My 3 ideas for additional realism and challenge

[pigofwar]

Hi All,
Just started playing, racked up 15+ hours in one weekend.  Game is amazing and I will keep playing even without these changes.  Also I am still new so might be missing something, however I feel that the following would add a lot if they were part of the new player/unmodified game experience.  In order of increasing difficulty to implement:

1) Hunted animals should have a percentage chance to leave the zone when near the edge, instead of simply waiting to die or sometimes fighting back.  It doesn't seem that they have that chance to entirely flee right now, but I could be wrong.  Seems like an easy one to do.

2) Components should be more specific, as in: what great luck, we have parts for a solar panel.  Not: I can build a solar panel from any components.  Reason: it just felt too easy for me to build a bunch of solar panels and windmills and not have to worry too much about energy (except when something explodes).  In the start of the game I felt that it would be better to be a bit more forced to make wood/coal/... burning stoves and power plants that consume finite resources.
To moderate this, you could also retain a generic component that requires many more of to make a thing of a shoddier quality than with the real component.  Overall this whole change can be phased in by progressively only requiring the use of specific components for certain things so I think implementation cost is manageable.

3) Fog of war and sentry duty, alarm bells, etc... comes to mind as a BIG requirement in a survival scenario.  I know that this has been discussed before and definitely is expensive but would add a lot to the game.  As a related change, colonists could also lose visibility and direction in a heavy snowstorm (making compass useful) and thus requiring a search party to be sent out after them.

Thanks for reading!

[jamaicancastle]

#3 is probably not going to happen. The game had a much more in-depth fog of war system in its earlier alphas, and the feedback at the time was that it just wasn't adding enough gameplay to be worth the frustration. So it got the axe, mostly.

[patoka]

i have the same opinion on number 3 as the poster before me.

number 2 seems too annoying and doesnt seem to add much to the game. if anything, there could be something else which is similar to components, maybe "parts". everytime you mine compacted machinery you get one of both, for example. merchants sell both. and depending on the kind of thing you wanna build it requires a differing amount of each. but i honestly believe that this smallest of change is too annoying already. we have advanced components already afterall. no need to get even more specific. i think that is why the term "components" were kept so vague.

number 1 sounds like it will annoy the hell out of people that wanna hunt large animals like megasloths, elephants, caribous and elks. maybe even deer will flee regularly. if anything i'd add a better flee mechanism to wild animals. but then hunting becomes even more annoying because they already hunt a bit unintelligently, it would only get worse.

so overall, since nothing seems to add anything positive to the game in my eyes, no, please no and heck no

[Headshotkill]

#3 is probably not going to happen. The game had a much more in-depth fog of war system in its earlier alphas, and the feedback at the time was that it just wasn't adding enough gameplay to be worth the frustration. So it got the axe, mostly.

There's a mod called "Real fog of war" which does just that, you don't notice it at first but a changes some critical game concepts.

-Hunting for animals is a gamble as you now have to scout the map for animals which can lead to some suprises
-Same thing for crashed items, you don't know what items have crashed so you have to check it out
-Now for the big ones, raids, you still get to know where the raid entered the map so you have a vague idea where they might attack your base, the suspense is waaaay bigger than vanilla, I have to spread out my colonists over multiple defense points for enough cover and when I see where the enemy attacks I have to move those from useless defense points to the actuall attack location.
-Sieges are A LOT harder, the enemy has complete advantage now in that you simply do not know what to expect when you engage them.
-...

I played vanilla ones after that but it felt like playing with God-mode enabled.


PS: The AI is also affected by the FoW rules.