Alpha 15 unstable branch testing feedback

Started by Tynan, August 17, 2016, 03:02:20 PM

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ShadowTani

Quote from: LightOfTheMoon on August 24, 2016, 01:23:21 PM
Don't know if this has been mentioned, but drilling gold has allowed me to reach ridiculous wealth relatively quickly. Perhaps if less gold was mined per cycle, it would be less dramatic. Just a thought  :D

As Tynan said in the post at the beginning of the page, he have corrected this; you need to make a new map for the changes to take effect.

Tynan

I've just posted a new version.

I hope this one is final. Aside from a few cosmetic changes I'm not planning on changing anything else.

Saves should be compatible with last update.

Please test and give me feedback about how it is! I would really love to read any play stories, balance feedback, or bug reports.

Thanks all.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

MikeLemmer

Tynan: How long should we have to test this until the official public release?

Tynan

#273
Quote from: MikeLemmer on August 24, 2016, 06:13:18 PM
Tynan: How long should we have to test this until the official public release?

Thousands of people have asked me about release dates, and the answer is always the same: I don't know!

Git log:
3d6f457 Translations update.
23b551e Fix: They'll refill a barrel in a frozen/over-hot area and immediately destroy the wort
221e5dc Fix: Wort doesn't spoil
e403a97 Fix: Resource readout categories count even things inside sub-categories that are their own resource readout roots. Fix: Resource readout sub-categories don't tab in.
6ab6bc0 Cleanup on resource readout. It now shows all appropriate resource.
297c77a Tooltip for tolerance now numerically outputs the effect multiplier. Tooltips can be wider.
e60075a Allow requesting specific trader kinds.
d947d77 Drug tolerance now affects ingestible outcome need offsets.
fa051e6 Merge branch 'alpha15' of https://bitbucket.org/TynanSylvester/rimworld into alpha15
0262a1b Various text and balance changes.
8a79f08 "Burn apparel" and "burn drugs" campfire bills no longer use Cooking work type.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

MikeLemmer

Quote from: Tynan on August 24, 2016, 06:15:38 PM
Quote from: MikeLemmer on August 24, 2016, 06:13:18 PM
Tynan: How long should we have to test this until the official public release?

Thousands of people have asked me about release dates, and the answer is always the same: I don't know!

Woo! I might finally get to spend more than 2 days on a public test colony!

podium86

Before getting electrically cooled/heated rooms, tribal start always lose their beer brewing barrels(from spoilage) to random events.

Makes it kind of not worthwhile to plant hops or at least extremely risky for not much reward, don't think it was that bad in real life?

ReZpawner

Quote from: Tynan on August 24, 2016, 06:00:08 PM
I've just posted a new version.

I hope this one is final. Aside from a few cosmetic changes I'm not planning on changing anything else.

Saves should be compatible with last update.

Please test and give me feedback about how it is! I would really love to read any play stories, balance feedback, or bug reports.

Thanks all.

Is there a changelog anywhere so we know what to test specifically in each version?

Tynan

Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Prettykrazy

#278
Was hoping to keep this post short but....noope, sorry

Tutorial-
I went through the tutorial twice to be sure because I felt something was missing. After the raider attacks and you defend you choose your storyteller and it's over.
But what about graves?
I feel new players should have to build a grave to deal with the body after. One of the defining characteristics of Rimworld is that you gotta deal with them bodies...otherwise you can easily get alot of mood debuffs and things can spiral from there. New player's may not realize the associated debuffs until it's too late. In which case we're likely to see them complaining on reddit/the forums about mood spirals. It might be worth putting the joy part around the same time as that to allow some explanation of mood effects as a whole. With that said, I read your reddit post about not wanting to overload the player right off the bat and I absolutely agree so I understand the difficulty in keeping the tutorial limited but I feel graves and moods should be significant enough to make the cut.

Drugs-
Giving the pawns the ability to pick up more than one of any drug seems to be a bit moot->When a pawn picks up more than one drug they can't use it from the Gear tab, instead it must be dropped, then used from the ground. This leaves the remainder of the drugs on the ground, which besides making hauling more pesky, makes it a bit pointless to carry more than one.
I could understand carrying drugs to bring go-juice to where drafted pawns are for the occasional defense. But as is the player can simply place the drugs at defend stations-unfortunately at the moment this is made very difficult due to stack size via lowering and raising stockpile priorities.
Perhaps allow a pawn to carry a drug in their gear, without being under a policy which allows them to use said drug freely. Like a "carry extra" tick/untick option or a "use when drafted"

Tolerance feels good, it rises and lowers at a decent pace, not too fast or slow. I feel tolerance is still a bit muddled in terms of the player knowing what is actually happening-I don't know how long a drug should last under x, y or z level of tolerance, I don't even know if it's x doses per tolerance or if it just lasts shorter.
Perhaps some time estimate would be handy- even just the default no-tolerance duration would be very useful.
EDIT I can see you added the % to tolerance multiplier, looks great. which was updated as im typing haha :)

Marijuana yield feels too high, with just a small 8X8 field I was able to get enough joints for long term use and still have plenty to sell. Somewhere along the production chain it feels like too much, not sure if its even worth bottlenecking though as the downsides don't go away even with a steady supply, if not I think the value for joints may still be a bit high. The so-far reduced value feels better but i'm not sure it's enough.

Coca growth time/reward feels right as does the flake to yayo conversion.

Amphetamine production is a bit too easy, with minimal starting silver I can easily get a huge chunk of neutroamine (which is quite hard to pronounce, I suggest a hyphen). then it's just a matter of time for the research, during which i can get even more. The low cost of neutroamine combined with the ability to mass produce and sell joints makes it really easy.
Considering Amph's huge gain of rest, consciousness, work speed, and moving, I feel like it should either be more addictive, harder to buy in large quantities, higher research, require more neutroamine etcetc.

Withdrawl-
Being able to see the % is super handy.
Felt like it was too harsh before but now it feels too weak. Had a guy with Amphetamine addiction get to 45% and didn't see a single mental break or anything. Not sure if i'm imagining it or not but did you replace all the mental breaks with long term debuffs? Going that route makes sense as a sort of mild but long term negative, requiring other drugs or joy to make up the mood loss.
That plays into making random/stray drugs be the real danger with withdrawing pawns.
I'll try to play around with withdrawals more in my next game session.

Drug Policy interface-
The updated tick/untick style display looks much better than before. Being able to have multiple triggers is great. The "drug policy name" (Chemical interest) identifier is great, no longer have to check and re-check character tabs
I kept thinking that having both mood and joy triggers for policies was a bit redundant but after some thinking it makes sense to have both, otherwise you cant do drugs for one level of joy and another for mood.

My understanding is that the drug system is designed to (other than the obvious emergent gameplay) improve mood and performance. But I'm having some issues with the performance enhancement aspect.
After playing with a stable colony for a while and really seeing the effects in action it felt like something obvious was missing.
At first I was using the default restrict schedule with only sleep and anything. Issue with that is that they would end up being active during the SLEEP periods, during which they only sleep or do joy if not tired-that makes sense to me so no issue there. This didn't feel very effective though as Pawns were overloading on joy and hardly any work was being done.
So I've been using the restrict tab with NO SLEEP, only a few hours of joy and the rest anything. This allows them to get mandatory joy while sleeping and working whenever they want. But even doing it this way I have no idea when they will tire.
The ability to trigger drugs based on REST.
As of writing this I can only get my colonists to do drugs when tired manually, by watching the colonist bar for who sleeps, which feels exactly like what the drug policy system was designed to make easier.
At first I thought a REST trigger would be overpowered but here's my idea after some thought.
The gain of increased productivity could be balanced with my pawn's risk of overdoses for short term usage, and tolerance levels for long term usage.
So say I want to rush my guys to finish a building or craft whatever->Schedule some work hours->Dose them up->Do the work
In that scenario the pawns lose mood and rest from increased work hours but that could be made up for by rest+ drugs and mood+ drugs. But riding them too hard like that would increase the risk of OD.
For a more long term situation the tolerance level would balance out the doses per day so as not to have some supermen colony of drug addicts, this is where knowing how many doses per tolerance (or however it works) is useful to know.

I'm sure there's some things i'm forgetting but i'll leave that for next time, thanks again for taking the time to read my post, and the last one, Tynan. Feel free to respond if you would like to clarify anything.

Cheers PK

PS where can I find that changelog? <3

ReZpawner

Fantastic. I do have one last problem, but I'm sure this is only happening on icesheet colonies that are fairly extreme. I keep asking people to send trade caravans, but they never arrive. There's no message indicating that they won't be arriving, they just don't. Even during the mild summer months, when they would survive the trip.

Is this working as intended to prevent people from exploiting the caravans? If so, it's not really needed. I added a forced one every season to test it, and the muffaloes always somehow managed to escape. Lots and lots of dead people - no dead muffaloes. No awesome free loot.
(This was at the coldest known map with -100C average winters).

Tynan

Thanks for the feedback Prettykrazy, very useful! I've taken some notes for sure.

The changelog is in the last build announcement post.

ReZ - That would be because they'll refuse to arrive if they'd die in the cold. I'll look into this. Thanks; I didn't think of it. If you'd email me your save that'd be useful.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

ReZpawner

I keep restarting to try out new things, so the one where I forced the caravans is gone. If it helps, I'd be more than happy to set up a new one though?

kamenoitte

#282
Drugs should deteriorate out in the open. My current game has some flake and yayo on the map (from raiders) that's still at 50/50 after months. (The relevance is that someone might walk across the map during a binge to get to it, and it would be nice if it had naturally disappeared like other things tend to.)

NolanSyKinsley

"e60075a Allow requesting specific trader kinds." Tynan you beautiful man, I LOVE YOU!!

Jstank

#284
Quote from: NolanSyKinsley on August 24, 2016, 08:56:12 PM
"e60075a Allow requesting specific trader kinds." Tynan you beautiful man, I LOVE YOU!!

...Because he thinks in git's hashe's!
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

             - Bernard of Clairvaux