Messages

I don't really want an "ate with table" mood buff, but I'd love a "family dinner" or "sit down meal" buff to pop if several pawns eat at the table together.  Then it could be more of a social thing.

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Rough
Biome: Boreal Forest
Commitment mode: no
Hours played in the last 2 days: 4 hrs
Complete mod list: Hugslib

Just finished a raid that resulted in 2 injured pawns, 3 captured and injured raiders and 2 injured battle boars. 

My two doctors went directly to the wounded, tended them in the order of greatest need (including a boar who would have died if they'd treated all the humans first), and did not try to eat, sleep or play horseshoes once during that time even though the battle started around midnight and lasted until morning.  It was amazing!

ETA: And now the two injured boars are being fed kibble and raw meat rather than meals!

It would be cool to be able to create a tribal start where all of the factions on the map are also tribals and all industrial techs (approximately electricity and up) are disabled.  Maybe allow small mechanoid raids (really small since there won't be any guns available to the tribals) for late game to stay consistent with the origin story of being driven out of their home by mechs.

Thank you very much for the replies.  It would not have occurred to me to click on the colony.

I think there needs to be a "Choose New Destination" button at the bottom of the screen with "Settle", "Rest" and "Attack" to make it clear how you send the caravan on to another destination.  Otherwise, a new player just has to luck into trying the right combination of left and right clicks on various icons.  It's not intuitive that some caravan actions have buttons/right click menu options and some don't show up in either place.

Okay, so this is a total noob question, but I can't figure it out.  I have only tried caravans a couple of times so I'm not very familiar with them.

My caravan has reached a neighboring settlement and completed a trade.  How in the world do I tell it to return home?  I tried right clicking, but the only option is to attack the settlement. 

Thanks

I'm not loving the new art, either.  Sorry 

I don't think everything has to show varying quantities with different art.  The fabric/leather bolts, for instance.  The bolt itself implies a large quantity of fabric, so you really only need one picture and a number to specify how much, exactly.  I like the larger bolts/rolls, myself (what we had before this update).  The little ones are too skinny.

The meat, too, suffers for the attempt to show "piles" of increasing size.  Why not have a rack of ribs and a couple of neatly stacked steaks as the meat art and a number shows how many of them there are.  I'd agree the color is too red now.  The previous coloration looked more raw meat-like. 

I also agree the components look like a very large spindle of thread rather than something industrial.  Maybe something more like a pile of cogs, bolts and piping?  I'm actually not sure what components are supposed to represent.  Electrical doodads?  Mechanical parts?

The healroot change I like, mostly because the green now fits with the rest of the biome color palette and doesn't stand out like it used to.  That bright green did make it easy to spot as I panned across the map, but it always looked unnatural.

Do you mean the wildlife tab? 

I don't use the wildlife tab for hunting.  I don't think that's really its purpose.  I use it to check how many predators are on the map and then I can click on each one to find them on the map.  It's also useful for mass animal insanity because I can go through the list of that type of animal in the wildlife tab, click to each, and check whether that one is a manhunter.  That way I know when the event is over and I've killed all of the insane animals.

Feedback on my current colony so far:

Storyteller:  Randy
Difficulty:  Rough
Biome:  Boreal Forest
Hours played in the last 3 days: 4 hours

I play at a glacial pace so I'm only into the second quadrum but so far the early game feels about right.  I've had 3 raids of what I felt were appropriate strengths and was able to capture 2 prisoners as well as let one die who I could have captured but didn't want.  There have been a couple of injuries but nothing permanent beyond a scar.

One of the biggest things I've noticed is that my best shooter (who is a 9, no passion, careful shooter) hits his targets about 2/3 of the time, which is wonderful.  He can hunt effectively and has been able to (mostly) take down raiders before they could reach him.  This seems improved from both B18 and early 1.0 but could just be my perception.

My first added colonist was a fleeing refugee who was addicted to luci.  She's got great skills and has been instrumental in getting the colony up and running, and now that her luci stash is depleted I've sent her caravanning to see if she can buy any more.  The nice this is that the colony is stable enough that I feel like I can afford to try to keep her rather than just banishing her as being too big a risk.

I have 3 boars and a turkey (self-tamed).  The boars are helpful in combat, though so far they've mostly been involved in taking on manhunters because they haven't been well-positioned to join in on raid defense yet. 

So, so far so good. 

Maybe higher quality clothing items, at least, could provide a small "I feel pretty" mood bonus while they're in good condition?  That way the lack of differentiation in armor is offset by getting a moodlet.

All the animal sizes look like they've been adjusted to fall into a middle-ish range, so they're all useful to the player. If squirrels weighed half a kilo, no player would want them clogging up the wildlife/hunting UI, because they would offer practically no meat for their colony. On the other hand, a single bear or muffalo should be able to stock a handful of pawns for at least a month of food, but they only give you a couple days. Unless Tynan's going to make muffalos extremely rare, or re-work small animals to not be player-interactible, these animal sizes are what we need to have in the game.

I think these could be made realistic without too much heartburn.

One month (real) = 1/12 year.  In Rimworld 1 year = 60 days, so 1/12*60 = 5 days.  I think a muffalo now would make 15-ish fine meals, so if it made 30 instead, that would feed 3 pawns for that 5 day month.  And squirrels, hares, chickens, turtles, etc should make 1 or 2 meals, tops.

It would definitely change hunting dynamics but I don't think it would make it worse, especially if those small animals were non-revenge and herd sizes were adjusted.

Trying to figure out the actual amount of armour a colonist has and how effective it is, is a lesson in futility. I don't want to have to break out a spreadsheet (exaggeration, I know) to work it all out. Is power armour on it's own actually fine? Layered armour better? Is it better to have higher armour on outer layers or on shirt/pants? I like the direction the system is heading in, but being able to see at a glance what the effect of having armour is would be great. Have it listed "Torso: 50% to deflect" or something to that effect.

It's actually very simple. If the attacker does not have a specific armor penetration, you just multiply the damage by 150%. That is his armor penetration value. So a 20 damage attack has 30% armor pen, for instance (scythers). Pila are notoriously high-damaging, but have very low armor pen, for example. You then remove the armor pen from your armor value and you get the chance to deflect/reduce the attack. It seems complicated, but on general you just have to multiply the expected damage by 1.5x and have some dozens of points above that to deflect/reduce it reliably.

That doesn't sound very simple to me.  Where would an average joe player go to find that information, anyway?  Shouldn't it be summarized in a tooltip in a digestible format that doesn't require stopping the game to do some mental math/get out a calculator every time you need to figure out how a given piece of armor compares with possible damage sources?

• I want my ultimate soldier pawns to be on the front lines, almost guaranteed to win in a fair fight because I have worked towards that by training my shooting skill, and crafted more accurate weapons. I want my soldier pawns to be part of my actual defense, not just things that make use of defensive structures I build. I want them to be lumbering tanks, fully kitted out in power armour I have researched and crafted, barely taking any meaningful damage. They can and will go down just like a normal colonist, but through pain with broken bones, not from death or lost limbs. Shooting shouldn't be all about accuracy. It should be the knowledge of when to fire and when to take cover, and most importantly where to shoot. Have a high shooting skill add to cover bonus. Can accuracy be fine tuned to where called shots are a thing? A shooter of 10+ should be able to purposely target to kill or wound. Combat capable pawns on both sides should be able to take down targets easier. Make target priority, positioning and flanking more important.

You want lumbering tanks, cover systems and more strategic combat. You can't make the first with the latter, since everyone would simply use power armor and melee instead of shooting. Balance must be taken. Today, in the current build, a shielded pawn with a longsword and a steel plate armor, with just 7-9+ melee, normal quality as standard, can tank and deflect attention reliably enough against outlanders. It can flank tribals and singlehandedly defeat three archers or more, unless you're really unlucky. One single melee guy can punish raids and avoid your valuable shooters getting shot. If you have two or three (three is a good standard when your colony reaches 9+ colonists, for door defense) melee pawns, one brawler, and all of them have enough equipment, they will provide a huge asset to your defenses. You use shooters/artifacts against the enemy's VIPs (high-combat pawns, high-power firearms, rocket launchers, etc). You charge their bolt-action/greatbows/lancers with melee after the shooters mitigate the initial wave, and leave one melee to protect them while they shoot (their shield also prevents friendly fire). All this combined with sandbags and turrets, all to bring up one point: why do you want this? You already have it. It takes a HUGE RNG failure to kill your melee people. They are already very beefy. There is no need for more protection against range, if anything, i'd simply make limbs default to 1 HP in one-shots, so they don't lose fingers that much. Simple.

Honest question here.  There's been a lot of lobbying from the forum to make melee viable in combat, which I understand.  But should melee be required?  Shouldn't it be viable play to only have ranged soldiers? 

Your description above would imply to me that melee is absolutely critical to succeeding against raids and I am not sure that's what a lot of players would expect (since our perceptions are based largely on what real world modern militaries do and there are NO modern military units that send in guys with spears and heavy armor next to their rifle squads.  We do see riot police who are essentially melee units, but their goal is to deter with non-lethal force.)

Not sure if this is a bug in the new version but if I have a stockpile set to hold corpses (like my freezer stockpile) sometimes rotting corpses or skeletons make it in and I can't get rid of them without clearing all corpses.

I have had sporadic instances where the "allow rotten" option disappears from my stockpile selection list (not just becomes checked/unchecked but is no longer visible).  In one case, reloading the game made it reappear.  In another, I had to delete the stockpile and recreate it.  The new stockpile had both options.  I have been putting it down to the churn of updates on save games, but it may be related to what you're seeing.

Still love to hear more suggestions about how to make tactical pawn vs pawn combat more attractive.

I find pawn vs pawn combat fun, and I tend to go for it, but I have one major problem with it: it's too unpredictable. The reason why it's unpredictable is that the gap in shooting skill between pawns that are supposedly good at shooting and pawns that are bad at shooting is way too small, in that everyone is too inaccurate, especially at short range. Just think about it; in Rimworld, it's perfectly possible for a pawn who is supposedly a planet-class shooter to miss several shots in a row on a downed elephant that is only a few meters away. This exact thing happened to me many times, but it shouldn't. In real life, not even a beginner would miss like that.

If the gap were wider, it would become more reasonable to specialize pawns into soldiers and workers rather than just draft everyone every time, because professional soldier pawns will have more chances to beat by a raid by themselves, unless the raiders also have very good soldiers. Another problem that inaccuracies cause is that it makes banzai charges from raiders too good, especially early on in the game. A few guys with knives and clubs charge at your pawns across an open field, your pawns miss every single shots at them, and then you either stand your ground and lose, or you do the door strategy and just wait until they turn their back and walk away before you go out and try again. It's lame, but it's necessary. And even if your pawn does manage to hit something, it most likely wont incapacitate the raiders, who can receive a direct shotgun blast and still go on to fight in melee.

On the other hand, you don't want everyone to be too accurate, otherwise all fights will be over in seconds. Maybe that aside from widening the gap in combat skills, all pawns should also be much more accurate at close range and less accurate at longer range. And while we're at it, the chances of suffering permanent injuries and especially of dying are way too high. In actual wars, most of the participants survive and come out without being crippled. They should have less permanent injuries, but also take longer to recover from their wounds, and maybe bleed out a bit faster to make battlefield medicine more important.

This would make a big difference for me, because it would make preparation count a lot more toward whether I could survive a raid or not.  Previously, the ability to build static defenses like turrets, trap corridors, and/or killboxes made up for the fact that close combat is really dangerous and allowed good preparation to go a pretty long way toward "guaranteeing" success (or at least allowing my little group to be victorious with not-a-colony-crippling level of loss/damage).

But if I could have highly trained pawns that I knew would (likely) take down their target if I set them up in a good position to do so before they came into range to harm any of my other pawns, then that, too, allows me to be successful through preparation.  And it would be more fun.  And probably make the damage and/losses feel more deserved because it would be more a failure of my preparation, not bad RNG on armor or weapon miss chances.

I guess I'll speak as someone on the opposite end of the play style spectrum.  I enjoy Rimworld primarily for the colony builder/survival aspects.  I like that there are raids because a colony that is never threatened would require far less infrastructure, but I don't want to play an RTS or turn-based strategy game.   "Door popping", watching raider statuses to see when they reset, etc are all things that sound horribly un-fun to me.  I want to be able to strategically position my pawns and let the battle play out, with pauses only occasionally to give more specific directions (there's an opportunity to flank, focus fire on *that* guy, etc).  So I was perfectly happy with the killbox model because it meant I didn't have to play a game type (RTS/turn-based strategy) that I don't like and am not very good at.

I generally accept that I won't have colonies survive more than about a year because the raids just get too hard for me to manage and colony death spiral inevitably sets in.  Unfortunately, going to easier difficulties to reduce the raid challenge ALSO reduces a lot of the other challenges (like mood penalties, type/frequency of events, etc) which makes the colony building aspects too easy.  So I hover around the middle difficulties, using Randy Random because I like not knowing how the game is going to escalate, exactly, and see how long I can make it.

there'snt much provided to really "analyze" if the 8 yorkshire really "make" a 19 pirates raid "turn into" a 31 one
since the 2 raids' types can be fundamentally different, the 19 might 've been sapper or raid with doomsday, while the 31 one might 've been "just a normal pirate raid with "normal" weapons", then there's the increase in wealth during the gap, etc. etc.

The 31 raid had a doomsday weapon and a tri rocket luncher. I know cause thats the reason my game ended.

Maybe you should have a psychic lance ready for those guys. Insanity Lance on tri-launcher = raid gone.

I really hope the game isn't intend to work like this, i.e. "if you happen to have the *one* good counter to X event, you live, otherwise, your colony is gone".