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If they would be boring, no-one would play them. They are engaging - planing and watching your plan spring can be as exciting as any action game.

And yet, boring-but-practical remains the meat-and-potatoes of the research trees. 5% here, 5% there, it adds up. Do it twice, and that's 10%. Do it ten times, and that's 50%

Increasing the numbers that drives the player's actions is one of the simplest and best ways to upgrade them. Sure, it doesn't have the wizz-bang factor of an entirely new type of gun, but it is simple and reliable. In most of the games I've played, simple and reliable is superior to wizz-bang, which often start off wholly inferior to simple and reliable.

Mining for another 5%, then mining for another 5%, there's nothing exciting in that. Despite all your ad hominem.

Exciting, no, but it sure as hell does make long-term mining faster and simpler. The more you do it, the more your miners can get done in one day before they have to sprint back to the barracks or the canteen because their tummies are rumbling and they want to go naptime.

Also, for one hundredth thime for frell's sake - RimWorld is a colony builder SLASH tactical combat sim, unless you choose no-raiders mode.

And 5% more damage, 5% more accuracy, etcetera, adds up, and would make a huge difference.

[is]

Right now I'm going for balance rather than practicality or sense. If we just have them up and leave after a bunch of failures, we're back to square one - you can easily just turtle your way through the pirate waves if you only have to worry about a handful before the raiders pack up camp and leave.

Square one is a perfectly fine place to be. "Hole up inside basically impregnable fortifications and wait for the other guy to sod the hell off" is a time-honored response to being besieged.

Some types of enemies might well throw themselves straight at that. Witless animals, for instance. Religious zealots. People who are hell-bent on your destruction and don't care if you take them down with you.

Profit-motivated pirates are not that list.

Like I said, the attack could be special. It's one thing to charge headlong after a half dozen waves before you failed. It's a different story to get fed up with your incompetent crew, personally waltz over to the nearest blocked off entrance to the colony and demolish it, before calling down the rest of your crew to assail the now-open colony which probably has few-to-no defenses in your new route of attack. And remember from a morale standpoint that he wouldn't just be ordering the charge, he'd be leading it.

Which doesn't change anything, it just means the player has to spend more time making more defenses. Especially since, as you know from which way the pirate captain will be coming, you can simply reconfigure your farm or whatever into another gun battery. And that's assuming there even is more than one wall leading to the colony, there may well not be.

[I want him to bloody haul right at this moment, and haul he shall!]

When you try to get someone to clean an area that's not in the "home zone" there's no feedback as to why they're not doing it. This had be quite stumped for ages because I'd obviously missed that the home zone was for cleaning and fire fighting. That's reasonable enough, but I just couldn't understand why my people weren't cleaning up!

Usually the UI tells me why people aren't able to be assigned a task. I'd suggest that the same feedback be given when you try to give them a task that's outside the home zone when that task is limited by the home zone.

On that note, I'd appreciate it if you could manually force people to do something, no matter the reason it's not available, unless they're incapable of it.

Incapable of being social doesn't mean someone should be incapable of bringing food to a starving prisoner, it just means they shouldn't be capable of chatting with them or trying to recruit them.

There should never be a reason when you can't click a colonist, rightclick on a dirty tile, and tell them to clean it, or rightclick on an object and tell them to haul it. I don't care if that colonist has hauling disable, I want him to bloody haul right at this moment, and haul he shall! I don't care if somebody half-way across the map has decided he shall haul that object, I want this guy to haul it, this instant. And I definitely don't care that someone else has "reserved" that fire, this guy's on-scene, so he should be the one beating that bit of fire out this moment.

I think I'll just imagine Shadow whining on X-COM being unbalanced in Ironman Mode because his people get shot at. That should lower my blood pressure!

You know what's a good game of X-COM? Turtling through the level, moving from cover to cover, annihilating sectoids and mutons as they come into view, and if you do manage to drop everything in the crapper, saying "fuck that" and reloading.

So why for fuck's sake would I play in ironman mode? Huh?

You make some good points. However, it seems odd that the leader would just set up a camp and leave again right away. What if, at the end, if they haven't accomplished anything after a long time, they spawn a full raider wave and send the Leader + any remaining guards with the attack. Perhaps have something special about it too, like they'll break down the closest walls to circumvent your main defenses? That way there's a satisfying conclusion to the raid and you still get screwed over if you don't kill it and don't have a huge amount of defenses set up at every possible entrance to your colony.

"Everyone we've sent against these psychotic militia compound nutjobs is now in a mass grave. Clearly, the only solution is to LEROY JENKINS!"

Sure, if you're a religious zealot. Not if you're a profit-motivated pirate captain. Ordering demoralized men at the end of a long and failed siege into a headlong charge against the enemy's walls is a good way to get shot in the back.

Boring but practical is also called busy work and should be left for hack&slashers. I'm with Amaror all the way.

Boring but practical is basically the entire premise of city-building games, whereas the exact opposite is the idea in hack and slash or machine-gun rampage games.

Incredible. You want your action games to be boring and your building games to be bloodsoaked, crotch-kicking carnage. You must be a masochist or something.

[fun]

Produno - ignore him. He openly asks for no-combat game, yet refuses to even notice he can just lower the difficulty. He openly asks for more OP mechanics that will allow him to survive with no losses and no sweat EVERY TIME.

Heheh, i know it gets boring trying to explain the same thing over and over and over again for the small minority. Luckily most people understand the problem and want to help make the game as fun as it can be by offering solutions.

You're not offering solutions at all. You're offering to make the game head-banging-on-wall frustrating and angering.

And no, "Turn down the difficulty" doesn't help. Because that turns down everything! Part of the fun is designing defensive positions that can, in fact, chew up entire zerg-rushes of idiots with rifles without taking casualties.

Or did you not think of that? That I might like seeing hordes of idiots mowed down like so much wheat? That for me, the challenge isn't in "losing is fun" kicks to the crotch, but in making defenses that kick "losing is fun" right in the crotch.

[I reject the entire premise!]

Sorry but either your not reading what i put properly or just not understanding.

I both read and comprehend; I reject the entire premise!

Tynan has stated he wants to remove turrets because of the playstyle it creates, alot of people agree. This is because of the tower defence playstyle.

And if he does that, I'll hate this fucking game forever. Constant raids not only bore me, they aggravate and enrage me. That's why in DF, I seldom bother having fighters, I just use Boatmurdered-style deathtraps to kill everything that dares march on my fortress.

Because I don't want to fucking deal with it. I like them as a nice nuisance that hangs around for a bit, preventing trade, then realizes that I'm not coming out there and they're definitely not getting in here and so they sod off.

So the easy solution,
Remove the turrets,
Remove the sandbags,
Balance the raider spawns to fit.

Remove turrets and sandbags? You'd make the game unplayable! You're a bloody lunatic.

If you want to keep the turrets then come up with a solution for the problem were talking about. Anything else is irrelevant at this point in time. I guess the same will come with sandbags down the line too, but thats for another thread.

Solution: Embrace "Turret Defense" as a perfectly valid response to endless raiders. Machine gun turrets that spit out endless hot lead, mortar turrets that lob explosives over walls if they have a spotter, tall platforms that let colonists with snipers fire over unroofed walls with practical impunity, barbed wire that blocks movement but offers no cover whatsoever. Let the raiders come, if they feel like throwing themselves suicidally into the jaws of defeat!

Let the people who don't want those things simply not build those things.

Maybe I'll try again... I wish you could just pick your initial three colonists' traits instead of rolling randomly. Having to explain some real headscratchers (such as the medieval lording who became a space miner, or the 15-year-old commissar nerd) led me to twist the story into knots. Though, that was also part of the fun!

I've simply never had such a thing happen to me as you are describing. This is why I was confused at your post.

Build a huge battery farm and wait. Sooner or later, unless you're playing Cassandra .250 with a high population (IE, events stop happening,) one of your walls will explode and set fire to everything. I had that happen to me in my .254b base, my living quarters got set aflame, and so did some of the colonists who went to put it out. It was pretty nasty, and I'm just glad I still had some rock walls to contain the spread of fire!

On this point, however. I do find it queer that automated turrets and nutrient paste dispensers are not out of reach of the colonists, yet the means to manage the flow of electrical current is.

You oughta be able to build this. Of course, for it to matter, you'd need to like, track where the power is going and have the high-draw places be the places that need them. That, or just install them outside of the batteries.

[Why would you?]

Those "no funnels, no waffles, no turret guys" have massive defensive fortifications, you realize, right? They have cheesy escape tunnels through which raiders cannot burst without spending time beating on doors, and other BS like that. In the end, it's more effective than turrets, it just exposes your colonists to more incoming fire.

Why would you? Why would you expose your people to fire when you can build a first line of defense in the form of turrets to soak up the fire? You wouldn't, unless you're a goddamn moron. You're also going to lose people more often, and frankly, losing people is like getting kicked in the crotch. The raiders don't scale down.

I like this idea, but it should work like a siege in DF. If the player holds out long enough, they'll just abandon what they can't take with them and bugger off, because all they're accomplishing is losing men. Obviously they'd take the food and metal, but would just leave the structures behind.

[e]Also, the raiders should also have to deal with morale and sleep, etcetera. If the player chooses to hit and run rather than fight them stand-up, eventually the pirates will get angry and demand to leave. Especially if the player keeps burning down their living quarters and they have to sleep in the open and stuff.

[cannons!]

Well thats idea behind the thinking, i think. But please re-read the quote in the first post to remind you what this thread is about.
Its not really about balance, that will come in time, but about the fact Tynan himself wants to remove turrets because of the playstyle they introduce and no matter what you do to anything else, if you keep the turrets how they are now the tower defence playstyle will never change!!

If you're under constant attack from raiders, defending your home with goddamned turrets is a good idea. Hell, I'd defend it with cannons! And mortars, and rocket launchers, and landmines everywhere, and sandbags and barbed wire and fighting pits and trenches. It would look more like Echo Base or something along the Sigfried Line than a nice rustic outdoorsy settlement.

But we can't build that. So we build something as close to that as we can. Taking that away is just a kick in the crotch.

I feel like this went a little over my head. Mind stating the point you're trying to make in simpler terms for my inferior intellect to understand?

Exactly what is hard to understand about it?

Even without any help from raiders whatsoever, your walls explode and set fire to everything nearby when your batteries discharge through them, because evidently surge protectors and fuses are a lost technology in the far-flung spacefaring future.

To say nothing of the fact that you evidently soak the walls in diesel fuel and kerosene, given how readily they catch fire at the slightest provocation.

So would you rather surround yourself with walls that, at any time and for no apparent reason, blow up like a goddamn incendiary grenade, or would you rather live in a dwelling made of nice, non-flammable, non-explosive stone? Because frankly, I wouldn't want to live in an inflammable death trap.

I'd like to second a "turrets shoot at animals" option, preferably with an option to choose which animals they gun down, so they're not shooting down harmless squirrels for no reason (or, knowing me, are doing exactly that,) don't gun down boomrats which will start a fire (unless the boomrats go hostile,) and don't gun down dangerous muffalo unless I feel like thinning the herd.

I'd also like to second "extinguish burning colonist" trumping everything except rescuing/arresting/capturing. And for the love of god, don't have it be someone on the far side of the map who gets the job; make everybody nearby pile onto the guy to put him out. (Raiders should have this behavior too.)