but nothing that tries this aproach of considering it in the context of other work that is being done.

-Stigma
#8
Hey all,

Everyone who has played this game have occasionally run into some issues with top-priority jobs. There is a big raid coming and your turrets are done, but you just need about 8 tiles of electric cabling and you will be golden... except that after building one of those tiles now your constructor wants to go to bed. DAMNIT MAN, YOUR LIFE AND THE LIVES OF EVERYONE YOU KNOW DEPEND ON THOSE CABLES!! Then you proceed to manually:

right-click -> prioritize building wire
(constructor runs a few tiles towards his bed)
right-click -> prioritize building wire
(constructor runs a few tiles towards his bed)
right-click -> prioritize building wire
(constructor runs a few tiles towards his bed)
right-click -> prioritize building wire
(constructor runs a few tiles towards his bed)
right-click -> prioritize building wire
(constructor runs a few tiles towards his bed)
right-click -> prioritize building wire
(constructor runs a few tiles towards his bed)
right-click -> prioritize building wire
(constructor runs a few tiles towards his bed)

All the while cursing under your breath probably ...

It would be really useful if we could assign super-priority to jobs. What I specifically mean by this is:

-You mark a task as super priority (either by selecting it and hotkey/button, or perhaps a "brush" tool, or even both)
-As long as there exists any super-priority jobs that a pawn can do (has an assigned jobtype for), these tasks take priority over all other jobs AND all the pawns regular schedule restrictions and needs are ignored.
-Completed jobs automatically delete their super priority when done (once), so no recurring jobs --> infinite loop problems.
-Super priority tasks take top priority, but do not block other lower priority jobs - so in cases where the super priority jobs are literally not possible (such as constructing not being possible until materials have been placed on the frame) these actions are allowed to happen so you don't deadlock.

Obviously if you overused this tool then your colony would collapse from your pawns not being able to take care of themselves, but I feel it would be invaluable for those critical jobs where you otherwise would feel the need to resort to the rightclick-prioritize method. Sometimes you just need to intervene with some micromanagement, and the only current way of doing that action-by-action with not even queuing being possible is excruciatingly frustrating at times.

Thoughts?
-Stigma
#9
I recently discovered something in the growing mechanics that I find interesting and potentially quite useful:

Pawns that are set to growing will automatically harvest fully grown plants inside a growing zone (assuming they can be harvested, in other words not bushes, grass ect.)

"Well, duh!" I hear you say, that's how growing crops works.
Yes, but the thing is - it doesn't HAVE to be domesticated crops!

If for example you have a handful of nearby berry-bushes near to your base, those yield like 30 berries compared to 5-6 units of potatoes, rice ect - and they grow fast. If you set a growing zone on that tile ( !! and set it to disallow growing !!) then your growers will automatically harvest that bush whenever it is fully grown. That's about 5 (or even more, considering the fast maturity time) tiles worth high quality food (joy bonus + can happily be eaten raw), but concentrated down on a single tile.

I think that in the long run in an optimized base this will eventually become less useful as there is a little more running around involved compared to concentrated farming fields - but it seems like it is a very useful trick in the early-mid game. After all, almost everyone does the "harvest nearby bushes" tactic to survive the initial few days. Now you can automate and optimize this operation (only harvest fully grown bushes) using the method described above.

EDIT: I've confirmed that it does indeed also work for trees (although some slow-growing treees seem to wait a little past 100% before triggering - I assume that's just a matter of rounding the number in the UI meaning that it's not really 100% done yet).

Trees aren't renewable without plating of course, but it's still a nice thing to know about if you want to optimize the use of nearby trees so you get the maximum yield out of them. On tundras and ice-sheets were wood is scarce this is probably quite useful. Instead of manually selecting each tree to find fully grown ones to cut you can just select a whole area of trees, disallow planting, and automate the process.

I found this kind of interesting at least, I welcome thoughts and feedback :)
(maybe this has been a well known technique for the old-timers here, if so then excuse me for being so excited hehe)
-Stigma
#10
Hey all,

I know that growing affects harvesting plants, but that made me think - does it also affect cutting down trees? Extra yield? Less time?

Usually plant-cutting is something I assign every to do, thinking that it is dumb untrained labor but... assuming you have limited quantities of nearby trees, would your main grower be better at this? (especially if it affects the yield).

It's a little fiddly to test since tree yields have fairly large random-ranges of yield.
Does anyone know?

-Stigma
#11
Hey all,

Quick question - does proximity (on the world map) to other factions matter at all? Are you likely to recieve more visitors/raiders from friendly/hostile factions if they are physically closer to your colony?

With the hospitality mod (highly recommended by the way) I rather enjoy having plenty of visitors and traders come by to mix things up and not feel totally isolated from the rest of the world, but if the distance doesn't matter at all then at least I can stop re-rolling generated maps to find acceptable settlement locations close to tribes and outworlder towns... Hopefully someone can clarify this for me :)

-Stigma
#12
Hey all,

The room system is new to me. Either it got added recently, or I never knew it existed before... and I'm having a hard time understanding it.

Firstly, what game-mechanics function does it serve? Is it only to make "impressive dining room" ect. bonuses possible, or does it have other uses than this?

Secondly, what are the rules for what a room gets designated as? The wiki says that a table is required for a dining hall, and a crafting table for a workshop - but what happens when these conflict, such as having both in the same room? In a quick one-time test when I tried it got set to a workshop despite having loads of eating areas, and apparently workshops have "no demands" ... does this mean that I am effectively gimping the potential of a beautiful dining by having any crafting stations there and I need very specialized rooms? Even just a stove in the room (a logical thing for an eating area) does the same thing by designating it as a kitchen.

Am I forced to choose between sharing one good large room or specialize it to get a bonus but then having crafters and cooks spend their time in cramped working areas? (or else spend a huge area for worksshops and kitchens that is 95% empty space...)

I hope someone can fill me in on how this works, and maybe also give me some basic strategies for optimizing. Thanks!
-Stigma
#13
Hey all,

Does someone know the exact rules for roof collapse? How near does a support have to be? It looks like this stuff got changed, and googling this just turns up a lot of old information that seems to not be accurate anymore. Also the wiki is very out of date and straight up missing a lot of info...

EDIT: Actually, maybe not all of that info was outdated after all. It seems like the rule still is "there needs to be a support within 6 tiles". I was getting a little confused about the shadows (areas looking roofed, but not actually being so).

So if I'm correct this means that the largest room you can make without supports is one whose width is 12 tiles (not including the wall)? This seems to be what my testing indicates.

If I'm wrong in any way, or the rules have more caveats then please let me know. Otherwise maybe someone else can learn from my experimentation.

-Stigma
#14
Ideas / [Suggestion] - add "mealtime" to scheduling
July 27, 2016, 02:06:59 PM
Hey all,

I think there is one very obvious thing missing from the restricted scheduling you can set up - mealtimes.
Keeping your pawns well-fed in an efficient way can be a little bit fiddly even with plenty of food.

For example with good beds they are liable to sleep effectively, not be too hungry when they wake up - then go and do work away from the sleeping area, except that just an hour or two later they get really hungry and have to walk all the way back to base to eat. Worst case they might go to mine some distant vein, only to do 1 tile and then realize "oh, I'm actually urgently hungry!" and then spend 2 hours walking back, and then a further 2 hours returning. This is a lot of wasted time (and a strain on pawns mood) based on pawns basically being too stupid to plan for basic needs, but more importantly the player having few tools to influence this behavior.

It would be really helpful if we could schedule mealtimes. Essentially, any timeslot with mealtime should place eating as the highest priority, and also decrease the threshold for colonists wanting to eat. At these times they should attempt to fill their bellies, having a smaller snack if barely hungry, or even overeating a little if need be if all that is nearby are full meals for example. Essentially, mealtime should ensure that pawns have full bellies for the day ahead.

I think this would lessen a lot of annyances with pawns going hungry and/or complaining about not eating at a table even when you have loads of food and nice dinnerhalls for them to use, without trivializing the management (ie. with large bases and distances you will still need more areas for eating).

PS: Does anyone know how/why pawns sometimes carry meals around? It's nice when they do - smart behaviour, almost packing a lunch, but how can I encourage/force this behaviour?

-Stigma
#15
hey all,

I am really missing a clock that tells me the in-game time. I've been away from the game a while and I almost think I remember there already was such a function before ... or maybe I am just remembering wrong. Is there an option I have missed or a mod that does this?

Thanks to anyone who can help :)
-Stigma
#16
Hey all,

I love this game, but there is one long-standing issue I feel has never been resolved - and that is the all-too-frequent occurrence of friendly-fire.

PROBLEM:
Basically any time enemies are close to your own pawns you have to very explicit babysit them, otherwise they will literally blow each-others heads off and often be a greater danger to themselves than the enemy is. Playing normally it is very common that many of the gunshot wounds you receive during a fight are from your own pawns.

EVALUATION:
I'm not saying to remove friendly fire. That is neither balanced, nor in the "shit happens, deal with it" spirit of the game. It should happen occationally, but much less frequently. Also, a counterweight is needed to prevent this from just making the game easier from what it is now.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION:
I suggest a change in the pawn combat AI that right before taking a shot evaluates if that shot has a significant risk of hitting an ally. If yes - then apply a significant accuracy debuff to hitting the targeted enemy, but also significantly lower the change of that shot hitting the ally. Some extra time may also be added to the aiming time as a penalty because the pawn needs to be extra careful with the shot. This should result in a more realistic and much less annoying simulation. If you position your troops badly you are still penalized, but you pawns will care more about not wounding your own guys than killing the enemy faster (probably in-line with most players mindset).

Modding the AI is a little out of my reach for now, but I thought I would at least give the suggestion. The more of these little frequent annoyances that happen from what players percieve as "oh my god, my colonist are all idiots!" the better and more polished the game will be (hopefully something like this eventually gets integrated into the core game).

Oh, and some basic changes to make colonist and raiders not AOE themselves or allies is also something that needs to be looked at and is very much in-line with the same problem as above. Until a better solution is available, this fix (not mine) helps a lot, and I suggest checking it out:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=21992.0

Finally, if anything like the above already exists as a mod somewhere for A14 then let me know. It's really hard to get a good overview of the mods, so sorry if I'm being redundant here :)

-Stigma
#17
Hey all,

Just wanted to ask real quick, what is your experience of very large maps in late-game with many colonists ect?

I have a fairly beefy CPU (2500K @4,4Ghz) but I don't know how badly performance degrades on large maps when there are loads of entities to track, so I'd love to hear your experiences. I like big maps with lots of options and room to do stuff, but it would be a shame if I find out 10 hours into a campaign that everything slows to a crawl because the system isn't really designed to handle these sizes (Tynan does warn of performance issues in the menu after all...)

Thanks for any feedback you can offer :)
-Stigma
#18
Hey all,

I'm just looking for some feedback from people who have played the "lost tribe" scenario and have more experience than me.
It seems overall pretty hard, but I can deal with the extreme research penalty and I love the "build from basics" start and the larger group of core colonists.

The thing I keep having problems with however is recruiting new colonists.
It seems like everyone I capture has a 1% chance of converting even with a good warden and comfy cells - making it a very hard and long process to turn anyone.

I guess this is because you are "tribal" and thus you suffer the same problem in reverse that colonies have of recruiting tribals. The problem is this penalty is waaaay worse on this side. I think even other tribals are 1% chance if I remember correctly..?

It just seems like this is overly punishing in the long run and it makes it very hard to expand your colony. 5 people to start helps - but not for long when getting more is extremely difficult. It seems like you have to rely almost elusively on new colonist through random events or buying slaves... is this by design? If so it seems over-tuned. Having recruitment be harder fits with the tribals slow rampup, but the penalty is just so extreme that you could easily keep prisoners for years without converting them and that seems a little too extreme.

What are your thoughts on this, and your strategies for working around it?
I really like the tribal start, but this one issue just seems like it will be crippling in the long term as you REALLY can't afford to lose anyone, plus you will get starved on manpower real fast.

-Stigma
#19
Hey all,

I could write up a whole article on this suggestion (maybe later) but for the initial post I just want to get the basic idea across as it is fairly simple.

Currently the combat of the game revolves around defending your base - and you defend it against pretty much the same threat each time - raiders. Amount of raiders and how good guns they have vary some, but that's about it. Hopefully variety in attacks will improve as the game development goes on, but here is a idea to add something different to the whole equation.

Rather than being all about defense (and often lots of turrets), add opportunities and incentives for going on the offensive. These would be combat objectives that require you to leave the safety of home (most likely involving elaborate chokepoints, lines of turrets and mines) to rely on just your colonists, weapons and your tactics. The idea is to add some pretty drastic variety to the combat this way by taking you out of your safety-zone. Here are some concrete scenarios that could happen:

- A small raider scout party appears and moves though the map (the AI makes sure that it does not wander into your defences for an easy kill). The objective is to eliminate the scout party before they can report back. Failure means a good chance of an especially large attack you have to deal with later, rather than this comparably smaller threat. Do you leave the safety of home to preemptively ward of the future attack?

- Local slave trader caravan appears and moves through the map (again, AI avoiding defenses as should be the case with pretty much all of these scenarios).  You can either let them pass, or attack them to potentially free slaves. (possibly add the option to trade with them also)

- non-hostile trade caravan passing through. Leave them alone, trade with them, or take on the role of the bad guys" to attack and steal whatever they are transporting - which could be anything from resources to guns.

There are dozens of variations here to work with just off the top of my head, and this opens up a lot of potential for both a of variation on combat scenarios, and also the opportunity to actually use the tactical elements of the game in a more meaningful fashion and get the feel of some squad-based combat to change the pace instead of it all feeling like "swarm wave defense". Also adds some meaningful choices both in terms of strategy but potentially also some moral choices to roleplay. if your colonists are close to starving, can you justify a "better you than me" attack on an otherwise friendly caravan?

Just something to consider for later additions to the "meat" of the gameplay :)
We certainly need some more different types of events than only raiders and crazy boomrats ;)

-Stigma
#20
Hey all,

This is a really simple suggestion because it is basically the exact same as in other games. Minecraft is a good example.

I assume that the world is semi-randomly/procedurally generated. This means that there is some sort of random seed that it works from to construct the world. Let us see the random world seed so that we can recreate and share interesting worlds with other players.

This should be fairly easy to code since it just exposes something that already exists to the player, so it should just be a fairly minor change in the UI. It let's players who want to try something else but do it on the same world do so, and also creates nice community interactions in terms of "challanges" on especially hard world seeds, and you can even suggest some newbie-friendly map seeds to beginners who find the game hard to start with ect.

All in all I think this would add a lot to the game and expand player choice without requiring a lot of work. Win-win! :)

-Stigma