[A17] Pawns Are Capable! (No more disabled work!) Updated to V3.2!

Started by Rimrue, June 18, 2017, 01:26:26 AM

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dburgdorf

Hmm. My testing thus far has mostly been with "starting" pawns, as I was working under the assumption that the basic pawn generation routine was handled in the same way for all cases. But that may not actually be true. Starting pawns routinely have four or five traits, but in checking some "visitor" pawns, I didn't come across any that had more than three. I'll have to dig through the code some more.
- Rainbeau Flambe (aka Darryl Burgdorf) -
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Rimrue

Moonra, the mod replaces incapabilities which are hardcoded into the backstories. So if you are seeing a lot of negative traits it's because there are a LOT of incapabilities in the backstories. The game allows up to 4 slots for traits, so unfortunately, if the backstories have 4 or more incapabilities then all of the trait slots will be taken up by the corresponding negative traits.

Often the game will add on a third or fourth random trait if there is space. But raiders, unfortunately are the worst for having vanilla incapabilities and therefore this mod's negative traits. :/

openyourmind

the thing is though, in vanilla no colonists get mood bonus for cleaning, nor do they get for mining or staying inside (mining only from passion). so if there was a way to disable additional traits, it would be more closer to vanilla game, rather than add something different.

Could you maybe advise on how to do that? Other traits seem fine and do their job as they should.

Rimrue

If enough of you guys want a mod option to disable the additional traits, we could probably do that if it's not too difficult.

moonra

I don't think they should ALL be disabled, I just think that there's too many and a bunch of them are kinda boring, like Neat Freak and Slob, and just take up space from the more interesting ones.

The main problem I have with this is that for me traits is the most important part of a pawn, followed by passions and then skills, so when I see pawns with very good passions and skills but look at their traits and it's "Burns Water/Claustrophobic/Outdoorsy" it makes me think that their most important stats are wasted because I'd probably not assign them to cooking or mining anyway and those traits could be something better/more defining.

I'd love to have a great solution for this but the only thing I can think right now is cutting a bunch of the traits off but that's kind of the entire point of this mod. The best way of course would be to have hates to be the opposite of passions, but I'm sure that would've been done if it was possible.

Is there a way to make the game generate the mod pawn with vanilla traits BEFORE adding the mod traits? I think that could work well.

Rimrue

All the negative traits are directly corresponding to the incapabilities they replace. If we were, say, to remove Slob, then Cleaning would become an incapability again. I tried to keep the number of negative traits to the bare minimum necessary to replace incapabilities, but, yes, it is still a fair few. There really was no getting around it.

However, Rainbeau and I are discussing if there is a way to generate more of the vanilla traits on top of the negative traits generated by the incapabilities. Unfortunately, as I keep repeating, due to the ridiculously high number of incapabilities in the backstories, these traits generate quite frequently on pawns. If there were fewer incapabilities in the game, we'd have fewer negative traits generating on pawns. :/

I'm sorry you think Neat Freak is a boring trait. It happens to be one of my favourites. It's tough enough to get a clean base in this game, so having a pawn that loves to clean is always a bonus for me. ;)

It (and Rockhound) are based off the Green Thumb trait (another favourite of mine). Early Bird is the opposite of Night Owl (as someone married to a bona fide Early Bird, it seemed odd that only people who like to be up at night would get a mood bonus). And Outdoorsy and Shut-in are also based off Night Owl (again, seemed odd that people wouldn't get a mood bonus based on whether they prefer being indoors or out). They are all set to appear quite rarely, though. As an example, in my current colony of 14, I have one Rockhound and none of the other additional traits at all. Even in my testing, it can take a LOT of re-rolling to find these traits. So I do not think they are appearing to frequently.

Anyway, as I said above, we are looking into it and will see what we can do.

moonra

All you need is a useless pawn that isn't incapable of dumb labor and there's your cleaner. I just happened to get one like that, which was great 'cause I was using a pretty capable pawn for cleaning/hauling, so he freed her from that duty.

QuoteAs an example, in my current colony of 14, I have one Rockhound and none of the other additional traits at all. Even in my testing, it can take a LOT of re-rolling to find these traits. So I do not think they are appearing to frequently.
Those certainly aren't the problem, I just mentioned Neat Freak 'cause I really think it's a boring trait, no offense intended. The real problem is indeed the backstory-related incapability ones. If I would do an edit of this mod I'd probably remove a bunch of the incapability on those backgrounds, but I have to admit that I pretty much don't pay attention to the background stories, to me it's mostly fluff. But I do realize those are important to some players/modders.

Rimrue

But you must pay attention to the "incapable of" section of the character tab? If I get a character (Sherriff, Model, Assassin, etc.) who is incapable of dumb labour, manual labour, and any other type of work, even if they are a beautiful, optimistic careful shooter, I'm going to hit the randomize button. And if they show up as prisoners? Strong chance they'll end up executed or sold as slaves. Lol

moonra

Oh, of course, I just meant that I wouldn't care if you removed half of the "NAME got a fear of fire after seeing hundreds of burn victims caused by the war", those incapabilities created by the backstory to give it flavor.
TBH I think most of those in the vanilla game are somewhat fine, although I think they're too "gamey", they work in terms of game mechanics but feel stupid in the context of the game, even a pyromaniac would put out fires if not doing so meant their certain death, the stupid popstar would probably take a beating if she forever refused to do "dumb labor", etc. I really hope Tynan introduces a hate system to oppose the passion one.

Rimrue

Oh, yes. We are both in full agreement there. Waaayyy too many incapabilities in the backstories, especially the player-created ones.  ::)

skullywag

ok so after using this in a CE playthrough, I have a few things to report:

Seriously, I have read the points above and yes thats all valid, the issue isnt so much that theres too many traits to cover the incapabilities its that they take up space the good traits normally would. I have 20 guys in my colony, I dont have any traits that I would class as good, no sanguines, no fast walkers, none with faster work speeds, no green thumbs. I even for the 1st game in forever have literally nobody good at crafting (everyone on 3 skill no passion, bar 2 of my starters i rolled specifically to battle this issue). No idea why this is the case bar terribad RNG possibly.

The other issue i have is that im finding myself simply avoiding the work they dont want to do anyway due to the penalties involved, in a pinch it might be useful but day to day im doing exactly what i did in the vanilla trait game.

I like the idea of the mod, but due to restrictions from the base game my personal feeling is that it doesnt work...for me...which annoys me, cuz i want it to work. :)
Skullywag modded to death.
I'd never met an iterator I liked....until Zhentar saved me.
Why Unity5, WHY do you forsake me?

Rimrue

Thanks for the constructive feedback, Skully.
:)

Quote from: skullywag on July 06, 2017, 08:33:19 AM
The other issue i have is that im finding myself simply avoiding the work they dont want to do anyway due to the penalties involved, in a pinch it might be useful but day to day im doing exactly what i did in the vanilla trait game.

That is WAD. They are capable, but only barely. Lol But seriously, they are meant to have their work assignments turned off most of the time, only being enabled in emergency or temporary situations.

Quoteok so after using this in a CE playthrough, I have a few things to report:

Seriously, I have read the points above and yes thats all valid, the issue isnt so much that theres too many traits to cover the incapabilities its that they take up space the good traits normally would. I have 20 guys in my colony, I dont have any traits that I would class as good, no sanguines, no fast walkers, none with faster work speeds, no green thumbs. I even for the 1st game in forever have literally nobody good at crafting (everyone on 3 skill no passion, bar 2 of my starters i rolled specifically to battle this issue). No idea why this is the case bar terribad RNG possibly.

This is a valid concern, however. You have the latest update 3.0? In earlier versions negative traits were generating far too frequently.  But they should only really show up on pawns with backstories that have them now. In my latest colonies (both testing and not), I have only a few colonists with negative traits. Nearly all my pawns have vanilla traits. That being said, we may have discovered a bug where pirates don't generate traits aside from the negative ones. So if all your colonists are ex-pirates, that may be why. :/

QuoteI like the idea of the mod, but due to restrictions from the base game my personal feeling is that it doesnt work...for me...which annoys me, cuz i want it to work. :)

We will keep tweaking. :)

Thanks!

skullywag

Ill check im up to date tonight and yes that pirate bug thingy might be at play here. Ill keep an eye on this.
Skullywag modded to death.
I'd never met an iterator I liked....until Zhentar saved me.
Why Unity5, WHY do you forsake me?

wwWraith

I'd like to clarify once more. It looks like it's not the "pirate bug" but just the same pawn generation routine in all the cases except starting. I think that the algorithm is pretty simple and natural: at first the game generates backstories, and adds corresponding incompatibility traits. Only after this step it tries to add "common" traits, but if there are already "too many" of them, it won't add more (because this algorithm couldn't suppose that there will be traits that should be ignored in the counting). The starting pawns (probably generated by EdB Prepare Carefully) may have as many additional traits as the player wanted because their generation is forced. Even this "incompatibilities" could be removed. But when I tried to randomize starting pawns without EdB Prepare Carefully and when I saw a pawn with 4 traits all of them were just added by backstories. So I hope you'll take a look at it as a whole rather than trying to find some specific cases in pirates or whatever.

But the second thing is that at least standard interface isn't capable of showing more than 4 traits. So even if you'll manage to add the "common" traits after "incompatibilities", in some cases the player won't be able to know about some of them.
Think about it. Think around it. Perhaps you'll get some new good idea even if it would be completely different from my words.

NoImageAvailable

Quote from: wwWraith on July 06, 2017, 01:23:21 PM
But the second thing is that at least standard interface isn't capable of showing more than 4 traits. So even if you'll manage to add the "common" traits after "incompatibilities", in some cases the player won't be able to know about some of them.

That's kind of issue here. The way trait generation works is it'll start out by adding backstory-forced traits, roll a random number between 2 and 3, add the gay trait if they generated as a same-sex relationship and only then it starts filling up random traits to the previously rolled limit. The problem with this mod is its adding incapabilities as forced traits, rendering all those Sheriff types even less useful because now all their trait slots will be hogged by incapability traits.

I've sent Rimrue some code to extend random trait generation to the maximum of 4 traits that can be displayed, but at best this'll give you 1-2 additional trait slots and the incapable of anything types usually have enough incapabilities to hog all 4 of them, so its not really a solution.

For my part I still think the best way to solve this is to drop the trait system entirely and instead repurpose vanilla's incapable of interface. Replace its function with the one from this mod so that way traits are completely untouched and you don't get an entire unused Incapable of section in the character tab.

Alternatively if you absolutely must go with traits you could always rewrite the character tab to replace the now unneeded incapable of section with additional space for traits, so as to break the 4 trait limit.
"The power of friendship destroyed the jellyfish."