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Throw everyone into cryosleep pods and wait for summer. Just make sure you leave the turrets on automatic!

I think that's an amazing idea and I'd love to hear how it works out.

The only issue is I don't want to just sit and time warp for an entire winter season...
Anyway, is there any dev-menu tool that changes the season. I would love to test this but it is summer in my current world and it takes awhile to time warp that long.

Trains/Mono-rail work/hauling carts XD

Ohh, minecraft style trains and rails for colonists and cargo! That would be really neat!

Throw everyone into cryosleep pods and wait for summer. Just make sure you leave the turrets on automatic!

I would like to see a complete ship overhaul. I want to be able to make ship walls with ship interiors with ship cockpits, not just a structural beam with pods and engines. You idea sounds great, but to do this we would need to be able to build better ships.

Imagine having a "ship wall" block to make rooms, that you can attach to structural beams. Everything within that room you made would be considered part of the ship, so you could take stuff with you like stockpiles, cook stoves, production benches, etc. This would allow your colonists to be truly interplanetary by launching to new planets, landing, and having the ship as a large shelter with everything you need to survive in it. You can land or trade or even stay on that planet a while to get more resources.

HECK, you could even make ship weapon modules that makes a use for the missile and artillery shell items, so you can have ship to ship combat, FTL style, or build a dropship to land at enemy faction bases in an attempt to end their raids once and for all!

Or take a ship into orbit, and have fight the raider ships before they can get into orbit and launch drop pods at you! But beware, the raiders might start sending escorts for their drop pod ship, forcing you to build bigger and better ships. Soon, you would have armadas of ships dueling it out, and orbital bombardment of enemy bases.

This idea has a LOT of potential.

Perfect, just perfect.

The best way to grow devilstrand is in hydroponics, but the bad thing is that when the power goes out the plants die.

I am good with the dev menu, and I would love to be a public tester for Rimworld! Sign me up!

Remember guys, do not sign up if your only reason is to get alpha 8 early!

You don't recruit them, you harvest their organs in a specific way so that they stay alive as long as possible. Here is how you do it:

Left Lung
Left Kidney
Right Eye
Jaw

And then you decide which one of the body parts you want the most, and you harvest that, because taking out any more parts will kill them. I would advise the heart or liver. After you kill them you chop up their body into meat and eat them, so no part of them goes to waste. You have to use every last bit of your resources around here to survive.

Because it is Unity. 

Just kidding, be patient! We all want glorious alpha 8, but Tynan is a developer not a fairy godmother.

Where the heck is that gif from?

I have a roomba and a quadcopter is use locally (havent released) but they are buggy and prone to idiocy so until the colonist pawn code is able to be handled better i dont think this is workable just yet from a modding perspective, would love to see simple haulers/cleaners core though.

Whoa whoa whoa, you MADE a mod that has drones in it!!!! Shut up and take my money! I don't care how buggy it is if you made a flying drone I will download it this second. I support this suggestion entirely. I want hauling quadrocopter drones and cleaning roomba drones and combat drones.

Hello and this will be a long post with many images. I was bored waiting for alpha 8 to come out so I fooled around with the debug menu and came up with this. I built a CQB map for rimworld and spawned in some people to fight in them. It was neat making different compositions of forces and seeing it play out. Without being able to control the fighters it really shows how group-level AI works, and how it does not...


My first arena map! It is very similar to a standard paintball map, except these are very lethal paintballs.

So if anyone does not know, you can spawn in raiders, tribal-people, mercenaries, etc from the "spawn pawn" menu of the debug menu, so I did that and this is what happened! The two groups remained mostly stationary with the exception of the grenadiers, who had to get up close.


The first battle.


Red team wins!

So I noted a few of the AI's strategies. They kept grouped together, and preferred to stay in cover and enact trench warfare rather than attempt flank the enemy. They also shot the closest enemy to them which meant that grenadiers who had to get in close were the first to die.

What I thought was interesting about this was that normally the AI fights the player, and is designed to respond to the player's actions, with no player to respond to except the the other group of enemies, the battle was mostly trench warfare with non moving units. The group level AI seems to overrule individual unit AI, meaning that even though that one unit has a clear shot against an enemy, it will instead concentrate it's fire on the targets the group AI chooses.

I decided to test my newfound theories with another map, this time, a mock base with enemies coming from all sides! This is what I got:


My next map, a base being assaulted by mectoids.

This is where the problems start with the AI. It is not designed to work in a close quarters, and enemies usually prefer open fights. This is why your colonists will often always win in close quarters battles, you can respond to the quickly changing situations the AI cannot. With the AI fighting itself, it had a hard time managing all the units. Often the defenders would run right past the mechs, and vice versa. I will show you a few screenshots so you can see what I mean.



As you can see here, the Mechtoids have had their group level AI (compared to individual decision making) decide that it would be best to group up and fight the defenders as a large group, instead of attacking from all sides and boxing them in. The latter would have been a much better option, however why did they all decide to group up? This stems from code that was written to keep units together, the same code that makes enemies assaulting your base stick together when approaching.

I have hypothesized that their are two forces controlling units in Rimworld. Group AI, and Individual AI. Group AI is performed when the group of pirates decide to assault your base, everyone in the group stops what they are doing and responds to the command. Individual AI is when a singular unit decides to shoot at an enemy, or move in for a flanking shot. The real neat thing is this, group AI can overrule individual AI to perform commands. That was why the mechtoids were running right by the defenders to meet up with their group, the group AI said, "lets all stick together now", and they all formed up, regardless of what the individual scythers were doing. If the individual AI was in control, the mechtoids would have fired at the first seen enemy and functioned in the small four man teams I positioned them in. Look at this picture.



You see how even though some of the people can see the attackers, but they don't advance to get them? The "stick together" command is functioning, and makes the defenders clump up in the very same way they do when they are preparing to assault your base. They have no directive to go after a hostile group which attacked them. There is no "search and destroy" function that makes them seek out enemies near them. Look at the next image.



In this image, it is hard to believe that that is the same battle as the previous pictures. That is because when the mechtoids all grouped up in the top right half, no one from the left side of the base followed them. The individual AI will only chase enemies it has line of sight on. This is a problem. The AI needs to be able to go to the last known location of an enemy, check to see if it has line of sight, and go to last known position, until it gives up or it engages the hostile. This could also be implemented as a function where when a unit engages an enemy, it sends out a call to friendly units to come to where the fight is happening. If this was the case, then the extra 7 units that were standing around would have been available to fight the mechtoids, which would have turned the tide of the battle.



In this picture there is only one scyther left. It has killed the remaining 4 defenders that were in the area. And it just sat there. It did not sweep the area to check to see if there are any defenders left, and the defenders did not move around at all to check the area for remaining attackers. They just sat there in the main room. I fast forwarded for a long time and nothing changed. A good thing was that when the defenders decided to eat, they actually went off to find tables to eat at, which means they ARE capable of searching for specific objects, in this case are tables. If they can do this then surely they can search for enemy units.

What I am not asking for is magical radar-guided raiders that immediately know where all your colonists are, but I am asking for some changes to how the group AI decision making works. It would be much more effective if the group AI would act more as a commander, sending out scouts and telling men to sweep areas for hostile, rather than a "everyone shoot this guy, everyone meet up here" function. If this happened, then battles will be so much more interesting with small fire teams and scouting parties and squad v squad tactics. Could you imagine, a small group of elite raiders with Navy Seal-ish tactics coming to raid you? That would be AWESOME! 

This was not meant to hate on the current AI, but to show room for improvement in the code system. If anyone wants to tell me how wrong I am, or if anyone actually knows how the actual AI and code works (because I sure as heck don't) please tell me how I am right or wrong! If you want a tutorial on how to set this up with different factions fighting each other, say so and I will make one.

More pictures of my arena battles are posted below.


Mechanoid verses Molotovs.


A slightly more crazy fight.


An overview of my base defense map.


My generic unit verses wild animals map. Swarms of mega-scarabs are quite lethal, I found.


My miniature melee map. It is supposed to be a wrestling ring.

If you took the time to read all this, great job! If you skipped to the bottom and are reading this first, then start back from the beginning.

P.S. Tynan Sylvester, if you read this, please comment on this about how I am right or wrong. I really want to hear your thoughts on my testing if you have not done something like this before to test the combat AI. 

Fire Supression: A research that allows colonists to put out fires 15% faster (or whatever percent) and allows the building of the Fire Suppression System.

Fire Suppression System: A building similar to the fertilizer pump, but instead of improving soil, it puts out fires in it's range automatically, like a sprinkler system.

These are my ideas to counter massive firestorms that happen from inferno cannons, lightning storms, inferno cannons, and the other reasons (inferno cannon). The FSS building would be useful for inside buildings where valuable resources or blocks are stored. Also with the research done it would make colonists put out fires x% faster. Nice simple ideas, could be done in just a little bit of work. What do you think?

Now, if any of you play XCOM, you immediately know what I am talking about. A Mec Trooper is a soldier who is cybernetically modified to have robotic arms and legs, and modified vision and hearing. The Soldiers who volunteer for this program sacrifice much, but they gain a substantial increase in combat effectiveness. Also, they look awesome.



If you gave your soldier two cybernetic eyes, robotic legs, a claw hand on one side and a syther sword on the other, and maybe some other special organs, then you could have a supersoldier. Has anyone done this yet?

If I am correct the amount of raiders and their weapons depends mostly on how well the AI storyteller thinks you can defend yourself. I have had times where I lost all but 3 of my colonists from a massive raid, and then 3 days later another group came and I freaked out thinking it was the end of my colony. But it was only 3 raiders with pistols. So I think it is a combination of your defenses and how many days have passed.

Hmm, good idea, but what if there was some way to customize these vehicles. Like you would have an editor you can open, and you could place blocks on a grid format to build your own custom vehicle! The way you design a vehicle would be very similar to building a base, but different parts and compenents.  It would cost the value of all it's parts, (so a battle tank would cost much more more than a potato delivery truck) and you could place items like chairs, turrets, cannons, equipment racks, storage zones, tables, beds, ect. You could build anything from a delivery truck to an APC to a tank! If you build a large enough vehicle you could make a mobile colony with rooms and turrets and food storage. The possibilities are endless! When you were done designing vehicles in the editor, you could make bills in a garage workbench to produce them. Then, alas, you have your mortar truck/personnel carrier/ambulance. The closest thing we have to this idea in-game is the escape ship. So think along the lines of that. This idea would have to be expanded upon to work properly, but it has potential!