Alpha 17 is on public unstable branch

[Skinnay]

Okay, I'm going to address the health balance. Thank you everyone for the info.

Don't go overboard on rebalancing. It's pretty good as it is imo. Those who don't know how to manage a hospital just need to play on "base builder" difficulty or stop their whining.

[Limdood]

Okay, I'm going to address the health balance. Thank you everyone for the info.

Don't go overboard on rebalancing. It's pretty good as it is imo. Those who don't know how to manage a hospital just need to play on "base builder" difficulty or stop their whining.

Or you could notice that about 80% of the posts say "too hard/severe" and 20% say "its fine" and NONE say "too easy"

and realize that games tend to need to strike a balance.  A 50/40/10 split would probably fit the genre and intent of the game, where fantastic micromanagers that place medicine stockpiles next to beds, draft doctors to be waiting to treat the instant a disease is about to need treatment, and surgically implants and removes peg legs ad nauseum on the first prisoner will find the diseases "too easy."  Experienced players will find the diseases just right, and casual/newer players will find them a significant challenge.

[Skinnay]

Okay, I'm going to address the health balance. Thank you everyone for the info.

Don't go overboard on rebalancing. It's pretty good as it is imo. Those who don't know how to manage a hospital just need to play on "base builder" difficulty or stop their whining.

Or you could notice that about 80% of the posts say "too hard/severe" and 20% say "its fine" and NONE say "too easy"

and realize that games tend to need to strike a balance.  A 50/40/10 split would probably fit the genre and intent of the game, where fantastic micromanagers that place medicine stockpiles next to beds, draft doctors to be waiting to treat the instant a disease is about to need treatment, and surgically implants and removes peg legs ad nauseum on the first prisoner will find the diseases "too easy."  Experienced players will find the diseases just right, and casual/newer players will find them a significant challenge.

Those are all absolutely things you should be doing. I see people posting how they only run on extreme difficulty then complain about infections. Infection rates scale with difficulty level. If you're playing on anything above rough, it makes sense that you should have to utilize every tactic and game mechanic to avoid death, and death is probably going to happen one way or another anyway.

[roben]

I just had a trade caravan in my base while a pack of manhunting wargs (of course) appeared on the map. Together with the tribals I managed to defeat them without any casualty until my sniper friendly fire-one-shot-killed (of course) one of the tribals, which caused the whole caravan getting bad will and attacking me (of course), which was instant game over. While the warg attack at first was fun and thrilling, the outcome was very frustrating and not adding anything positive at all to the game. So would it be possible to make friendlies a bit less irascible to friendly fire while a fight with enemies is going on?

Edit: Note that there already is a bad will penalty for caravan casualties after the caravan leaves implemented, at least for A16.

[Rimrue]

I  just lost a prisoner to infection at 30%. :/

I've been playing this game since last summer (was that A14 or A15?). So not a newb. I don't play on harder than rough, though. My current game was Randy Challenge. And I micromanage a lot and play on normal speed often.

Personally I would just like to see the chance of infection dropped a bit. That guy with the three rabbit scratches shouldn't get an infection if treated promptly, but the guy with burns to 60% of his body? Absolutely! It seems like everyone gets infected no matter what you do. In real life, if you use a medikit with antiseptic swabs and clean bandages--no matter how dirty or uncomfortable the environment--it should still prevent infection for most injuries (cuts, stabs, bites, scratches). Gunshots and burns I can see being at higher risk.

Anyway, please rebalance! Micromanaging infections every day is not much fun to play. Especially with the other changes that increased difficulty.

Thanks!

[Omega_K2]

* The caravan requests after the patch now seem just fine in terms of request/reward ratio in general. Perhaps travel time should be taken into account? I'd travel 2x2 days for some rewards, but certainly not 2x8days.
* Rivers and roads are pretty cool addition, but could use some adjustments
* Caravan joy probably shouldn't be at 0%. Could just assume they got some enjoyment from seeing some more of the world then just that base
* Not sure if this is intentional, but I've noticed you need to build walls next to doors now or it can cause annoying bugs. If you have a large room with small bed rooms (2x1) and don't extend the walls to the door and you mark some of the beds prisoner it causes the entire area with other bed rooms to become prisoner after a while.
* Human leather should probably be worth a little more again, since the mood penalty you take for acquiring it is pretty serious.
* Dislike the season/month names, but there is a topic with good discussion on this
* I like the smarter raiders

TL;DR: The infection rate at the moment is if anything, lower than it needs to be. Just make sure to treat your colonists in time, and clean your damn hospitals.

I don't have any significant problems with infections when I reach a late-stage game. The problem is the inverse difficulty curve, where even a scratch can doom your colonists in early game, due to having limited medicine and poor accommodations. It's still possible, sure, if you micro-manage every single treatment right on time.

I'm with ttgg on this, infection right now are more undertuned then anything else (and i'm on cassandra extreme). Before it was patched it was overturned, but now it seems to weak, in particular with those conditions you mentioned. I was able to avoid infections just fine without having a proper hospital, and the infections that I did get went almost too well given I was just on herbal medicine. And besides cleaning the blood/dirt of the rooms hurt people were in there wasn't really a whole lot of micromanagement needed.

I think it's a pretty acceptable degree of micromanagement, there are much worse offenders like being unable to prioritize jobs in a particular area without removing all others orders (like constructing a segment of wall, hauling the harvest you just got, etc), but that's not really A17 related.

[Tynan]

New build!

I much look forward to all your feedback.

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Rebalanced medical tend quality. Factored out 70% starting effectiveness of medical tending by rolling this factor into Medical Tend Quality stat so the stat shows the actual quality. Adjusted Medical Tend Quality stat and added a post-process curve to it; it now gets close to maxing relatively early. Changed how tend quality affects infection chance; now any tending, even at 0% quality, reduces the infection chance by 15%.
Human immunity gain speed is less affected by age, and is affected later.
Rebalanced melee: -Increased melee hit chances across the board. -Adjusted melee hit chance to be curved, so it integrates with capacity offsets better. -Reduced melee dodge chances somewhat, but the values have an effect even at low skill levels. -Increased human unarmed melee attacks damage and reduced cooldown. -Rebalanced shiv, club, knife, mace, and a few other melee weapons a little bit.
Rich explorer scenario 40 glitterworld meds -> 30 glitterworld meds.
Fix: Mortar's forced target is reset after every shot.
Fix: Escaping sappers can sometimes cause 10jobs/10ticks errors.
Increased PathFinder's heuristic strength for sappers.
Fix: Fall asleep threshold can be greater than wake threshold which makes pawns oscillate between resting and sleeping in bed.
Improved PathFinder performance for really long and complex paths.
Fix: Faction adjustment messages have excessive precision.
Rotting corpses are now inedible.
Made sure that you can't equip more than 1 item of the same type when for some reason you have an armor with stackCount != 1 in your caravan's inventory.
World objects can now have a custom description. SiteCore description is now displayed in the info pane.
Fix: Herbivores would consume saguro cacti.

[O Negative]

New build!

I much look forward to all your feedback.
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Rotting corpses are now inedible.

Always look forward to these change logs

Not sure how I feel about rotting corpses being inedible. Not that I like my people to eat them, but there have been times where a rotten corpse was the only food I had available, and it saved my colony in the middle of a toxic fallout

Just checked the bugs forum, and saw this reported. I understand the change now

[XeoNovaDan]

...

I second this. Although eating rotting corpses is gross, disgusting, repulsive, and just absolutely downright awful - they'd still ultimately be edible, albeit extremely unpleasant. Maybe make it so that if a rotten corpse is eaten, throw in an MTB for Gut Worms?

[Mehni]

Or you could notice that about 80% of the posts say "too hard/severe" and 20% say "its fine" and NONE say "too easy"

Infections are a lot more manageable this iteration 0.17.1533. I'm probably going to be vilified here - but it might be too easy now.

Unless it's in the kidney or liver, infections aren't a guaranteed death sentence. I've had a run or two end due to infections here and there, but nothing that wasn't my fault of completely out of control. They are manageable. A single death generally isn't the end of a colony.

It does make getting herbal medicine more important. Boreal/Temperate forest are even easier in comparison. Arid Shrubland and the other biomes are slightly harder now, due to a lack of healroot foraging. Growing skills are more important.

For posterity's sake, we are now on Build 1536.

[Avalynche]

Has anyone been noticing a ridiculous priority for food with colonists? I'm finding myself needing to manually feed everyone meals or else they go for raw food and even human corpses before meals?

[Seinne]

Small little thing that doesn't even seem worth posting but in the name of precision....

I noticed that where dirt paths meet running water they just continue over them instead of ending on the banks. Continuing over them would cause a dam, where ending on the banks would cause a forge which makes more sense for a dirt path. Roads and highways you could assume a bridge, but not a dirt path.

Told you it was a small thing.

[Awe]

Rotting corpses are now inedible.

Is it possible to make rotting elephants/thrumbos butcherable for recieving at least their tusks/horns?

PS Also didnt sure is it bug or intended, but eating agava fruits debuff with "raw food".

[makkenhoff]

A typical tribal start, half my tribe is starving, the other half are worthless and start eating all the pemmican. I micromanage the TWO decent tribe members into hunting and gathering, while the other 3 blunder about attempting to create some sort of shallow cave shelter in the arid shrub, and gathering what supplies they have managed.

A mad animal shows up, shreds both decent tribe members with suprising ease, I utilize the previously mentioned blunder-band to pummel the angry...  boomrat. Boom! Everyone's on fire, thankfully one of the brainless ones manage to put themselves out, and rescue the two shredded useful ones.

Now, typically, this is where the story would end - they would get infected and die. But, the balance change resulted in something entirely unexpected. Both shredded tribesman lived, as well as the blunder-band. Now, with everyone injured and no one up for gathering or hunting, we kind of ran out of food, and I was using my one remaining walking tribal to gather plants, before it happened.

Of course, it had to be the one bonded to two wolves. They even took down the tribe's remaining warg. So, strike 4 tribals down. I'm left with one tribal, thankfully one of the useful ones. I butcher all the animals the minute they calm down, and the humans rotted outside. Thankfully, this fellow is a psychopath, and doesn't care, he also doesn't mind eating raw food, which is a plus considering his refusal to do trival tasks such as carrying things around.

So, onwards, he kills as necessary, brings it back to his sheltered shallow cave, and butchers it. Things continue, with minor heat related woes, until I get a call for assistance, someone is being chased by pirates. I'll admit, I planned to carve up both the refuge and the pirates, animals got a little scarce and I was looking for the long term. But, the refuge's amazing ability to pick up, and place objects in stockpiles diverted my plan.

So, I've finally got a hauler, and it was so much easier to get the shallow cave built up into a fairly nice base. It took almost an entire Quadrum, but now I've got a solid base that I can defend, and I've got a healthy amount of farmland to provide food.

Then I get a message - an item cache. I see the magic words: Chain Shotgun, Minigun, Charge Rifle, and in my humble opinion the best weapon ever: the Heavy SMG. So, I figure, I'll take the two tribals I have, and go see about this item cache. I didn't have a lot of food ready to go, but I figured I could always cannibalize the non-violent hauler if necessary. So, I went in slightly ill-prepared food wise.

I arrived at the location, to find myself staring down 19 madden man-hunting raccoons. My fearless hauler decided to take one for the team, screams, and charges into them. Fur is flying in every direction, while my combat ready pila thrower was making his way for the chamber full of priceless weapons. The hauler lasted less than 2 seconds (on normal speed!). They jumped my pila touting warrior in less than 10 seconds after. He did not make it to the door, 10 tiles short. Not only were the raccoons faster than expected, but they were very accurate, considerably more than I expected them to be.

I really am genuinely excited for the combat in these scenarios, I just think my play-style is causing me issues on certain ones, like large numbers of man hunters. (I don't use enough pawns, just a buddy system usually, for combat.) It works fine for turrets and lower amounts of man hunters, but I just struggle with higher numbers.

(Multiple edits because I'm half asleep trying to correct my spelling and grammar, sorry if it is hard to read - it's late here.)

[zoranac]

I had a normal tribal start, where I uncovered a ancient tomb filled with megascarabs and nests. I was unable to fight it off so I decided to leave it for later. Fast forward about two weeks and I get a raccoon that has tamed itself, and decides its a good idea to wander into the bug nest. upon getting attacked, it defends itself and causes the bugs, now a huge swarm, to seek more blood, traveling halfway across the map to tear down the walls of my poor, helpless, plagued, sleeping tribes people. However this was probably fortunate for the tribes people as even if they survived the quick mauling of the bugs, and made it through the plague, they probably would have starved and froze to death as a cold snap had wiped out the majority of their crops. Game is hard. Everything is feeling / looking good so far though. However I keep having an issue where it pauses the game for no reason, although it might have been due to the massive swarm of bugs...