Messages

Steam provides no good automatic way to allow playing on older versions.

This is my biggest complaint with Steam, even with a finished non-early-access game. I know the selling point is seamless updating and the fact that developers can "push" their players to a certain version to simplify support to a certain degree. That's all well and good, but there should be an override where more advanced/curious players can still access the older versions.

All good ideas, but presently uranium doesn't accomplish a whole lot except selling excess for silver. This is Alpha-5, there's a lot to still be done, and it's all subject to change.

How good are trees as cover?

They're better than nothing, but only really useful when attacking siege raids and you cannot find better cover (dirt, sandbags). At home, you'll want to use stone walls.

Next time you're in a battle put one of your colonists in range of an enemy. Select the enemy and mouse over your colonist. In the popup that appears, it should tell you how much the tree is accounting for. Angles seem to matter, so a straight shot will tell you what the raw tree data is. Mouse over information works either way.

I haven't tried the rock/slag idea yet. It theoretically seemed to me that the cover you're providing to the enemy would be worse than slowing them down. Is the idea that you have sufficient firepower in there that the cover penalties to your weapons statistically don't really matter? Also to consider is that your weapons have more time to fire on the enemy putting more bullets into play. I'm guessing your experience shows that rocks are still superior?

All good points really. Nice constructive criticism.

The temporary prioritization of certain tasks within the main categories was recently discussed here. No need reiterating the ideas here, but I think the issue can be solved multiple ways. My feelings are a few posts in.

Colonists going outside or in dangerous areas has also been discussed in numerous places. I've seen one and two recently.

I don't know if we will ever have large maps with all your neighbours around and you could wipe them out, but someone could probably use something like the existing siege mechanics to create a mod that could do a small scale replica of an enemy colony.

It would entail something like this:
Day 5: A group of raiders (size depending on difficulty) arrives off screen and sets up a colony from supplies dropped or carried in.
Day 6-10: Basic structure is built with beds and a food supply.
Day 15: A small party, 1-2 guys head towards your base, are used for harassment and if injured return to their colony.
Day 20+: harassments are frequent but unlike typical raids are small party and occur every few days and a few shots back at them scare them off.
Day ?: Your colonists get tired of this constant annoyance and wipe them off the map causing the raider base event to finish and switch back to the larger raiders that are default.

This would be my preference for an approach. The main enemy bases are still "off the map" and inaccessible keeping with the current theme for other factions. This may be important if the intent is not to have a standard skirmish setup where you win after destroying everyone's base in each corner of the map. As you say, it's another form of attack like sieges. It also introduces another layer of strategy on whether or not a preemptive attack would be best. The longer you wait, the stronger the other colony becomes.

Friendly colonies (with smaller forward deployed bases that are visible on your map) would also be kind of neat. They may be susceptible to attack from a common enemy introducing more strategy on whether you should try and defend them to keep around for trading as an attack buffer. This would certainly strengthen the diplomacy system as well, though I don't know the extent to which that's the intention. Tynan has said he doesn't necessarily have long-term plans (I'll cite a recent source), so we'll see what direction he takes us in. I'd say there's enough indicators floating around that imply the diplomacy system is going to continue to expand.

Of course this may be a good amount of work since essentially AI factions would need to know how to build a basic base and defend it. We're partly there with sieges, but I imagine bases would be more work still.

I think we can get mostly there if the various objects in the game identify what their effects are. This should ideally be present when selecting the object for building before even being placed. The player can then do some rough math for planning purposes. There are other factors, however, that you point out such as room size and interior vs. exterior. I haven't fully tested the room size requirements for the various mood modifiers. Would be nice to see this spelled out. There's numbers floating around on the forums and wiki, but they may be outdated since they don't seem to be matching what I'm experiencing on a modern build. Perhaps I need to spend some more time with this.

A more sophisticated, but very helpful system, would show the breakdown of effects a colonist would experience of rooms the player is currently mousing over. List each effect as a line item along with specific numbers. This would alleviate any ambiguity and leave the player satisfied in their choices as they weight the various effects against space and material considerations.

Only way to accomplish now is to force a colonist in there, and see what happens. I think a system like this makes sense as an early investment in development time since the effects of anything newly introduced in future alpha builds will be fully understood by the players.

We were discussing hidden traps and weapons very briefly here. I think it's a great idea and open up new depth to defense. I'd especially like to see shorter range, but very effective anti-personnel weapons that can be hidden. They're more traps than anything. Only trick is, you'll need to lure enemies in close for them to be effective. May make enemies think twice about throwing their full numbers at you at once and at the same location. Admittedly, this does complicate the requirements of sophistication for the attacking AI.

Regarding the automated meals: as I mentioned briefly here, what's not available is a bill that can specify that you always want X meals of any type available. From there you can specify the priority of meal quality per the current bills system.

Here's a relevant scenario: My primary cook is level 12 and was cooking fine quality meals. She was injured so i assigned another cook. I forgot that this cook's experience was nowhere near 12 and lacked the ability to cook fine quality meals. The usual message that warns of this situation didn't fire because technically I had a colonist capable of doing this, but they were otherwise occupied healing up. Besides the player not being alerted to the situation, it would be nice if the player could present their intent for situations like this. I want 8 meals available at any given time. My preference would be for them to be fine meals, but make lesser quality if you have to in order to achieve 8.

Another scenario would be running out of ingredients necessary to make fine meals.

The only thing the player can do right now is specify a bill for 8 fine meals, and then another bill for 8 lower quality. While this would solve both problems above, when the proper cook is cooking under normal conditions, I'll have 16 meals on hand, which is not my intent.

Stack-able meals is coming per the change log as was said. I would assume colonists selecting the oldest meal first would be built into that system. I've further said elsewhere that a rationing system under player control to specify what order colonists consume certain meals in would be nice. Sometimes I may want to serve the better food during certain events pursuant to their expiration. To further demonstrate the need, try to capture some PSMs (they are currently considered to be fine quality to the colonists) from a failed siege and get your colonists to save them for a rainy day. Right now you have to flag each one as forbidden as they are retrieved.

Why not just add in some kind of "relieved that we managed to defend against a raid" mood bonus in for a day or so?
It could counter some of those penalties and enable you have a little time to return to the usual colony life.

Also sounds good to me, and rather realistic. I think I'd feel better if we just fended off an attack from people trying to kill us. I'm not sure it will be enough with large scale battles, however. It hasn't been any of my games, but others are dealing with dozens or even up into the hundreds of dead on the map. I'm not sure if the current dead body mood penalty has a cap. There's also the issue of the player not necessarily clearing the bodies as the number one priority. They may choose to repair their base first and secure important infrastructure first which may take longer than a day or whatever time frame this bonus would be active for.

My colony fell apart because we all felt bad for killing people who came in and tried to kill us. I think I give up lol

I think this is the nexus of the issue. The dead body penalty probably needs to depend on what affiliation these bodies had before they died, and to a certain extent how they died. Seeing some random pirate who was intending to kill you dead on the ground (especially because you shot him in defense of your life) shouldn't bother you a whole lot. Seeing your dear friend that helped you survive since crash landing dead should be more upsetting.

I also think the current state of the body (i.e. how long dead) should have an effect as well. While a dead body is always upsetting to a certain extend, a decomposing/rotting body is probably more so. Lessening the initial dead body penalty would also alleviate some of these issues.

As a side note, if you're ever wondering why a job isn't getting done, take a colonist and right click on the object in question (I believe power needs to be applied if applicable, but that should be obvious to the player). If that particular colonist can't do the job, it will identify why in parenthesis. This gives you the clue of what type of job it is. Very neat system. In this case, it should be telling you that the colonist can't prioritize because they're not a crafter.

Only place it's failed me was with my primary higher-level cook being hurt recently. I couldn't understand why my newly assigned (temporary) lower-level cook wasn't cooking. I finally realized the stove was only setup for fine quality meals, and he lacked the skill to cook them. Right-clicking the stove with him didn't bring up a menu.

What we really need are more realistic raiders. Raiders who want money should come to the colony to steal money, and leave without incident.
Most real raiders never fire a shot, they just use intimidation to get what they want. Consaquently, you shoud have the option to comply with raiders' demands, at least untill you can defend yourself.

That's a good idea, actually. I could part with some of my initial silver until I'm fully up and running. Pirates are supposed to extort anyway. The "pirate king pack" purchase tier talks about negotiations, so I'd assume this is on the eventual radar. Would be cool to have some representatives meet your colonists. Not all the time, but more "civilized" pirates.

Regarding traps, I see your point on the single-use aspect. Still, it wouldn't be very different from resetting defenses from a conventional castle siege. Refill those cauldrons of boiling oil, rock tumblers, burning logs etc. Attacks happen infrequently enough to make this feasible I believe.

There's also the possibility of expanding beyond single-use. How about a hidden flamethrower that's disguised like a rock or pops out of the ground or wall? Same with turrets or wall mounted machine guns that present themselves out of a compartment that looks like a wall. Essentially defenses that are not readily identifiable until you get too close, at which point, it's too late for you. This could be balanced, especially if weapons have finite ammunition.

I'm probably over-thinking now, but since even pirates come from a unified faction, they probably should catch on to traps eventually, especially if there are survivors that escape. Then again, you could move things around. In general, it would also be nice if attackers anticipated the possibility of traps (in a non-specific way initially) to a certain extent. This may reduce occurrences of the entire force making a run at your base (especially when they consider that some nasty anti-personnel weapons may be waiting), which would prolong battles and create skirmishes to a certain extend enhancing game play. For this reason, I feel the player should ultimately be responsible for activity the trap or initiating its activation. Otherwise, the player should be able to specify some very specific conditions before activation. A premature activation of a very effective hidden trap (which is useless at range) needs to be taken seriously by your colonists.

Agree, and this would make a perfect candidate for research. Start with some basic wooden carts and graduate to more capacity, self-propelled (faster) devices for hauling. Having the carts be physical objects in the game would be neat. Depending on how many you build, certain (or perhaps all) haulers will be able to move more. This would be very helpful on huge maps where moving pretty much anything from the other side of the map one-at-a-time, takes days.

An initial/simplistic approach could be to simply increase the carrying capacity of colonists across the board per research. In essence, you research the cart, for example, and all colonists gain carrying bonuses even though you don't see the cart. The logic is already there for colonists to pick up raw materials from numerous piles. It would just need extension to allow colonists to carry multiple bodies, or rocks etc. on the same trip.

From what I've seen, and supported by the wiki, sandbags provide more cover, but can be destroyed (rather easily it seems). I'm still back and forth on the idea of whether to surround turrets with rock or sandbags.

I just made it to the day 100 (unfortunately I don't think my stat uploads are making it through since the the log shows server errors), but just barely. Spaceship construction has started. I created a hall of death with stone walls which has helped, but it's only a matter of time before I've overwhelmed. The problem with the hall of death (at least they way I'm deploying the concept) is that if it doesn't survive the initial shootout, you're done for. I've been trying to pack as many turrets into a larger area that fires on a smaller area. I have an 'L' turn to get into the hallway to ensure the turrets have range on anyone turning the corner (if the walls stay intact no one can fire on the turrets from out of their range). Click screenshot below for a larger view.



The issue is the weakness of the turrets and they're tendency to explode, causing a chain reaction of explosions wiping the entire defense out. While I agree it should be this way for balance (actually the whole hall of death idea and stacking of turrets really shouldn't be viable in the future), I'm not sure what else to do with what's available in this Alpha. The obvious answer is to spread the turrets out, but then I don't have enough firepower to repel the attack. With a good amount of turrets partially damaged, as soon as one of those turrets explodes it's over.

I think the number of attackers is alright, but the player needs more options to repel the numbers since attack groups always seem to have more numbers than you have colonists. We need traps, stronger turrets, bunkers etc. More suggestions here.

The other issue is weapons for the colonists. There's really no way to arm them with proper weapons until you're actually able to survive one of the more advanced assaults and scavenge the weapons. Trading opportunities are too random, expensive, and in too low quantity to be that useful. We really need the ability to craft weapons, perhaps some specialty ones that the enemy doesn't have. A little piece of "home technology" that the colonists have from their world. Smaller raids in between would be helpful as it would give the colony an easy victory with access to better equipment. Then again, how much sense does it make for some pirates to fly in outnumbered. Then again, they could have just underestimated the colony strength.