Alpha 18 unstable test build is released

Started by Tynan, October 24, 2017, 01:45:47 AM

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Bozobub

a) Pink trees and still-broken mechanics put the lie to your claim.

b) A17 broke about as much as it fixed.  For example, medicine quality does *nothing* in A17, except during surgery.  Not a small bug, there are *many* other relatively bad bugs that have been present for *many* Alphas, and of coursenew ones in A18; legless rescuees, anyone?  Read the bug subforum much?

c) The game's balance in A18 is, simply put, not great.

c) I can complain exactly when I like, thank you very much.  What, you though Alphas and Betas are put out only to garner compliments..?

I don't expect all bugs to be fixed before the next Alpha iteration.  I DO, however, expect far more attention to be paid to some rather glaring issues, especially long-lived ones, some of which are discussed here.  I won't be touching A18 with someone else's 11-foot pole, until that happens.
Thanks, belgord!

Yoshida Keiji

Quote from: PhantomFav on October 31, 2017, 12:26:39 PM
This story start with a cave and end with another cave.

Jay, Camel and Wolfy (I called him Wolfy because he survived 3 wolf's attacks with only his spear) were happily foraging a tundra map. With curiosity, Jay entered in a cave, and saw at his end an "ancient danger" chamber. Hoping in a secure environment, she opened it... NOPE! The room was full of hives!!

Days passed and the little tribe built a wood hut and two bedroll for a confort sleep, far away from the crawling monsters.

But while the bugs where destroying the chamber's walls, a collapsing roof crushed a megascarab. This triggered the hive and 12 megascarab plus 4 Megaspider, went for my colonist. The pawns were trapped in seconds within the hut, so Wolfy scarified himself for Jay and Camel: he draws mega-bugs' attention away from his two female friends.

Killing with his spear one megascarab, Wolfy was eventually horribly teared apart (first an eye, then an arm, and lastly a leg), but Jay and Camel survived unhurt. The lovers, still guilty for the fate of their friend, organized a caravan for a more safe map immediately after the burying. They were without food and with few woods to build a fire camp and a door, but eventually they founded another cave!

With mushrooms in abundance and a roof on their heads, they survived in a desperate situation. Without that cave, now they could be frozen and/or starved to death under a thick layer of snow.

...and yes, that's the legendary Wolfy's spear, recovered after the bugs returned in their damned mountain!

The caves are a very cool new engine for new stories!

The Insectoids behavior is awkward too, but has been happening from before. No matter what harms them, the insectoids will blame the player. It doesn't make sense that any damage to them is avenged agains the player. They can go wild if harmed, but seeking the players is unfair. Insectoids can run like 100 tiles whenever they hit an old deadfall trap or like in your case, a collapsing roof. They won't really seek for colonists, but will attack if any is at their range. Their 100 tile range can sometimes, be in other directions where your base may not be. But still, it looks un-natural to see them hunting with no direct attack to them.

ShadowTani

Another thing I dislike with the newer behavior of the bugs is that they will all aggro even if you attack a bug on the other side of the map from the rest. It would feel more reasonable I think if the aggro was based on a specific radius around the bug. I've been avoiding them like the plague in recent alphas as a result, they are more trouble than they are worth atm.

Quote from: Bozobub on October 31, 2017, 05:32:15 PM
I don't expect all bugs to be fixed before the next Alpha iteration.  I DO, however, expect far more attention to be paid to some rather glaring issues, especially long-lived ones, some of which are discussed here.  I won't be touching A18 with someone else's 11-foot pole, until that happens.

I get what you're saying and agree bug squashing is important, but you're more complaining for the sake of complaining here - aside from mentioning the medical quality, you're not really specifying anything. I also find some of this criticism somewhat unfair considering better and more worthwhile quest rewards was something that were requested by many. More furniture have been requested over several alphas already. A18 have little, if any, new game mechanics compared to other alphas. It's a polish update that primarily expands on existing mechanics and features. Several bugs have been fixed too, just apparently not the ones that was of any importance to you.

If you haven't already I would suggest you either address the issues you're having in the bug forum, or if it's issues already reported, give them a bump with the statement that they are still an issue in A18. Additional information always helps too.

Snafu_RW

#213
Quote from: MarvinKosh on October 31, 2017, 11:19:39 AM
Quote from: Yoshida Keiji on October 31, 2017, 06:19:28 AM
Quote from: MarvinKosh on October 30, 2017, 11:05:05 AM
Marshy soil only has the 'Light' and 'GrowSoil' affordances, however you can add the ability to build walls on it ('Heavy' affordance) by laying concrete first. So, by using the concrete floor tool, I guess you can ultimately find out what you can and can't put walls on.
Thanks for this, so far I have never used concrete or paved tile. The ability to build on them is exclusive to A18 or has been possible since earlier Alphas?
Marshy soil would have supported walls in A17.
A17 certainly allowed the building of concrete/flagstone/tiled floors, with accompanying beauty+speed boost. No idea about building on marshy soil.. which reminds me:

Mud (near a /freshwater/ source) should degenerate to fertile soil if a moisture pump is nearby; saltwater should degenerate to marshy soil (then to normal soil/gravel). Moisture pump should be able to clear pools of shallow standing water (not if they're fed from river/sea obv) eventually, otherwise what's the point in building them?

DF 'channel' or pipe construct/craft may be useful here to irrigate desert, without dealing with Z-levels as such..
Dom 8-)

The Nickman

Shift-clicking on tasks to add them to a queue in itself makes this Alpha fantastic IMO.  Haven't played around too much or encountered any of the other new features, except:

- bedrolls are a great addition for tribals
- I had the chief of my tribe suffer smokeleaf withdrawl and execute one of the tribe's dogs, which was bonded to another.  That really hurt, and I didn't expect the execution to be instant, more a trying to beat the animal to death-type thing.  I need to be on my toes a LOT better next time!

Bozobub

#215
Quote from: ShadowTani on October 31, 2017, 06:41:57 PMI get what you're saying and agree bug squashing is important, but you're more complaining for the sake of complaining here - aside from mentioning the medical quality, you're not really specifying anything. I also find some of this criticism somewhat unfair considering better and more worthwhile quest rewards was something that were requested by many. More furniture have been requested over several alphas already. A18 have little, if any, new game mechanics compared to other alphas. It's a polish update that primarily expands on existing mechanics and features. Several bugs have been fixed too, just apparently not the ones that was of any importance to you.

If you haven't already I would suggest you either address the issues you're having in the bug forum, or if it's issues already reported, give them a bump with the statement that they are still an issue in A18. Additional information always helps too.
You are mistaken; I only posted one example, simply because I don't care to type them all.I don't NEED to report these bugs; they've been up there for a long time.  That, in fact, is the point.
Thanks, belgord!

Iwillbenicetou

I was thinking about more balance to tornadoes. There is no way to counter them, and if they spawn on top of a base, they can kill pawns and destroy walls. There needs to be some way to counter it.
Mod Help! The basics on how to download mods!

Goldenpotatoes

Quote from: Iwillbenicetou on October 31, 2017, 09:32:35 PM
I was thinking about more balance to tornadoes. There is no way to counter them, and if they spawn on top of a base, they can kill pawns and destroy walls. There needs to be some way to counter it.

Tornadoes ignore roofing and go through mountains as if its carving a path through fast enough to make a planet-class miner sweat. At the bar minimum, you should be able to hide in the mountains to be 100% safe from the death spiral.

Also they should have tiers of destruction instead of always being death in wind form.

MikeLemmer

Quote from: Yoshida Keiji on October 31, 2017, 05:17:06 AM
It seems I can't do any of these "Incapacitated refugees" in Tropical Swamp, they are all farther than their remaining life time...and Caravan forming is always a whole odyssey itself.

Well, technically you could launch Droppods to them to reach them in time.

Goldenpotatoes

I had a nice discussion with ZorbaTHut in the discord about the gameplay balance concerns of the almighty tornado. Although I'm personally not too fond of the concept of a base-damaging event with not that much in the way of counter-play as with most events, I can see the need for having something that can disrupt a player reliably if they happen to be unlucky enough to cross paths with it.

I can live with it being guaranteed damage if it gets within distance of my base, but some things should be adjusted.


  • Tornadoes shouldn't be able to path into cells with thick roofs, like mountain overheads. A player should be able to reliably hide in places like the newly-added caves for protection.
  • There should be some sort of foreshadowing of the tornado, such as the weather quickly turning cloudy and windy before the event letter is sent with the tornado spawning. This gives watchful players a bit of a head start on grabbing important stuff to haul to safety/add some nice atmosphere.
  • Maybe some more visual effects for the tornado ripping through the terrain? Having damage done to your base that can't be exactly avoided is going to be a real sore spot for some players (me), but at least if a tornado decides to rip through their (my) dormitories it should be visually interesting so they (I) don't feel as bad about getting bullied by nature.

Bearing all that, i'm sure it'll come in as an interesting story element for the eventual stories of how a tornado ruins a wedding or decides to take a stroll through a siege camp's mortar site.

kanukki

Quote from: TheMeInTeam on October 31, 2017, 12:14:50 PM
Quote from: kanukki on October 31, 2017, 12:09:27 PM
Some feedback on my blight experience... due to #reasons (heat wave, raid, starvation...) my fields got overrun with blight. Although I then gave orders to cut all plants, they still insisted on prioritizing planting new crops - which promptly got infected with blight - before removing the old blighted ones.

Even if I can set Plant Cut higher than Grow in priorities, I feel there would be a less micro-managing solution if I could give explicit order to remove only blighted crops, rather than having to click each one. Especially once you have 20 or 30+ blighted.

At least with the last event, once it happened it was over and you could just start re-planting.

Click select any growing zone in the vicinity and block sowing.  Unblock when blight is cut out.

Good tip, thanks. Should have thought of that. Would maybe be nice to be able to double-click blighted crops to select only the blighted ones, but I can live without that quality of life improvement, I guess.

Yoshida Keiji

I hope anyone who until A15 complained about the "Repairs" work tab as unnecessary regrets that now with "Tantrums".

I currently have a poison ship, so I was building a fire wall (3 stone walls, 1 sandbag, 3 stone walls), and now a Psychic drone event triggers (like if I had both ship parts at once) and my Psychically hypersensitive character goes on a tantrum... and starts hitting at random staff all around my base...while I only have 1 single constructor. This means that my Fire Wall constructing was put on HOLD to repair the damage caused by the tantrummer...and I still have the poison ship sitting there...

I really want that Repair work tab...since I started in A16, I can't say want it back, but I know it used to be there.

Tantrum is a good reason to bring that feature back again, so I can assign my constructor to finish that fire-wall while low skilled constructors go repair around.

/facepalm to all those who complained about repair tab as unnecessary.

XeoNovaDan

Quote from: Yoshida Keiji on November 01, 2017, 05:56:39 AM
...

Actually yeah, the repair work type would be nice to have back. Tantrums as you said, but also tornadoes; it's quite tedious to micromanage constructors to replace destroyed structures, rather than repair walls which are really a lower priority - although the queueing feature slightly alleviates this.

Dashthechinchilla

Quote from: The Nickman on October 31, 2017, 08:57:29 PM
Shift-clicking on tasks to add them to a queue in itself makes this Alpha fantastic IMO.  Haven't played around too much or encountered any of the other new features, except:

- bedrolls are a great addition for tribals
- I had the chief of my tribe suffer smokeleaf withdrawl and execute one of the tribe's dogs, which was bonded to another.  That really hurt, and I didn't expect the execution to be instant, more a trying to beat the animal to death-type thing.  I need to be on my toes a LOT better next time!
Shift clicking to build a queue might be the most awesome new feature, why a I just now hearing about it! ?

Yoshida Keiji

I just had the "new blight" and I didn't like it. It feels like it was reduced to a "manhunting turtle" level threat, just cut out a few plants and you are safe.

The "old Blight" enriched the game. If you had zero food stored and you get Blighted, then you deserve to succumb. But even then, you can sort to berries, hunting and even a rice plantation in rich soil can prevent your colony to die from malnutrition. And those are the easy options, any player could just go caravan 1 tile away from the colony or just turn into cannibalism...or even go the closest friendly faction to buy food. Or a lucky caravan visit, they almost always have pemmican.

This "new Blight" seems to go against your own direction, you want players to go out and explore the World, Blight was a good excuse for that, and settle other peripheral outposts. Without it, the "new Blight" is almost nothing, and now nobody has to "leave" the map and can stay there. While with the "old Blight" player ingeniousness was key to survival. And all this assuming the worst case scenario of a player without any food stored. Because if you had some, a normal rice plantation can release you from taking any hard measures.

Rollback to the "old Blight".