Messages

If animals are going to count significantly toward raid size, maybe there needs to be strict distinction between utility animals and war animals so it's clear whether your offensive/defensive capabilities have been increased. 

On the other hand, maybe it's okay to let people build their Muffalo Mob or Alpaca Strike Force and steamroll the enemy at the cost of major animal husbandry and upkeep.  I don't see why that gameplay needs to be eliminated, or even balanced against.  Those who find it cheesy don't have to play that way.

The core issue, to me, is the colony death spiral.  I play on middle difficulties because I want a survival story but I don't want to have to be a meta gamer or consummate micromanager just to survive raids or manage mental breaks.  I have about 1000 hours in the game, over the past 3(?) alphas. 

Right now it feels like *everything* in Rimworld is there to kill you and nothing you do will really help (much).  Previously, raids were kind of simplistic and you could build a defense setup that would soften them up a lot and make the outcome of the battle likely to be in your favor.  I'm not sure why this was a bad thing, at least on lower/middling difficulties.  It took time and resources to build, but it felt satisfying to finally be "safe" (except for the sieges and poison/psychic ships).  And being able to achieve that relative "safe" provided an emotional pad for me as a player that made a lot of the negative mood issues (like the pawn being mad that they ate lunch out in the field instead of at a table) and injury issues (like having an armored pawn's eyes scratched out by a squirrel) more palatable. 

Now, with the raids seemingly structured so that you'll never be safe and largely have to risk your colonists' life and limbs for every conflict, those bizarre negative moodlets and RNG killer squirrels just become contributing factors to the death spiral.  They're discouraging rather than silly/stupid "what's the X thing that ever happened to you in Rimworld?" story fodder.  That saddens me, because it was the mix of survival and silliness that drew me to Rimworld. 

More positive events would really help.   Getting rid of some of the really unfair-feeling events would also help (slaughterer mental break, rampant illnesses on caravans, for example).  But mostly, I, as a player, need to feel like my little colony is more than one bad break away from total destruction every single time I sit down to play. 

Sorry, that wasn't directly about RNG, but I don't think the real issue is RNG itself (which is largely a good thing - Randy Random is popular for a reason) but instead about how easily bad RNG can destroy a colony despite the player's best efforts. 

The real question is, why do emus have a 100% chance or revenge while cougars only have a 10% chance? That just doesn't make sense.

That appears to be an in-joke because emus are obnoxiously aggressive birds.

In general, I am comfortable with the manhunter-when-hunted mechanic.  It fits with the other animal-related absurdities in the Rimworld universe.  For playability/balance, I think the really valuable animals (thrumbos, rhinos, elephants and megasloths) should have 100% manhunter chances, too (or at least very, very high). 

Because muffalo are milk-givers and have previously been pretty docile, I think players tend to view them as domesticated animals more than wild animals and expect them to behave like Wooly cattle, more or less.  Given how difficult actual cattle are to acquire (I've had little luck finding them with traders, anyway), they're an awesome option to have.

It might make sense to make muffalo a little less valuable from a hide perspective, i.e. lower the defense rating of their hide) so they can continue to be safe/easy to domesticate.

Also, should it even be possible to sell meat to trade caravans?  Wouldn't it just spoil before they could get it home?  I can see selling raw meat to orbital traders - presumably they have refrigeration - but caravans are all hauling stuff on pack animals.  That also might make it reasonable from a balance perspective to make normal prey/herd animals safer to hunt. 

Ideally, I would like to be able to designate a trading spot/zone.  I don't think it's going to be very easy at all for Tynan to try to bake in logic that makes the traders pick a reasonable spot on all/most maps/bases.  There's just too much variability.

Instead, to discourage using this feature to ambush traders with impunity, perhaps the cost to buy faction goodwill should increase with each faction member's death and the bonus from releasing a faction member unharmed should decrease with each member's death.  So once you're on good terms with a faction, you have to keep it that way or eventually you'll have no mechanism for winning them over again.  If you ambush and slaughter a caravan you get the spoils, but you'll have to spend a fortune to regain their good will, and if you keep doing it they'll be permanently hostile and you won't get caravans from them any more.

I guess while writing and editing this, I found my own answer.  Perhaps the intent is you don't get to manage these stories, you always get the bad outcome and have to deal with it.  You have no input, you can't change it, you only get to pick up the pieces.  It's a pretty negative and annoying story if that's the case.

How come no input? Arrest them, beat them, kill them.

If there was a decent chance that I could actually arrest someone without violence (most criminals confronted with armed police/security guards will surrender in real life) I would be far more willing to incorporate high break risk people into my colonies.  But when the only option is to damage them until they can't walk any more, at great risk of permanent injuries, I'd much rather just not have them in my colony to begin with. 

I think the *risk* of a pawn refusing to surrender quietly is a great thing for a story generator.  Having it as a guaranteed behavior makes that whole situation not fun for me.  I want to run a colony of decent people trying to survive together, not some dystopian gulag where the colonist's character weaknesses can only be addressed by violence.

The armor rating reflects the odds that the armor will reduce or entirely deflect the damage. Many attacks have armor penetration that will cancel part of this armor rating. In general, it is better to wear one good piece of armor than multiple layers of poorly armored clothing.

[Show me the details]

The game computes the damage reduction as follow.
Armor = ArmorRating - ArmorPenetration
Roll three random values A B C, each between 0 and 99.
1) If Armor < RandomA, no damage reduction occurs.
2) Else if Armor/2 < RandomB, all the damage is deflected.
3) Else if Armor/2 < RandomC, half the damage is absorbed and half is converted to blunt damage.
4) Else, no damage reduction occurs.

When multiple layers of clothing are worn, the steps above are performed for each layer. In particular, the damage is reduced by half each time step 3 triggers for a layer, and nullified entirely when step 2 triggers for a layer.

[Edit: fix typo in formula]

This is the first description of the armor that I have actually followed, so I vote yes that this be included.

And thank you  seerdecker :-)

Why won't predators hunt humanlikes anymore? I strongly oppose this, I really hope it is just temporary.

It has always been a thrill when in tropical biomes panthers begin to roam the outskirts of the base, that sensation of danger added to the experience. It would make sense if cobras didn't go for humanoids, but big predators not trying to hunt colonists seems very wrong to me. It takes away the challenge of some biomes, and also the immersion.

This could be a thing in lower difficulties, but passive predators in extreme doesn't feel right.

I think it may be a (temporary?) fix for the problem of not being able to shoot ranged weapons point blank any more, since unannounced predator attacks on a pawn with a ranged weapon becomes pretty devastating with little agency to counter it.

I think restricting ranged weapons to only be used at range is, overall, a good design choice.  Maybe predators should be relatively easy to stun with melee attacks from a rifle (decreasingly as predator size increases, maybe).  So you have a good chance to bonk a fox on the nose and run far enough to shoot it, a lesser but still significant chance with a wolf or big cat, and only a small chance with a bear.

New game started in the most recent build (1.0.1953). 

My recruiter is attempting to recruit a prisoner but the chat bubbles don't appear and the recruiter is not getting any experience.  When I click on the recruiter pawn, the status/activity text at the bottom of her character sheet that should say "Attempting to recruit Weiss" instead says "Standing" and only flashes "Attempting to recruit Weiss" so briefly that I can barely try to read it before going back to "Standing".  The recruiter is not getting any experience during this process and does not get experience once she finishes the recruiting attempt.

Additionally, neither the recruiter's social log nor the prisoner's show any entries related to the recruit attempt or its rejection. 

My recruiter pawn only has a skill of 1 and no passion. 

What the cook really needs to improve comfort is a quality foam/gel mat to stand on rather than a chair.  From personal experience I can say those make a HUGE difference in how comfortable it is to stand for long periods. 

Someone should create a poll...

+1  This would be really useful.

To me, saving to an external file to load into new games is far more important than being able to transfer bills between benches in one game (though that is useful, too).

I would love to be able to export all of my crafting bills, cooking bills, drug policies, clothing policies and stockpile definitions to an external file.  Then, in a new game, when I create a stockpile or bench, I would be able to select "Load" and it would give me any applicable bills out of my external save file.  Same with policies.  It would save me a ton of tedium when starting a new game to be able to do this.

[actually]

Yeah, this really may have been the worst decision. If he wanted to simplify the jobs list then he should have taken out 'Bed rest' or one of the other ones that are actually confusing for new players.

Uh... what is the difference between "Patient" and "Bed Rest" in the jobs list?  I never have understood exactly what differentiates them.

What I would like is for trait-related mental breaks to be called out in the letter you get informing you when they strike. That way the player knows that they didn't do anything "wrong" (except allow a pyromaniac/chemical fan/gourmand into their colony) to prompt the break, unlike mood-related mental breaks.

Good point, and I agree that would be a reasonable solution.

Is this a bug or intended?  A pawn in my colony had a mental break at 72% mood.  The minor break threshold is listed at 35%, which I always took to mean pawns wouldn't ever break if their mood is above that.  The pawn doesn't have any traits that impact break threshold.

Screenshot attached.

Did he/she have the new Gourmand trait? IIRC, it causes occasional Pigging Out Mental Breaks even when a Pawn in content, the same way that Chemical Fascination causes pawns to go on Drug Binges.

She's a gourmand, so that explains it.  Thanks for the info.

I think it should be removed, though.  The Gourmand already has an increased hunger rate.  It feels pretty unfair from a gameplay perspective because it's something I can't really control except by refusing Gourmands into my colony.

At the very least, the mood tooltip needs to be updated with the exception so players aren't turned off by what appears to be buggy behavior.