Messages

[brawler]

 I personally really like the Ferals expansion to the Rimsenal mod, where it's an entire faction equipped with weapons you'd picture a brawler-trait-having pawn using. Classic Quake array of pistol-machinegun-shotgun-sniper-rocketlauncher-oddball, all lacking in the range and overall reliability of their conventional counterparts. Thing is, they all have close-quarters modifications, like an axehead on the shotgun, or spearhead on the sniper. As somebody who has never written a piece of code in my life, I'd imagine it would probably be simplest to make specific weapons for that purpose rather than adding the possibility to modify weapons that we have now, otherwise you'd have to deal with modifying interfaces or double the bills menu for the machining bench with "Assault rifle, Assault rifle - bayonet."

Or just incorporate simple sidearms and get over the fact that you can have a minigun, but not a knife and pistol at the same time.

[Amazon]

Hey friend, when I see into the melee dodge chance, there is a -50% base value for the Widows. Why is this so? Shouldn't Amazon killers have at least the same dodge chance as those puny humans? 

No idea why specifically giant women fused to giant spiders with four times the legs as a human would be an easier target to hit than a comparatively smaller, more agile human.

 I also support Bolgfred's ideas. They actually make lots of sense, gotta say. Pyro might be one of the more illogical ones, could see them getting good recreation from just staring at torches and campfires.

game dropped "planks" and similar stuff long ago, overcomplication just for overcomplication is not fun.

we ever have chocolate dropping from trees in form of bars...

I think it really depends on the player.  Rimworld appeals to a pretty diverse group of gamers.  Some are more colony-manager fans, some are more survival players, some are more action or strategy or RPG.

I lean toward more processing steps, in general, because I like the sense of industriousness and accomplishment when I am able to produce finished goods in my colony.  Chocolate bars dropping from trees and reams of cloth dropping from cotton plants feels cheap in that regard because I didn't have to work for them. 

...which breaks immersion greatly. People would find mixing cocoa with milk a viable middle-of-the-road approach, but oversimplification and overstreamlining alienates the core audience.

These are actually some fairly good points. Personally, I like my game as an industrious little ant farm. Maybe it means I should switch to Factorio or Rise to Ruins, but I never put too much care into making the most effective siege bunkers, but good, well, factories with residential areas. As such, I felt kinda bummed by what the game gives me to work with. Beer's nice, gotta grow hops, ferment them in barrels, process wort, make sure the whole thing's all temperature controlled. . . except it's far out-classed by most other forms of silver-making. Shoot a critter, butcher it, sell the leather, pick cotton or devilstrand and you have it ready, smokeleaf is a case of picking and rolling, it lacks the complexity I'm personally seeking. At the same time, I know that there are those who play this more like an RTS, and want expansive, raid-ready bases, where the most effective tactics available take priority. Probably hard to please both.

More importantly, I have a question for the twelve people who like a combination of simplicity and complexity: Where do you draw the line? Do you care about why beer and stonecutting have more of a process then acquiring steel and wood, or is it irrelevant? Is there anything else that you'd like to see more complexity in or something that should be simplified?

. . .
1) You mentioned manpower problem. Game could became very grindy at start, especially with 1-3 starting colonists. Because of mediate job between collecting resources and construction, you'd likely spend a lot more time before building your basic base. Also tech.level should affect refining, for example bloomery should be initial station for smelting, and it should be slow and ineffective. So we get tedious and long starting phase of game and that's not good.
. . .
3) As was pointed before, you can end up without means to gain resource to build workbench for that resource.

And there is consistency with mechanics for stone blocks and animal products, gamewise.
Meat, leather and blocks are "luxury" resources.
Blocks took a lot of time to make, but you get rid of "junk" chunks and receive aesthetics and fireproof buildings.
Hunting is a risk, takes time, requires butchering afterwards, but you get meat for fine and lavish meals and leather for clothes production.

I'm sure that there will absolutely be those disagreeing with me, but should there not be a larger gap between tech levels? When was the last time that you could remember feeling the impact of a new research going through? By the time you have guns researched, you've probably got a couple decent ones from fighting-off raiders or selling natural resources to traders. Hi-tech research benches and multi-analyzers are nice, but they really only affect how long one or two pawns take to fill a little meter in a cramped room. As it is, the jump from campfires and plate armor to full-colony climate control and automated turrets isn't too much more than a hop. Yes, it is arguable that it's more fitting for a thread requesting more content for the Neolithic and pseudo-medieval technological ages, but I imagine placing an electric smelter in a castle could have a great impact on players, and allow them to better appreciate lower tech levels.

Pawns could starve in some climates without meat, typically in places lacking wood. The butchering spot was made to compensate. As previously mentioned, a clay or stone furnace wouldn't be too hard to imagine. We've already got the electric smelter without a low-tech counterpart, don't we?

I also have a hard time making sense of your "luxury resources" argument. Couldn't you argue that everything's luxury item, if you could describe meat and stone blocks as luxury. Once you've got a wall up and all the trees inside of it harvested, would it not be a risk to venture outside? Vegetables could be a luxury, it's land you could be using for weapons storage, or space for turrets and deadfall traps. I don't see any reason as to why meat should take so much more of a process than, say, wood or steel. You could say it's because you need food to survive, so it shouldn't be easy to come by. By that same logic, you literally can't beat the game without the steel needed for a high-tech research bench, a multi-analyzer, and ship pieces.

 Deer are timid as hell. I could see them sticking around for a bit, but they don't overly like human company. I'd imagine the same applies to many other critters. Rats though? They don't give much of a damn. I could see a colony growing to spook animals with a higher wildness away, limiting hunting to critters like rats, squirrels, and hares, while the big game would move to adjacent tiles. It'd give more of a reason to venture out, and might give more of a feel of a big hunting trip.

Sure, it's a rough idea, but I think it could go somewhere. Better than having reliable meat-piles just wandering around a bunch of walls and constant gunfire.

Refining steel might also force a lot of changes to the resource requirements of benches. The steel refining bench probably shouldn't use steel, otherwise you could get stuck. But if it uses stone then you can also get stuck because the stone bench takes steel. So either have to change the material cost of multiple buildings or somehow refine steel using only wood.

We didn't need steel to make steel, nor copper for copper, or any other metal. Pickaxes aren't craftable and will always be with pawns, so a stone furnace wouldn't be impossible. Metallurgy would definitely be a neat addition to the game (Steamworlds are part of the lore, just try and keep me from my copper!).

I would enjoy having more raw material processing, as long as it didn't go way overboard.  One of the things I really like about the Vegetable Garden mod is the fact that cotton has to be processed on a loom to get cloth, and rice/corn/wheat are ground into flour for recipes, etc.

How could I forget about Vegetable Garden? That's one of my favorite mods! I can vouch from personal experience that getting a line going for harvesting plant fibers, refining them, and then making your clothes and materials. Same deal for dividing oats between breakfast porridge and flour. It really led to a lot of diversity in my gardens between colonies, seriously, great mod.

With writing, there is a concept that you should be as concise as possible. Similarly, with games, you should not add complexity for complexity (or realisms) sake.

The reason meat processing works is because there are interactions and meaningful choices at every step.

Could you not argue the same of anything else in the game? Fingers are a part of pawn anatomy, why not simplify it to hands, and hands to arms? There are no bionic hands or hooks (yes, there is the powerclaw, but let's ignore that), just arms. Just have arms affect manipulation, it'd be simpler. There's no sense of smell, so why bother giving pawns noses?

Similarly, stone chunks have minimal use. They're aped by sandbags. Why not just have them bust into bricks based on mining skills? The stonecutting table isn't used for, say, picking the stone off of jade or gold you found until you get to the precious parts, so it's loss wouldn't be significant. If you're going to shoot an animal just to haul it back to a freezer before you take it out, butcher it, and drag it's bits back to the freezer or textile stockpile, why not just have them explode into pieces based on the hunter's shooting skill? Still gotta haul and store the stuff, gotta keep the kitchen clean, it's just shaving what may be an "unnecessarily complex" part of the game out.

My issue is not with overcomplexity or simpleness, but with the uneven distribution of it. Rooms aren't hot, they're 38 degrees Celsius. That's neat, and complex. Meanwhile: Frozen food is as edible as fresh food, rather than needing to thaw so that it tastes better and doesn't break teeth. A microwave or way to cycle food between a freezer and a refrigerator wouldn't be too bizarre, would it? Probably would be in a world where you can perform a medical operation on an infected pinky-toe, but can't repair the wear on a rifle.

 There is a tree. We need wood. We chop down that tree and get wood that we can instantly use for wooden floors, weapons, fuel, and furniture. No varnishing or de-barking.

There is some steel ore. We need steel. We mine it, and we instantly get useable steel without the need for special processing, smelting it out of stone, or shaping it into ingots. We can now use it for everything from vitals monitors, to guns, to furniture (again).

Alright, so that's how this game works. We don't need to refine the things we harvest.

There is some stone in the shape of a wall. We need stone walls. So we mine the stone, hope for a chunk, bring it to a stonecutting table, cut said stone chunk, and then it's good to use. Otherwise, it's just glorified rubble.

You see a muffalo. You need food. You hunt the muffalo, haul its body to a freezer, butcher that body, and then collect a bunch of it's bits (potentially more if you want a higher tier of meal) and then cook a meal, rather than just, say, a steak.

Anyways, my point is that the game's a bit inconsistent in this regard. Rather than having to refine all of your materials (similar to Rise of Ruins, which I rather like, though it is on a larger scale as far as workforces go), or having them all readily available, it's a mix of the two. This just seems a bit odd. Personally, I rather like consistency, and would prefer if there were a bit more of a rhyme or reason to how materials could be used. Say what you want about it, but Minecraft's got a good head on it's shoulder in that regard. See a tree? Chop some wood, and logs are good for sturdy structures, making charcoal, and can be processed into planks. Planks are a plentiful and cheap source of building materials, in addition to being part of making tools, furniture, and some structures (like boats, stairs, pressure plates). They can be further refined into sticks for arrows, tool handles, ladders, etc. Point being: Being able to use logs for everything doesn't make too much sense in Rimworld, especially when steel needs less work to use than the stone it's encased in.

What are your guy's opinions on this? The reason this isn't in suggestions is that I don't really have a better idea than what we have. Our current method of stone or meat needing so many more steps than most other resources seems arbitrary, everything just dropping resources when harvested seems silly, and we lack the pure manpower or automation required to handle so much processing dedicated to only a few products. Any ideas on how to improve the process or alter it in some way will probably be ignored for the most part because the devs have better things to do and I'm not one of them are appreciated.

You've already got cheap walls - wooden and steel walls. Just use those.

Desert map: Almost no wood. You need what you have for chemfuel, keeping pre-electricity stuff going, but you also need some walls.
Flat map: Almost no stone, and therefore steel. Do you really want to use probably the #1 most sought-ought resource in the game for cheap walls?

 Your bionic-enhanced soldier is injured in battle. A doctor will work on the fleshy bits, but a craftsman/builder (potentially needing some medical/intellectual skill to boot) to repair the mechanical parts.

 As a lore nerd: The insects were designed by humans to defeat mechanoids. Can't facehug a robot.
As an aliens fan: It'd be a pretty neat idea, especially if the size of the creature facehugged correlated to the size of the resulting bug. Get a megascarab out of your chickens and yorkies, speds out of wolves and pigs, and megaspiders out of muffalos and elephants.

 This is just one of those things that should be in the game, right next to steel slag walls. Sometimes you just want a cheap wall somewhere without the extra work of having to cut a bunch of stone or in places where wood isn't abundant.

[great memory]

*slow clap*
Thanks. No seriously.
You could have just pointed out my mistake bluntly instead of going out of your way to
a) snidely put words in my mouth
b) insult my intelligence
I made a mistake. If you can't get over yourself to point of not insulting people of mistakes they make then I have no need time or interest in any of your comments or suggestions.
So yes, thank you for showing yourself to be a rude jack ass that I don't have to pay attention to.

I mean, you did scroll past my explicit mention of things that make people more than human highlighted in obvious yellow text to copy-paste ten snippets from the CRB that describe ways in which a pawn may be more than human, rather than just using one original sentence to say "with all the xenohumans, someone probably just got a little bit of g-dwarf or soldiermorph in their family tree". Pretty sure you couldn't qualify reading through a pamphlet, copying and pasting it into a box, formatting it, and clicking post as a mistake. Besides, I could easily cut Xeo's post down to a more manageable size so half this page wouldn't be quoted text, but I had to cut yours down to a seventh of the size to make it manageable. Otherwise, I'd have to quote twenty-one lines of quoted text, which is like, 6.5² lines of quoted text in total. That's just unnecessary.

I don't want to veer this thread off track - and I disagree with the following - but you could've sighted traits such as great memory, super immune, tunneler, jogger, beautiful, and whatever else you want to group in there as things passed-down from designer babies or xenohuman blood. I'd imagine that if you were going to send colonists to a jungle planet or a plague was moving through a densely populated Urbworld, giving some people a great immune system would be a great asset, and would probably be modded into people. Same could be said of sending a tough guy to a planet with raiders and insects and robots (oh my!).