Plasteel/synthread floor - Ancient Danger buff - 'X per day' bills - Rebalancing

[pfhorrest]

1. Currently, rooms will still get dirty with 3 tile wide sterile floors in all directions outside a doorway, a sterile floor underneath the door tile, and the room in question being entirely floored with sterile floor. One interesting addition could be plasteel/synthread matrix floors which are completely impervious to dirt (requiring something like 15 plasteel, 175 synthread and 75 uranium per tile). When placed underneath a door these would prevent dirt from entering or exiting a room via the tile underneath that door.

2. Ancient Danger needs a difficulty buff. All too often the best strategy upon starting a new game is to immediately open these up and kill whatever's inside for resources as well as capture & recruit any friendly prisoners in the cryptosleep caskets. Having these caskets is also a significant advantage in the early game, since they can be operated without having unlocked the relevant research. With some combat micromanagement the starting survival rifle & pistol, or charge rifle is more than sufficient to accomplish this in the vast majority of cases. Ancient Danger should be a mid- to late game challenge to be accessed once the colony is of sufficient strength.

Some possibilities for this buff:

-Megascarabs released from cryptosleep will be awakened in manhunter mode.
-Capsules with hives will contain an already-sizable infestation.
-Hostile space marines will awaken high on Go-Juice, Luciferium or both, and/or have painstoppers installed.
-Friendly space prisoners will awaken with Luciferium addiction, meaning that the colony must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of their recruitment (and also that they have only a limited amount of time to successfully recruit them, as you cannot administer drugs to a prisoner).

3. We really need a bill option "Make X per day". This will remove the frustrations with "make until X" or "make X times" in one fell swoop along with making prioritizing working at these workbenches more relevant.

4. Rebalancing is needed for several aspects of the game, most notably weapons, crops and medicine, but also for a few miscellaneous items & situations.

-Make lower quantities of neutroamine available from traders or increase the materials required to make medicine. Medicine used to be scarce, now every playthrough is flooded with cheap medicine.

-Increase the amount of materials required to produce Go-Juice or have Go-Juice be 100% addictive. It is extremely powerful for combat and is produced too cheaply after little research with too few downsides.

-Luciferium should not be available from Ancient Danger capsules in such large quantities. 30+ is a common amount to find in these capsules, which is enough to last nearly three entire in-game years for one colonist.

-We need reduced crop yield or increased grow time for corn. Even on Extreme difficulty settings and forced indoor gardens (ice sheet, etc) corn grows too quickly and yields too many units for food production to pose a challenge or any other crop to be realistically viable. This would also make farming berries more strategically relevant.

-Colonists should not experience the 'witnessed outsider death' debuff if the death in question was that of an attacking raider intent on plundering and killing.

-A general rebalancing of weapons. Currently, a survival rifle is more effective for close range than either of the sub-machine guns or the pistol.

-Miniguns have too wide of a miss radius, they trivialize attacking tribal raids in the later game (they should be accurate enough that they cannot hit 5+ targets by missing).

-Crop blight should affect only certain types of crops and/or crops in a certain area. It doesn't make sense that healroot 150+ tiles away gets blighted along with potatoes growing in a hydroponics basin six doors deep into a mountain base.

-This being said, crop blight should have a chance to manifest as a chronic problem that recurs several times over a given season. At the moment it is more an inconvenient setback than an event that forces interesting emergent gameplay.

-Due to drugs, psychic soothe pulsers are now much less useful. Their effect should last around 3 days instead of one. Items become interesting when their potential use value later versus their trade value now must be weighed against each other. Items lose this interest when the advantage is so heavily weighted towards selling the item at your earliest convenience.

-Mood bonuses/debuffs for cramped or spacious bedrooms should be static and not active upon being in a room for a certain period of time. This would prevent people from making 1x2 bedrooms with no debuff and reward people who create spacious bedrooms.

[pfhorrest]

Quick bump

[Thane]

Bumping isn't allowed and wow that is a lot of suggestions for one thread.... I like the second one. Definitely an issue.

[SymbolicFrank]

Tackling Ancient danger / poison ship / psychic ship without building a turret wall often gets colonists killed in my games. Or get them things like fractured spines / destroyed stomachs and such, which you cannot heal.

I have no idea how I should do that without power armor and only a survival rifle and pistol.

I play on Randy Random / Rough.

[Arctic_fox]

Tackling Ancient danger / poison ship / psychic ship without building a turret wall often gets colonists killed in my games. Or get them things like fractured spines / destroyed stomachs and such, which you cannot heal.

I have no idea how I should do that without power armor and only a survival rifle and pistol.

I play on Randy Random / Rough.

I build a long tube out of wood with stone doors and have a colonst pop out of one door take a shot and hide and when all of whatever turn to said pawn have another take a shot from behind rinse and repeat untill dead.

Then i build little rooms around the cyro pods stuff 2 heaters a pop and a few batterys and as little wire as i can use from my base in and have all my colonsts at one tube and pop the lid if they are hostile i crank the heaters to max until they go down and the one with 4+pawns around him gets beaten to death with swords, if friendly i see if they are worth keeping if i have enough beds i take em to my base if i have more recruits then beds or they have a luci addicition they go in the pod until i can make use of them if they are worthless i either sell them or let em bleed out and turn em into food.

[pfhorrest]

Tackling Ancient danger / poison ship / psychic ship without building a turret wall often gets colonists killed in my games. Or get them things like fractured spines / destroyed stomachs and such, which you cannot heal.

I have no idea how I should do that without power armor and only a survival rifle and pistol.

I play on Randy Random / Rough.

For both ships & Ancient Danger, the key is to not aggro the mechanoids - once they're in a "wandering" state you can then use duck & shoot combat micromanagement to slowly whittle them down. Activate ships by throwing a grenade and then getting behind enough cover that you can't be detected, and open Ancient Danger rooms by hiding behind cover and shooting the perimeter wall instead of deconstructing it.

[jmababa]

Install RT weapons now you won't dare open those cryptosleep caskets at early stages of game they might be holding a katana or a pssh or a tavor or a spas or grenade luncher or RPG which are most dangerous weapons in RT I've ever seen.

[Rock5]

These are mostly good points although I suspect the poster usually plays with mods and might not be too familiar with vanilla balance (I could be wrong). Mods mostly destroy balance. If something seems too easy with mods doesn't mean it would be easy in vanilla. Anyway...

-We need reduced crop yield or increased grow time for corn. Even on Extreme difficulty settings and forced indoor gardens (ice sheet, etc) corn grows too quickly and yields too many units for food production to pose a challenge or any other crop to be realistically viable. This would also make farming berries more strategically relevant.

This doesn't quite make sense. In the worse biomes you usually only have gravel to grow on. On any soil less than 100% fertility potatoes yield more. In hydroponics rooms you can't grow corn. Plus the it grows longer, so if you fear blights and other crop destroying events you might choose quicker crops anyway. I think it's pretty balanced already. It just happens to yield the most in temperate climates, which is useful because you usually have  lot more to do in those biomes so having a longer growing crop is desirable.

-Crop blight should affect only certain types of crops and/or crops in a certain area. It doesn't make sense that healroot 150+ tiles away gets blighted along with potatoes growing in a hydroponics basin six doors deep into a mountain base.

-This being said, crop blight should have a chance to manifest as a chronic problem that recurs several times over a given season. At the moment it is more an inconvenient setback than an event that forces interesting emergent gameplay.

And how about it only affecting 1 crop? That would encourage players to diversify their crops.

-Mood bonuses/debuffs for cramped or spacious bedrooms should be static and not active upon being in a room for a certain period of time. This would prevent people from making 1x2 bedrooms with no debuff and reward people who create spacious bedrooms.

I admit I always use 1x2 bedrooms. It saves so much space. I wouldn't want to see a long term debuff but I don't mind room builders getting a bonus for making rooms. But I believe you can already get a "little bit impressive bedroom" and "impressive bedroom" buffs which might be enough of an incentive for room builders, although there is a huge gap between 1x2 room and large rooms needed for these buffs. Hm.. maybe 1x2 builders should get a small debuff, say -1 or -2, just from being too small, that goes away with more reasonable sized rooms. This would just be sized based. Then for those that like to go all out, they  can build larger more impressive rooms for the buffs.