How is the pacing in Alpha10d or later?

[wildeaboutoscar]

Honestly I'm finding it a bit slow, but then I am on Cassandra-easy (or whatever the first level of difficulty is). I've only had 1 raid and lots of fire so far and I'm approaching 15 hours in.

[Tynan]

Honestly I'm finding it a bit slow, but then I am on Cassandra-easy (or whatever the first level of difficulty is). I've only had 1 raid and lots of fire so far and I'm approaching 15 hours in.

Bear in mind you can change the difficulty if you wish.

[KillerH]

The pacing has improved significantly from alpha 9
I feel that the colonist time tables is a really nice improvement.
I have varying time for sleeping for my colonists so that some sleep while other work.
This insures the work never stops.
I have started with the first iteration of 10 and played the same colony on all. The start was definitely strange and slow paced but after the updates it has normalised.

[wildeaboutoscar]

Honestly I'm finding it a bit slow, but then I am on Cassandra-easy (or whatever the first level of difficulty is). I've only had 1 raid and lots of fire so far and I'm approaching 15 hours in.

Bear in mind you can change the difficulty if you wish.

Yeah I just did and it's a lot better now.

[DustBust]

So with AlphaF, I have put about 12 hrs into it.. big fan and I have to say, it seems to be paced pretty good. There's a slight struggle in the beginning trying to keep the colonists happy and get the basics in but I like it, I think it is how it should be.

It does feel that since Joy was added I don't feel as productive with a few colonists though, it gets smoother the more colonist you have for the same tasks and you don't notice it later in the game but I kind of like having limited colonists rather than maintaining an army too. The older versions it seemed like it took longer to get more colonists and each life was precious where now, it no longer feels personal with each colonist, I have a hard time remember who does what when I need something done now. I guess take that with a grain of salt.

[stefanstr]

The pacing has improved significantly from alpha 9
I feel that the colonist time tables is a really nice improvement.
I have varying time for sleeping for my colonists so that some sleep while other work.
This insures the work never stops.
I have started with the first iteration of 10 and played the same colony on all. The start was definitely strange and slow paced but after the updates it has normalised.

I like the timetables, as well. My only gripe with them is that one hour usually isn't enough for the pawns to do anything. An hour is how much a pawn needs to get to another side of the base. Maybe 2-3 hour periods would be granular enough? Less clicking, same effect.

[RemingtonRyder]

Staged starvation, I really love.

I've been playing modded, but setting up a hydroponics to feed all colonists at the start of the game has been challenging, with them all getting into starvation at some point and eating the early crops. Eventually, I started making enough food so that they could all nom on meals rather than raw rice, but it was looking fairly grim, especially for pessimist colonist 4 who could have broken several times.

[isistoy]

Played 20 hours Alpha 10f, with Cassandra classic - Challenge - Temperate Forest/Large Hills (-3°C/22°C) - Day 255 - 25 Months:

- First year: Good whole balancing, got escape pods, spontaneous joins-in, some easy fights, a good setup for food and power sources.
Clothing went immediately wrong, so I had to make it raw at the start, to refine it later on with the help of craft/loot/trade.
Realized, I could get Shifts in place through the planner. It really helped making the best of my workbenches and particularly engage "Do Until" cooked food, after having enough colonists and placing them correctly.
No big trouble with enemy flows, only my own mess ups here and there, like opening a hidden zone full of ancient mechanoids inside the base, with just a few colonists and a bunch of turrets

- Second year: A hell of a Winter, with a hard 5-6 days Cold Snap, plus Current Overload discharging batteries, all at once, just at the end of March! Can you believe it! Hardly made my hydrocrops survive (-24°C outside, 1-2°C inside, all exterior crops just starting killed in 2 days)! It helped proved we were just nealy in capacity for Just-In-Time cooking : ]
Still no big trouble with enemy flows as of yet, turrets and shooter plus melee intervention squad work altogether nicely.

Overall:
- Fights are a little bit easier than Alpha 8 (my last game sessions before this one), apart from mechanoids. The quality / beauty applying to enemies also changes it, I suppose. Feared of the moment I won't be able to keep the pace and have a too big equipment gap but it has been manageable so far.
- Joy bar is nice, though I am still to get into the game's subtleties for beauty and quality influences.
- Prisoners recruitment is fine, even with Joy not applying.
- Really like Melee shields and weapon crafting and got me a bunch of "Finishers" or "Tactical defense team", depending on the threat.
- Time table is a nice addition to the game. I am still to micro some of its effects (long working tasks, like mining Plasteel, particularly), but nothing showstopping at all!
- Temperature is giving me hard time for planning, added to difficulties in dealing with Stone specialization (Marble, Slate, etc...) and isolation/ventilation. Good mechanic!
- Basic medicine crops helps a lot!
- Clothing system is great: it keeps adding some pace to work-benching, forces you to adapt to make this skill evolve as well, which is good, imho. Now, colonist behavior against it might need some complements.
- Filters can be tricky/wacky sometimes, but help manage zones and activities greatly as well.
- Had a good amount of trading during a while but it changed and is now quite rare, which is a bit frustrating...
- Drinking can go wrong, guys!

[Kegereneku]

Updated my post before with the following picture :
My Colony now

Got a colonist killed, managed to recruit an awesome female ninja warrior interested in bionic, still trying to recruit an equally hard 16years old genius engineer, rescu/captured a Soldiers.

Again : Day/Night and seasons spacing are about right, Attack on Cassandra Classic ROUGH are still very very hard and threaten the existence of all colonist unless I get lucky or revert save.

My equipment is completely subpart and unless I get it from Raider I won't ever be able to buy new one.

I wonder if I uncovered a bug : A sandstone GRAND sculpture is supposed to take 1600 work or so. When I started it I discovered it took around 5000.

[Pathing]

-Click Cassandra extreme. Start the game on highest point or lowest point in world map. Flat.
-look around for the biggest steel source.
-Move all starting resources to it.
-Mark storage room zone.
-Build research table. 1 colonist with highest potential and most suitable on research starts researching stone cutting and hydroponic which the first is determined by how rare foods are. Build 2 solar panels, 1 battery, 1 heater or cooler.
-One goes hauling. The last goes mining steel. Miner builds Nutrient paste dispenser with 2 hopper. Bacon for trading and communication console.
- Build stone cutting table. Stop hauling. Keep making stone blocks.
- When both researches are finished, build 4 hydroponic, 1 sun lamp, 6 heaters or 4 coolers for green house garden while stone maker keeps creating blocks. Wall them up then wall up food storage room with Nutrient paste dispenser inside it. wall up storage room. raider should attack now but it is only 1 so it may die. Someone might join.
- Research Geothermal. Build 5-6 houses.
- Build T- shape kill box with 2 entrances at north west and north east corners. Focus on building kill-box wall first. Raiders should attack again (3-5 men). Expand to 10 houses approximately. Get about 5-7 colonists and start to fill kill-box with a lot of turrets(10+) while capturing 1 Geothermal plant. (From now on attackers are nothing)
- Expand the wire all around the map (Prevent evil ship). Capture all Geothermal spots (More turrets!). Wall around the map( Prevent besiegers). Mark all build-able tiles as residential zones. Build many outposts (kill-box alike) at the edge of the map.
- Build a ship or collect more colonists till your pc can't handle anymore 

Overall, the attackers are weaker. I have more time after I figure out how I can deal with joy system using time table. Still, it is fun. I hope to see volcanic bio-me or ruin city in the future very much. 

[cultist]

For the record, I usually play on the "challenge" difficulty setting. I prefer the Arboreal Forest biome because I enjoy the season changes as well as the extra challenge cold weather adds.

I think the pacing in the early game is very good - it has been that way for several updates now. I find myself scrambling for resources, constantly making tough calls about what job to finish first and how best to utilize each colonist's skills while the base gets covered in blood and dirt because no-one can spare the time to clean. Defenses are improvized and fights are nerve-wracking because I don't have enough (or indeed any) turrets and barricades.

Somewhere around the 6th or 7th colonist joining I find there is a bit of a speed bump. People start wandering because there is nothing for them to do. I've built and researched the essentials, everyone has a room to sleep in, the base is nice and clean and the freezer is stocked. This results in long-ish periods of boredom interrupted by frantic scrambling to set up defenses when an attack comes. At this point in the game, siegers and crashed ships are a welcome distraction, because these situations require you to take direct controls over your pawns to best deal with the situations.

Suggestions:

Resource scarcity is almost exclusively an early-game challenge.
Adjust the amount of resources spawned on the map according to difficulty setting - steel in particular. I have never purchased steel from a trader because I always have an excess of it - if not in storage, then close to home and easily accessed.

Smaller but more frequent attacks. Being attacked tends to put most of your colony on hold, and the time lost in work-hours can sometimes be a bigger issue than any injuries suffered. More frequent, smaller raiding bands would stress the player more overall than the large groups that spawn currently.
To avoid these smaller groups simply becoming cannon fodder for your turrets, I would like to see smaller raider groups use guerilla tactics against the colony - sniping your turrets from range, blowing up random bits of wall, setting fire to your crops, etc. - anything that forces you to stop what you're doing and deal with them personally. I don't know if it's possible, but perhaps the AI could evaluate when a group spawns whether or not it would be a match for the player's current number of turrets and armed colonists in play and plan their assault based on that.

Nerf geothermal power. I'm probably going to catch some flak for this one, but I think GP is way too strong compared to the other power sources. A solar panel can barely power a freezer and a single auto-door and doesn't work half the time (more than half if you count solar eclipses). Wind turbines need lots of space you could use for something else. GP is risk-free, maintenace-free, hassle-free and has a massive power output. Yes, it requires research, but you can start that as soon as the game begins and have it ready in a few days.
Alternatively, add some sort of unique catastrophic event to GP generators or gate the research somehow.

[Wolfen Waffle]

Random Randy, Challenge mode.  291 games days into the scenario, about 17 hours of play time.

10c took forever to recruit - I compensated by just selling every 99 difficulty person captured.  But you knew that already.

10d-f:  Rate of events is a LOT lower from previous releases, but feels much better.  Its now a pleasure when a ship comes by, and any thoughts of earning a living via trading (such as buying medicine from combat ships and selling to virtually anyone else) have gone away.  That is appropriate - we are suppose to be in survival mode! 

Difficulty scaling is keeping it challenging.  Not so much with raids, those are pretty ignorable since they are still mostly coming at me with primitive weapons, and my kill boxes take care of that.  I have started to see some variation in that though - like one group maxed with shields and melee weapons.  Evil ships are still my biggest challenge - trying the "wall in" approach now to see if I can force them into a special built kill box.  Would be nice if Evil ships mechanoids could be defeated some other way.

My personal challenge in the game is to never lose a colonist.  Have to admit I've allowed one who was never satisfied to die.  About the 6th time he went berserk my classic approach of having 2 colonist melee him back into submissions resulted in his death - and I literally said  "good riddances!"   Why do I take this approach:  Only makes sense to me if your going to spend 20-40 hours playing a set of people, improving their skills, giving them bionic parts to replace shot off ones, etc. that you do your utmost to keep them alive.

But I would like it if we could trade with other factions on our planet...
*Looks at Tynan*

[SpaceDrunk]

Alternatively, add some sort of unique catastrophic event to GP generators.

There used to be a mod, possible Tech Tree Minami, which added just that: generators had a chance to overload and explode, which damaged nearby stuff and left a ton of slag that you had to clear before you could build another one.

[silenced]

Well, pacing is good, overall.

Playing on Randy Random - rough. Didn't watch the food situation too closely so went on low food for quite some time until I got my food production running, only 4 colonists after the first year (all others I captured had a difficulty of 99 to recruit, so they were sold (after they rampaged several times and got shot by turrets placed right behind their cells)).

Lots of raids by pirates and tribes so far, but manageable numbers.


Something I have to add, negatively: I have 3 steam vents nearby, in a boreal forest, but 2 of them are unuseable for power because of one corner at each is swamp. Which is a bit annoying, but at least I can use one to vent it's heat into my greenhouse (which is quite effective and saves quite some power to be honest).


Just got hit hard by a raid that dropped right onto me, while a solar flare was active, but well, shit happens all day, new colony incoming!

[amul]

Playing 10f, rough Randy, on the medium-large map, for more time than I'm really comfortable admitting at this point I seem to take much longer to play one year than most people do -- I've only just hit 11 months but I've been playing for days due to a lapse in freelance-scheduling. I skipped version 9.

tl;dr version: The pacing on "rough" is about where I want it, but I wish the pacing of attacks wasn't tied to the pacing of everything else.
Actually speaking, this is the first time I've played through an entire winter. Usually I get a new idea about how to lay out my colony in a new way, and I get all excited and start a new game. I think this is primarily due to enough new features across both releases that there is a bunch for me to do.

The pacing is about decent, but Randy has been Random'ing on the side of easy so far. I've mostly had tribal raiders. My scariest threat was a crashed Mechanoid ship, which dropped two centipedes -- only they were equipped with awful weapons and quite literally only hit my colonists twice. Maybe I'm just better at hit and run tactics now?

Ships are coming in at a decent rate. I sort of wish that you could scale the frequency of trade ships independently of the threat of violence. With the two combined as part of the difficulty, it places the focus on the combat, which isn't where I want it. I've said this elsewhere -- I'd like to see more focus on diplomacy, interactions with the other factions, and a wider range of events. Though I am very happy that there are enough events now that I'm not getting a solar flare every gorram month

I was hugely grumpy about the focus you've been putting on melee combatants in the last few releases, but I have to say that I'm quite enjoying them now. Partly this is because my colony was melee heavy for the first 8 colonists. Partly, this is because my (abrasive) craftsman crafted an excellent plasteel knife, decorated with an image of Psychically Sensitive Chef vomitting while my Brawler pointed and laughed. Naturally, I equipped the Brawler with it

I don't know if it's new or I only just noticed it, but the Beauty measuring overlay has been fascinating! I suddenly understand the need for hallways! I still wish there was a roofing overlay that worked similarly.

In the early game, when I was below about 6 settlers, the Joy element was fun and fascinating to watch. Around about late November, I decided to celebrate the success of the colony by scheduling an entire Day Of Joy. I was quite disappointed when, despite my scheduling requirements, they all filled up on Joy by 10am and then went back to work.

(I wish I could schedule mealtimes and siestas, when pawns could sit around on my human-leather armchairs to gain comfort, eat a decent meal, and THEN head out to the mines on the far side of my map. I also wish I could schedule daily device-shutdowns so my Smelter only runs when the solar generators have power. And then I wish I....well, the point is, the timetable just makes me wish I could put more things on the timetable, so I think that qualifies as A Damn Fine Idea(tm). )

Anyway, I'm now only using the Timetable to schedule sleeping shifts -- 6 hours, and everything else is Anything Time. The colonists are managing their Joy and sleep much better than I could. Since I can't prioritize specific job lots, only categories of work, I end up forcing people to work on the specific tasks I set for the them. I'd like to see something like the "increase priority" area-selection option that's in Banished. Or at least be able to tell them to work on the food crops before the rose garden.

Indoor-accessible trade beacons have basically nullified the danger of weather-based deterioration rates. I feel like my weapons and clothes should also deteriorate from usage.

It's weird what gets warnings and what doesn't. My doctor gets tired from trying to bandage up my warriors and that gets a mood warning, I start running low on food and THAT gets a warning, but when the power goes out and my precious Devilstrand field starts to freeze, I won't notice until I happen to check in on it. And I might not notice if somebody loses a hand or an eye while hunting muffalo armed with only a knife and a bad haircut.

Though I am pleased that the above-mentioned Brawler with the knife, now armed with a personal shield, is hunting rabbits and squirrels without fear.

Speaking of which, the Outfits menu and Stockpile Qualities are FANTASTIC. My only gripe is that I can't "duplicate" an outfit and then make adjustments. Terribly minor.