Alpha 16 unstable branch feedback

Started by Tynan, December 12, 2016, 01:49:06 PM

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Zhentar

I got a map with no ancient shrine. Is that a bug? I can provide a save/world gen params if it is.

ReZpawner

Quote from: Zhentar on December 13, 2016, 09:11:10 PM
I got a map with no ancient shrine. Is that a bug? I can provide a save/world gen params if it is.

Ancient shrine? Do you mean ancient evil, or is the shrine a new thing? If it's the old thing then it's just bad luck, and it shouldn't really affect your game much.

MikeLemmer

Quote from: Zhentar on December 13, 2016, 08:13:25 PM
If you're finding it that easy to make it to the AI ship, you've figured out something I haven't (or maybe you just got an easy map?). It's going to take me at least 4 years of journeying at this rate.

I think it just automatically puts the AI ship at the farthest boundary of the known area. If you just generated 30% of the area, you can reach it in about 2 seasons. If you generated the whole world... might take longer.

I would suggest the AI ship requires a laundry list of resources to repair itself to spaceworthiness again, so players can't just roadtrip to it immediately.

MikeLemmer

#78
I've been messing around with the world modifiers, and I think the 2nd-coldest setting on the World Temperature is off. While 1 step below Normal Temp still generates worlds with quite a few growing seasons, if I set it to 2nd-coldest I get NO growing seasons on 95% of the world and an average temp of 24F around the equator. While it doesn't have the giant ice sheets the Coldest worlds do, on the Coldest worlds the average temp at the equator is 17F, just a few degrees lower than 2nd-coldest. That seems off when the average equator temp of 1-step-colder-than-normal is a balmy 60F, and its opposite, the 2nd-hottest temp, still has growing seasons on a good 50% of its surface. Tynan, could you please double-check the temp stuff and see if you could get the 2nd-coldest average equator temp around 40F instead of 20F?

UPDATE: Yes, it seems like Cold worlds become inhospitable faster than Hot worlds. I still had Growing Seasons on 20-50% of the land on the Hottest planets, while even 2nd-Coldest planets only had Growing Seasons on 5-10% of the land. The Coldest planets had none (which begs the question of how they still have boreal forests).

newcadence

#79
I killed some guys and stole their clothes, as usual. There's a new debuff for wearing clothes taken from dead people, Dead Man's Jacket, -3 mood.

Personally I like it, and I'm excited to see if humanskin clothes have a similar debuff, but will it ever wear off?

Edit: My lovely Psychopath is also getting this debuff, which seems a bit inappropriate.

terheyden


  • "Create caravan" needs some love. I can see my colonists and all my stuff, but when I click on any of it, nothing happens. There should be some help text walking you through how to put together a caravan, and why you would do it. Even some error text like "you need to tame some animals first" would at least lead the player in the right direction
  • I would give your home base a different icon, or put your colony name under it or something. When you click "World" and the world pops up and a little blue house is there ... it looks really barren. It's not obvious that you need to click on the blue house to create a caravan, or even that the blue house represents you

noel1

Firstly I'd like to say I really like that I can form a new caravan and travel the world.

Haven't done it yet and it wasn't at first clear to me that I need animals to do it.

Plus, what is the point of forming caravans?

Will I be able to go back to my home base after sending people out?


dualavatara

#82
Don`t know if it designed behaviour, but i`ve sent a two pawns caravan with a heavy load of beer and smokeleaf joints. Both pawns (not teetootalers) gone bad with usage of the cargo and caravan MIA at last.

UPD: Caravan had enough food.
And another point - why can i use other animals to carry caravan stuff? Have some elephants (the have great cargo capacity stat in info window btw), but only muffalu add cargo space.

Lightzy

Maybe I haven't played far enough in but it doesn't seem like the game has any impetus for using caravans.
It always seemed much safer simply not to use them

What's the use of them?
Are there special items scattered around the map that you can only find using caravans? Stuff that's necessary for the spaceship? something else?

Pushover

Seems like there should be a button in assigning outfits to not wear dead people's clothing, given that it provides a mood debuff. It's a little tedious to determine which clothes are from dead people and restrict them.

Grishnerf

#85
they have a capital D behind the Name for "downed" i guess.
Born in Toxic Fallout
Drop-Pod Escape Artist

Canondeath

#86
i did started a few different worlds and traveled to some locations and the amount of plasteel buildings seems to be to much.
currently i get around 20-30% plasteel builings.
I think you can get plasteel to easy/fast this way in early game
As a suggestion i put a limiter on the amount of plasteel buildings that can spawn on one map.
for example not more 3 plasteel buildings

Pushover

Quote from: Grishnerf on December 14, 2016, 04:03:14 AM
they have a capital D behind the Name for "downed" i guess.
It's possible to tell by clicking on the item, but as far as I know you cannot set a policy for all your colonists to not by default wear any dead person's apparel. Short of vetting all the gear in your storage and your colonists once in a while, or micromanaging the hauling of gear, it's hard to avoid this.

Fafn1r

#88
    Quote from: terheyden on December 13, 2016, 09:04:41 PM
    • When I capture a fallen enemy now, there's a note in the mouseOver: "Presumed guilty (expires in X hours)." What is that???

    You can execute them for -2 mood penalty, instead of -6(?).

    Tynan, this doesn't really affect the gameplay. I can avoid 'prisoner executed' penalty by leaving downed raiders to bleed out. I used execute prisoner job two times - first time to see how it works, second time in A16 to see how this guilty thing works.[/list]

    sulusdacor

    #89
    so i played the a16 version a bit and have some mixed feeling about it. so far i just build up my base, have not gone into the caravan feature to much. (looked with dev mode shotly into it yesterday tho and saw some on spartys streams.) playing on the extreme cassandra difficulty so far, so some things might be different in other storytellers. (played first half on the first devlopment build and yesterday with the updated version)

    (wall of text incoming ^^)

    world map/start:

    for the world map thge main thing i was and still am a bit confused about is why hexgones? the bulk of the game are squares. you build your stuff in a square grid. so why hexagones? this makes no sense to me, since if i would enter a biome/tile, from which side does my pawns come in, if its a hexagone on the world, but zoomed in its square? i must admit in terms of design it looks good, but i find it a bit confusing with the rest of the game.

    the map itself looks good, some highlighting on the square you select is probably needed. there as already pointed out somewhere in this thread.

    for the difference between mountains, small and large hills i must say, that they look nice, but if i want a specific biome they currently make i hard to find your thing. you basicly have click + look at the description to get the terrain, since the graphical differences are very settle. for a nice looking map, this might be cool. but i wish there was some overlay options, like in the world maps before. were you could switch/show biomes/height etc.

    so for my biome i thought, maybe not a hard one, but with some snow. so i have some freezing temperatures a time of the year. i ended up landing in a temperate forest biome, with like -10 to 20 degress temperature range. this usally was pretty easy to survive, since you could grow and hunt.

    for the people i rolled a bit, to not get abrasive/ugly/volatile/etc. people, since i wanted to test the building stuff mostly and worry to much about mood early. it's usally a bit of an issue for a new alpha, since you don't know how to play around the new modifiers, but with decent starting colonists usally okay.

    so starting out, building into a moountain. all things seem okayish. got some growing going. finaly build soem small rooms (2x2) for my people. wanderer, first raids etc. things started to get weird after the first real raid, meaning when people got hurt.

    medical stuff:

    so i fought off some raiders, someone got beaten up/shot at and took some damage. this is in general not a big deal, get healed up fast, get some work done, fit at the next raid. (i thought) my patient stayed in bed, but literaly healed nothing in terms of health. when the next raid hit he still was not full helth. i thought hm maybe my doctors are super bad, i checked and they were at 5. for an early game start this seemed okay and hospital beds seem to be far away in terms of research at this point. so this meant basicly getting hurt in raids can send you in a bad injury/pain spiral. if your good doctor gets hurt/dies your done. in my colony it lead to much more food problems, since no work could get done with bed rest and people healing super slow. (not sure if that got tweaked or my colony is to far along at this point, but had less problems now with it, got hopsital bed too. so might be that)

    i understand the idea behind the doctoring and this makes a good doctor have some impact. but for early game this mechanic is pretty bad. when i read/heard about the medic change in the new alpha i expected the infection system and the bedrest problem to get a look at (how illnes workes and the they randomly get up to do stuff, even if i tell them to bed rest. since i feel like there was most of the problems.) so i was a bit of disappointed, since the old doctoring problems still exist and are super bad. meaning pawns are hut, but still do joy, put on clothes. get up for no reason. i hoped so a fix there. i usally use briths mod for patient sanity this so its not as bad. but seeing this in vanilla is a big problem.

    on the note of illness/infection in hindsight i haven't had a infection in a body part. not sure if that is removed, but had some people bleeding badly in some fights. had one pawn die to plague, even with all time micromanagemnt bedrest and a doctor treating asap. had no medicine and no hospital bed at this point.

    i still had the problem that a pawns arm/leg got cut off and bleeds badly and doctors treat all minor wounds first then the cut of body put. (this was with the latest build) i remember hearing from someone that this should have been fixed, could be a rumor.

    other thing i installed a bionic leg (or tried, save scummed here a bit to test). my doctor had 92% surgery chance. my room had smoothed floor and hospital beds and there were no filth spots insice (have not checked the cleanliness, assume one ish [edit. just checked in game, its clean/zero]). but it took my doctor 4 attemps to install the leg. i'm not 100% sure if there were changes made to this part, but 4 tries seems a bit high (m ight be just bad luck tho)

    work priorities:

    i was super surprised when i saw repairs removed. i can understand, that with potentially adding more skills in the future there might be some going together to not flood the work tab. but repairing stuff after raids is quite important and this could relieve some work amoutn from your contructors in the past, by letting other people help. so i dont like that. since in most cases you will have stuff to build in your base early/late game. and forbidding/deleting very blueprint/project seems to add more unneccessary micro.

    the other thing i dislike is the decontruct. in most cases you want the decontruct first to build new stuff there or need the ressouces. so having it at first was kinda needed in my opinion. i honestly dont understand why this priotiy got moved. and yes you could have the roof problem. but this will happen one time and then you get it, that the roof needs to be done first. plus i think/assume (can't remeber right now) you added the roofing job priotiy at first two. so this problem would be gone either way. which was usally the reason for deconstruting not at first.

    prisoners:

    so i got a bit lucky my run and got a drop pod spacer quite early. at the time i had the 2x2 rooms. so i thought put a small bed in, smooth the floor. should be a recruit in no time. i never got the prisoner... i feed him, my warden did his job. the prisoner dont had bad traits, like volatile to make him break easily. so what happend was i tried to heal the prisoner up, this took forever. he was grumpy for the pain, the room was to small, he had no table etc. so he broke after some time. with the cathrsis buff later his mood was okay. after it ended he broke again and the cycle started again. after some time i build a bigger room, with light, table, heater and all (my colonists were still living worse then the prisoners at this point). so i put him in there. got a 2nd prisoner. the cycle stoped for a bit. but i had super low chances <1% (he had 60ish difficulty, my warden had 5 or a bit more social at this point, which i think is okay early on). i didn't took prisoners for a while till i had like 7 colonists or so and only took wanderers/refugee events to stock up people. i'm not sure if it's intended, but i feel like taking a good chance prisoner early and putting him in an okay room should make it possible to recruit with decent chance. at this point i build a big prison room and have a 9 and 14 warden and this problem is gone. but you don't have that early on. together with doctoring this version i feel like high social is a must have skill to progress at a decent rate.

    bed room debuffs/base design:

    so yeah the small/cramped bed room debuff. i think this is one of the resons my prisoners broke so much early on. my colonists doing fine, even with me still building the sleeping caskets. i personaly dont like them as a concept overall for the game. let my explain a bit. if i build the bigger bedrooms, there is not much stuff in the vanilla game to put in there. maybe one statue/plant pot for mood and a chair? but i feel this looks stupid. there is not much more to put in. a table you dont want, since random people come in to eat and the pawn get disturbed sleep. so i end up with a big room with some strange things inside. yes i can use mods and put in more fitting furniture, but i dont think that should be the point. the vanilla game should be balanced/designed around itself in the first place. so i dont get this reason for having bigger rooms.

    the other thing is that it forces a specific base design. if you dont want the debuff you have to build at least X by X rooms. so every base looks the same in terms of sleeping areas at some point. yes you can build other shaped rooms, but since most stuff is square the majority will end up having square rooms too. i feel this hurts the game variety. let me explain this a bit on infestations and mountain bases, since it's a bit clearer on that. with the introduction of the infestation event my base looks like the others. before the infestation event i first build a base with corridors when i stated out in the game. later i thought maybe i could skip them and use only work rooms and i loved the base design. it had no benefit/disadvantge over the other one, but i liked it. my base looked different from that of anybody else. i loved the 2x2 bed rooms with single beds and a statue in them. not for the benefit, but the design was cool. if i took on a mining colony in the north i build sleeping caskets for my workers 8rooms that only fit the bed), since it fit the theme of the colony in the late game. less comfor = small rooms. but it ran the same as the other ones, no benefit/disadvantage. so with the infestations suddenly this design was bad. because if a spawn happens. you dont have enough room to move back. you might have to deconstruct walls to make room to move/free bugs. this would leave my base in ruins and people got hurt due to smaller rooms. so if you dont wanted to have all this draw backs you needed some kind of corridors now. i tried my old desing a few times and the amount of micro/stress you had to go through just to have your own base desing was unreal compred to just making a corridor. so to have room to move around/have enough shooting power, you usally want bigger hallways (around 3 large). this neccesety ends up making your base look a specific way. you want to enclose most rooms in a hallway to be able to aproach rooms from different angles if the bugs move to a bad spot. so in the end my mountain base looks about the same a the one from other people. hallways, bit bigger rooms for work/storage etc. not because i like it, but because not building this way makes the game so much unfun, that it's unreal.

    now back to the small room debuff. later on you would want to have the room benefit buff (the low expectations buff goes away, mood managment gets a bit harder etc.). so meaning you would want roomsize x by y at least. put in items z for the mood/beauty. this means not only does my corridors look like other people, now my bed rooms do too? and thats not because i as a player choose to do so, but because the game mechanic forces me to. i understand that some mechanic lead to certain optimal base designs adaptions. but should these not have clear benefits and drawbacks? currently you can have different killboxes/defenses. some work better/worse against other enemies. but you have a choice. i always liked that about the game. but i feel like adding the bedrrom debuff is a bad thing.

    why do you have a debuff for smaller rooms? is every colonists claustrophobic? do they spent their whole day in the bedroom? if they spent ther day "outside" mainly, why does the room size even matter? why do you force the player to have bigger rooms? i dont get this decision, sorry. i understand you don't want players to build sleeping caskets, but why? does it make the game super easy/hard? i dont think so? do larger bedrooms make the game harder/easier? as far as i know it does not, so i dont have a clue why this change was/is made.

    dead mans cloth:

    uhm yeah. if you add the debuff, can we get an option to let our people not wear this stuff? that debuff is a bit less then naked, but there are some clothes, that the colonists do not need to counter the nakes debuff. and currently you would have to turn off all the clothes of the type. button would be nice.

    in general i like the attempt to make producing clothes a bit more of an must. but i dont like this route. since you fight for your life,  have a lot of other more severe problems. you care that you wear a dead persons clothes, but just killed 10 people in cold blood? how does that not matter (i know there was a debuff for killed someone, not sure if is still their, but this was temprary)? i'm not sure if the dead mans cloth goes away, but i assume not. so killing a bunch of people you forget, but the fact that you wear the cloth bothers you forever? so yeah. the other thing is i expected with this update to add the recycle cloth function/recipe/workbench. since the dead man's cloth change forces you to make clothes, but on harder biomes you will not have much animals to hunt and growing cotton will not be a priority. so you have the debuff for forever in this biomes.

    forgot to mention, maybe another route would have been to just give player made clothes some more boni/benefits. like infusion mod or just lower the raids cloth if drops in general (so you would only get tattered apparel). just a thought.

    deterioration/roofs:

    the deterioration makes sense, but i feel its a bit overkill at first. from what i saw the rates seemed fine. they ai core does no deteriorate, but mechanoid corpses do?

    workbench penalities:

    not sure about this change. since power is usally a struggle in vanilla. you don't end up heating all rooms. you get the penality even if its roofed and 20 degress outside? (i dont think there is a way to check these values so not sure on this could be wrong). i'm pretty sure a stonecutters table would be okay outside in a roofed area. and if the pawn has good clothing this should not be an issue. since the most hinderence would be his clothes, but he does not change them in general if he works outside or inside. the other thing is we already have temperature penalities for inside/outside, they are hypthermia and heatstrokes. so why would there be a need for others?

    the other thing, why not just make the penalites on workbenches for electic ones. i dont think a mechanic process would have penalities.

    caravans/new colonies:

    as i said have not yet played with them much. the main fear i have, since usally 15+ people colony would couse lagg, depending on the size of the colony/jobs this would vary. but 20 peeps would slow you down a lot. with the world map running on the side and multiple colonies at the same time, i'm not sure if the lag will not stop my colonization attemps in very early tracks. not yet at this point, so just a guess. hope there are a lot of performance improvements made to avoid this. but i love the idea and stoked to see what happen, when my people are at this point.

    raids:

    i just tried this with dev command. and got my 5 people in to try and see what loot there was. but for a later colony this seemed hardly worthwhile. from what i saw the raiders had the same weapons like my people and the storage only had some meals and maybe medicine. which the last one would be worth it, but for the effort/time investment i'm not even sure here. i'm burning to see what mods can do to that feature. it seems quite interesting. maybe i just had a small ooutpost in my test. so still unsure about that.

    weapons variety:

    i like the less charge rifles change. since i find myself using the other weapons like lmg/assult rifles a bit more. good change and seems to work nice so far. got only one charge rifle so far after quite a while into the game. really love this change.

    desertification:

    i assume there are some changes hidden here. since my map is not as barren as they used to. maybe just luck, not sure. from the event list in dev mode there seem's to be no grow event. so probably just the plant spread/ growtime. but i like it very much.

    animals:

    with the colonies/caravans these seem to gone up in value, whiuch i like overall. the problem is that the alpha version does not fix the problem which came with animal figting in the past. yes you can have the foloow check markes, which i good. but the main problem was/is the slow reation time of animals, the runing in front. which leads them getting shot by friendly fire lots of time. the other problem is that the zones are still bugged, a problem the mod itself had at first. but i assume this gets fixed along the way.

    research tree:

    love the tree. as someone said, not sure how well it works with mods. but i felt the old one was a mess and some sort of overview and/or search function was needed there. maybe some zoom out/in for mods and if more research gets in the game is needed, but it looks good.

    overall:

    overall i have a bit of mixed feeling about the alpha, there is a bunch of stuff i love (mostly a ai feature, research tab, animal tab). i'm a bit disappointed that some big issues are not getting a fixed (patients getting up, no eating asign tab, animals response etc.). for the main feature of settling/raiding it seems okay, was not something i particular wished for in the first place. but since most people seemd to wanted that, it made it and i must admit it seems like a big change up in terms a late game. so looking forward to testing this out in depth a bit more.

    so yeah, love the game great work as always. sorry if some stuff sounds a bit to negative. really love your game, looking forward to updating my mods in the later days. thanks for making this early release testing avaiable to us. hope this helps a bit, got a bit rambly sometime,sry XD

    thx for the great work ;)