Best and worst skills in A16

Started by b0rsuk, February 09, 2017, 05:20:01 PM

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SpaceDorf

Quote from: makapse on February 12, 2017, 01:40:14 AM
Quote from: SpaceDorf on February 11, 2017, 05:29:08 PM
For Medicine I noticed again that Doctors have to cheer up and feed the patients.

I think this should fall under the category of social jobs, the same way they do it with prisoners.


Its a rather hard choice since in real life, that cheering up usually is the doctors telling the person that he is going to get better.

True, but that kind of cheering is mostly not needed.
The patients you need to cheer up are the ones that are bound to bed by circumstances,
non-functional bodyparts or crappy diseases.

It could also open the way to help colonists that are on the edge or have a mental break, instead of a smokeleaf and hops based therapie.
Maxim 1   : Pillage, then burn
Maxim 37 : There is no overkill. There is only open fire and reload.
Rule 34 of Rimworld :There is a mod for that.
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Aerial

I'd like to see the Social skill have an ongoing impact on the mood of the other colonists.  For instance, people with high social skills might crack a joke which gives nearby colonists a +1 or +2 moodlet for a short time.  They'd be more likely to say something encouraging in a conversation, also resulting in a small bump, etc.  And it would be really nice if a high social person could be instructed to go defuse an argument between colonists before they start beating on each other.

Medicine we already know needs an overhaul but I'd like to see there be a reason to keep multiple doctors around through specialization.  For instance, you could have specialties like Organ Replacement, Bionics Installation, Plastic Surgery (fix those noses and ears!), and Neurosurgery.  Any doctor above a certain skill threshold could train (maybe through the high tech research bench?) at most two of the specialties, and those abilities wouldn't be available without the specialization.  Unspecialized/lower skilled doctors would be medics or trauma surgeons who can stitch up bullet holes and melee weapon damage, install peg legs and eye patches, fight disease, etc.  A trade to keep non-specialized doctors viable might be that a specialized doctor is very good in his specialty, but he won't be as good as an unspecialized trauma surgeon of the same skill level for dealing with the everyday stuff. 

cultist

It's a mistake to think that every skill is important for every game. Artistry isn't important for year-round growing zones, but on maps where there is nothing to work with except stone and no growing period, you need an income and art is perfect for that.

b0rsuk

#33
It would be nice if patients who can walk ate by themselves. It would work similar to delivering food to a prisoner. People would love the ability to build tables and chairs in hospitals. It's not even that it would be more efficient (marginally), but because it would look nice and polished.

Quote from: cultist on February 13, 2017, 09:32:20 AM
It's a mistake to think that every skill is important for every game. Artistry isn't important for year-round growing zones, but on maps where there is nothing to work with except stone and no growing period, you need an income and art is perfect for that.

But why shouldn't a game strive to make all skills roughly as useful ? It's not even a problem that art is not very useful. It's BORING and not fanciful at all. It's completely static. In Rimworld, artists sit in a basement like some kind of gnomes, instead of fooling around, acting pretentious and becoming alcoholics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2erFUojbAA
Artists in this game are utterly predictable. I don't know how to implement it, but artists should take inspiration from world around them, have dry spells and amazing streaks of creativity. They should beautify the world around them.

I think 'pure art' jobs should be only a part of what an artist does in Rimworld. Things like 'art on chair' or 'art on bed', currently governed by Construction skill, should be governed by Art skill. Artists would have a chance to put such carvings or decorations in everything they make - furniture, carpets, jackets, shirts, walls, lamps, animal beds, improvised turrets, incendiary IED traps, doors. Most pieces of equipment and static structures could be decorative, granting beauty, mood and sometimes social relations bonuses.

It would work like this: base stats of an item or structure would come from the base skill - Construction for walls, doors, furniture.  Crafting for weapons and apparel. Base skill would determine HP, insulation, comfort for furniture. But if the maker of the object also had the Art skill, he has a random chance to add such decoration to the item when making it. A person wearing a jacket made by an artist who successfully rolled an Art check would have better social relations with people and a mood bonus. It would be possible that an Awful jacket has an Excellent embroidery on it.

There could also be a very small chance that an artist decorates an already existing item or structure. An artist might put a carving or a mosaic on a floor of a temporary room, and later be unhappy if you run a wall across it to redesign your base.

TheMeInTeam

Making everything "equally useful" is unrealistic (in the sense that measuring + accomplishing this from a development perspective is so constraining that it's not worth doing).  What you do want is for situations presented by the game to make options more or less desirable.

In that vein, medicine, melee, and similar skills that don't see nearly the benefit of high skill as others do need a look, as many of these types of skills are fine w/ nobody interested and your top pawn being relatively low level at it.  Melee with good micro is an effective early game option to get more high-priced clothing to use or sell and prisoners, but it's not very dependent on the skill, more so just on engineering 3v1 or more beatdowns and avoiding infect-able injuries (or making time with them very short).

b0rsuk

If not equally useful, then at least equally interesting. It makes sense that Art is not as important in a frontier settlement. If they can't make my colony effective, they should at least make it pretty or provoke various emotions.

Limdood

Quote from: b0rsuk on February 10, 2017, 02:56:39 PMYou can't train Growing effectively in biomes with harsh winter,
sure you can...in the same gamey way you can train other skills in the game.

Have ANY patch of gravel warm enough to allow you to sow crops...light doesn't matter.

Make a 1x1 growing zone set to oak tree....plant oak tree, force cut oak tree, repeat until growing skill is where you want it.  Sure it's cheap, but no worse than operating and release mad-doctor-style on prisoners just for skill, or constructing tables and chairs and chess tables and billiards tables up to almost max, then doing the last 5 units of work with your best constructor

Sola

Quote from: Perq on February 13, 2017, 02:33:47 AM
Quote from: Sola on February 10, 2017, 06:45:50 PM
Good skills:
Cooking - An interest in this is great to have.  at 6, fine meals cost just as much resource as a simple meal, and provide a mood boost.  Higher skill is faster cooking, and this game is all about managing time.

Research - An interest in this is great to have.  Even if the colonist starts at zero, your one dedicated researcher will eventually be able to carry your technology by himself.

Less Important:

Crafting - Great for rocks, but partially offset by having a workshop with two tools cabinets.  You can make a fully functional army entirely comprised of drops from raids, though.  Tailoring is a non-issue.

Medicine - Good if you have it, but even a colony of zero-medicine pawns can keep you alive.  Glitterworld medicine makes up for a lot of shortcomings where bionics are involved.

Don't really care:
Melee - I'll equip all my shooters with clubs and swords if the need ever arises.  Not once have I said, "I wish I had someone with 15 in melee right now."

Social - Someone will come with a passable value in this skill eventually.  I can keep my desired pawn imprisoned and try indefinitely until then.

Animals - I really tried to like this, but taming is just too risky, and training will happen eventually.  I don't really need that dog to start hauling any time soon.
I tried to force-tame bears in a couple colonies, and even when I had a 16 animals guy on it.  He tamed two bears, then died to a third one after a failed taming attempt.  Simply a terrible risk:reward ratio.

Art - There are other ways to get beauty in your room.  There are other ways to get money.  Art is largely a non-issue for me.

Crafting - depends on what you define as army. If you aim at bullet-proof vests and some basic weapons, then yes, drops will be enough.
If you wan power armors and charge rifles, crafting is essential. Not to mention that crafting enables you to get long-term components, which are crucial to get if you plan to get your 10+ colonists from the planet. :P       

Melee - And this is because melee is very powerful. :V Afaik melee skill increases the base damage of the weapon by a %. A good quality plasteel sword wielded by a skilled pawn can deal around 25-30 damage per swing, every 2 seconds. Needless to say, unarmored pawns lose limbs left and right to such pawns. :V

By the time you're able to craft power armor and charge rifles, you will already have someone that's capable of crafting.  That is very far along the tech line, and not something I worry about on my first 8 or so pawns.  A capable crafter will appear eventually, and at that point, he's going to be my component-maker, tailor, and smith.
...And that's if I don't simply buy the charge rifles and power armor.  Silver is easy to come up with.  Dedicating a day, 200 steel, and 10 components (or whatever it costs) to a sniper rifle is less awesome.

As for melee, agree to disagree.  I'll take ten survival rifle guys over five survival rifles and five infantry any day.  Easier to micro, less worry about friendly fire, and less danger in general.  With shooting, you can potentially kill people before they get to your pawns.  With melee, you are going to trade blows, and that's a chance of injury I simply don't like.
Two tiers of construction jobs.  One for expensive/quality items, and one for walls/floors/etc.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=28669.0

Tynan

I'm doing a bit of a skills relevance review for Alpha 17, so that should address a lot of these concerns. I do agree that they don't pop as much as they could. I think they could be more relevant, make more interesting choices, characterize pawns better, and different play more with different pawn sets.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

SpaceDorf

Quote from: Sola on February 13, 2017, 05:25:31 PM

As for melee, agree to disagree.  I'll take ten survival rifle guys over five survival rifles and five infantry any day.  Easier to micro, less worry about friendly fire, and less danger in general.  With shooting, you can potentially kill people before they get to your pawns.  With melee, you are going to trade blows, and that's a chance of injury I simply don't like.

Thats why I like at least 2 or 4 Melee Pawns to hold the flanks and different weapon ranges and fire rates to micro a true elastic defense approach.

If a melee pawn gets through to your snipers yoz have a problem and the whole line might collapse.
If said melee pawn is greeted by the sword wielding bullet sponge ..
Maxim 1   : Pillage, then burn
Maxim 37 : There is no overkill. There is only open fire and reload.
Rule 34 of Rimworld :There is a mod for that.
Avatar Made by Chickenplucker

wimpb

I had a thought that the research skill could be a slightly more generic "science" skill. The idea is that it represents a pawns more theoretical skills rather than practical.

As far as gameplay mechanics is concerned, it would mean he is better with research (obviously), but also more advanced manufacturing, like knowing how to operate more advanced crafting tools like computerized assembly benches or 3D printers. Those aren't really in the game, but it would make sense to me if the component assembly bench was more advanced and you needed a high research pawn to operate that. Certain things would still require more practical hands on crafting and assembly skills, but stuff like components or high tech gear would require a brainy guy operating a computer.

Also I think it would make sense if that was the skill for drug fabrication. There are chemists who wouldn't know anything about how to handle a scalpel or bandage a leg, but would be really good at running a drug lab.

And as an aside, I think it would be interesting if some of the crafting required a production line of manufactured goods. Right now most crafting is mine steel, make gun. Would be interesting if late game equipment required more intermediate steps, like how some items require components that can be assembled at the component bench. This would either mean you need to setup a larger production line or you could trade more for the stuff you need.

Deathawaits4

Melee isnt good, but it isnt useless either. I never use my melee guys to attack when i have a shootout with pirates. But i use them when i am starting to loose. Put a melee with skill 20 on every side of a door and watch them pirates break the door. These 2 guys can take out 10 pirates with high tech gear with ease.

hoffmale

When looking at Rimworld skills, I see basically 5 orthogonal skill groups:

  • Fighting: Shooting, Melee
  • Survival: Medicine, Cooking
  • Production: Construction, Crafting, Art, (Research)
  • "Dumb labor": Growing, Mining
  • Interaction: Animals, Social

How did I get to those groups? Well...


  • Fighting: These are the only skills that matter once you've entered combat. Depending on your play style you might only need them until you've built your killbox, but even then they don't become totally useless (e.g. if you get hit by a drop pod raid).
  • Survival: These skills are needed to keep a baseline colony running. Well, one could argue about cooking since it could be replaced by eating stuff raw or getting a nutrient paste dispenser, but I'm currently thinking more along the general concept behind the skill.
  • Production: These skills are necessary to create a stable living (and working) environment. You can absolutely survive without these, but it will be a challenge to keep your colonists mood above the breaking point.
  • Dumb labor: These are skills that absolutely don't require mastery to be useful. I personally see them on the same level as hauling or cleaning: You probably want someone in your colony to be able to do these (depending on your map), but you don't really care about how good they are at it (well, ignoring the growing level requirement on healroot/devilstrand).
  • Interaction: These skills can be powerful under the right circumstances (e.g. training massive amounts of hauling animals or recruiting valuable prisoners), but don't influence the basic colony survival much.

As you can see, the different groups all have their own aspects and are more or less independent from each other. However, I still have some issues with this arrangement.

First of all, the "Dumb labor" section feels really a bit out of place. There are some cross-cutting concerns to Survival (Growing) and Production (Mining), but the skills themselves are too basic to really compare to the skills in the other categories. I think these should be moved to the same level as hauling or cleaning, as they really are about the absolute basic tasks one could do (basically anyone having a more or less functional body could do these).

Then, let's look at the Production skills:

  • Research: While I think it does fill a balance gap in the game (tribals creating power armor from the start would be a bit weird), I don't really like how it is implemented. It affects nearly every other skill in some way (by basically unlocking new possibilities there), but the researcher by itself doesn't have to be capable of doing anything in those skills. I'm really doubting someone incapable of cooking would be able to "research" pemmican, or someone without any knowledge in crafting could investigate the creation of power armors. I feel like this skill could be split up among the other skills (e.g. add an "experimentation" bill to existing workbenches that lets you research new technologies).
  • Construction: I think this skill currently is too broad. It covers basics (walls, doors, roofs, ...), furniture (tables, chairs, workbenches, ...) and electric installations (generators, heaters, coolers, ...). And while I'm not too set on the distinction between basics and furniture (making a door kinda seems similar to making a table), there is a huge level of difference when comparing these to electric installations regarding required know-how, tools and details. (Also, I'm not too clear on why the comfort level of furniture is tied to its beauty level, but more on that in the next point.)
  • Art: If you want a perfect example of cross-cutting concerns, it's the art skill. Art is basically about making beautiful things (or, possibly, making things more beautiful). And while sculptures fit the first interpretation quite well, I don't get why the art skill isn't used when determining the beauty of other stuff. Like, how does a constructor determine how beautiful he should make a certain piece of furniture? Or, what makes a colonist think their clothing is really awful when it has barely been used? One possibility to address these interesting questions would be to include an artist (think: designer) in the creation process: An artist might make a polishing pass on a piece of furniture, or design some fancy cuts/patterns for clothing. This could be the same guy creating the chair or t-shirt, or someone else (so your main constructor/crafter can focus more on making a functional piece instead of worrying about aesthetics).
  • Crafting: If you think construction is overloaded, I don't know what Crafting is. It covers creating drugs, clothes, weapons, armor, fuel, resources, and I'm sure I'm still missing some (I'm starting to wonder why cooking got its own skill). The question is now: What to do? Should one split this skill up, and if yes, in how many parts? 3 as per the work schedule? 4 with an additional "military stuff" skill? What about drugs (move them to wholly to Medicine or an extra skill)? Add a "dumb labor"-like refining skill for stuff like stone-cutting and smelting? Or something completely different?

Other than that, I think Social is a bit too weak right now, but there were some good suggestions in this thread already.

(Also, on another note: I'd like some way to train colonists in Melee, maybe something like a dojo? Currently that is the only skill where you really have to risk your colonists life to train it...)

Well, these ideas still don't fix the "mastering" problem that's currently in Rimworld, but just increasing the number of skills (e.g. by splitting construction and/or crafting) should increase then number of masters needed to cover all skills (which would require larger colonies, with more pawns able to do dumb labor, and so on).

b0rsuk

#43
Quote from: Deathawaits4 on February 13, 2017, 10:18:40 PM
Melee isnt good, but it isnt useless either. I never use my melee guys to attack when i have a shootout with pirates. But i use them when i am starting to loose. Put a melee with skill 20 on every side of a door and watch them pirates break the door. These 2 guys can take out 10 pirates with high tech gear with ease.
You're not going to level a single colonist to Melee 20 without a melee neurotrainer. Before you have kevlar vests and kevlar helmets, you'll be trashed. Now you can survive, but you need to hit enemies many times and melee tends to have high damage output. Either you go down fast or they go down fast. Are you going to fight with plasteel knife ? And things that can take a lot of damage tend to dish out a lot of damage.

About splitting Construction - note that by midgame constructors already have nothing to do. Only occasionally you expand by building another room, or make some repairs. Splitting Construction may make sense from realism point of view, but such colonists would become unemployed even faster.

Perq

There is a reference to Warhammer 40k scale in RimWorld. And when it comes to melee, I see it just how it is (was?) in tabletop Warhammer 40k - melee is to break ranged-heavy squads.
And to be honest, this is how I see melee in RimWorld. Using ranged is obviously a good choice over melee - because it is ranged. But to shoot you need to aim, and that needs some distance and space. Honestly, the fact of melees locking ranged in melee fight makes it fun and diverse. It isn't just about who has better guns - it takes strategy to not let your ranged guys be overrun by melees.
Using your melee guys to attack a shooting range of enemies is simply a bad play, and it won't work. Yes, melee guys will get hurt, but it is better for those melee guys with proper melee weapons to get hurt over guys with ranged weapon who will most probably get killed, because they have no weapon to fight back (other than iron hands of justice :P).
Striving to take no damage seems logical, but honestly it should not work.

Having full-ranged army should almost always end up in failure. If game generates armies that can be shoot off before even reaching you - something is wrong (unless you have weapons are better than they are supposed to be at given point in game).
For the same reason kill-boxes are such a plague, to level of exploit. No sane raider would enter something like that - they would try to get around any way possible, and if nobody is coming out, they would first burn every single geothermal generator, piece of cable, plant and so on.

Being able to defeat raids with no damage on your part (be it building, injured pawns or cut off limbs) would suggest raiders are complete morons who don't know what they are doing. And if so, they would be long gone, because nothing that is that dumb survives in the Rim. :P

Ps. Got a little off-topic, but I hope it still serves to explain why I think melee should be a thing, and why skill itself should be considered as useful, even tho there are some exploits (like kill-boxes) that prevent it from being useful.
I'm nobody from nowhere who knows nothing about anything.
But you are still wrong.