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Aren't they pretty awful vs armor now?  I haven't used them in a few iterations of 1.0, but since the armor rework they seem pretty crummy for the amount of steel they cost.

Slow/stun with less damage would probably constitute a buff.

The game has a lot of RNG elements that screw you unless you are willing to really push its mechanics to work around them.

I don't like to play pretend with intents.  The game's rules define its possibility space. 

This means things like "spam abandoning colonies to raid 5 ancient dangers at the start" and "training a doctor via beating on animals or doing surgery on prisoners" are just as much a part of the game as sowing rice.

Maybe some players eschew things because they want to challenge themselves.  Maybe some players skip marginal benefits that are tedious to attain.  It's up to players to choose how to play the game for fun, but the rules are still what defines the game.

[if I had not already experienced it]

I would not have made that assertion if I had not already experienced it.
For 90% of my last 1.0+ run, I had a colony of 7(at 3 years in) all colonist with 4 or less doctoring and I still got this supposedly impossible low skill penoxy production going. Did you two forgot the possibility of RNJesus screwing the player over? Recruits will not always produce the needed skill even over multiple years.

In that run I did eventually get a decent doctor, but not until after I had penoxy production going. And penoxy is literally what prevented my colony from succumbing to disease because my colonists lacked the skill to fight with out it.

You can forcibly train medicine skill by repeatedly spamming peg legs on/off a prisoner as long as you can grow herbal meds.  While it takes a few/day to boost someone with no passion to 4000 xp, it's still something over which you actually have agency.

Problem with penoxy is that having a steady supply for 7+ people is slower to attain than even this dispassionate mad leg scientist.

Create a caravan to go for a walk outside your colony. Wait to get attacked or force an encounter. Defend yourself. Win. Then murder everything with four legs currently on the screen. Take your meat horde back to your colony. Real tribes don't hunt in camp. They have excursions, sometimes days at a time, to hunt for food. If you choose to camp on a barren icescape, I think it just magnifies the need to travel further to hunt for food.

Is encounter rate actually high enough where this can be done?  You have to feed both the hunting party and the colony, and I'm not convinced encounter proc rate is fast enough to allow it.

If you settle near an enemy base in earlier versions you could repeatedly raid it to generate new animals, but in 1.0 it seems attacking a base has a several day cooldown before you can do it again, so this is not a fast enough source of food any longer.

@ OP: you can draft and pick up items if you set a pawn as part of a caravan.  If insects are still sleeping you might be able to use this for some pretty hefty jelly runs if you can avoid aggro.  Just wall it in w/ door sufficiently that it doesn't freeze.

Technically the word use is correct, since infect's first definition includes "disease-causing organisms".

Though it may be confusing since there is a noticeable distinction in the game between diseases and infections.

Not only is there a notable distinction, but the in-game reference to "infection" still requires disease-causing organisms (you can't get an infection w/o some kind of hostile organism to the body).  The game implies a disambiguation wrongly in the context of the penoxy description.

Im not sure what you are suggesting here.
Do you mean wait till they get a disease and treat with medicine, or penoxy?
Because last I looked into it penoxy doesn't help post infection. It is a preventative measure.

He means penoxy is in a bad place mechanically, and it's true.  By the time you can realistically manufacture enough penoxy to keep a colony on it, you already have access to resources that will allow you a consistently high tend quality to tank through diseases w/o it, and without the hassle of trade, labor for manufacture etc.

The time when you most need it (early game), it's not viable to keep people on it so consistently and the best defense against disease is probably to train at least one good doctor and leave him on ancient danger luciferium (pawns on luci still get disease, but natural IGS is so boosted they don't need bedrest at all, even doing self-tend w/o meds at low skill).

I'd like to see penoxy go back to what it was like before, except boost immunity by less.  This way you can take it on longer intervals and still receive some benefit.  Right now its place in the game is marginal at best, mostly a late game luxury so that nobody ever has to bedrest.

You can have the best medical facilities on the Rimworld, with the best medicine available but if the only doctors you have are <5 skill your colonists are still at risk. In which case preventing disease with penoxy is practically a requirement..

By the time you can possibly cycle penoxy, you can have a doctor with ~9-10 skill even w/o passion, though it's very likely you will find one that has at least one flame to train up by that point.

The game uses the terminology loosely.  That said, "infections" in the game are definitely distinct from disease.  Unless penoxy actually stops infections from happening now (I've not been following change log over past few days), it probably shouldn't say that it does.

Do berries actually give a mood benefit?  I'd just remove that and the food poisoning chance from harvested crops of pawn-planted berries.

This gives them a niche: you can grow them and skip cooking, but they don't keep well unless you freeze them, which is generally not necessary with other crops.  You need a decent growing skill to plant them, which is a substitute for cooking skill early.  More established colonies would still want to transition off them, because they don't get the fine meal mood buff and food poisoning is rare in a clean kitchen + decently skilled cook.

Roofs are a pretty effective equivalent to graves in terms of preventing trees/fire spreading, even in 1.0.  Trees aren't allowed under roofs and stuff doesn't tend to regrow without any light.  Thus you don't need to floor and I'm not sure roof is actually slower than graves for this purpose.

I consider graves to be something like football helmet stickers, and mood hit from observing corpses when hauling them is pretty annoying so they're okay mitigation for that too.

An interesting system! I might throw a few switches here and there.

Hmm, yes that might not have been the best comparison. However, predator hunt is far more memorable than a harmlessish explosion. Regardless, it's still a boring problem with minimal problem solving. Why even bother with zzzt in the first place?

That's a good question.  In most cases it doesn't add much to the game.  It does give a small incentive to decentralize power and group items that consume power together based on estimated consumption, and the inability to do this easily is a small nerf to mountain bases compared to plains bases.  I agree it's not a very interesting event, but the annoyance factor is also comparably small so it barely registers for me.  If the yellow zzzts were removed from the game I wouldn't care (red ones are fine, since those are just from unroofed electronics/battery).

It's not an issue of how difficult it is to manage, but how fun it is.

It's akin to the argument for predator hunting. Now I personally don't mind it, or the new alert, because there's something interesting when a bear sneaks up on your doctor. It's frustrating at times but that's fine. Switching backup batteries on/off is well, kinda boring.

Unlike wildlife, we don't have a tab to look at. We need to look at the batteries and see how fuel they are. There's no convenient way to turn one part off while the other charges and so on. RW isn't Factorio, it's not trying to be it, but in Factoria power management is a major part of the game whereas RW is a very background thing. Unlike the new turret system, there are a variety of turrets, you can make them out of different materials, and placing them and managing the power/steel barrels integrates nicely into RW's current system.

Fuses will turn it into a broken machine event. It's not like you need to watch the temperature, you can shove it anywhere and it works. I don't personally know how I would improve upon it other than MAYBE having more varieties of battery and maybe temperature management?

It's not the same scenario as predator hunts at all:

- One has a micro tedious preventative measure, the other has a less micro tedious (in IRL time) reactive measure.
- One has a setup that the player can do on any biome to guarantee the event never happens without further micro, the other has no such option and is at least a marginal threat on every biome but possibly sea ice.
- One has a high chance to kill a pawn outright, the other in decent setups takes a few moments to repair.

In other words, neither the threat nor the lack of counterplay is comparable.  Heck, you can't even selectively disable predator hunts (pre-difficulty implementation, which is only sort of), while you can disable zzzt.

The amount of IRL micro time each raid is indeed the main downside to armor impacting work speed.  You need to do some pretty heavy zoning/careful shelf placement to make the in-game time decent, but because of how the game's clothing assignment switching works this still takes a lot of IRL time to do quickly in terms of game-time, and you can't afford to dally.

As for moving in armor, I'm not sure how heavy it's supposed to be in game, but if you haven't tried it you'd be surprised how much difference even 20 pounds of weight makes IRL.  Back when I actually had some athleticism, I could run 2 miles in ~11:20.  First time attempting it with that on, I couldn't even complete 2 miles w/o stopping to walk.  You do acclimate, but not to the point where it's like you're not wearing it (don't think I ever broke 12:00 wearing it).  Wearing enough flak to stop bullets is probably considerably heavier than that.

Maybe this is something that could make power armor more appealing than the flak stuff to a greater extent?  The implication given it's "power" armor is that it offers some assistance for movement that would otherwise not be there.

You know what, raids are too micro-intensive. Pawns should just equip themselves and shoot and fight automatically, no user input needed.

Tell you what, base building is too micro intensive too. We should just expect pawns to automaticallt build, hunt, cook and craft what we want.

Actually, why cant we just win the game by default? Theres just too much microing in generating input for the game to respond to our commands. We should just command to win and win...

No need for disingenuous stuff.  Provided you have the time, it's always useful to switch into armor - this is often not a meaningful decision and it *COULD* be ordered with a tiny fraction of the player inputs that are presently required.

To illustrate: zoning all of your pawns into a pre-defined region takes < 5 seconds, even if you have 20 pawns.  Giving orders to 20 pawns to switch into available armor could take a similar amount of time in principle, but right now it will take several minutes.

The less time you spend on rote micro, the more time is spent on gameplay where your inputs/choices matter and are not obvious.  If players want the "flavor" of poor UI civ 6 has so much you can literally spend > 1/2 the total time in front of the screen on that.  Rimworld has many features to avoid this and is better for that QoL.

Can't be good at everything.  While I like to push to the highest levels of challenge in most games, this does cut into a little bit of the catharsis and I play fewer games as a result while trying to master the ones I do. 

The ideal is that you enjoy it.  Nobody else can do that for you, might as well play like you want.

This event doesn't have much effect on gameplay if you plan for it.  Rather, if you don't spam batteries it's a small event.  If you don't make conduits at all (my typical approach) you can't get zzzt even if it's enabled.

The amount of IRL micro time each raid is indeed the main downside to armor impacting work speed.  You need to do some pretty heavy zoning/careful shelf placement to make the in-game time decent, but because of how the game's clothing assignment switching works this still takes a lot of IRL time to do quickly in terms of game-time, and you can't afford to dally.

As for moving in armor, I'm not sure how heavy it's supposed to be in game, but if you haven't tried it you'd be surprised how much difference even 20 pounds of weight makes IRL.  Back when I actually had some athleticism, I could run 2 miles in ~11:20.  First time attempting it with that on, I couldn't even complete 2 miles w/o stopping to walk.  You do acclimate, but not to the point where it's like you're not wearing it (don't think I ever broke 12:00 wearing it).  Wearing enough flak to stop bullets is probably considerably heavier than that.

Maybe this is something that could make power armor more appealing than the flak stuff to a greater extent?  The implication given it's "power" armor is that it offers some assistance for movement that would otherwise not be there.

There is indeed no such thing as an expendable pawn.  You can melee without taking friendly fire, or even enemy fire.

Sure, if you attack a downed pawn. Otherwise, it is too situational.

If you just draft and attack in the open, sure.  That's a losing proposition no matter the weapon though.

If you don't do that, then it's up to the player to engineer the situations where the weapon has the advantage.