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I'm really hoping visitor behavior and inter-faction relationships get a huge overhaul in A18.

As long as we are talking about changing that, I'd love to see the ability to just type in a number as well. Once I know the exact number I want for a bill, (and assuming similar bills at the same bench will be the same range) it would sure be a lot easier to type it in rather than drag the slider and have it get all jumpy right around where I want to set it.

This applies to everything with a slider.  For example, setting up drug policies is incredibly tedious due to having to finagle the sliders around rather than just being able to type in the numbers.

And +1 to the OP's suggestion.  As well, when you type in the number, a circle should be drawn on the map showing what that range looks like, visible only when you have the bill open.

Masks would only be treating the symptoms rather than the cause, which is the too-heavy penalty for pawn appearance.  I mean, how shallow are these people?

If they let eating without a table ruin their day, I would say that they're pretty shallow. Jokes aside, there is actually historical precedent for people wearing masks to disguise disfigurement. An industry rose out of creating masks for soldiers who lost eyes, jaws, etc in WWI, restoring some normalcy to those unfortunate men. So I think that it's feasible that people on rimworlds would develop similar solutions to similar problems.

Very true, and I actually kind of like the idea of masks as a way for disfigured pawns to improve their appearance.  But I still think the social penalty should be lessened for those who have close personal ties to the ugly/disfigured person.

Masks would only be treating the symptoms rather than the cause, which is the too-heavy penalty for pawn appearance.  I mean, how shallow are these people?

A better solution would be for the ugliness/disfigurement penalties to be mitigated by relationships so that friends/lovers/spouses would not be impacted much by the pawn's physical appearance but they would react badly to a hideously disfigured stranger - at least until they got to know them.

I didn't know about this button either, so I've also learned something.

+1 to this.  And for letting me know there's a mod out there for it already.  I hadn't heard of Numbers so I'll have to check it out.

I would love to be able to assign clothing and weapons to particular pawns.  In addition, I'd love to be able to put a wardrobe or cabinet in that pawn's room to store those items without beauty penalty.  (Limit the wardrobe to a reasonable number of item "slots" to prevent abuse, of course.  Maybe 6 or 8.) 

The pawn would select items from their own belongings first, regardless of whether other items are of better quality or more desirable, but if they do not have a particular item and there is one in a stockpile with no owner, the pawn could then wear that one but it would not be owned by that pawn unless the player assigns it.

+1

I also think rice should only grow in mud.

i just thought....there is a downside to this...it removes the ability of the smelter to determine smelting range - unless both the smelter bill AND the stockpile have to be set right, which just doubles the work instead of making it easier.

"Mark for smelting" should simply take priority over any bills in the smelter.  That way you can still have a bill to smelt all awful melee weapons that are smeltable, but you can also mark a specific non-awful melee weapon and it, too, will get smelted.

If there was a caravan inventory stockpile type whose allowed contents were defined the same way the caravan loading screen is now (i.e. you select how many of what items to take out of the spreadsheet-like list of everything the colony has), then pawns could collect everything for the caravan via their normal routine and plop it down in the "loading area".  That way they could stop to sleep, eat and do joy activities, as well as allow the animals to continue grazing/whatever while they're not needed. 

Then, once everything was gathered you could click a menu item to insta-form the caravan and leave from that spot. 

The loading stockpile would probably have to be defined as one per caravan, so you could have a Caravan 1 stockpile and a Caravan 2 stockpile going at the same time.

The current system is detailed, but not necessarily even that realistic. I would like to try a simpler system, like the one from very early Rimworld alphas, where characters had just HP bars. It could be some kind of compromise, like no limb loss until at 50% health or lower. Yes, it's nice to quickly headshot an incoming enemy, but it cuts both ways, and the determining factor is random, almost completely out of your control.

Tynan normally favors gameplay over realism. In this case he's clinging to realistic a mechanic that is not especially fun. It boggles my mind. I guess he just knows no better, hasn't played story generating board games like Eldritch Horror and Robinson Cruzoe: Adventures on Cursed Island.

I don't want a simple HP system.  That would be so boring.  I like the detail in the current system, even if the implementation isn't quite there yet. 

I think changing how armor works would be a big step forward, i.e. armor blocks all damage below a certain per hit threshold but the armor takes damage over time, so a guy in power armor would be immune to squirrels, at least until he got swarmed by a hundred of them and they had time to wear down his armor enough to get to him.

I'd really like to see the weapon accuracy go way up and have the armor and damage mechanics fixed to make the results make sense. 

It would also be cool to have different types of armor that are better against different weapons.  A steel breastplate could protect better against arrows and pilas but not be great against guns, while a kevlar vest is really good against bullets but can be pierced by pilas, greatbows and swords, etc.

Another proposal.

It's strange that your settlers are the only people that have any idea what a mechanoid is. After all, they're made of juicy components, steel and plasteel. They can be thousands years old. We can't expect wild animals like vultures to dine come and dine on them. But outlanders might come with a card and carry them home to disassemble. Pirates might specialize in extracting mechanoid weapons, which could be bad news in future raids if you let them do that. Tribals might want to throw them into a volcano, take home and worship them, or sell them to a shaman.

I like this idea.  Downed mechanoids become raid magnets - especially if the raids target "kidnapping" the mechanoid rather than attacking your base - and if successful the raiders get to up their wealth with the items they would presumably get from deconstructing the mechanoid.

our pawns are also able to survive laying on the floor covered in 5 other's people's blood with 6 gun shot wounds to their body after being patched up by a guy with a 2 doctor skill.

That just shows again that squirrels are more dangerous than assault rifles. I don't expect our weapons to work like in a movie, but I can't imagine a skilled shooter not being able to hit a group of tribesmen charging at him badly enough to down a lot of them.

Somethink that has been criticized before: I personally don't like how armor reduces damage by a given percentage.
To use squirrels as an example again: A colonist in power armor could still be downed by them. Imagine Iron Man dying because of a mad squirrel ...
Tested it: Colonist with melee skill 8 and normal power armor was attacked by five manhunting squirrels, took out for and was then downed by the fifth one.

Generally, our wishes would make the game easier in every way though ... I think there's just not a perfect solution.

As much as I agree that much of this is horribly, *horribly* unrealistic, there's more than just the gameplay difficulty vs realism balance to consider. 

Part of the appeal of this game (IMO) is the absurdity of some of the things these colonists encounter.  A furry tsunami of manhunting squirrels being but one example.  I actually bought the game because reading the "funniest things that have happened to you in Rimworld" thread in the Stories subforum had me crying I was laughing so hard. 

So I agree that the game's challenge should not come from arbitrary difficulty or frustrating mechanics, but I don't want to see it get so "realistic" that the absurdity goes away.

It would be nice if the research/technology system was a little more complex.  For instance, my tribe has a major penalty to research speed because of its neolithic origin.  No problem!  But then I take in a crash pod survivor who was the chief engineer for some spacefaring organization who has a high intellectual skill.  But they still can't research any faster even though they already understand electricity, etc.

Alternately, my colony of crashlanded survivors is researching technologies for building their ship and the researcher dies.  But no matter!  Ox, the tribal they captured and converted yesterday has a reasonable intellectual skill so they can put him right on that fusion reactor research.

I think research speed should be *by pawn* not by colony type, with modifies for what kind of society they're embedded in (tribal adopted into an advanced colony vs spacefarer adopted by tribals, etc) and their own skill.

This would be soooo much better than the current system.

+1