100+ hours in, my major gripes and suggestions how to fix them

[James Swift]

First of all - the game is really great and I like it a lot.

I play Cassandra Classic on "some challenge" difficulty level.

There are 3 most annoying things for me:
1) micromanagement
2) injuries
3) how random events happen
4) shooting accuracy

Micromanagement
1) Sometimes, I need my pawns to do some tasks ASAP, like harvesting, sowing, hauling freshly cut crops.

What I expect when I click "prioritize sowing the area"? I expect my pawn to go and sow the damn area, not to plant ONE seed and run away. I know, that I can make all other work for that pawn less important, but what is the purpose of priority work then? And they still sometimes run to saw different area.

When I want 5 pawns to harvest plants in a small area, I have to either order by hand cutting of every single plant, or uncheck every other work. Both things annoy me as hell. I just want to click "harvest the area" and that's all.

Same with hauling freshly cut crops. Hauling is least important task, so I have to uncheck EVERYTHING, or they will run away.

How to fix that - make priority task sowing/whatever in the area, and not the single item.

2) Pyromaniacs. They are usually quite happy in my colony, buuuuut, sometimes they want to start fires every freaking day.

And that is not fun. I just have to follow them for 5 minutes with drafted pawn to beat out all flames. It is extremely boring, annoying and does not add anything to gameplay.

How to fix that - some kind of button to assist pawns in mental break state.
Additionally, as someone on this forums suggested earlier - make pyromaniacs addicted to fire, and just allow them to entertain themselves with campfires, cremation or smelting. When they don't do fire-related tasks - they go into mental break.

Injuries
It feels like all pawns are made of pressurized blood containers, which explode on contact.
I'm afraid to touch my cat now, for it will give me eye scars, and I half-expect all people on the streets to miss limbs and be scarred from head to toe.

Seriously, though. HOW THE DAMN DAMAGE SYSTEM WORKS? All my pawns used to wear armor with steel helmet. First hit from boar - permanent brain injury. Squirrel? Both eyes scarred. Dromedary? Chew-off finger in first hit. HOW?! How this works?! I equipped all of them in armor and devilstrand clothing. The only possible way to get such injuries would be to put squirrel on ones face or put fingers in the dromedary mouth.

I never lost a pawn in this colony, but almost all of them miss fingers, legs, arms or have eye scars. WTF?

How to fix - make damage system somewhat more believable. It's just annoying and not fun.

Random events
I have no idea how AI storytellers work, but I suppose they use some kind of "fair" random to determine, what happens next.
And it tends to make EXTREMELY ANNOYING event streaks.

A year ago toxic fallout + poison ship happened to me at the same time. That was nice and challenging.
After that I had volcanic winter. Okay, still interesting, but that is beginning to annoy me. And then coldsnap followed before I had a chance to fully grow my crops. I survived, but 90% of my livestock died. And that was not fun. Basically, the game rolled "90% of your livestock died, deal with it" and that's all.

So, that tough winter is over now, we barely have any food. We eat damn squirrels and raspberry. Finally, my potatoes have grown and we are saved, hurray!

What happens now? Three nice and meaty madhanter packs in a row plus large herd of muffalo migrating through the area.  Once again, it just feels as if the game is mocking me.


Now, how this can be fixed? Markov chains! Make event probability depend on previous events. This way annoying streaks can be made much more rare or even completely eliminated, if deemed necessary.

Humans are perfectly capable of justifying logically almost any game system, so I think the only thing that should be the priority - fun factor, and not logic behind why events are interdependant.

Shooting accuracy
Totally forgot that one. Usually, my snipers spend whole in-game night trying to hit sleeping turkeys/squirrels standing right next to it. It's nice to train shooting, but it's just ludicrous how they can't hit anything, especially if it is laying.

[lux3y]

Micromanagement
1) Sometimes, I need my pawns to do some tasks ASAP, like harvesting, sowing, hauling freshly cut crops.

What I expect when I click "prioritize sowing the area"? I expect my pawn to go and sow the damn area, not to plant ONE seed and run away. I know, that I can make all other work for that pawn less important, but what is the purpose of priority work then? And they still sometimes run to saw different area.

When I want 5 pawns to harvest plants in a small area, I have to either order by hand cutting of every single plant, or uncheck every other work. Both things annoy me as hell. I just want to click "harvest the area" and that's all.

Same with hauling freshly cut crops. Hauling is least important task, so I have to uncheck EVERYTHING, or they will run away.

How to fix that - make priority task sowing/whatever in the area, and not the single item.

Use Manual priorities and set those things that u want urgent higher then any others at that time. This will minify u microing it manually and unchecking all other tasks, in combination with using the work schedule tab put them temporarily on a full work schedule. Now they will do exactly what u want and expect if u set this properly. U can also set hauling as a higher priority this way, neglecting the lower priority task wich it is by default. Use the powertools that are given to you.

[James Swift]

Use Manual priorities and set those things that u want urgent higher then any others at that time.

I have to either order by hand cutting of every single plant, or uncheck every other work

That's what I used for coldsnaps, but it still is annoying. After harvesting everything harvestable, I need to change back their work priorities. And if it was a smaller, but nonetheless important task, changing everything back and forth can be as time consuming, as the task itself. Like, beating fire out. I have to set all of them to work and then change back to sleep/joy/whatever. Otherwise, they may run away after beating one square.

[lux3y]

Hmmm if u have all other priorities at 2 u can just put the currently urgent one to 1 to make it the primary thing to be done so u don't have to change everything, just increase 1 and then afterwards decrease that single one, when there is fire they shouldn't be going back to there bed afaik, i could be wrong but i haven't seen that happen on my games, however i have had it happen that a pawn far far away in my base would be assigned to a fire and others that are in the middle of beating it out have no more reserveable tiles, thus going to rest or eat or w/E and by the time that 1 or more pawn gets there it has spread again. Just quickly drafting and undrafting everyone does usually sort that out rather quickly re-assigning the closer pawns. But that would be the only scenario i can think off from the top of my head. U can also use shift+left-click and right-click the job to increase/decrease priority of the entire colony at once and don't have to set them all individually.

I understand the problems/gripes u mention tho, just trying to help making it a tad easier or less frustrating, micro heavy.

[lux3y]

Regarding shooting accuracy, keep in mind that sleeping animals get a "cover" bonus since they are laying down.
Better melee them to wake them up then shoot them or if possible melee them. I prefer to draft a group of pawns and manually hunt but that's more or less personal preference. Night hunting is highly unefficient.

[James Swift]

Regarding shooting accuracy, keep in mind that sleeping animals get a "cover" bonus since they are laying down.

I know that, but it is still quite silly. I can't image shooting for hours and not hitting a target standing right next to it.

[lux3y]

I think the cover is partially because if u down pawns in raids u don't want them to be absorbing every bullet because another raider is behind it.
I'm not sure but i believe this is partially why 'downed' or 'sleeping' pawns get the cover or it would give strange situations in those types of events.
Tho i could be wrong i'm just trying to think what the reasoning behind it might be and this seems plausible to me.
I think it's a design choice that had to be made and probably wasn't always this way.

[sick puppy]

pretty sure night hunting is inefficient due to simple algorithms. whenever i catch my night owls hunting i draft them and send them right next to the animal they wanna hunt. more often than not the first shot hits and very surprisingly often small animals get one-shot. large animals are a bit easier to hit anyway, so even if at night you can just wake them up with a point blank shot to their butt and let them run around in a frenzy. most hunters shoot just good enough to not let them go to sleep anymore, so you can undraft those pawns and they will usually go straight back to hunting and shoot the wounded animal

still, would be nice if the ai did this on his own. laying animals should ALWAYS be shot from point blank range (except the explody type), no matter if asleep, healing, downed or unconscious.