Great game, there is some minor unfairness though.

[Edmon]

Firstly, I want to say that this game is great. I must have played thousands of games, but it's been a while since someone captured the magic of games like dungeon keeper, theme park/hospital, syndicate, basically bullfrog stuff.

I've lost so many days (and at the weekend, nights) to playing this game. There is just something about a game where you can quickly grab the logic of how things work and then get creative with it. Using old skills again to beat the dumb A.I. deadlocking itself, making effective rooms and production lines while worrying about defence, etc.

Not that the A.I. is that dumb, to be honest, it's a hell of a lot smarter than those games I listed above. But I do like that it operates in a predictable way that lets me work it to achieve the outcomes I want. This was definitely part of what made bullfrog games so great to play.

Anyway, that aside, after completing a fairly standard game on a temperate climate, I decided I would go for some "cold as possible" winter survival. In doing this, a few "unfair" things became apparent when dealing with possible starvation every day.

I don't know if you'd consider these bugs, unintended or sort of "anti-exploits". But they do degrade the experience a little bit. I hope listing these helps you out in the continued development of the game .

1) Traders will eat the food you bought from them immediately.
- In winter survival, when everyone is starving, buying 300 food from a trader could be a god send. Watching their herd of 12+ animals and their 5 guards eat the vast majority of it the moment it hits the ground feels extremely unfair.

Traders should not have their cake and eat it.

2) Bears will starve in harsh climes, they will then "hunt" colonists or their pets. For some reason, this will not trigger defences or turrets or really, any reaction at all. It won't even trigger turrets when a colonist is under attack near a turret. Turrets should really have a setting that makes them engage any animal that comes into range, if that is so desired. Pets should run from hostiles to the safety of their bed or animal spot.

Turrets should definitely engage animals "stalking" a colonist or pet by default.

3) Crops will magically disappear, even completely grown, if the conditions are met that kills them. This one just doesn't make sense and feels very unfair. A brief loss of power at night in hydroponics, or a cold snap, could pretty quickly "disappear" fully grown plants that could have been harvested before with no issue.

Don't get me wrong, plants should definitely be "killed" and thus no longer be able to "grow", maybe turning brown, with a description of "dead" and disappearing after a day or two. But you should be able to harvest whatever yield was achieved before the plant died. Unless it was blight that got it, then maybe the plant could be brown and marked "blighted" and you'd get no or little yield when you clean it up.

Magically disappearing yield that would last 3 seasons unrefrigerated makes no sense, basically and feels unfair.

That's it for now. Keep up the great work.

[avilmask]

I double on eating part.
Trader animals tend to destroy your crop fields pretty often, and guards just eat your stuff from fridge. Especially if something destroyed all wild sources of food.

[Serenity]

Bears might just find some wolf or bunny to eat. Arctic bunnies however always starve and go bad. But yeah, I've had people being suddenly attacked by a bear I knew that wasn't there.

Hydroponics dying from power loss is a balance issue. The growth rate from them is extremely high. Yeah losing all your crops from a solar flare is annoying, but rice grows so ridiculously fast that it's not really an issue. You should always have enough stored in your freezer to get over that.

[Edmon]

Bears might just find some wolf or bunny to eat. Arctic bunnies however always starve and go bad. But yeah, I've had people being suddenly attacked by a bear I knew that wasn't there.

Hydroponics dying from power loss is a balance issue. The growth rate from them is extremely high. Yeah losing all your crops from a solar flare is annoying, but rice grows so ridiculously fast that it's not really an issue. You should always have enough stored in your freezer to get over that.

You shouldn't balance your game around things that feel unfair, it would be better to decrease the growth rate to compensate or reduce the yield. Plus, already grown crops magically disappearing makes no sense. They are already grown, the product is already there and will last many months. What does it matter if the parent plant suddenly dies? Especially to a cold snap. It doesn't make sense.

[avilmask]

Basically, he says it would be cool for crops to not just disappear when they die, so pawns could harvest unfinished crops that >50%. Unless it's blight. I actually think the same way. During toxic fallout there is an option to grow crops under a torch light (for tribal), plants barely survive to 50%, and "disappear of old age", so you have to micromanage every crop to harvest, what little you can take in a right moment. It would be nice for them to leave dead harvestable crops, so you don't need to check you crops every couple of game hours.

[sadpickle]

Just wanted to reply to

2) Bears will starve in harsh climes, they will then "hunt" colonists or their pets. For some reason, this will not trigger defences or turrets or really, any reaction at all. It won't even trigger turrets when a colonist is under attack near a turret. Turrets should really have a setting that makes them engage any animal that comes into range, if that is so desired. Pets should run from hostiles to the safety of their bed or animal spot.

Turrets should definitely engage animals "stalking" a colonist or pet by default.

PLEASE this needs to be default behavior. I won't bother with a permadeath colony because of this particular issue. It's asinine. Your hunter getting ambushed because he's far from base... ok, I can see that; try to be smarter about hunting priorities. But a stream of animals coming into your base to take a bite out of colonists is so stupid. Watching your colonist get mauled next to a stack of turrets spinning around doing nothing is stupid. These same turrets will shoot an animal if it "revenges" but not if it's initiating violence.