Simple suggestion for improving relationships

[Goryus]

It's often hard to tell why relationships aren't going right, or aren't forming at all, in your colony.  A lot of this is because relationships are heavily controlled by the hidden Compatibility and Attraction values.  It also doesn't help that these are completely independent from the pawn's opinions of each other.  So sometimes you have two pawns who have no attraction and aren't compatible, but the only messaging a player sees is that they have a +100 opinion of each other.

An easy way to make this more intuitive would be to expose the Compatibility and Attraction values to users by making them have an impact on social opinions.  For example, when looking at the social relationship between too pawns, you could see

• +3  Seems compatible
• -3  Finds unattractive
• +5 Finds very attractive

Etc.  This way you can know which pawns find each other attractive, and which pawns are compatible with each other, and their actions towards each other would make a lot more sense with that added context.

Next, there are a lot of restrictions on Lovin' that can prevent it from happening at all if certain thresholds aren't met.  If two pawns are in a relationship (Lovers / Fiancees / Married), there should be a minimum probability threshold for Lovin' that's always above 0.  (It doesn't make much sense to call pawns Lovers when they have no actual ability to be Lovers.)  So, IF we're in a relationship, AND LovinChance <= 0.01, LovinChance = 0.01.  Something like that.

"Beautiful," "Pretty," "Ugly," and so forth should also have an affect not just on social opinion, but on the Attraction stat.  I think right now it's just completely random.  Along the same lines, Compatibility should slowly improve over time if Pawns have a positive opinion of each other, and slowly decrease over time if pawns  have a negative opinion of each other.  These changes will make the way Attraction and Compatibility work a lot more intuitive.

Just my $0.02.    This game is amazing, by the way.