Unstable build feedback thread

[Syrchalis]

A melee-range shooting was really good. Things like chain shotgun or SMG actually served their purpose as close-to-mid range combat weapons.

What's the point of pistols revolvers SMGs and shotguns now? Bows are dirt-cheap and greatly outperform them. Chain shotguns and SMGs are especially bad due to a low range - you can only hope to shoot once before it becomes a club.

But... but... the machine pistol is really really amazeballs. DPS-wise, considering tech, crafting cost and raiders dropping it.

Also why were the heavy SMG and machine pistol graphics swapped?

[Serina]

New build going up.

Here's the raw changelog:

----


Increase raider death rate a bit now that rescue quests are more of a thing.
Made an alert when a pawn is assigned to recreation or in need of recreation is bored of all recreation types, with an explanation of what to do about it.
The game now informs you why a pawn got food poisoning.
Fix: Food poison chance from room doesn't apply if roomless. Chanced food poison chance from room cleanliness from a factor to an offset.
Slight rebalance on centipede; he's a bit faster now.

Increased raider death? Nooo! I often end up with a lot of dead bodies during raids, normally the ones I want to recruit. Oh well, I guess I just have to accept more random refugees.

I don't remember writing a response to this, but I thought about it so here it is. More details on recreation and alerts are nice adds, very helpful to newer players. Current expectations, how much tolerance falls each day and the recommended amount of recreation types is great.

Food poisoning details is also another nice add. Did you by chance change the effects of food poisoning? I was playing on a new save yesterday on version 1.0.1948 and I had a pawn get food poisoning, but she didn't become incapacitated. Just threw up all over the place while she was moving around. Then, the same pawn got food poisoning some days later but this time she was incapacitated and then was rescued and brought to her bed.

[Bones]

If you can just kite away from melee guys, turning and shooting them as you run, the game is broken.

SHOOT THE LEG!

Joke aside one tactic I've shamefully done is to put several guys on one side and another that goes near the melee guy, as the melee guy chooses him as the target I can kite away while the others shoot.

I don't see how this could be fixed or if needs to be fixed. When it's one guy it should really be difficult to get to one of them as they keep running and shooting. Maybe try to turn off the information that says who the enemy is targeting could help a little.

But if it is a group of melee guys they probably shouldn't all target the same guy, the best tactic (to disrupt the player) would be to each one target a different pawn so one wouldn't be able to cover for the others since they are all in danger.

But if you got a pawn with jogger then kiting becomes so easy..

[Oblitus]

A melee-range shooting was really good. Things like chain shotgun or SMG actually served their purpose as close-to-mid range combat weapons.

What's the point of pistols revolvers SMGs and shotguns now? Bows are dirt-cheap and greatly outperform them. Chain shotguns and SMGs are especially bad due to a low range - you can only hope to shoot once before it becomes a club.

But... but... the machine pistol is really really amazeballs. DPS-wise, considering tech, crafting cost and raiders dropping it.

Well, when you can't choose - then yes, they are better than wooden clubs. But to use machine pistol really efficiently you need to meet all this conditions:
- have a melee pawn to cover your shooter
- force enemy to come into their really poor range
- have no option to use long-ranged weapons

All those are met only in two real scenarios: tunnel skirmish with insectoids and city warfare when enemies are dropped right on your heads. Otherwise, I'd rather use greatbows or bolt-actions early and assault/sniper rifles later. Also, pistols have no stopping power and you have to stuff your target with a ton of lead before it is dealt with.

If you can just kite away from melee guys, turning and shooting them as you run, the game is broken.

If you can just walk to a guy with automatic firearm and kill him with club the game is even more broken.

[gadjung]

I think 'Allies coming to help' should have tweaked values regarding tribals.
Having 6 pawns coming to help with 20+ fennec foxes is bad, since they died almost instantly.

Also it's kinda bummer that You cannot call tribal for help because they dont have droppod technology - i would just expect them to come after day/two - so handling sieges/poison|psychic ships would be easier

Also 'unknown' case of food poisoning has funny font

[attachment deleted due to age]

[TheMeInTeam]

Shouldn't shotguns and pistols be able to fire in melee? Especially now that shotguns got a AP nerf. I thought really close range was shotguns purpose, and some pistols. I do love the change over all to make melee more of a thing though!!

But if a raider does manage to close the gap, isn't your pawn kinda Fkd?
I'm not sure if the goal is to never let it close on you with a ranged wep, but it would be nice to be able to carry a small melee wep to switch to in those  cases. Or let pistol whipping do a bit more damage than a punch.

For melee to have a place in Rimworld, it can't be 100% realistic.  Rimworld being a game can't be 100% realistic anyway.

The problem with shotguns, but more importantly things like machine pistol/heavy SMG/Charge rifle firing in melee is that it made melee redundant/non option excepting anything but blunt vs armor, and questionable even then. 

Good quality plasteel longsword?  Nah man, just point blank them with heavy SMG...and that after you've already shot them at range.

The point of pistols and revolvers is their mobility.  Their aim time is ridiculously fast, and the autopistol has a very low cooldown time also.  There are a large number of weapons against which you can hit cover, shoot the auto pistol, and move out of LoS before the other gun can shoot back...without even needing to use a door.

I agree shotguns are in a kind-of weak place, due to the low armor pen.  IRL shotguns are also not particularly good with armor penetration compared to rifles with ammunition designed for it, though the force from the larger slugs would probably knock armored people off their feet if the armor absorbed the blow rather than glanced it off.  Their placement on the tech tree is as an early game weapon...maybe a small damage boost to compensate terrible armor pen, given they are indeed devastating w/o armor?  Not sure.

This is especially awful with predators, since you usually only know that you are hunted after pawn takes several hits. Monitoring wildlife tab for predators 24/7 and manually controlling hit squads to deal with them is not exactly fun.

This is a problem irrespective of any change made in 1.0, though wildlife tab makes it easier to manage it.  Once hunt alert mod (strict QoL, simply relaying info available to clicking on the animal in question) is available for 1.0 it probably won't be too bad.  I still think hunt alert should be vanilla, given that it is literally a more convenient display of information the game already provides.

Dare I say, weapon racks? Or a mixed team of melee fighters and shooters? Amaze.

Still won't be needed.  I'd put money on still being able to defend easily with 100% ranged weapons and decent base setup + micro, just as before.  But at least your SMG doesn't transmute into a plasteel longsword and the AR into a ~poor steel speer immediately upon pressing the "b" key in melee range .

Though when doing caravans you actually can carry melee weapons and drop switch them.

Well, when you can't choose - then yes, they are better than wooden clubs. But to use machine pistol really efficiently you need to meet all this conditions:
- have a melee pawn to cover your shooter
- force enemy to come into their really poor range
- have no option to use long-ranged weapons

All those are met only in two real scenarios: tunnel skirmish with insectoids and city warfare when enemies are dropped right on your heads. Otherwise, I'd rather use greatbows or bolt-actions early and assault/sniper rifles later. Also, pistols have no stopping power and you have to stuff your target with a ton of lead before it is dealt with.

Machine pistol's warmup/cd cycle is barely too slow to move into cover, shoot, then leave before a bolt action can fire.  It probably could if it wasn't a burst weapon.  Auto pistol definitely can.

IMO people are really undervaluing the advantages conferred by the ridiculous warmup time and fast movement after shooting available to pistols.  You can force fighting inside range easily with base setup, and render a lot of weapons incapable of fighting back.  If enemy has bolt action I can hit them without taking return fire.  If they have a revolver I actually have to be careful, since they can fire on me nearly instantly.

Bolt action/great bow type weapons definitely have use cases but to claim these clearly outclass pistols is silly.  My base is littered with bolt action rifles from raiders that never hit me, though they've seen use by my pawns.

[Kopek]

Can't build power conduits in smoothed stone corners.  Is that a feature?  I hate having to carve out extra sections of wall just to hide conduits in corners, then cover them back with constructed walls that don't match!

[Ser Kitteh]

But... but... the machine pistol is really really amazeballs. DPS-wise, considering tech, crafting cost and raiders dropping it.

Also why were the heavy SMG and machine pistol graphics swapped?

Because one is a tec-9 (an actual machine pistol) and the other is an uzi (an smg). Honestly I'm of the opinion of heavy smg for a P90 and the machine pistol for an mp5k or something.

If you can just walk to a guy with automatic firearm and kill him with club the game is even more broken.

Except you have things like armor and deflection and dodge. Things that can save a shooter's butt when an angry space marine with a longsword comes after them. This is how Rimworld's melee has work for a long while. 1.0 really rewards a proficient melee fighter, especially if you armor them up and give them a good weapon.

It's not broken, it's how it was designed in the first place.

[DariusWolfe]

Let's try this another way.

I'm coming up on my second winter; just over a year in-game, with Phoebe Medium, modified crashlanders (no silver, no pet) I have 8 colonists, none of which are worthless, but they've got their niches. 4-5 of those are people I'm willing to call fighters, though it's a loose term; I feel I'm doing better on fighters than my usual campaigns, though. I'm just getting out of using scavenged weapons, and I'm starting to armor 'em up, but components are a hard gatekeeper for most of the better equipment. I've just researched turrets, but haven't built any just yet, same reason. I get a raid that I think would be called medium sized, about 8 dudes. Problem is, two of my fighters are out on a caravan, and won't return for another day or more. My best fighter is recovering from malaria, my second best fighter is still in late stages, and my third best (of those present; I sent my second and 4th best on the caravan) is also recovering; He's only a 'fighter' because I was running out of meat while all of my better shots are away or sick.

So the raid comes, and I have my better fighters grab helmets; Best I can do, aside from their standard uniform of duster, button-down shirt and pants. flak armor went with the caravan, and stick them behind the sandbags. I stick one of my shit fighters on the mortar I captured from a rescue mission earlier; Can't make my own shells, but I've got 6 incendiaries that I captured along with the mortar. (Did they always auto-fire? It's been a minute, but I thought they used to have to be manually targeted before they fired) and the first shot's actually not bad; manage to actually injure one guy. The other 5 shots end up being hilariously useless, and more likely to be a risk to me than the enemy. The potential miss-range is kinda crazy, but if Shooting skill matters (I think it does, right?) then I can't say that it's unfair.

But anyway, the raid actually attacks by the second shot. They all stop outside of my shit-fighter's range (he's got a masterwork pila; I watched him one-shot an alpaca during hunting, but I don't think he actually hit anything during the fight) and start laying down the hurt. Two melee guys charge through my fire and get right up on me, but the one melee guy I've got is... indisposed, because he's on fire. The raiders also have an incendiary launcher, and it seems to have pinpoint accuracy. How many shots are those supposed to have? Because I feel like they shot it at least 4-5 times. My sniper's back there doing some damage (well, he's shooting; I'm too busy trying to deal with the melee guys up in my face and the fire to tell if he's actually landing any shots) but the guy with the assault rifle and the pila are apparently useless, and the melee's just doin' his thing, badly. I try to get my constructor/cook into the fight, but somehow he no longer has his knife? At least he's able to put out some fires. They downed my doc, still suffering from malaria, and then manage to kill the pila-wielder. I just noped out of the fight at that point; They're barely bleeding and half of my fighting force is gone, so I don't see much chance of surviving this one.

[Awe]

Well. Play a bit last builds.

New armor system looks pretty nice. Almost third winter on my cassandra/hard and pawns is pretty healthy in terms of injuries.

Caravanings also looks good. Decent item rewards, same crappy rescueable pawns as before. But noticed issue with foraged food consumption - started last caravan with like 1k pemmican and 50 packaged meals, visited some POI and now i have 10 days of foraged berries, eaten pemmican and halved packaged meals. -_-

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Dashthechinchilla]

Tynan, are you going to do a feature video for the 1.0 release or anything else for the big event?

I am loving the update. I would say the vanilla game plays intuitively. The only thing I really miss is some of the features from the allow all mod, skylights, or my aliens. As a gardner, I always thought that building grow lights for indoor plants was weird,  since most Gardners just use the free bright thing in the sky and build a greenhouse.

[erdrik]

Playing a map with caves, and there is a Hive in one of the caves a good distance away from my base.

Got a Raid and instead of attacking and trying to break the door into my base the Raider ran up into the caves and got destroyed by the hive. The Raider had to pass right by my Base to get to the hive. After he passed the base, I even sent my colonists outside the base to see if he would come back to attack them.

Raiders combat log titled the encounter as "The Biarcampe of the Basin vs Insects".
Is this intended? I mean, to send raids against non player threats on the players map?
If so, thats cool but the description is just the standard raid description and should probably be changed.

[TheMeInTeam]

They downed my doc, still suffering from malaria, and then manage to kill the pila-wielder. I just noped out of the fight at that point; They're barely bleeding and half of my fighting force is gone, so I don't see much chance of surviving this one.

The question is, what would you change about this kind of raid?  Based on your description, I can think of several approaches to reliably beat that raid, and at least a couple that will generally win without taking any damage on any of the defending pawns.  The game gives you multiple tools to do this; there are more raid defense interactions closer to "9" than I believe Tynan suspected (limited-to-no damage holds on little resources/tech).

The game's design even allows 4 pawns capable of violence to straight up destroy raids of 10-15 before having access to electricity. 

That doesn't mean the game is perfect necessarily, but what would you change based on your experience and why?  For example, I asserted that ranged weapons firing at melee is inconsistent with AI raiders and made the utility of melee weapons very questionable...commonly dropped weapons fired at point blank outperformed nearly every melee weapon in the game, and presumably melee should be a comparatively viable option.  So there was reason to tune the relative strength of melee vs range.  Note that the ranged weapon is not "completely useless" in melee.  Not only do you have statistical debuffs applied to anybody you've damaged, you do still have some melee damage output, and it's blunt at that (less gimped by armor).

What would you want to see done differently?

In terms of faction relations I haven't gotten comm console up to really test how the tradeoffs function in practice.  I only have two non-hostile factions in my game, one outlander one tribe.  I've done the occasional quest or trade, but haven't really pushed the alliance system to see how it works with silver trading resource renewal post investing into it.  I like that uranium is finally not a pure RNG constrained resource a lot.

[Gfurst]

Geez another 6 pages since yesterday, try to keep it objective people.

So here comes another big list of notes I've taken, but first a little field report to give it some best context.
I really like the caravans feature, it feels really satisfying to plan out the whole shebang, prepare and execute it properly, and I've find my self really relying a whole lot on trade, usually having tons of excessive leather, there are also tons of used and new clothing lying around, so its basically my primary commodity. So I trade them in bulk for whatever resource I'm currently in need, a lot of times even needed food depending on season, neutroamine, components, anything that might be good.

So at that particular time, I was in desperately running out components, just when I was about to build a fabrication bench, so I took upon a trade quest opportunity of 20x incendiary shells for a power claw and something else, even though the reward wasn't exactly desirable (though I have a plan for that claw). So I did a big caravan, 5 colonist, 2 alpacas, packed in most of my spare stuff, lots of trade clothing, brought in excess beers and drugs as well, plenty of Pemmican (like +1k), hay for the animals, lots of medicine, smokeleaf for my addict medic, scheduled penoxy for their good health, rollup beds (which I'm not even sure counts for anything). Its was a big ~10 day trip, and so our journey begun.

So the first poop that happened was finding out about another wimp colonist that fell because of food poisoning like 1 hour after leaving. Goddamn she is a scout with pretty decent shooting that I didn't notice earlier (seriously from 80% to 15% pain tolerance is way too big a difference). The second poop was finding out penoxy is even more useless than I thought, failing to block the flu on three of my pawns in the caravan. but fair enough, there was like two "on the road" caravan encounters which served as a good trade. Still I literally had to trade everything I had for the resources I needed, it was alright because I really needed the resources and I got them. By the end, I had 12 days of food for what was expected to be a 9 day trip, with all the stops I've ended up coming home with nearly no food at all, so I felt rather unrewarded for the effort i went through to make proper preparations.

Shortly after, I had another rescue mission pop-up, I would leave it alone was it not being a sibling of one of my colonists, and I like to roleplay that they would never leave someone behind. Penoxy really proved itself useless now, the same wimp scout caught the plague and rendered immobile while nearly reaching the mission site (a couple other pawns also caught it). I mean, now this is really a bug because it hadn't block what it was supposed to prevent (flu and plague), while on caravan. Now on the rescue mission, there were a bunch of man hunting capivaras, with one downed soldier already, they mauled pretty bad my two melee, my rangers barely able to finish them off. Had to quickly setup camp, because pretty soon infection came raging on. It was so bad I had to quickly scrape by in hurry and send a transport pod with additional meds and food, and even then two of the colonist barely beat off the infection. I stayed there for a couple of days, cooking up any pemmican possible while the wounded recovered.

So finally I hope you can see my reasoning for what I'm about to suggest. Penoxy is still pretty useless where as it should work great as a general purpose disease prevention, for people going into dangerous situations and properly preparing, aka: going on caravan or facing dangerous battle like mechanoids or raiding a camp. That should counter most diseases, including food poison and infections. I'm thinking of it as being the equivalent of antibiotics in game, so a possible counter balance to that would be having it lose efficacy after a while, like drug tolerance. Another point is also making caravans less prone to disasters, and the previous would help it a lot. And god dear god, the wimp threshold is way too low.

Now some more objective notes:

• I've noticed Insect jelly has a raw food poison chance, why not have this stat show up on other food as well, and also indicative of its current condition.
• Since you get negotiation prices of around 15~25%, caravans still end up being rarely worth the effort.
• Caravans also seem to have a problem with eating long term food first (pemmican, packaged), usually leaving a ton of forage by the end of the trip
• None of the caravans trade offers (other caravan encounter or villages) offer proper travel food, its okay to prepare properly but they should still offer food for sale in case of eventualities.
• Caravans also seem to be forgetting their destination after loading a save (yesterday build).
• People on caravan don't return to their supposed proper beds, more often than not breaking couple beds and have people sleeping on the floor
• Caravan animals remain on the edge of the map when returning, making unpacking quite a long process, as opposed to have them at the packing spot
• Transport pods also need the love that caravan interface got. Plus copy/paste fuel limiter and simulating how much fuel it needs would be great QoL additions.
• Orbital trade offers should be a popup message like visitors in the map. I can't tell how many times I've missed them.
• The hauling changes are good, but I've seen them going overboard, like a pawn tidying up one way and soon after comes another to tidying up the reverse way. Tidy up orders should only take place when they can actually reduce stacks, like having 5 stacks when you could have 4.
• The same logic should apply when hauling to a stockpile with more "importance", if you can reduce a stack then you can haul. So that they don't keep constantly hauling small quantities. Though for a more long term solution, check the "stockpile 1 of a type" thread in the suggesiton forum
• Tree planting time is just atrocious, they spend nearly half a day planting a single tree, never mind that they already take a long time to reach maturity, the balance is off.
• Ruined eggs (caused by low temperature) should be treated as unfertilized eggs, stocked and used in recipes.
• I've noticed that pawns are now much more likely to haul when cutting field plants, pretty good. But they should also do that while harvesting animals (milk and wool).
• It would be nice to have drag and flick for the work tab, something like the schedule. Changes in priorities have been good to the point I feel I don't manual priorities anymore.
• I've also seen highly devoted hunters, to the point where he would rather hunt than receive treatment (bleeding). This priority seems off though.
• I would really like to see better hauling to places of construction though, or specially in crafting/cooking, where they need more than 1 ingredient, seeing them take multiple trips from/to the same place.
• I got some bonus dromedaries, though they seem to be ordered among the cows.
• Have ctrl/shift on the trade interface, for +10/100, would be nice UI streamlining.
• I've also noticed modifier keys (shift/ctrl/win) is taking away some context popups, making it hard to screenshot them. I don't think that was the behavior before.
• Here comes another vote for the previous difficulty flavored names. Plus I had also noticed how easier it got since you changed them, I went to check and apparently Rough translated into medium which apparently is for new players and easier now, though I would rather have medium being, well, the middle ground between easy and hard. Anyway I've switched to hard now and jump seem to be quite big from one to the other.

Regarding the weapons change, I like the fact that you can't shoot melee, like if they are struggling, it makes sense. But in which case some weapons should have better blunt, like rifle and shotgun being better than pistols, but worse than actual melee weapons. But still shotguns feel too weak, they can barely land a shot at their range and cooldown, and with the low AP they barely do damage if they do land one shot. And also, does this means we can go back to swarming centipedes again?

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Tekuki]

So been playing the same colony since unstable start for 1.0, almost 400 days in with 40 hours invented into.
>Building the ship
I was planning instead of just starting a new colony again cause i want to see how tribe run are now i wanted to end it with building a ship, (sorry in advance if this going to sound like a rant) and holy shit building a ship for 15 colonist (well 14 one die in the process) it was a pain in the butt to do it, the uranium(i got like 1k from deep drill lucky), steel and platsteel requirement was understandable but the advance component was a joke in a bad way. 5 per sleep pod (60 AC for 15 pawn), 36 for all the engine, the ship beam was fine since it just need 1 per beam and i use 3, reactor need 16, cluster need 12 and core need 8 bringing it to a grand total of 135 advance component and 90% of it was crafted.
Problem with AC is the requirement to build it is ok but it take time, alot of time as a pawn might get 1 or 2 done a day depend on how many time they take a break. When ever a trader do sell AC it cost alot but it understandable but they only carry 1 with them, JUST ONE which make the ship building process super long.
Another thing it take so much time that you might as well travel to the ship seeing how much resouces one need to even build a ship
>Waking UP the Ship
So once build the ship after like 1 year in game it was time to defend it, i remember testing it out in a17 or b18 not sure which one was which but it was hard but i was thinking since i build it, it might be tone down......boy i was wrong.
day 1: was normal just got a man hunter pack and deal with them with a lot wound (not the best at fighting them
day 2: hell break loose when i get not 1 not 2 but 3 raids in 1 day, won't be that bad if 2 didn't drop on me one after another and both was melee only (one human & one mechs) then the last raid was more mech but from multiple side and i just give up at that point cause i haven't even recover from the manhunter pack, the human raid RE injure my guy and the mech pour salt on the wound
>finally thoughts
-i feel like the ship AC requirement should be tone down a bit cause building anything else with AC just throw back building the ship
-tone down the amount of raid you get if you build the ship cause what just happen to me was super discouraging to even waste my time of effort to build something just to get slap in the face by cassy
-traveling to the ship is a better investment to do then building a ship as you just need food or cargo pods there
-make building a ship more worth it and less painful cause it would just make people not want to build a ship to "beat" the game, like make it less time to activate the ship
-better grace period between the raid so my pawn can have time recover a bit instead of going to battle half dead
>Final Final word
i don't want to come off complaining about the game END game requirement but it does put to question why build a ship when i can just continue the game or just make another one. Hopefully you would just see this as a feedback (sorry if this was hard to read not the best at writing)