Eliminate predators

[Yoshida Keiji]

Ooh, bold. And red. And all caps. A bid confrontational, wouldn't you say?

Yes, I'm salty. This is because removal of predator "surprise" attack, means = One less fun feature for skillful players. So basically, my game will suck more because of BAD PLAYERS. I will start a serial sexual predation once the Tornado stops being a natural disaster too.

In a decent gaming skill scenario, people shouldn't have pawns wandering around to map borders.

Players could indeed just keep track of their colonists all the time.

[...]

So people just exterminate every predator instead. But when you're playing on bigger maps, this means thoroughly searching through the mapevery in-game day.

[...]

It's not about skill, it's about most people not having that extra 1 hour they could spare from their daily freetime just to avoid it. The countermeasure isn't even skill-dependent, it's just a time-hog. And people don't like that.

If you are a decent gamer, you could at least, change your colonists "zones" to HOME, so that at least, they are not too far away...


Now again....why is it that other players "lack" of thinking, shall affect decent player's games???

[Granitecosmos]

If you are a decent gamer, you could at least, change your colonists "zones" to HOME, so that at least, they are not too far away...

You don't even have to do that most of the time. The only reason for colonists to not be near the base in the first place is when they're off mining, hunting or woodcutting with the occasional hauling of stone chunks or resource drop-pod loot.

And for a few colonists, this can be perfectly supervised by the player.

But when you have 15 or more colonists and you're assigning a lot of these jobs it can get problematic. People never have problems with predators hunting their pawns near their bases because they can react quickly and efficiently. The problem is when they send out a hauler to collect that medicine from a resource drop-pod and the hauler gets attacked on the far end of the map which means reinforcements won't get there in time. And then you have total bullshit moments like when a fennec fox stunning a colonist for several seconds (the fennec fox is about as large as a domestic cat).

Now again....why is it that other players "lack" of thinking, shall affect decent player's games???

They don't lack "thinking", they lack the extra 10 minutes it takes them to search through the map every in-game day for any predators. Most people have 3-4 hours of daily free time. It's completely understandable that they'd rather play the game than check the map over and over during that time.

Looking at your map is not "skill". I could play on the smallest map setting and easily check the map every day. But when I play on the largest setting that option equals to boredom so I just check roughly the same area I'd do if I played on the smallest setting. By your definition of "skill", I'd be considered more skilled by changing one in-game setting while doing nothing else differently. Do you know what else equals to positive change of outcome just by changing one in-game setting but not the way you play? Lowering the difficulty setting.

That's not how "skill" works.

You're just saying "git gud". But the reality is, getting good doesn't change the fact that the solution to this problem right now is extremely tedious micromanagement over and over. If that's what you want, so be it. I'd rather use a mod and check the animal list (something I could do anyway if I wanted to sacrifice hours of my time to check the map over and over) and see if there's a new predator on the map or not. This is the problem. All that mod does is save my time and my sanity from looking at every corner of the map all the time.

Meanwhile the "mad animal" event works basically the same way. One animal decides to target one of the colonists (just like a hunting predator). Then it goes there and attacks the colonist (just like a hunting predator). This part is the only problem the players have with hunting predators because they get no warning. But for the "mad animal" they do get a warning. Why does that one work this way then? According to your logic, that one also makes your game "suck because of bad players".

I remember someone asking for the creation of a mod that removed all warnings several versions ago. Someone made it for them and posted it in the mod release section. Let me tell you, it wasn't popular. Not everyone is a masochist. And most players agree that events need fair counterplay or at least some kind of decent reward to balance out the lack of counterplay. While the game is all about occasional gains and occasional losses, noone likes pointless out-of-the-blue losses without no counterplay other than spending hours looking at the map. And yes, tornados spawning on top of colonists is another good example of this.

[Yoshida Keiji]

Predator attacks are inexcusable for many reasons, and the lamer it gets with more pawns and larger maps. I play with 400x400, so don't try to argue with me. "It's difficult because it's too large", sounds like my last girlfriend. Let's see:

* Predators, show up on map from the START!
* You will always know where they are.
* Predators hunt from smaller as possible and scale up based on available prays.
* Predators pray make wound and death cries (like noob players), whenever attacked, so anyone can hear "Predator's Presence".
* Predators, may NOT always consume the whole corpse. So whenever patrolling your surroundings, leftovers easily signal their presence.
* Predators do NOT "freshly" spawn on map with their food bar empty, so there's enough time to spot them.
* ALL animals have the ZZZ sleeping animation, so it's SUPER easy to spot them at night, even in speed x3.

The more pawns you have the easier to fight off a predator attack, you just need to be clever. Either you are mining, chopping wood or hauling drop pod items, you shouldn't be performing any of these actions in different random locations all scattered across the map. If you assign mining, chopping or hauling... Do it by sectors, and NOT throughout the whole map! Want wood? How many did you send to chop down trees out of 15? 15!!!. Are you mining? How many are mining out of 15? From a same mountain??? 5? 4? 3? And you can't fend off a predator attack with 5? 4? 3?

You just can't excuse yourself from a predator attack. Means you are a BAD PLAYER.

[CannibarRechter]

> Ooh, bold. And red. And all caps. A bid confrontational, wouldn't you say?

You should take the hint, not increase font size. Some of us just want the forums to be chill, and friendly. Kindly, will you please accommodate that?

[Yoshida Keiji]

Nope, sorry. I ain't babysitter

[Ramsis]

Nope, sorry. I ain't babysitter

Well hey funny thing about that, I am the babysitter... and I've steadily watched as you've been overtly aggressive in multiple posts but this one is kinda just rude for the sake of being rude. So consider this your warning buckaroo, either chill out or I'm giving you a two week vacation. Not hard to get along with folks in this community but you just keep trying to stomp all over people you don't agree with and I don't care for it one bit.

[Granitecosmos]

"It's difficult because it's too large", sounds like my last girlfriend.

Wow, dude. Learn to read.

They don't lack "thinking", they lack the extra 10 minutes it takes them to search through the map every in-game day for any predators. Most people have 3-4 hours of daily free time. It's completely understandable that they'd rather play the game than check the map over and over during that time.

Looking at your map is not "skill".

Players could indeed just keep track of their colonists all the time. But that'd mean cycling through all the colonists every 5 minutes.

So people just exterminate every predator instead. But when you're playing on bigger maps, this means thoroughly searching through the mapevery in-game day. Which is again not fun but tedious.

It's not about skill, it's about most people not having that extra 1 hour they could spare from their daily freetime just to avoid it. The countermeasure isn't even skill-dependent, it's just a time-hog. And people don't like that.

It's not hard. It's not skill-dependant. It just takes away my free time. I'd rather play the game than scan the map every 15 minutes.

If it gave a warning when a predator chose a colonist as their target it would be completely fine. And you failed to adress my point regarding the "mad animal" event.

See, the problem is not predators having the ability to hunt humans. It's about most people having a life; they don't want to spend their precious free time staring at every inch of the game map just to avoid a predator attack. And right now that is the only proper counterplay in vanilla. The Wildlife Tab mod is popular for a reason.

* You will always know where they are.

You don't. And this is why the Wildlife Tab mod solves this problem; it lists all the animals for you that are on the map and with one click you can jump to them. This way you do always know where they are without having to search through half the map.

* Predators pray make wound and death cries (like noob players), whenever attacked, so anyone can hear "Predator's Presence".

Not when this happens on a larger map and the predator is doing it further away from the base. The sound clue has a maximum range so this is not reliable.

* Predators, may NOT always consume the whole corpse. So whenever patrolling your surroundings, leftovers easily signal their presence.

People check their surroundings when they either want to get something they know is there, or are being warned about something. I wouldn't check my whole map for no reason because that's a waste of time. On the other hand, if I get a message about drop-pods landing I'll sure as hell check out what's there and maybe even the most optimal route to send my pawns as well.

Players don't get such notifications about predators leaving corpses and on larger maps these won't necessarily happen close enough for people to notice. So yet again, not reliable, especially since animals can die naturally too (heart attack, for example).

* ALL animals have the ZZZ sleeping animation, so it's SUPER easy to spot them at night, even in speed x3.

Except when you're zoomed out so you can actually see enough of the map to not make it take 15 minutes every time you do so. And night means dark which means harder to spot this small detail. Furthermore, most people puase their game when they search through the map so it being animated doesn't necessarily help either.

Want wood? How many did you send to chop down trees out of 15? 15!!!. Are you mining? How many are mining out of 15? From a same mountain??? 5? 4? 3? And you can't fend off a predator attack with 5? 4? 3?

You forget about hauling which easily has the potential to generate a few far-away jobs. And this is when people lose their pawns; because you've sent all those woodcutters out and after that half your colonists are incapable of hauling and half of those who are capable have higher-priority things to do at the moment (like planting/harvesting, for example). Eventually 1-2 stacks remain and those 1-2 colonists go out to grab them. And then a wild, hungry bear appears.

You just can't excuse yourself from a predator attack. Means you are a BAD PLAYER.

I'd be perfectly fine with predator attacks if keeping track of predators wasn't as time-intensive to do.
It's not hard. But it takes too damn long. And the moment it doesn't take too damn long (a.k.a. using Wildlife Tab mod), it stops being a problem. This is my point.

[Yoshida Keiji]

I started playing this game since A16 and I'm still playing in Rough level. Until today, I used to look up on this community. Trying to learn as much as I can from those who are here from before A16 and all those who play in higher levels Intense and Extreme. But where are them?



I can't believe how dramatic people are for such a minuscule to insignificant game problem.

Why is Predator Attack such a tiny danger?

Because it has the simplest and most easiest counterplea, which is: Build a Wall. Now if you don't build a Wall, don't complain. It was your fault.

Additional secondary counterplay: Scan the map. I do that on 400x400 at night and it doesn't take longer than a single minute. And I do that in speed x3.

Basically if you are playing a video game, you are already wasting your time anyways. So coming up with wasting your time - while wasting your time is an: auto-self-defeating argument. Don't want to waste time? Then go read a book, and stay away from any video game.

I challenge every single person reading this thread and let's laugh our asses off in a year from now, once you are so used to scan the map, that then you will reach the point in which you will look back in time and "realize" how unnecessarily exaggerated was all this matter. I hope we laugh together about this.

Think for a minute, how long does it take you make a clockwise scan of the whole map while zoomed out? HA!!! I got you!!! It probably took you longer to find an answer to the question than actually doing the scan! HA! Yes, it is THAT fast! I can't believe people make so much scandal for something that has a 1 minute solution.

Not to mention a third counter play: Go night shift while all predators sleep!


So...now you have 3 options. Walls. Scans. Night shift.

Not enough? Okay... I give you a FOURTH counter play: Tame rodents so that predators target your small animals over your Colonists!


Basically, it's all a matter of paying attention on what you do.

Having all your colonists at all four corners and all four sides of the map wide and stretched thin means, you are doing it wrong. So this is more a player problem than a game design problem.

* Instead of selecting all sides wood chopping, select one side only that you can easily watch over, and once they are done there, repeat again in another side.

* Instead of selecting all sides to mine mountains, select one side only that you can easily watch over, and once they are done there, repeat again in another mountain.


YOU, the player, are the one who is assigning specific tasks to specific pawns. It's a matter of active memory. You sent them to a specific direction, so watch where you send them first. It is your fault if they get killed.

And this is for those who go "outside" your walls, because the ones who remain inside don't need overlooking.

This advice comes from a player who can runs three (3) simultaneous colonies at the same time.


I refuse to believe I'm the only one doing this.

[CannibarRechter]

> I can't believe how dramatic people are...

And yet the drama continues, eh, almost like someone is seeking it out.

Look, the solution was already posted. People can get mods, if they don't like the ambush. There is specifically a mod that will alert the player.  This thread is not going anywhere. It should be locked.

[Granitecosmos]

Basically if you are playing a video game, you are already wasting your time anyways. So coming up with wasting your time - while wasting your time is an: auto-self-defeating argument. Don't want to waste time? Then go read a book, and stay away from any video game.

Why does someone read a book? Because they find it fun and/or interesting. Wy does someone play a videogame? Because they find it fun and/or interesting. Saying it's a waste of time is like saying doing anything for your own enjoyment is a waste of time. Which is bullshit.

And most people don't find it fun and/or interesting to check the map for potential new predators every five minutes.

I do that on 400x400 at night and it doesn't take longer than a single minute.

One day cycle takes 3 minutes on 3x speed. Don't believe me? Feel free to test it. Now, let's say the player pauses the game sometimes to do actions. So let's say it takes double of that, 6 minutes.

So, for every 6 minutes you'll use one minute for micromanaging predator presence intel. True, it won't be so bad for the first few times. But let's say you play the game for 2 hours. That's 20 minutes of your time. That's not insignificant at all. Meanwhile others use the Wildlife Tab mod and do that in 20 seconds, reducing their wasted time to 6-7 minutes for that 2 hours long session. And that's all the difference, since you'll stilll have to remember where the predators are and how hungry they are.

Remember, the Wildlife Tab mod doesn't change the predators' hunting mechanic. You still get no warning. All it does is save your time and that's why it's so popular.

Now if you don't build a Wall, don't complain. It was your fault.

You forget about hauling which easily has the potential to generate a few far-away jobs. And this is when people lose their pawns; because you've sent all those woodcutters out and after that half your colonists are incapable of hauling and half of those who are capable have higher-priority things to do at the moment (like planting/harvesting, for example). Eventually 1-2 stacks remain and those 1-2 colonists go out to grab them. And then a wild, hungry bear appears.

I'll keep quoting that until you show me how to counteract that without even more micromanagement.

Go night shift while all predators sleep!

This is your first valid counterplay without micromanagement but keep in mind that night means dark. Some players might have bad sight which makes it hard to see the screen and the game doesn't have a gamma slider.

Tame rodents so that predators target your small animals over your Colonists!

This also works but requires a colonist with good handling skill. So it's situational but also a valid choice. On most maps that can't support grazers for most time of the year you won't find many predators either. But then we have the tundras and boreal forests which turn into barren wastelands after 1-2 in-game years but don't drop the predator presence. So this only works where the growing season lasts for at least half a year, unless you actually want to feed those rodents with food your colonists could use instead.

But let's be honest, would the game really suffer that much just because we'd have a wild animal list? Even though I'm fine with it being a mod, it's purely QoL so I can see it being merged with vanilla at one point or another.

This thread is not going anywhere. It should be locked.

Agreed.

[patoka]

ugh
damn

i really didnt wanna answer you anymore because you are too annoying
but here i am again. i'm not only gonna answer you, though.

1. your calculations are only valid for fast enough computers compared to the current game state. i play on a two year old low end laptop that wasnt made for gaming. while it almost never lags (like once an hour for a split second) it does pla the game significantly slower if the maps are large enough. one save game i have in particular is year 6 now (my first game) in base builder. i just started a fourth base after having played with three (normal and boreal forest and tundra, newest is shrublands) and i am quite a hoarder. i have over 40 pawns by now scattered all over the bases with a multitude of pets. i never got my hands on a chicken, only cock, so it isnt too bad. still, dozens of pets. anyway, you get the point. i constantly play on triple speed or i wouldnt get anywhere. i used to play with pausing the game a lot, but that isnt needed anymore. i do lots of micro and stuff, but in this save game i use the wildlife tab much less than in other savegames because i have enough time on my hands anyway. i even purposely turned on saving every half a day which kinda leads me to save scum at times, but whatcha gonna do if a sudden restart of your laptop could mean an hour of gameplay being lost if you only saved every day or even less? another example of mine would be a recently started save game of mine where i play on the tiniest map (and only have one base). on normal speed it is way faster than triple speed on my oldest map. it was really hard getting used to it again to be honest which is why i started pausing a lot. on the other hand a small map has fewer animals and aside from one guy with a club every pawn is a good shot so they all hunt. that combined with me putting them on a meat-only diet really makes it simple. just always mark all animals to be hunted, with or without the wildlife tab. if with it, you'll immediately see the dangerous animals. if not, you'll get notifications that those animals can and will turn manhunter.

2. damn i thought i had like three points to make...did i summarize everything already? umm...i guess not having the wildlife tab in my first run for so long didnt disturb me at all for the reasons stated. not having it in my newest run wouldnt disturb me either. BUT if i had a good ass computer and played on large maps i would definitely want to use it.

3. all in all, while i do see how the wildlife tab kinda takes you out of the game, it is just way too practical as it also immediately shows you what wild animals are starving, which ones are sick or debilitated or may even have suffered a few shots from my hunters but didnt get finished off because my hunter chose to rather smoke a blunt

4. personally i wouldnt measure the quality of players by checking if they use the wildlife tab or how often they check the map or how fast they play. if it was about that, seeing how fast they can build a thriving and stable colony with strong and healthy pawns, good job distribution and not hoarding but using the owned and given resources to their fullest extent is much better. another way of seeing if someone is a good player is when you look at how they cope with raids and i guess with other occurences aswell, but those are a bit different. in raids you can see if a player is able to distinguish between important friendly pawns and less important ones. equipping the right ones with the according arms and armor while giving your cannon fodder the armor that they can risk tearing up. also distinguishing between strong or dangerous enemy pawns and weaker and less dangerous pawns is important. where do you put your pawns to meet the raiding force, or do you want to ambush them or maybe even flank them? do you have a plan on how to spread them thin so that your warbeasts can tear them apart? do you have traps set (not counting kill boxes, those suck), do you maybe immediately see the need to call in for reinforcements from friendly factions an if you do so, was it maybe overkill anyway, or could you have used even more? does a player know how many pawns they need to kill in order to make the enemy flee and are they capable of determining which ones they should avoid, which ones to kill and which ones to shoot at while they are retreating, if any and maybe which ones to run after with warbeasts and melee fighters? mid fight it is important to micro most if not all of your shots so that not too many pawns shoot the same one, on the other hand it is also important to take down key enemies before less important ones. does their speed have an effect on the battle? can you flank the enemy well in a certain rock formation? can you distract key enemy fighters with your cannon fodder infantery so that they can be shot from afar? once the battle is over it is also important to consider which pawns to save and which not. is there maybe an enemy pawn which is more important to capture and to patch up than to save and heal your own? seeing how efficiently one can clean up a battlefield, capture enemy units, save knockes out pawns and tend to the wounded while mitigating the probability of infections is just as important. and let's not forget the spoils of war: what do you do with the dead bodies? eat them? skin them? throw them to your pets as additional food? bury them? burn them? put them in sarcophagi? and what do you do with your newly captured prisoners? will you set them free for good will? will you harvest their organs and then do with their bodies the same as you did with their fallen comrades? will you disfigure them and send them on their way in hopes of meeting them again on the battlefield and having weaker enemies? all these are questions an actually bad player wouldnt be able to answer correctly, while a good and experienced player would and therefore would also fare better in the same raid.

not that my answer added so much insight to this topic that we dont have anything else to talk about, but i, too, believe it is alright if we closed this thread.

[Granitecosmos]

your calculations are only valid for fast enough computers compared to the current game state.

This is true. But the fact that scrolling through the tab takes 10 seconds while checking the map manually takes at least 1 minute doesn't change. The frequency changes but the ratio stays the same.

A RimWorld player who enjoys the game will easily play 1000 hours total. Let's say their PC is so bad, every in-game day takes 30 minutes. During that 1000 hours the player wasted 33.3333... hours by looking at the map to keep track of predators. If they would've used the Wildlife Tab mod, that would be only 2.7777... hours.

The amount of wasted time adds up over time. And that's important.

it also immediately shows you what wild animals are starving, which ones are sick or debilitated or may even have suffered a few shots from my hunters but didnt get finished off because my hunter chose to rather smoke a blunt

Wild animals never really starve. They just leave the map when their hunger bar is empty and can't path to a valid food source. And the mod never actively warns the player about sick/debilitated wild animals either, not to mention how rare those occurrences are anyway. And I'd say hunters not finishing their jobs properly is a priority flaw in the first place.

[DFDelta]

Is predators attacking pawns even happening that often?
I have pretty much only seen that occur during harsh winters or toxic fallouts when all game animals have starved/died/stopped migrating or when a wolf/bear/cougar wandered into the middle of my base, where it couldn't reach any wild animals.
One is resolved by a single extended hunting expedition one or two days after the onset of winter or early during whatever Event makes new animals stop appearing on the map, the other is IMO a non-issue since you look at your colony all the time anyways, and when you see a wolf/bear/cougar there you round up 2 or 3 guys and shoot it.

I don't know if that is because I usually play on maps using the largest 2 settings, so there are plenty of game animals around unless something unusual happens. Maybe ist different on smaller Settings where there is not so much choice of Prey for predators.

[Yoshida Keiji]

[...]
IMO a non-issue since you look at your colony all the time anyways, and when you see a wolf/bear/cougar there you round up 2 or 3 guys and shoot it.
[...]

Thank you very much for this, I really needed somebody else to say it for me. If you have all pawns sleeping due to no night-owls, there's really no reason as to why not look elsewhere in the meantime. Since night-owls are few, I'm pretty sure most people know where they are anyways...and of course....predators sleep at night too...

[Shurp]

So, it seems I started a bit of a flamewar... sorry about that.

That said, I just came back to this thread because I wanted to report that the Hunting Alert mod does work beautifully.  Predators spawn on my map edge, immediately charge my base to eat my pawns (since there's nothing else to eat on a tundra map), I get a nice little warning alert, and I send my pawns out to shoot them.

In other words, it saves me the micromanagement of scouring the map looking for predators, allowing me to respond the same way as anyone who cares to look for them can do.

So, in lieu of an option to turn predators off altogether, this will do. 

For those who would find this useful: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=17094.0