Some "cheap" suggestions

Started by twoski, August 30, 2015, 01:48:04 PM

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twoski

I've been playing RimWorld sporadically for a while now, i generally play around with it, then lose interest, then reinstall a few months later once more features/fixes have been implemented.

Overall it's pretty solid but there are a few issues that reoccur every time i play. These are small issues that i think would be easy to work on.

In no order of importance:

Weapons.

It's really a hassle to get your hands on some non-rubbish firearms. I made a weapon smithing bench mod for this game a while back and i think i posted it on the forums here. The jist of it is that it takes plasteel and steel to craft weapons. I think some may require uranium too. But the amount required was high enough to make it somewhat of an investment (since plasteel is needed to make the space ship you have to be careful with your resources), and the quality of the weapon relied on the crafting skill of the person making the weapon. You also had to research the bench and it took a fair investment of research time as well. I think it was quite fair, honestly, and i hope you consider doing something like this. You can even steal my mod, i already implemented everything.

Lacking Resources

A few of the games i played were a little obnoxious solely because of the lacking resources on the map. Sometimes it seems like plasteel doesn't exist. Uranium seems even more rare.

It would be nice if the world generator had some hard lower bound on how much uranium/plasteel got placed on the map because as it is, it's really feeling like blind luck.

Alternatively, introduce more events that bring rare resources to the map.

Events.

Or specifically lack of events. The last time i completed the game, i think i counted 8 mortar barrage events. The map was littered with sandbags by the time i managed to lift off. It's a really obnoxious event since you either have to send off all your pawns and hope to god they don't all get incapacitated, or sit and let them take a dump on your base from a distance before besieging it. I'm okay with this event happening on average once or twice in a game, but as it stands it's way too common. Events are really easy to do from a modding perspective so i assume it wouldn't be too hard to add some variety.

You have plenty of pawn-oriented events but there needs to be more natural disasters! Fire is an awesome thing to deal with, yet it rarely seems to be a threat.

Some simple ideas:

Meteor strike: A large-ish meteor hits the map and causes a massive fire around its impact site. The meteor can be mined to give uranium or some other rare resource. This ties into the severely lacking resources problem i mentioned earlier.

Meteor shower: Smaller meteors rain down on the map and cause fires at their impact sites. The small meteors can be mined for a small amount of some rare ore, similar to the large meteor.

Brushfire: On dry biomes, have a small chance for a fire to randomly start somewhere during a heatwave. Simple as that.

Sandstorm: In desert/dry biomes have sand start blowing around for a short period. People who aren't indoors will have a hard time breathing and may be incapacitated.

Tornado: Maybe slightly harder to implement, but a tornado would take form on a random spot then move around in a somewhat unpredictable fashion. It would destroy plants, turn trees into logs, and cause significant damage to buildings (smaller buildings such as turrets would be outright destroyed). Wooden walls would be susceptible to being torn apart by tornadoes. The resources dropped from breaking stuff would be thrown in a random direction too. Pawns and animals would be sucked in and thrown in a random direction by the tornado and be incapacitated.

Hurricane: High winds with a high chance to damage wooden walls and smaller buildings like turrets. Occurs in maps that are situated geographically near the ocean.

Hail storm: Happens in the cold biomes. A short event where large baseball sized hail pellets rain down and cause random damage to outdoors things. Pawns get bruises if they stay outside too long.

Secret attacks: I notice that the visitors event is one of the most common. Maybe have a small chance for small groups of visitors to actually be pirates who reveal their identity once they are within your designated home area.

Weapon drop: This ties into the lacking firearms topic. Maybe have a drop pod containing some weapons fall from the sky. A short period of time later, and some pirates appear on the map in search of it and will walk over to the weapons pod. If they find the weapons, they take them and leave. Otherwise, they siege your base.

As you can see, there's plenty of interesting nature-based events you can do. Not everything has to involve pirates destroying your base with artillery or weapons. Events are what really make games unique and interesting, there should be a much greater focus on diversity and man-vs-nature here, i think.



blub01

Quote from: twoski on August 30, 2015, 01:48:04 PM
You have plenty of pawn-oriented events but there needs to be more natural disasters! Fire is an awesome thing to deal with, yet it rarely seems to be a threat.

well, there are flashstorms now, and the toxic fallout definitely counts for something, and heat waves and cold snaps are crazy, anyway. also, one more suggestion for natural events, monsoon-like several month rains every summer jungle biomes, that turn the ground into mud, which turns back into dirt when the monsoon ends.
Quote from: Zobaken on September 02, 2015, 12:37:37 AM
1. Please make people unable to move through deep waters. I don't like raiders cosplaying Jesus.

Boston

Re: meteor strike/showers

How "large-ish" are we talking about, here? A meteor the size of a house (about 40 feet to a side) would be equal in destructive and explosive power to the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing on the map would be able to survive the impact, the following firestorm, nor the atmospheric/environmental damage.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/asteroid-hits-earth.htm


twoski

For the large meteor event, the meteor could be roughly 8x8 tiles wide, for the smaller ones they could be tiny little ones roughly a tile or 2 in size.

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#4
Yeah. Just gotta point out, you can't really complain about lack of content when a game is in alpha and constantly adding more content.

Also, there's a mod for meteor strikes. I don't remember who made it/where it is though.

Edit: It's a skullywag mod, https://github.com/Skullywag/MeteoriteEvent
Selling broken colonist souls for two thousand gold. Accepting cash or credit.

Boston

Quote from: twoski on August 30, 2015, 02:46:07 PM
For the large meteor event, the meteor could be roughly 8x8 tiles wide, for the smaller ones they could be tiny little ones roughly a tile or 2 in size.

For a tile, let us assume a "tile" is about 3-5 feet across, as a colonist is about the same size as a tile + accounting for the 3/4 perspective

Therefore: an 8x8 tile is 24ft x 24ft / 40ft x 40ft.

..... Nothing on the map will survive that. An explosion in equivalency to a nuclear weapon capable of destroying cities just impacted the planet right outside your house.

Even a 3ft x 3ft / 5ft x 5ft rock is still equivalent to a "bunker buster" bomb. Worse, since in a meteor shower, you would have a lot of them hitting all at once.

Or, not really, considering how that isn't how meteor showers work. The fact that you can see a meteor shower is due to the fact that the meteors are burning up in the atmosphere of the planet. Plus, even if they did impact the planet, they would be spread across the entire planetary hemisphere, not impact an area 1 mile x mile across.

falcongrey

Quote from: Boston on August 30, 2015, 04:20:30 PM
Quote from: twoski on August 30, 2015, 02:46:07 PM
For the large meteor event, the meteor could be roughly 8x8 tiles wide, for the smaller ones they could be tiny little ones roughly a tile or 2 in size.

For a tile, let us assume a "tile" is about 3-5 feet across, as a colonist is about the same size as a tile + accounting for the 3/4 perspective

Therefore: an 8x8 tile is 24ft x 24ft / 40ft x 40ft.

..... Nothing on the map will survive that. An explosion in equivalency to a nuclear weapon capable of destroying cities just impacted the planet right outside your house.

Even a 3ft x 3ft / 5ft x 5ft rock is still equivalent to a "bunker buster" bomb. Worse, since in a meteor shower, you would have a lot of them hitting all at once.

Or, not really, considering how that isn't how meteor showers work. The fact that you can see a meteor shower is due to the fact that the meteors are burning up in the atmosphere of the planet. Plus, even if they did impact the planet, they would be spread across the entire planetary hemisphere, not impact an area 1 mile x mile across.

Very true on that... if ANYTHING the meteor just for 'destructive force' perspective would need to be 1x1 tile at BEST and the destruction would still be massive for a Large or even the HUGE map if your system is able to play one like mine can. At a ball park guess as this would be a 3ftx3ftx5ft rock, likely plasteel or harder hitting the ground at 15+ times the speed of sound on a Large map, about 1/3 of it is now a crater.

For game mechanics, being this IS a game with pseudo realism, we could minimize the blast destructive radius to about 25 tiles out (so 50 tiles across would  get Tera-formed to a wasteland like zone with geological features grossly altered) and then another 20 tiles out from that is set on fire from the heat. The inside would in basic be turned into a wasteland and outside the blast zone would be a burnt area that would need at least a year to start regrowing. Game ending if it comes down on your home in any way shape or form like the flash storms use to be and I feel should remain as such.. Have you seen storms of similar effect to the flash storm in real life hit buildings? It tares them apart and usually multiple buildings around it!
It matters not if we win or fail. It's that we stood and faced it.

twoski

well the meteor size can be changed, what is important is the quantity of rare resources it drops. which should be easy to sort out.

A Friend

Meteors seems to be plagued by SCIENCE ™

How about this as a substitute: Ship parts, (A kind that does not carry mechanoids nor any evil vodoo.)
Just like those in the crash landing mod. Explodes upon impact and scatters resources and fire around.
"For you, the day Randy graced your colony with a game-ending raid was the most memorable part of your game. But for Cassandra, it was Tuesday"

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