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Since the low-end tornados would no longer cause much damage, you could potentially add a rare high-end tornado swarm that drops several tornados during the same storm. 

I had forgotten how irritating the vanilla caravans are.  The Hospitality mod, IMO, is indispensable.  Until Hospitality is updated, I'm probably just going to turn off caravans in the scenario editor (I think I can do that) because no caravans is preferable to dealing with them.

I don't know what game you play.
But at Rimworld the Hospitality mod don't change anything with caravans.
Hospitality is only for visitors.

Trade caravans that come to your map - the original caravans.  Not the caravans your pawns form to go elsewhere.

Yep, thats we are speaking of.
Hospitality change only something to Visitors
Trading spot let you choose where Trading caravans will stay until they leave.

I may be misremembering, then.  I don't use the Trading spot mod, but I don't remember having any issues with visiting caravans while using Hospitality, so maybe there's some kind of behind-the-scenes logic going on.  Or maybe I've just gotten lucky.

But you're right.  The behavior I was thinking about was groups of visitors rather than a caravan.

I think it would be great if visiting caravans simply made camp in clear space near your base that did not overlap growing zones or the home zone.  They could plop down a campfire and bedrolls for each member, and declare their own restricted animal zone nearby. They would keep to a zone centered around the camp fire and we could send pawns out to trade with them. 

I had forgotten how irritating the vanilla caravans are.  The Hospitality mod, IMO, is indispensable.  Until Hospitality is updated, I'm probably just going to turn off caravans in the scenario editor (I think I can do that) because no caravans is preferable to dealing with them.

I don't know what game you play.
But at Rimworld the Hospitality mod don't change anything with caravans.
Hospitality is only for visitors.

Trade caravans that come to your map - the original caravans.  Not the caravans your pawns form to go elsewhere.

I completely agree that caravan behavior is way too stupid, and that there is need of a designated location. To avoid black ops exploit, it cannot be an assigned spot like the caravan spot, or else players could abuse this by making traders meat shields.

I had forgotten how irritating the vanilla caravans are.  The Hospitality mod, IMO, is indispensable.  Until Hospitality is updated, I'm probably just going to turn off caravans in the scenario editor (I think I can do that) because no caravans is preferable to dealing with them.

I don't see why assigning an allowed area for a caravan is a bad idea.  If an entire caravan is slaughtered (or your reputation drops below a certain threshold not easily reached except by killing a lot of their members), maybe their faction strikes up a deal with some other faction and has your colony bombarded from space, or they launch one mortar shell at your base for each caravan member killed or imprisoned, etc.  I'm confident retribution would be a common part of the political system on a Rimworld.

But what about the caravan caught out in the open by a pack of manhunting squirrels?  Or the caravan that arrives in summer wear during a massive cold spell and freezes to death before they get to you? 

Hospitality has added the ability for caravans to ask if you can protect them before entering a map tile with dangerous conditions (heat/cold/fire), so the latter can easily be solved.  For the former... maybe the reputation loss with the faction is reduced by 1/2 - 2/3 if the caravan member deaths occur due to manhunting animals?  Yes, someone could still use an animal pulser, but they'd have to find and buy one first so it's not likely they could get more than one caravan that way.

Honestly, Tynan should have fixed vistor/visiting caravan behavior a long time ago.

I'd rather have the old raid sound back.  The horn gets lost in the music for me.

I'm all in favor of diversifying alert sounds, but I was happy with the old raid sound, personally.

> That's the whole point of natural disasters.

Even the earliest settlers to Tornado alley knew how to deal with Tornadoes: they built underground. I'm not playing A18 yet, but it would be weird if Tornados could do any damage to people who are dug in. Also, if the game had Z (which obviously it doesn't), the lower levels would be immune.

It's an opportunity to introduce an advanced building material - could be reinforced concrete or even some kind of futuristic plascrete made from plasteel and other ingredients - that can withstand tornado winds. 

The truth is that quality mortared stone is actually pretty good in tornados because much of the damage and loss of life is due to debris flying at high speed (which thick stone is pretty good at rejecting).  So theoretically our stone block walls ought to withstand a tornado pretty well.  What they're not good for is earthquakes.  That's when you really need your construction to be steel-reinforced and built on a foundation designed for earth movement.

As much as I like the tornado as an added game event, it shouldn't affect natural stone (hills and mountains) and should cause limited damage to stone structures and the things inside them.  Wood structures, of course, would get shredded.  To balance, perhaps Tynan could also add earthquakes (which wood is generally better for since it has a lot of flexibility) but stone is not, and maybe flooding, which would destroy interiors more than structure.

The frustration with this mechanic really stems from the fact that you have to store everything on the ground.  You can't put something inside a box or hang it off the ground with rope or even put it in a backpack and carry it around with you to keep it safe while you make better provisions.  So your only option to protect those MREs from animals is to *build an entire building* (or at the very least half a building if you have hills to build against).  In some biomes, you can lose a fair percentage to animals before you accomplish that.

I would love something like this.  I already create a custom zone called "Work Here" that I assign whenever I want something like this for a specific pawn but it either has to provide them a path to food and their bed (not always convenient or sensible) or I have to remember to unzone them twice a day.  It would be great to have a zone that applies only when they are restricted to work activities.

The best approach would be adding small amounts of many stressors over time so that there's no one mechanic to game for best results.

Upkeep is a fundamental money sink.  Currently it exists in the form of structural damage from combat, clothing wearing out over time, and zzt! and breakdown events.  However, it doesn't scale much with increasing colony size/wealth. 

I am more in favor of adding storm/earthquake/meteor damage than I am of adding consistent degradation rates on all structures for the simple reason that the constant repair loads becomes an irritating chore but sudden, somewhat-catastrophic events, feel more like challenges and are more "fun".  The timing and severity of these damage events could scale up as time passes.  They would also provide opportunities to damage/destroy the colony stockpiles of various things, which currently are only ever threatened by fire or incoming mortar shells.

Scaling up colonist expectations over time would also be a good mechanic.  This exists currently in the "new colony hope" and "low expectations" mood bonuses that disappear over time, as well as the decreasing returns for joy activities.  (As a side note, a tech tree/development tree related to adding joy opportunities would be a welcome addition to help developed colonies offset this.)  But these lack a significant means to continue applying pressure to an established colony.

I would like to see this mechanic expanded to include colonists expectations for their food and living conditions.  They should be grateful to be alive for the first year or so and happy to eat nutrient paste and sleep on the floor as long as they're safe, but as the colony wealth goes up, they should start to expect good food and nice accommodations for the same mood level.  I'd love to see food variety added in there somehow, too, as something that makes a positive impact on either pawn mood or health.

Resource scarcity would also help apply pressure to the colony.  Right now, you can get leather from any and every creature.  2 or 3 rats produce enough leather for a t-shirt. (I don't think you can actually tan rat skin into leather, but even if you could, you'd need fifty of them, at least...) You can harvest leather from turkeys and chickens, which is nonsense. 

Food scarcity would also help.  I find that I can sustain a colony easily (food-wise) on a 10-day growing period.  Anything more than that and I'm swimming in extra food production.  It's ridiculously simply to feed everyone and it shouldn't be.  Crops should produce a lot less to make it harder to produce a surplus and make it more of a decision as to whether you can afford to take on  more colonists.  Places with longer growing periods should be balanced out with more threats to the crops  - herds of animals that wander in and eat them, locusts/pests, storm/flooding damage (floods could be added as an event without adding a water system per se), blight (ought to affect only one crop at a time), and diminishing crop returns when you keep replanting the same thing over and over (nutrient exhaustion in the soil).

That got long :-)  Some thoughts, anyway...

Thank you guys for the support. Especially the guy that made an account especially to support wow haha

I'll try the mod you suggest, but I posted because I believe this is what the CORE game requires at this point in its development to become everything it's meant to be
It doesn't really need more adventurous stuff like caravans. Right now it just needs a lot more basic content that's added with the explicit purpose of rewarding the player for specializing in whatever it is he/she feels like. In effect, allowing more choice of radically different playthroughs.



And I don't think most of these suggestions are hard to implement.
In fact I think they're some of the very simplest things to implement. Just require some playtesting for balance, which everyone here, I think, is already, in effect, engaged in.

Adding more types of minerals, metals, animals, plants etc is so easy it's literally a graphic and a few basic entries to set it up. Mods have added thousands.

Dispersing these resources at world generation I think is also not very difficult. The game already does it, I think. With stone types and rarer stuff like jade and gold.

Just remove any colony-gen condition that mandates that the player have X mine-able metal/etc and put it all in world-gen. The player will decide where he wants to settle, whether a metal rich place or a place with good earth for growing stuff etc. Choice isn't taken from him, it is GIVEN to him, where before he had no real choice as everything is nearly the same. It is not a choice if it doesn't have rewards/penalties to consider.

Making colony health/happiness depend also on food variety is also rather straightforward, requiring you to make whatever you can where you are and trade (or send forage parties) to get what you can't.


Making crafting require more of various resources is also not a very big deal given the very few crafting items currently available. You don't even have to really test it. Just make items require whatever seems reasonable and tweak it as you go based on feedback. So your shield generator now costs X irridium crystals, Y something else etc to make. Done. It's as simple as changing a very simple xml entry I think.

Setting up a research tree with soft-excludes for specialization (or having science pawns themselves specialize in specific subjects) is a bigger project, but it would definitely add a lot.

And so on.

It may seem simple but the balancing required to add so many new dimensions to the economy and survival aspects would be huge.  Probably an entire release worth of development to even make a first pass at balancing it so that each play "path" remains viable (if variable in degree of difficulty). 

Consider:  you introduce a new material - iridium crystals - needed for the top half of a new technology tree.  They're only available in jungle biomes (or deep in mountainous maps, or whatever).  So, a player that settles elsewhere has to be able to trade for them.  Do they spontaneously "appear" in trade caravan inventories without regard to where the caravan is from?  Or does there have to be a settlement from that faction in the biome somewhere?  If the latter, how do you deal with a map that has no jungle biomes?  Or the only faction that might possess those crystals to trade being your enemy?  If they spontaneously appear in traders' inventories, how do you make the economy viable?  (Right now the Rimworld economy is pretty broken so the current system probably wouldn't work... RNG supply does not make for fun gameplay diversity most of the time.)  And that's just one new material for one new tech tree branch. 

TL;DR  I'm totally in favor of Tynan adding this kind of depth, but it's not a small or simple task.

Just adding my +1.  Resource diversity and technology diversity are both desperately needed in the vanilla game. 

+1  This also should apply to drug schedules.

Not when you order them to rescue that dude, who managed to throw the molotov  at the wall and not past it ..

or you try to strip him .. so you can at least save his gear .. or rescue the single shoddy sniper rifle your colony got ..

At that point you're micro-ing the pawn's actions, right?  Or am I misunderstanding?  Wouldn't you micro him to beat out the fire first, then rescue or strip, etc?

Okay, so yes, I can forbid and draft and what not to prevent pawns from hauling things that are burning, however when drafted they avoid fire in pathing, so it would make sense (at least to me) they would check, is X on fire, yes, better not pick it up. or is there something I'm missing?

Are the haulers not set to fight fires (or are incapable of firefighting)?  Otherwise, they should be trying to beat out the fires first in their priority list before trying to haul.

You idiots do realize that you can simply turn off "follow maters when drafted" in the animals tab, right?

No need to be rude. 

However, he's correct.  In the animals tab there is a row of items that can be checked if you want the animals trained in that area, including rescue and hauling.  The last two in the list are to follow the master into combat and follow the master when doing fieldwork (hunting, etc).  If you uncheck those, the animal will stay inside its assigned zone.

The problem is that the moment you successfully train Obedience on an animal, those get set true automatically.  Tynan should change it so the default is to keep those unchecked.