Your Cheapest Ideas

Started by Tynan, October 09, 2013, 12:17:07 AM

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Joshow

I'm not a developer or anything so I don't know what is or isn't cheap - but how about the option of making ships so you can cross oceans?

Or, in the tutorial screen when it suggests where you make your first settlement, it stops letting you do that on a literal island with no other settlements xD

Tynan

Quote from: Joshow on June 25, 2019, 03:43:16 AM
I'm not a developer or anything so I don't know what is or isn't cheap - but how about the option of making ships so you can cross oceans?

Or, in the tutorial screen when it suggests where you make your first settlement, it stops letting you do that on a literal island with no other settlements xD

The ships thing is a viable idea, but not exactly a cheap one!

The island thing - Are players confused by this? My general sense is to not baby players too much. Maybe having some warning would be good though.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Pangaea

There is probably a mod for this, but as I really like the vanilla game and I would imagine it's "cheap"...

I'd love to see a button for only mass-ordering to cut/harvest fully grown trees, bushes, wild healroot and the like. Particularly in biomes with limited wild growth, this would be great. For some reason it's often hard to tell from their look which trees are fully grown and which are not, so I end up clicking on most of them to find out. Or give up and mark a whole ton for cutting, which will select loads of 60% and such.

A search field for items in the Storage zones would be grand too. I often spend a good deal of time trying to find whatever I'm looking for as it's not always intuitive where items are 'stored', and there are a lot of various types of items.

This may not be "cheap" in the sense wanted, but I would really love a mini-map that can be toggled on and off. Although the maps aren't huge (I play on standard size), I tend to have the game somewhat zoomed in so I can see more details (I love just watching the guys doing their thing). When I'm looking at some animal kill or something away from my base, it's almost absurd how often I happen to scroll in the 'wrong' direction when trying to re-locate my base. So I need to zoom way out -- oh, there you are -- then zoom back in at the base. It could be pretty simplistic, just draw the outlines of the base or something, but merely the ability to click on it and quickly go back to base would be great.

Limdood

Quote from: Tynan on June 26, 2019, 05:58:24 PM
The island thing - Are players confused by this? My general sense is to not baby players too much. Maybe having some warning would be good though.
In the spirit of this thread, and addressing the question...

What about a pop-up alert when you select a colony starting location in a new game that has no other (friendly?) faction bases able to be reached overland? 

LWM

Quote from: Pangaea on June 27, 2019, 04:11:55 PM
There is probably a mod for this, but as I really like the vanilla game and I would imagine it's "cheap"...

I'd love to see a button for only mass-ordering to cut/harvest fully grown trees, bushes, wild healroot and the like.

More Harvest Designators!

It's v lightweight, and this one is a relatively simple one.  I THINK it gets all of those?  I use it for fully-grown trees.

QuoteA search field for items in the Storage zones would be grand too. I often spend a good deal of time trying to find whatever I'm looking for as it's not always intuitive where items are 'stored', and there are a lot of various types of items.

Rimworld Search Agency

This is a heftier mod that also includes Hauling Hysteresis, which I find *quite* useful, but that's me :)

I don't use minimaps, but I know there are multiple options out there...

Which is all to say, yes, quite right, mods out there!

--LWM


Pangaea

Thanks for the mod suggestions. I've downloaded them. Would still love to see this in the vanilla game, though :)

Another cheap idea: I'd like to see more stats for the colony as a whole. There is a TON on each person or animal, but very little for the colony. Some things I'd like on that page: amount of people kidnapped ( :-X ), and amount of enemies (and mechs, animals?) killed. These numbers would also include whatever killed, kidnapped or otherwise missing pawns have done. So not just a sum of the relevant stats for present pawns.

Hardly groundbreaking stuff, but it's small things that would make the game even more enjoyable for me -- especially when you manage to survive for a few years, with changing staff.

Pangaea

Another tiny thing, since I've started using the collapsed item categories on the left part of the screen: Could you make the game remember the state of each category? That way we won't have to expand the same wanted categories each time (medicine and such), while battling with the auto-scrolling with the mouse on the left side of the screen :P

delraith

Hmm, I'm cross posting this from reddit as I didn't want to make a whole new thread, but I suspect this idea is not that cheap.

Reduced gear variables
In the current system of item tiers (poor, normal, good, etc), item % health, and item material type we have three redundant effects. The downsides of this are poor inventory/stack management issues as every garment occupies a singe cell(!), and when interacting with traders the large amount of clicking required to sell off 20-30 different parkas that are of slightly different material, tier, and %.

Proposal: Make gear stats rely on fewer variables. Percentage and quality could easily be rolled into one without disrupting flavor and game flow.
- When rolling for item quality upon creation, all items that would be legendary would be 150% instead. I.e: 150% (Legendary), 140% (Masterwork), 130% (Excellent), 120% (Superior), 110% (Good), 100% (Normal), 90% (Poor), 80% (Shoddy), 70% (Awful).

The benefits of this change would:

  • Make the value of high quality gear more desirable in not only its protective value but its longevity, and would make staving off the negative though of worn-out apparel much more difficult with crap wares.
  • Instead of relying on mechanics like "Tainted" damage imparted to gear during combat would make gear much less valuable, turning raiders into swiss cheese will leave very little of use behind. Yet if a masterful headshot takes a raider's head clean off of a pristine set of marine armor, that's great news for you.
  • The amount of possible item instances is DRASTICALLY reduced. Instead of having 900 possibilities of a single cloth tuque (1-100% in 9 tiers = 900 possibilities) we instead have 150 possible cloth tuques. This also nudges us closer to better stockpile management/trader interaction/QoL.
  • Fix some pawn behaviors where they refuse to wear clearly superior armor, or when they refuse to remove worn-out shield belts.

Additional options for further reducing variables:

  • Certain materials could be simplified and compiled even further (I'll make another post about that). And/or materials only impart +/- effects to an item upon crafting. Lightleather would grant apparel -20% whereas Thurmbofur gives +20%. Wood and stone are poor choices for sharp weapons (-20%), but decent for clubs and maces. Plasteel makes everything better (+20%). Something like that.
  • Simplify gear percentile status. Compress the devaluation of gear into fewer stages, as appose to having 1-100% with a tick on every single interval, make gear devalue in 5% stages and change the devaluation & damage rates to compensate

Pangaea

^^ Just a minor nitpick: some of those categories don't exist any more (shoddy, superior iirc).

ManHuntingSquirrel

#5859

Quote from: Tynan on June 26, 2019, 05:58:24 PM


The ships thing is a viable idea, but not exactly a cheap one!

The island thing - Are players confused by this? My general sense is to not baby players too much. Maybe having some warning would be good though.

I'm not a developer neither, but what if drop pods could travel faster while flying over the sea?
- The Squirrel-Llama Manhunting Association CEO

vadim_normal

Button for turning not ended walls/doors into plan and button for turning plan into building.

LWM

"not ended walls/doors"?

Gyrocopter445

Watchtowers. PLEASE
Purpose - to help colonist defend against raiders/mechanoids/mad animals from a safe position and distance early in the game a snipe-off doomsday rocket/triple rocket raiders in the late-game

Pros:
- Colonist can shoot over walls
- Slight yet proportionate range-increase for ranged weapon when pawn is on watchtower

Cons:
- Colonist can be shot at (Even over walls) (Commonsense)
- Walls adjacent to watchtower only provide protection equal to that of a sandbag for colonist on the watchtower

Notes:
Doomsday and triple rocket-wielding raiders can be a hassle in the late game. A good sniper on top of a watchtower would greatly benefit from the (proportionate) range-increase and hit that raider before he can do some real damage.
Watchtowers would really just be a fun addition to the game. Seriously.

Kirby23590

One simple text edit for the quality weapons descriptions could make it more helpful-er to player to understand what it is...

So Modifying the description of the Quality Stat should be a cakewalk.

Quote
An item's quality is how well-made it is.

There are seven different types of qualities.

Awful, Poor, Normal, Good, Excellent, Masterwork and Legendary.

Adding that would help out to easily know the lines of those qualites and it's really one of the cheapest things i have ever made, from July 09, 2018... ;D

One "happy family" in the rims...
Custom font made by Marnador.



LWM

Quote from: Gyrocopter445 on July 17, 2019, 05:30:45 AM
Watchtowers. PLEASE
[...]
Cons:
Is it a pro or a can if the raiders decide the watchtower makes a really good target for the rockets?  Pawns, of course, cannot climb down quickly, so ....boom?

--LWM