Unstable build feedback thread

[Madman666]

Slapping a moodlet on banishing a useless liability on top of game's tendency to present said liability to you frequently, will only provide a rich soil for futher complaints, until someone's mod disables it, the way some people disable their colonists from caring for losing an "innocent" prisoner, who tried to melt their faces off couple hours ago.

[shaw6622]

I thought I'd add my current experience regarding pawn quality.

I'm playing Phoebe Medium Crashlanded, day 56, not sure if pawn skills/health etc links to difficulty level.

So far I have not recruited anyone from raids - I tried early on with a very good shooter, but after days of feeding and trying to recruit them they were showing no signs of turning, and with food running very low I set them free, and haven't had anyone tempting enough since then.  If recruitment was a bit easier I'd do it as I love the process, but it does seem to take me a looong time so I tend to leave it for later once I have a nice environment and time/food to spare.

Otherwise my new colonists are:

- chased refugee, staggeringly ugly night owl, with high melee and a burning passion, plus decent skills in plants and crafting, no health issues
- wanderer joins, abrasive but with great memory, passion for shooting (10), burning passion for animals (3) and social (9) and passion for medical (4), no health issues
- wanderer joins, staggeringly ugly, too smart and psychically hypersensitive, burning passion for shooting (8 ) plus some other starter skills and a couple more passions, torso stab scar

All in all a good balance so far, decent skills to offset the negative traits (I still hate the staggeringly/ugly trait though, ruins the realism for me that ALL colonists care about each other's looks on the edge of survival.  Plus I do seem to get a lot of them.)

I've been playing every day and haven't noticed a problem with only getting useless pawns, but the highest I've played is Rough.  Plus I have been restarting a lot.

[Orvelo]

I don't think I have seen a option anywhere to have a animal that are trained with obedience (and thus have an ability to have a master) NOT assign themselves the handler as their master. I find this especially annoying since I have dromedaries as livestock/pack animals and I use males exclusively for pack animals and want to train them have obedience in case of caravan ambushes.

However with wildness of 25% the obedience training decays once in a while (or tameness if no levels at obedience). and every time my animal handler re-affirms the dromedarys obedience training, the camels deem to reassign the animal handler as master Every-god-damn-time. Also, I don't want my dogs to have masters unless bonded (and animals seem to bond easier with their current master than randomly with no master) so having this option would be quite swell when training up new puppies in their upcoming job as hauling slaves.

[Oblitus]

In fact, why I even play it? Mods. My 0.18 setup had over 150 mods. They were centered around making all threats avoidable with enough effort and extending content mass. In fact, they turned this game into colony sim (exactly what it is declared to be, BTW). Harsh, unforgiving, yet, if played right, beatable in a sense that you can avoid permanent losses with perfect play. And you know what - it also made it a good story generator. Let's take that 70 years old pawn from the previous screenshot:


What story Rimworld 1.0 can offer should I take her?
She used valuable food and medicine offering nothing, and when another bullshit happened everyone died.
...
No variants. All stories this "story generator" creates are about a dramatic (and, honestly, not all that diverse) breakdown. Drama is a spicy seasoning that should be used with moderation.

What my (probably broken for a hardcore player) build can give? Well, it would be the same, should I make a mistake. But if not?
Our wealthy colony, provided by efficient facilities, protected by diamond walls and powerful turrets, is a safe enough for us so we can care for a wanderer requiring nothing in turn.
Or: an old veteran joined our colony, and we used a fair share of our wealth and all our scientific resource to heal and augment her, to the point when she became our best fighter.
Or even: we are kinda pressed hard, but we still can afford to keep old and weak one on a simple job without hazarding ourselves. Makes us feel better, really!

[SpaceDorf]

I have a Meta Question about Pawn Generation.

Is Pawn creation truly random or are there modifiers at work ? ( similiar to those used by the scenario editor )

Because my ingame experience is as follows.
There are ( rightfully ) only a few outstanding pawns where backstory, traits, actual skills and passions truly align as there are only a few unlucky ones that have every addiction, disease and bad trait there is to have and euthanasia is the only sensible thing to do. 

But bad thing about the bulk of pawns is that they make no sense.
They have a decent mixture of abilities, but such contradictions of character that I just can't acccept them as person.

Trigger Happy pawns that are either unable to do violence or have no shooting skill or passion
Double addicted teetollars.
Vatgrown Soldiers as sickly, wimpy slowpokes.

Those Pawns don't tell a story but break the suspension of disbelief and after this
there is nothing left but to min/max them as robots.
I think there should be some way to balance these issues, because a good story is about struggles from without and within. It is about overcoming or succumbing to those struggles and flaws.

The Problem that I want to point out is that the Pawns of Rimworld as they are now feel more of an obstacle the Player has to overcome to be the hero of the game
instead of the Pawns being the Heroes and Villains of the Rimworld guided by an benevolent(or not) player.

Also I dread the birthday of every pawn above 40 because some sickness will half usefullness for sure,
no matter how well managed my colony is.

[RemingtonRyder]

Here are a few insights from my PTF (Permanent Toxic Fallout) 1.0 colony.

I started with four colonists, I still have only those four colonists because my one and only prisoner died of heatstroke. However, there was one colonist (called Lips) which seemed useless because he didn't have any skill at or passion for construction or mining. When there was nothing left to haul or clean, he would frequently be found wandering around idly.

So what I did was train him up by smoothing walls and floors. Yeah, he sucked at it for a while, but guess what? He's now skill level 4, and has a reasonable chance of success at succeeding at simple construction jobs like putting walls up, constructing batteries and conduits. There are still quite a few buildings that he can't build, but he can still deliver resources to frames.

Now you see, I like this story. Lips starts doing a job that he had never done before. He isn't good at it, and he doesn't particularly like it, but he helps out when needed. Over time he gets better, not great, but he's no longer so awful that furniture and walls fall apart moments after he starts putting them together.

Maybe he ends up recruiting someone who is far better than him at constructing, but if the colony is ever short-handed he's got those 4 points of construction skill.

So my point is, don't get too hung up on what a new recruit can't do or can't do well.

[Ser Kitteh]

^+

It's very much true. I had no passionate researching pawns for a year and a half but I put my Intellect 4 colonists on the job anyway. He pretty much got us electricity and AC and all the fancy doodads before a proper researcher came. Same goes for my combat medics. Two have no passion for it but they got up to level 8 all the same and more or less maintain it.

[mndfreeze]

Tynan please for the love of the environment and the planet lower the time it costs to sow trees. lol.

I have pawns getting entire nights of sleep done before the guy who ran out to plant a last minute tree gets finished.  It's silly as as fook.

I'm in my early-mid stages of a tribal arid shrub run on phoebe chillax rough.  I have a dedicated researcher still using the fisrt bench as I haven't gotten the second one yet.  For the earlier techs with a dedicated researching the speed feels OK now.  I'll comment again when I meander up into the end game researching since the point increase was on that end.

save the trees tynan!

[Boboid]

Just throwing this out there - Tribals have more consistently useful (and flawless) pawns by what feels like an order of magnitude.

There are almost no extremely specialized tribal backgrounds, and very few prohibit doing "standard" useful tasks such as cleaning/hauling/plantwork.
Scavenger prevents cleaning/hauling which is a bit of a red flag.
Vengeful Child prevents Medicine but.. bad medics are barely better than people unable to do medicine.
Reclusive Child prevents Social and is similar in nature to vengeful child
Sole Survivor prevents violence which is a doozy but you don't see a lot of it - I don't think raids can spawn with people incapable of violence (Though I could be wrong on that, not 100%).

There's also 1 or 2 childhood backstories in the tribal pool that allow adult backstories outside the tribal pool but they're pretty rare. Can't remember them off the top of my head.
Additionally a lot of tribal backgrounds have Indoorsman built into them - It feels like half of all tribals will happily live under a mountain. Not that I've found mountain bases particularly enticing lately.

The worst tribal backgrounds are pretty consistently useful. The chance of a critical failure in pawn generation is pretty slim.

It's really noticeable after playing 7 or 8 tribal colonies in a row and then switching to crashlanded that Tribals are actually.. pretty awesome despite their research penalty.
Tribal colonies more easily recruit other tribal pawns(which is pretty desirable), and they forage significantly more effectively (170%) which is reasonably useful.
I have to say that it would be a decent idea to increase the transparency of those effects somewhat though. There's no way to know that tribals forage better than new arrivals apart from caravaning with both and happening upon the forage tooltip indicating so. Ditto for the recruitment difficulty.

Additionally I find it's common for me to deliberately attack even the gentle tribal faction to keep them Hostile simply because I want to increase the chance of being attacked by tribals. They don't carry doomsday launchers and they don't use drop pods.
Since tribal raids are larger you increase the chance of getting prisoners and those prisoners as mentioned earlier are more likely to be useful. Tribals will rarely (if ever) give you valuable or useful weaponry or such from their raids but that cuts both ways.
Tribals aren't even particularly good trading partners so it doesn't really feel like much of a loss overall.

In my experience with Rimworld being generic with no significant benefits or flaws is often better overall and tribals currently fit that description perfectly.

[mndfreeze]

Just throwing this out there - Tribals have more consistently useful (and flawless) pawns by what feels like an order of magnitude.

--snipped stuff--

IMO, tribals need this kind of boost to make up for the heavy research penalty.  I find it fairly common that I'm years behind on tech that I would have been at if I were playing crashlanded.  They need this stuff as early game survival.

They probably could have a few more negative backstories though, though I feel they are fairly well balanced as it is in general.  The game scales raids and stuff faster then you can keep up as it is and with tribal games I find it's the early game, not the late game, that is a colony ender or not for me.  As tribals near the later part of the mid game, or the end game, they are pretty much the same as outlanders, but that first year or two can be brutal.

[seerdecker]

I'd like to offer some feedback about the utility of pawns. I play Cassandra extreme exclusively; I love the new naked brutality scenario. I estimate that the ratio of useful pawns is about 10% (a very rough estimate). The usefulness of pawns have increased in 1.0 by virtue of there being more positive traits: fast learner, great memory, indoorman, etc. I think it's a good thing.

At extreme difficulty, there's little room of margin for debuffs. Pain and traits like depressive/neurotic/staggeringly ugly make pawns a liability because they are more likely to break or cause others to break. Breaks tend to compound, and the resulting morale loss spiral endangers the whole colony. This incites me to be conservative when it comes to pawn recruitment.

If pawns are made more acutely useless, then it becomes more important to avoid the bad ones. In that case, I would recruit a pawn with zero passion as long as they're healthy and reliable. Likewise, if I'm stuck with a bad pawn (wanderer join), then I'll pay whatever cost I have to pay to get rid of them. Increasing the penalty for doing makes the game more difficult but ultimately it doesn't change my incentive of removing a crippling liability.

In summary: at higher difficulties, the severity of the negative traits is significantly increased, and this affects the perceived usefulness of pawns.

[Syrchalis]

Just throwing this out there - Tribals have more consistently useful (and flawless) pawns by what feels like an order of magnitude.

It's because their backstories are nearly exclusively small positive buffs. Spacer backstories have a much wider range, they can be insane in stats (e.g. wasteland wanderer for childhood and artificer rampant for adult - these two have combined +32 in skills while only disabling art (wasteland wanderer)) - but they can also be incredibly terrible (old sheriff... new sheriff is actually one of the best backstories).

Tribal backstories are more in the range of +4 to +6 in stats without disabling anything. So tribals are naturally capable of everything and get a small bonus in a few areas. If they get a few passions you immediately have a very useful pawn. So essentially only a very small % of tribals is bad, either because they have the worst combination of backstories or absolutely no passions.

[iamomnivore]

So yeah, my pawns can't attack or hunt in .1964 either. They just stand there. I'll make a bug report because I see other stuff there, but not specifically attacking outright or hunting, though I'm willing to bet the pawns' inability to put out fires might be related.

This has to be mods or a version/save issue. A new game results in unbroken hunting/attacking. Bleh.

Running mods on an unstable 1.0 version is not going to provide accurate results, here. Might be a good idea to abandon those until things get stable (and the feedback isn't as _critical_ as it is, now.)

[iamomnivore]

I'm pretty sure that peg legs for animals were removed because it was too easy to gain Medical experience that way. Maybe if peg legs for animals came back, but didn't give Medical experience...

Why? Training medical skill on animals before humans is exactly how it is done IRL.

I'll throw my weight behind this. Medical skill building isn't exactly filled with opportunities. Especially, with the low experience gain on tending with no medicine. So, one would have to sacrifice a great deal, of medicine, to make much headway with this. Seems like it may be a fair balance. Any other thoughts on this experience, lately? I've tried training up medical by rescuing animals I've hunted and knocked down, tending them, and then eating them. It's a small pay-off, for the effort. Just started doing this in the last two versions, if that helps.

[iamomnivore]

I'll just leave this here.

HAHH! Her poor soul just had too much of the killing ;P