Official: New content in progress for Alpha 17

[Ruisuki]

Heres arbitration: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=19276

and heres a second vehicle mod that also looked cool though just for aesthetics:https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=2170.0


http://dev.coldevil.com/rimworld/E-Vehicles/screenshot01.jpg

[SKD_Dudu]

So from what i understand: Rivers and roads, We will have newer and diferent type of enemy outposts, the AI will act better in combat and will be more smart, a incident-quest system, a pawn can heal itself now and the skills-economy-meal system will be rebalanced.

About the rivers and roads : I don't know how it will work, but i don't expect only simple things like the speed penalty and speed bonus.

The newer outposts : Well, it will be interesting to see new and diferent outposts, i expect some of them to have fewer enemies and the outpost with the Leader with more enemies and more hard to destroy.

The AI in combat : Well, i've played in every difficulty, the AI is previsible, their movement can be handle pretty easy if you know the pattern, most of the time, they make it in numbers, not in movements and tactics and that's why turrets and mortars can be overpowered and do all the job in this kind of situation. I expect a more tactical AI, things like diferent teams, focused in stategy, focused in specific tasks, in a way which you will be hitted hard ... and die slowly.

Incident-Quest system : Once, i saw people inside the forum talking about this, it was a matter of time to this appear, the World didn't offer a lot of things to do, well my mind goes wild, when i remember how the modders can work with this newer possibilty.

The pawn healing : This is interesting, i was waiting for something like this, i expect some penalties if the pawn heals itself, depending of the damage.

The Re-balancing of the Economy-Meal-Skills and etc ... : Well, my body is ready ...
Aside jokes, the cannibalism thing got my attention, so the trait will be more extreme i guess ... The room stats are a expected thing. The surgery "will be more normal and less insane". Storytellers with newer and more variated incidents ... hmm interesting ... the only thing which i know, is Randy will still doing the same thing.

[Ruisuki]

doesnt the misc mod offer incident questing? how will the new feature in a17 differ from the mod?

[lauri7x3]

nice. i like the idea of river beeing a natural wall. will it be possible to alter the river way artificially in the future? to provide like better farming, traveling or defence??

and also: what about the huge lag and ram problems in late game? they rly stress me out

[Probe1]

Thanks Ty.  One of Rimworlds primary issues is the lack of refinement.  Its not easy to do an overhaul.

[Wintersdark]

I'm really interested in the changes to skills (as with that forum thread, there's a huge disparity in the value of skills) and even moreso to the changes to animal handling.

I rarely raise animals, as any meat-providing animals simply take too long/too much of an investment to raise, particularly when so many events and environmental hazards can do so much harm to animal breeding. 

It's frustrating, as it makes meat production unreasonably difficult barring a couple techniques.  Right now, it's easier to just occasionally take a drafted hunting party and murder a few herds than actually bother trying to raise animals.

Worse, the Animal Handling skill is basically worthless for farming animals, which is just plain bizarre. 

[DNK]

I'm excited most about the rivers and roads. I really hope this is moving more in the direction of (and beyond!) Dwarf Fortress' worldgen/live world. It certainly seems that way, especially with more outposts too (no necromancer towers or evil biomes yet, though). The following questions (not A17-specific) come to mind:

• Will these rivers/roads have an effect on gameplay, other than moving throughout the world? Can we build boats to travel the waterways? Will we see waterway-based traders and raiders (Vikings!)? Will they also use lakes/oceans? Can we build bridges?
• Will we ever get waves for coastlines? At least a sound effect? I love coastal locations, but the audio-visual content is not fleshed out yet (understandably, but I hope it it will be soon).
• Will we get currents and sounds for rivers? Will we get added fluvial terrain with new plants/animals like marsh grasses, snakes, and crocodiles?
• Will we get a sort of real-time movement of people/groups/traders through the world, rather than just as a "storyteller RNG event"? Will their starting point (and anywhere they stop to trade) affect what they have to trade?
• Will we get more fully fleshed out settlements/societies/nations in the world? Large cities that span multiple "regions"?
• Of course, will we get water wheels and other water-based production facilities?
• Could we create "tolls" for waterways and tolls we have a settlement on?

Really, improving worldgen and world-connectedness are about as important to me as multiplayer, and given the latter is probably not happening, I'm super-stoked!

[Joel1]

@Tynan can't wait for A17 everything sound great so far!

I've been having some lag issues here and there due to chicken farming, long year round colonies and massive raids, will A17 include optimizations?

[Guilty Omelette]

"Enemy AI overhauls. They'll be harder to cheese in various ways and act more sensibly."

This honestly makes me nervous. If I have to battle endless waves of invaders who always outnumber me and who don't value their own lives, I don't *want* them to act optimally. The more 'sensible' the AI becomes, the more killboxes and the like are required.

[oreganor]

Woah! Sounds promissing, I was just investigating how the "Ship Flag Mission" was done currently because it really hinted the possibility to create interesting locations for players to visit... So I guess I better hold my horses and focus on learning per-map events while waiting for A17 to be released instead, because that "quest part library" sounds like a potential spot to let modders fill-in content. Just a few questions:


- The "quest parts" will be connected to somekind of map-gen rules/templates so the site components can be selected at the moment of creating the world-map location? Or the assembled map will be randomly selected from the whole array of template/defs/assemblies and we just can control the "core part" of the location?


- The whole system will be "additive" in nature so different modders can add easily to the library of parts? Or this will be the initial draft with some examples to later be made more generalized (The point about "future extension" is what catches my attention... As if you weren't expecting mods to fill in content there ASAP).


AI revamps and skill revamps... Always nice to hear about them, sadly I have the feeling that my small moding attempt is gonna be trashed by A17... I guess surviving a new alpha is somekind of a modding "ordeal" every1 has to go through, lets see if I'm up for the challenge .

[Greep]

"Enemy AI overhauls. They'll be harder to cheese in various ways and act more sensibly."

This honestly makes me nervous. If I have to battle endless waves of invaders who always outnumber me and who don't value their own lives, I don't *want* them to act optimally. The more 'sensible' the AI becomes, the more killboxes and the like are required.

Well, I'd assume that smarter A.I. would come with a corresponding smaller raid sizes.  Hopefully anyways.  You can always set the difficulty down, but raid size is linked with everything else in difficulty.  It's be nice if just the size of raids were a second difficulty option, since storytellers don't affect that IIRC, even phoebe.

[oreganor]

This honestly makes me nervous. If I have to battle endless waves of invaders who always outnumber me and who don't value their own lives, I don't *want* them to act optimally. The more 'sensible' the AI becomes, the more killboxes and the like are required.

Sometimes AI improvement do not make life harder for the player in the sense that it makes it more lethal, it may make them more "player like". Some behaviours I'm currently missing that do not make raids more lethal:

- Recognizing "lost" scenarios situations... A Tribal Raid against a full long range high tech colony, covered by intense mortar fire? Time to flee at the 1st sign of activity by the defenders, not after seeing more than half your fellows killed before even reaching a valid melee target.

- Intelligence. Each enemy pawn that escapes the map should at least tell stories about what he/she saw... Maybe AI from that settlement avoids repeating the previous raid entrance and try a different spot/facing? Probe Raids could be detected by the player... More frequent but with higher chances to retreat to gather Intel. That way players will get a hint that the "real raid" will come sooner or later, so they will have time to callback caravans/quest groups to help at defense.

- How about diplomatic AI? Or even faction-wide surrendering after repeated failed raids? At some points those AI leaders have to deal with the same things a Player has... After the n-th casualty even the most bloodthirsty leader can be "replaced" by a new one that may decide "making peace" with your colony is the only way to survive. Now that players can go offensive on a given Faction, makes sense that Factions take a more proactive role in diplomacy.

[RadaRadaRada]

make cannibalism a bit less ho-hum

Inb4 prions

[corestandeven]

Looking forward to this. Along the same lines as oreganor will there be any improvements where it comes to the faction system in A17? Currently the faction system is rather undercooked at present, essentially other factions are your enemy or they are not. The relations numbers dont matter in reality, basically just whether they are red (hostile) or friendly (green). You can clearly make factions hate you by attacking them or capturing their people, but it is not easy to improve relations - and to be honest there is not much incentive to do so anyway. Given that there is a social skill for pawns it seems lacking that you cannot interact with visitors beyond attacking, capturing/rescuing members, or trading. Creating alliances and strong relationships with outsiders should surely matter just as much as attacking and defeating hostile ones, but there is no real reason or major benefits. 

On a similar topic, the relationships with other pawns also seems not quite what it could be at present. There should be an ability to at least get pawns to talk to other pawns in an attempt to settle differences. Maybe high social skill pawns could act as mediators/councilors? This then has the option of either making grievances worse, causing more fights and/or disruptive behavior, or patching things up if successful.

Linked to this, the only real way to get pawns to talk to each other is to force them to eat at the same time. Having a 'eat' option in the schedule planner along with joy, sleep etc so you can get pawns to eat together (or separate if they are unfriendly or anti-social) would be hopefully be a quick thing to implement.

[username2]

Hey!
Made this account to say the game is brilliant, have been playing for about 6 months now, and I'm absolutely in love.

few thoughts:
1. balancing - i think would be amazing if you put this patch out in beta (if possible). The wacky outcomes and exploitablity of economy/enemies are awesome at first, but after a while its a real deterrent to replaying
2. Improve the storyteller - I think idea of storytellers is amazing, would love to see more work added here