Some logic holes in the game. + possible fixes.

[Vas]

I just wanted to point out a few logic holes I've found so far.  Some things I think might need fixing.

1. Metal walls, burning down?  Since when was metal a combustible?  You'd need to like, super heat that wall to a super high temp.  Sure, I can imagine a fire damaging the conduits inside the wall, but the fire wouldn't damage the wall it's self.  Maybe make the conduits unusable if the wall is damaged beyond 30%, but don't have a metal wall, burn down because of a fire.  That fire would have to be a couple thousand degrees!

2. Metal walls are WEAKER than stone now?  Since when was metal weak enough for a guy to melee attack it for a few seconds and break through?  I think stone walls are weaker objects.  They can be used for walls that raiders might normally ignore, sure.  But metal is generally a more sturdy substance.  One idea I have for remedying this issue, is to allow colonists to build conduits separately, into walls.  So now you can have rock walls with conduits built against them (The graphics would just show conduits under them), but instead of like being along the spot in front of wall, you'd place a strip of conduits along the wall it's self, and logic would say they placed the conduits either against the corner of the wall and floor, or maybe even drilled a bit into the wall to build the conduits into some secure piping.  This would require an additional layer of build area, so you can have wires on a separate level.  Like in old sim city games, where you build pipes, it makes the town transparent while you place them.  Just an example though.  So wiring will ignore placements of buildings as it would share a different level.  I rather like this idea as it means I don't need explosive walls all over my base anymore.  I could just place wires where they are actually needed.

3. Wires are extremely volatile.  If you get a heavy fog storm, ever single wall inside and outside your base starts suffering heavy damage.  It's strange that fog would start killing your walls while inside, behind sealed air tight doors...  Right?  Inside a mountain even.  Come on.  Where's the logic in that? - Seems to be gone now.

4a. Wires explode all the time and delete 100% of your total power reserves?  Since when did bad wires in real life explode and delete all battery power?  Batteries aren't exactly capable of draining all of their power into an explosion like that.  Sure a wire could get hot and pop but that won't delete a nuclear power plant's worth of power when I have like 50 batteries randomly placed throughout my entire base.  It might drain some power from the nearest few batteries but then it would just stop working, it also wouldn't do much damage other than start a fire if near flamable material.

4b. A second fix to volatile wires, would be to allow people to construct more sturdy wiring, costing more resources and more work time, you can build stronger more durable wiring.  This would be unaffected by "your wires randomly exploded causing a mini nuke detonation somewhere inside your base because you have like 50 batteries and my story telling event decided to be a dick and cause your entire lunch room to be 100% utterly destroyed by a single wire!"  If such an event happened and all you had was sturdy wiring, then it would heavily damage or break a wire completely and you just have to go replace that one wire.  Possibly start a fire on any near flammable materials.

5. Raiders should be using weapons fire on doors and walls, not punching them.  You can't ever punch  through a metal wall, not ever.  Go ahead and try.  Even with nice thick gloves on to prevent breaking your fist.  It just won't happen.  Good luck with that though.  Tell me when you've managed to punch through a big strong sturdy metal wall.  Anyhow, this is where raiders with grenades really flourish.  Other than randomly chunking death balls at your colonists, they can chunk these death balls at your walls instead, and walls would suffer 50% less grenade damage because, like, it's a grenade, against a metal wall, or stone walls taking 25% less grenade damage because like.  It's a grenade, a tiny little metal canister with a small amount of gun powder in it, against a stone wall.  These grenades are designed to be used against people, not walls.  But that would be where you start blasting away at walls with explosives, doing more damage than bullets and you get through much faster than punching a wall or door.

6. I believe this just needs an alert system button, but colonists ignore danger and run right out into the battlefield during a raid and ignore being shot at to carry some potatoes to a hopper that's already almost full "Hey, this hopper is one less potato of perfection.  I better run past these 43 snipers, 600 grenadiers, 21,784 gun users, to pick up a single potato and fill it.  Cause like, that's the logical thing to do in this situation other than hide in a hole, right?"  Cause, that's totally what I'd do in a situation where I'm trying to live as long as possible on a barren waste land with people trying to kill me.  Run outside and ignore grenades and gunfire and snipers to grab a single potato.  I'll do it all matrix style, dodging bullets and stuff.  No wait, I won't need to.  I'll raise my hand and stop time around me making bullets all just stop in mid air.  Much better.

7. This isn't really a logic hole, more of a wasteful problem.  Colonists go to sleep at night, yes?  They have a light next to them.  Do they sleep with it on all night?   Why?  Why not reach over and flip the switch to turn off the extremely over powered light that somehow draws much more power than it should?  I mean, you don't need light, while in bed.  Maybe have it so that in a room where a colonist is detected as sleeping, it turns off the light.  And in a room where the owner leaves, he turns off the light on the way out, turning lights on on the way in.  Such as another guy goes in to do repairs.  I guess it's not THAT bad though.

8. Another bit of logic issues, is the fact that colonists are cramped like, all the time?  No matter what?  I build a 3x3 room with a single light?  Sure, it's a little cramped.  A 4x4 room with a single light?  Come on, that's not cramped, you have a bed and like 12 empty squares of space, that's  like the size of my room.  I could fit a TV and a mini fridge in that 4x4 zone.  Ok.  I tried 5x5, now I have a light, a bed, and a plant to pretty up the place.  OH MY GOD YOU WHINERS, it's still too cramped?  Screw it, I'm sticking you in a 2x2 room and locking the door! - Seems to be fixed.

9. Solar flares shut down 100% of your equipment.  Ok, I get that this would effect equipment outdoors, and maybe even under metal roofing or shallow rock.  But why is my stuff way way way back in the cave under super heavy thick rock, also being shut down?  I've got batteries back there, so even if it somehow shuts down my solar generators, I should have devices powered on around the base under thick rock, protected against the solar flares.  My people have to starve to death or hate me for eating raw food because a solar flare hit for a  day and a half and my food stuff has all shut down even though there is an entire mountain on top of it?

10.  You can sell your colonists as slaves.  But you can't barter passage with a trader and leave this barren planet? Like your entire colony leaving the planet, ending the survival sim?   Sure some traders would say no, and well I don't think you want to end up selling yourself as a slave, unless it's actually better than dieing on a planet but anyway.  If you can launch people into space for traders, I'm sure you can get yourself off the rock.  I guess this just requires time for the game mechanics to be worked out though but if you can launch objects into space, you should be able to do a great many other things.  That's why I think the launchpads should be deleted, and instead replaced with trade pads and landing pads.  This would still allow traders to have a random low chance of offering some or all of your colony rescue off the dieing world.  Maybe their ship can only hold x amount of people so they promise to come back in a week to get more of your people and such and repeat this till you're all safe or dead.  Ending in partial victory if half of you made it out alive.  In exchange for such, a trader would take whatever you have produced around the base and maybe you'd work for them in the end but that's all end game stuff, stuff you won't really care about or even see.    "I'll take this 1000 coin now, and come back in a week after I've dropped these 5 people off at a planet, I expect to see 1000 more coin for the next trip too." something like that.  Anyhow.



I can't think of any more logic holes at this current time though.  I hope this makes sense and adds an impression of what can be done to make  the game feel more realistic.  It's a bit silly to have randomly exploding conduits that take out entire facilities when you have lots of batteries.  Or have whiny colonists complaining about almost mildly decent sized rooms on a dead planet with little resources.  I can understand those royalty colonists who are used to having everything handed to them and never worked a day in their life, or rich guy type colonists having issues with medium sized rooms, but not hard working low wage type people like a miner, who is used to small spaces. 

Sorry if this is a large post and such for some of you, or even the devs.  I'm always very detailed when I'm trying to make things better, find ways to solve problems and such.  I love the game and want to see it succeed.  Seems that people mostly ignored some of my other posts, meh.  I hate feeling ignored.    I'm gonna go all mental colonist here soon on you guys!

[Nasikabatrachus]

I haven't read all of this, but point #1 could be partly solved by making metal walls appear thinner and less sturdy. It wouldn't solve the fire problem, but it would explain why they can be knocked down by a few people bashing them over. As it stands, metal walls look like solid blocks of steel more suitable for a bank vault than necessary shelter in a survival situation. Of course, some concessions to gameyness are necessary for a vijyagame to be fun, but realism makes things feel more grounded and visceral. Both are important.

As for #3: what?! I've never noticed fog causing walls to degrade faster. Are you sure this is real?

The biggest problem I personally have is that natural rock walls are way too soft. On a lark, I did some "grenade mining" and although it took a lot of attention, a single colonist was able to eat through a truly ridiculous amount of rock. In the future, I hope that rock walls are tougher and that actual mining equipment is required to make significant progress into, say, a mountain.

[ApexPredator]

Just a few comments:

1/2/5 â€" Since this is a crash scenario I believe the metal being used for walls is scrap metal not a solid piece of magic steel that they pressed together by hand. If I am correct about metal walls being made of scrap metal it would explain your complaints with 1, 2 and 5 as thin metal is easily melted/burned  and making stone stronger, and making it so a raider could melee through it.
3 â€" If the wires are not properly insulated, which nothing shows they are this may also explain your problems with this one.
7 â€" Agree…
8 â€" 6x6 is the smallest room you can have that isn’t cramped

[Vas]

As for #3: what?! I've never noticed fog causing walls to degrade faster. Are you sure this is real?

Every time fog comes through, my walls started suffering random damage all over the place.  Conduits kept screwing up and getting half damage markers and such.  It might be coincidence but I think it is related.

Just a few comments:

1/2/5 � Since this is a crash scenario I believe the metal being used for walls is scrap metal not a solid piece of magic steel that they pressed together by hand.
3 � If the wires are not properly insulated, which nothing shows they are this may also explain your problems with this one.
7 � Agree�
8 � 6x6 is the smallest room you can have that isn�t cramped

Even scrap metal doesn't spontaneously catch fire.  Go ahead, go to a scrap yard and try to light a metal sheet on fire and tell me how that goes for you.    These are supposedly spaceship hull parts and even life pod parts too.  Space grade metal shouldn't spontaneously combust.  Lightning also doesn't cause metal to burst into flame, because metal grounds lightning, it's a conduit for lightning.  I have a big metal poll beside my wood house and my house doesn't catch fire and lightning strikes almost every storm!  It doesn't even effect the dish sitting on the pole.    I even watched lightning strike my dish from my friends house once.  Metal simply doesn't just randomly burn, it melts.

Well wiring does need some fixing anyway.  Could add insulated wire as a solution to this to make wires less dangerous.

As for 8.  I'm not running a fat camp here.  These fat asses need to deal with smaller rooms!

[Nasikabatrachus]

As for #3: what?! I've never noticed fog causing walls to degrade faster. Are you sure this is real?

Every time fog comes through, my walls started suffering random damage all over the place.  Conduits kept screwing up and getting half damage markers and such.  It might be coincidence but I think it is related.

Is this every colony you make? Or just one? What storyteller were you using?

[Vas]

As for #3: what?! I've never noticed fog causing walls to degrade faster. Are you sure this is real?

Every time fog comes through, my walls started suffering random damage all over the place.  Conduits kept screwing up and getting half damage markers and such.  It might be coincidence but I think it is related.

Is this every colony you make? Or just one? What storyteller were you using?

Doesn't seem to happen as much now, because it was happening almost every single fog storm in the past.  With every colony.

[TrashMan]

if you want to look at it logicly, stone is durable and requires no maintainance. A stone building can remain standing for thousands of years.

Steel is far more "durable" (short-term), but rust, electrical wireing and similar require maintainance.