Caravanning with Prisoners - Game design flaws

[Yoshida Keiji]

This is a follow up from: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41583.msg409835#msg409835

Traveling the world with caravans, suck. And to make it worst, you may engage in ambushes and/or attack other outpost scattered around. Occasionally, you may capture some enemy survivors. By experience, you will soon learn that some steps are positive while others are negative.

If you managed to capture an enemy, you must either travel towards an outpost to sell the slave, or go back to your base and emprison the captured there...however...there are instances where all your characters go to unload their inventory first while leaving the prisoner...literally hanging around in the open...and he/she escapes... as the caravan will be leaving the subject at a map border... ... ...

What you can NOT do...is to keep assaulting other outposts as the prisoner may just walk towards the enemy base and eat tons of bullets before even reaching his/her goal... which wasn't decided by the player by the way...

Inevitably you will end up asking yourself...why cant we just tie them to a tree instead? Or a muffalo?

The prisoner should ideally, be sent to a designated prison cell or at least "escorted" on arrival... but certainly not be left alone to wait for a warden to pick him/her up.

We need to be able to capture downed enemies without the need to build up a room for them in order to treat their wounds. I usually use the enemy facilities as prisons though, but case by case instances, sometimes we really want to patch them up first, before transporting them to a cell.

[tmo97]

I wish I could provide more experiential judgment on this, but I never get to a point where my colonies are stable enough to trip cross country. Squirrel scratches used to be my go-to failure when self-tending wasn't a thing.

"I've had more than one experience when prisoners who didn't get manually captured and escorted to cells walked into my base (through my field of deadfall traps) and died, giving all my colonists a -5 mood penalty."

That's almost hilarious if it wasn't disappointing. It sounds like another pathfinding issue that should've been avoided in the first place. Prisoners and pawns walking on deadfall traps that they can avoid. Escorting to cells should be made a priority directly after unloading them. It's that simple.

"If you managed to capture an enemy, you must either travel towards an outpost to sell the slave, or go back to your base and emprison the captured there...however...there are instances where all your characters go to unload their inventory first while leaving the prisoner...literally hanging around in the open...and he/she escapes... as the caravan will be leaving the subject at a map border... ... ..."

Major design flaw. How could you not notice this, Tynan? I'm not spiteful I'm just thinking about how you failed to notice this wall you'd hit if you ever went there, if you get what I'm saying.

[Injured Muffalo]

Speaking of deadfall traps, the first time I used one, I had one of my colonists wandering through the gate I had created to go find some rock or whatever. The thing fell on her head. "Permanant brain injury."

So I think there needs to be a rule available to tell your people to never step on them unless they are rearming them. Besides making a zone every time you build a trap and toggling it every time you need to get in there.

As for encounters, I have found prisoners/animals enough of a problem that I have been making zones for them to stay out of it. But for some reason they sometimes wander around for a while before going to the zone. It's too bad.

Just a simple command to "stay here" like a draft for those of us who can be drafted would be great.

[Fieldy409]

You know how it just automatically and instantly forms a caravan with the prisoners and stuff after you destroy an outpost? Maybe they should just make caravans work like that all the time. Yes it might be abuseable but you could probably just give a situation like GTFOing from pirate raids instantly where you'd have to do caravans the normal way instead of instant. At least until they fix it so there arent all these hassels.

I'm assuming fixing this will be a big chunk of 1.0

[Ser Kitteh]

Rather than using an unnecessary and complex method of sleeping spots and rooms, might I recommend slave collars and shackles instead? Maybe when downing an opponent, have an option to "shackle" them? Considering that caravans have slaves following just fine, perhaps replicate that as well?