Pawns are waaay too slow

[DNK]

As it says in the title. I personally modified my game to make pawns something like 3x faster. It is SO MUCH BETTER. No longer does "picking up an item 200m away" take literally 12 hours. No longer does "going to the dining room to eat" take 4 hours. It just happens in a somewhat reasonable amount of time, and I don't have to worry that "mining that distant ore is going to cripple my colony" or that "a crashed space part is going to require me to starve 10 pawns for 3 days to destroy because it takes them 2 days round trip".

I know it removes a bit of the spatial challenge, and also it makes melee units a lot tougher (which can be made up for with faster gun fire rates), but I just got so tired of constantly being hamstrung by weak hamstrings.

Anyone who wants to experiment with this, there's a file under ThingDefs\Races_Humanoid.xml. Modify:

      <MoveSpeed>4.61</MoveSpeed>

To something faster. I am using 12.5, and it's very nice.

[b0rsuk]

You solved the wrong problem. Your problem is hauling.

[CB elite]

For me, the pawns move at a pace that I can handle. I don't care to see pawns zoom around the map like sonic the hedgehog lol. However, the amount of time in each game day is somewhat low, in my opinion; yes, even though there are now 30,000 ticks in a day. Let's do some simple math:

Givens:
24 Hours = 1,440 Minutes
One Day (24 Hours): 30,000 ticks
Pistol (Standard) Aim Time: 150 ticks
-----
(150 ticks/30,000 ticks)*100 = 0.5% of an in-game day to aim/fire a pistol
0.5% = (0.5/100) = 0.005
1,440 Minutes*(0.005) = 7.2 in-game minutes to aim/fire a pistol

Increasing things like movement speed isn't going to fix the problem of days feeling extremely short, especially when there are so many other things going on that make the days feel short :/

I understand the logic behind short days, though. If days were too long, events of all kinds would be way too far and few between to feel any kind of sense of struggle. There are many other reasons as to why long days don't make for a very fun game right now, but that's a list I am too lazy to make right now :p

I believe that as Tynan and the rest of the developers create more and more things to do/worry about in a game day, the day lengths will become gradually longer and all of the tasks that seem to take ridiculous amounts of time will start to seem more realistic.

Maybe, just maybe, one day it won't take colonists 7.2 minutes of their time to aim/fire a pistol

[ctgill]

I'd be interested in seeing a mod or choice on playthrough launch in being able to pick day length  (eg; short, medium, long)

On one hand they seemed short at first when I started playing back in A4? Now I just have sort of adapted now I know my limitations on what I can reasonably expect a colony to do at X amount of people. Like when you first land with your 3 people if you have someone at 5+ construction you can very simply set up a 8x8 with 3 wooden beds and possibly get even a wind or solar up + battery with temp going (if you really micro manage that first day) so long as you didn't choose some place to settle too far away from ground zero.

[zandadoum]

You solved the wrong problem. Your problem is hauling.

how is the problem "hauling" when it takes 2 hours to get from a bedroom, to the fridge and then to the dining room, when they are basically next to each other

how is the problem "hauling" when it takes 5 hours to go and switch on a heater at the other end of the base, when the base is not really "that big"

how is the problem "hauling" when it takes 15 minutes to aim a gun and 48 hours to kill an evil ship + mechanoids.


i would absolutely not mind the current speed, if it wasn't for the fighting... i treat my colonist quite well and under normal circumstances i only get a couple of douchebags to go unhappy sometimes. everyone is well fed and sleeps well, etc.
yet when a fight starts, stuff takes so long that people either collapses from exhaustion or they go mad in middle of a fight or whatnot. specially against mechanoids, which take ages to kill.
and the worst part: only my colonists suffer from this. it doesn't seem to affect raids (other than sieges, who DO go to sleep sometimes), but it 100% doesn't affect mechanoids...

mechanoids... a relentless, overpowered event. more so on randy extreme, have had 1 evil ship, 1 mechanoid raid and 1 mechoid drop in middle of my base, all basically at same time.
nowadays, as i still play games for FUN (weird, right?) and i don't find mechanoids to be fun... i just reload game.

if on the other hand, my colonists wouldn't take 6h. to get into position and 1h. to fire their snipers a couple of times... maybe i'd actually give a damn about mechanoid raids.

[b0rsuk]

You solved the wrong problem. Your problem is hauling.

how is the problem "hauling" when it takes 2 hours to get from a bedroom, to the fridge and then to the dining room, when they are basically next to each other

how is the problem "hauling" when it takes 5 hours to go and switch on a heater at the other end of the base, when the base is not really "that big"

how is the problem "hauling" when it takes 15 minutes to aim a gun and 48 hours to kill an evil ship + mechanoids.

Show me your base. I smell some totalitarian architecture.
My pawns are done eating within 1 hour of waking up. I know because they have their joy hour on their 2 awake hour.

I agree the combat feels sluggish, but this is not due to movement speed, but insane number of hits a pawn can take.

[DNK]

You solved the wrong problem. Your problem is hauling.

My problem is I don't want to have to base my entire colony design and gameplay around an arbitrary constraint. I can design a colony that is on a small map and is tight and efficient. This leaves minimal room for creativity and "big" ideas, plus if I want to use larger maps I have to accept that it's going to be almost unplayable. If I want my colony to have a nice large courtyard in the middle of it, it comes at the price of doubling my hauling time.

If I get raided and want to haul all the loot somewhere inside the walls, it's going to take days. Half the time I haven't finished before the next raid arrives. It gets old.

Your last post says it all: you don't care much for creativity, and anyone who wants to create differently than you is "doing it wrong".

[DNK]

For me, the pawns move at a pace that I can handle. I don't care to see pawns zoom around the map like sonic the hedgehog lol. However, the amount of time in each game day is somewhat low, in my opinion;

Yeah, ultimately it's a factor of "how much time does walking/hauling take in comparison to actions/metabolism/etc". Altering the movement speed is the simplest way to rebalance this, but increasing the day length while slowing metabolism and such would do the same. If there was a way to slow down the entire simulation, you could do that while increasing movement and then they'd not look like Sonic but otherwise be going faster relatively speaking.

They don't zip around that much even at 12.5 though. I think it's roughly DF speed at 30FPS. I guess that's faster than some like, but the other alternative is as I mentioned, and it's a bigger PITA than a single line edit.

Anyway, you can play with that number to see what's a good balance for you. For me, it was roughly 3x speed. You still need to take some efficiency into account for hauling and base design, but a lot of the other hauling/transit issues (raids/sieges/crashed ships) are gone mostly, or at least manageable now rather than being game-breaking.

It just gets to feeling like the Sims (older ones at least) - it takes 3 hours to wash dishes, 2 hours to go from your kitchen to bedroom - it's like you never have any time because it's getting all used up in transit. I never found that fun.

[b0rsuk]

Your last post says it all: you don't care much for creativity, and anyone who wants to create differently than you is "doing it wrong".

No, you're either being dense or failing at reading comprehension. You're making a strawman argument.

No one forces you to make a base that consists of several huge rooms. You can make two dining rooms, two food storages, etc. This is the way it works in real life. A single dining room won't solve the world's food problems. Bigger and bigger rectangle isn't the pinnacle of creativity. It's ridiculous.

It's expected that at some point a huge room won't be efficient. Really big cruise ships, for example, typically have several restaurants, swimming pools, buffets. Otherwise it would be a noisy mess with many bottlenecks.

It's your game and you're welcome to increase pawn speed each time you turn the map size up one notch. I'd rather adapt in other ways. And you can always increase game speed.

[CB elite]

For me, the pawns move at a pace that I can handle. I don't care to see pawns zoom around the map like sonic the hedgehog lol. However, the amount of time in each game day is somewhat low, in my opinion;

...

It just gets to feeling like the Sims (older ones at least) - it takes 3 hours to wash dishes, 2 hours to go from your kitchen to bedroom - it's like you never have any time because it's getting all used up in transit. I never found that fun.

Ah, Sims



Game: "Your carpool will arrive in about one hour to take you to work".
Me: "Oh, okay. Better grab a bowl of cereal real quick, so my Sim isn't in a crap mood all day"
Sim: Walks to fridge*
Game: "Your carpool has arrived"
Me: "Well then..."



Don't get me wrong, I find both Rimworld and Sims incredibly fun to play. But, it's like you said. I feel like a lot of time is lost in transit. But, again, it's not just transit that makes time fly in this game. Combat literally takes FOREVER sometimes... Hopefully the day lengths will be increased over time, and it won't be necessary to mod the movement speed of the people, and there won't be issues with people starving to death because they have to deal with a raid

[DNK]

No, you're either being dense or failing at reading comprehension. You're making a strawman argument.

No one forces you to make a base that consists of several huge rooms. You can make two dining rooms, two food storages, etc. This is the way it works in real life. A single dining room won't solve the world's food problems. Bigger and bigger rectangle isn't the pinnacle of creativity. It's ridiculous.

It's expected that at some point a huge room won't be efficient. Really big cruise ships, for example, typically have several restaurants, swimming pools, buffets. Otherwise it would be a noisy mess with many bottlenecks.

It's your game and you're welcome to increase pawn speed each time you turn the map size up one notch. I'd rather adapt in other ways. And you can always increase game speed.

You're being needlessly aggressive and offensive in this discussion. Disagree politely without insulting me as you do so.

I'm not building giant rooms always. I'm building open spaces. The sorts of open spaces that architects and designers use throughout the real world, despite the inefficiencies and increased costs (albeit they're also not crippling high costs in the real world). The places you don't find these inefficiencies are the budget versions. Anyone who's been around a while knows this. There isn't a major city without parks, a nice office building without a large lobby, a good hotel that hasn't likewise invested in a larger lobby and more spacious hallways, a non-metropolitan university without large spaces between buildings for pedestrians and parks and so on, a non-metropolitan corporate headquarters campus without several spread out buildings and green spaces, etc, etc.

I like my colonies to grow up naturally, using multiple separate spaces connected generally by an increasingly nice central area. Places that look like an actual colony and/or growing town or just any old "nice" commercial complex. Sometimes I even go so far as to want to break the mold of shoving every pawn into an identical small box apartment in a complex and give them individual dwellings, with yards and all that, perhaps once the colony has reached a certain size/wealth level. Obviously, I need to mod the game to do that, because it's not really an option to have a so spread out colony with the default 4.61 speed.

That's sort of my point - this is a game with a strong focus on creativity and storytelling, yet this one stat has greatly handicapped both. I must always tell a story of space limitations, brutal efficiency, and a cookie cutter base with everything arranged roughly in a series of small corridors and packed spaces, more akin to an aircraft carrier than a real colony.

I think the real problem is that everyone has just assumed the walk speed as a given and so assumed the current design limitations are a given as well. The issues with raids and crashed ships is maybe the most obvious aspect, but the deeper and more critical one is this creative restriction. I look at the bases most people make, and they're pretty much all quite similar, all heavily based on movement efficiency or the concomitant space efficiency.

[TLHeart]

I build open bases, with single houses for each colonist from the start, large open spaces to grow crops, play horseshoes, A covered beer garden, open on one end to the center of town square, with all the sculptures, trees....

I have no problems with the travel time, or getting work done, or having colonist break, as I pay attention to the mood needs, and adjust the work schedule to fit the individual colonist.

Many people play the game from the min/max philosophy, and that is what is limiting the creativity, not the movement speed. I understand min/max, but do not restrict my base design to that need. Most of the bases posted are from min/max and kill box designed defense.

No need to mod the game for individual houses. I do it in vanilla.  I built one town, with a town square, that had a sheriffs office/jail, saloon, church/meeting hall, General Store(trade depot), tailors work shop, smithing work shop, A cafe.... My defense for this town was the open spaces, with all those doorways, and streets and corners to shot from. And every colonist had their own house, a 7x7 house with 2 doors, and a back yard.

If you feel the need to mod the game to fit your desires, so be it. But for me, the walk speed works, and I enjoy all the different ways I can build a colony, and even with a fight with the mechs, my colonist do not break, or collapse from exhaustion. Understanding HOW to fight the mechs, is critical.