Unstable build feedback thread

[DubskiDude]

Just for fun, I decided to take a look at how many shots it took for my guys with excellent pulse rifles to down a single centipede.

41.  It took 41 shots, and that's only counting the ones that hit and weren't completely deflected.

Urgh.  I think I'm done bashing my head against this problem for now. I'm going to have to build a giant trap maze again.  Sigh...

Yep, 80% sharp armor. It has to go down. I'll keep saying it until it happens. It just has to go down.

I also reluctantly agree that psychic drones are too high. Soothes are always a set value, but psychic drones can get worse and worse and can just cripple colonists because wealth.jpg.

[Greep]

Started using the LRMS.  Verdict:  Still nearly worthless lawl.  You're still risking the lives of possibly multiple colonists for something that is just not worth much.  In this case I sent out a bionic warrior to go fight some cougars, night fell and his cruddy dual legs made him as slow as them and I had to leave.  So now he gets nothing and risks ambushes going there and back.

Bio warrior fighting colonist + gear: probably worth 10-20k to me.  Gold lump: ~1k.  Risk is not even remotely worth it.

[Madman666]

Started using the LRMS.  Verdict:  Still nearly worthless lawl.  You're still risking the lives of possibly multiple colonists for something that is just not worth much.  In this case I sent out a bionic warrior to go fight some cougars, night fell and his cruddy dual legs made him as slow as them and I had to leave.  So now he gets nothing and risks ambushes going there and back.

Bio warrior fighting colonist + gear: probably worth 10-20k to me.  Gold lump: ~1k.  Risk is not even remotely worth it.

It won't ever be worth it sending one (2-3) guy at the point of having power armor\bionics while threats scale to your colony, not your caravan you sending out. And it won't scale to caravans, because cheesecakes.

[Greep]

I guess if I got a threat I could handle at the lump guaranteed it might be worth the risk of ambushes, but still.  Ugh. Caravans.  The russian roullete of rimworld.

[mcduff]

I kind of feel as if Centipedes should be tough to kill, like an "oh shit" moment. But they can't be both an "oh shit" moment and something that happens three times a year once the wealth hits a certain level. If they're going to be regular fighters they need to be less of a pain to kill, if they're going to be this tough they need to be more of a once every so often option.

[Madman666]

Well, last time i checked it was a lot more manageable with 5-6 properly armored guys out of 20 colonists with like 300k wealth then it used to be. It wasn't 16 raiders against my 4 unlucky dudes anymore. Buut after that threat scaling was adjusted couple times, so who knows. This game has "you're rich - you're dead" policy lately.

[Broken Reality]

Started a new colony in Arid Scrubland and as tribal start I need wood. So I thought I would try out the tree planting, set up an 18x18 plot for drago trees. With two planters with 10+ skill I still haven't finished planting and the first tree I planted is nearly full grown at 88%. Then after all that time spent planting I lose 10 trees to blight and get zero return, no wood from them even though if not blighted I would have gotten wood from them. Tree planting and growing just feels bad when you get to plant on average 5 trees per day with two growers.

Due to the lack of wood I've had to rush electricity and cooling, normally I have been getting smithing and plate armour first (after stone cutting, complex clothes and furniture). The time taken to get what you need as tribal feels worse, though with the change to water mills I no longer feel obligated to play on a river map though the defense from a large river is hard to ignore. Out of 6 colonists I have 2 people researching full time.

[Crow_T]

A minor thing that has occurred to me - shouldn't parkas have a negative impact on heat tolerance? If I'm wearing an alpaca wool parka that insulates me down to -50 degrees, it makes sense that this would make me too hot in a lot of situations, but quite often the heat range ends up being something like -48 to 24 degrees or something, which feels like a big ol range and means your colonists end up wearing parkas into the summer.

I agree, also perhaps dusters could be at the opposite end, increase the lower end of comfort for them. Dusters and parkas should slow a colonist down, while jackets should give no speed penalty and cover a good middle temp range. As is stands I see no reason to use anything but dusters in less extreme biomes, it'd be nice to have some more decision making in this area.

[EvadableMoxie]

So funny it's come up, I just did a LRMS site.  It was a components site, outpost with 12 defenders.

I drop podded in 4 dudes in Power armor with pulse rifles. I did drop in the middle because that seemed more badass even if it was dumb tactically. No one was downed, but I took moderate damage.  Probably could have come out of it only lightly wounded if I dropped at the edge.

I then podded in steel so my builder could build a pod launcher.  Unfortunately, I forgot to send fuel, so I had to send another pod.  I podded back one of the soldiers I sent immediately since he wasn't that great at mining.  I was going to send another back too and leave 2, but my builder mental broke into a daze and no one else had 6 construction.  That was annoying. 

I got a double sapper raid that destroyed my colony because I didn't notice the second group.  After reloading (I've given up on not doing that since I got wrecked 7 times against the same poison ship) I got a 14 elephant manhunter pack instead that killed one of my melee.  He had brain damage anyway.  Had my builder not broke I'd have had an extra fighter for it, but it probably wouldn't have made a huge difference. It certainly would have made a big difference on the sapper raid, though.

I spent 10 drop pods and 1 launcher which is 670 steel and 11 components, total. There was 162 components at the site.  If we wanna say a component is worth 12 steel that's 1944 steel worth of components, versus 802 steel spent is 1142 steel in exchange for about 300 chemfuel.

Now, had I optimized I could have cut it down to 8 pods. Each pod is 60 steel and 1 component or 72 steel total, so that would have been 1286 steel.

Steel is really precious but overall that's kinda bleh. Had it not been an outpost with 12 defenders I wouldn't have had to use 4 soldiers, which also necessitated 4 pods since I couldn't leave myself vulnerable for long by walking.

I've changed it to silver, I'm curious how much raw silver I can get.  I've been buying up all the stun/insanity lances and doomsday rockets I can because raids are just getting ridiculous at this point.  I'm also going to see if I can keep all the factions at allied via gifts for defensive assistance.  Still trying to adapt to the spear nerf.

[Greep]

That is a good point about using drop pods to get back, that takes ambushes out of the equation.  Although when you tally up the resources in that case, that further saps your gains from the lump as the drop pods get used up and the chem fuel as well.  I might check try it out again for some plasteel lumps, but it's pretty iffy.

[Madman666]

Honestly raids and threat scaling in general just needs a hard cap to prevent it from going nuts and irritating people. And it should be defined by difficuly, with Extreme not having said cap at all - so you wanna get raped - enjoy extreme difficulty, where raids will never stop growing at all. And if you don't want to have your caravan of 6 people ambushed by 20, just because you have 30 people in power armor at home - lower the difficulty by couple notches and have fun.

Maybe even make drones on Extreme scale without a cap too, so drama lovers can boast how big a drone they've managed to survive before dying horribly.

[Greep]

Technically there is a hard cap now, but 10k raid points is pretty high

I made a suggestion here regarding difficulty and raids, but I guess people don't like the maths:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42424.0

[Madman666]

Thats not a cap, thats a fail safe from frying CPUs and getting fined by angry customers.

[patr]

New build!


Adjust animals' manhunter chances and speed.

This feels a little over the top to me personally. It is fun watching animals that are literally going extinct irl from being shot with rifles run down guys in power armor, wielding charge rifles and waste them. The actual effect is that I just have to draft several people to hunt anything larger than a monkey. If that's the intended effect I suppose its working, but it seems counter intuitive to introduce a wildlife tab only to make it suicidal to use it several patches later.

Not saying it couldn't have been tweaked up but when you give something with a large amount of health a 10% chance to go manhunter each time its injured the cumulative effect is that they basically always go manhunter unless you get a lucky shot. Combined with the fact that elephant's and rhino's are now cheetahs...just feels annoying having to micro it when the outcome is virtually identical.

[bbqftw]

So funny it's come up, I just did a LRMS site.  It was a components site, outpost with 12 defenders.

I drop podded in 4 dudes in Power armor with pulse rifles. I did drop in the middle because that seemed more badass even if it was dumb tactically. No one was downed, but I took moderate damage.  Probably could have come out of it only lightly wounded if I dropped at the edge.

I then podded in steel so my builder could build a pod launcher.  Unfortunately, I forgot to send fuel, so I had to send another pod.  I podded back one of the soldiers I sent immediately since he wasn't that great at mining.  I was going to send another back too and leave 2, but my builder mental broke into a daze and no one else had 6 construction.  That was annoying. 

I got a double sapper raid that destroyed my colony because I didn't notice the second group.  After reloading (I've given up on not doing that since I got wrecked 7 times against the same poison ship) I got a 14 elephant manhunter pack instead that killed one of my melee.  He had brain damage anyway.  Had my builder not broke I'd have had an extra fighter for it, but it probably wouldn't have made a huge difference. It certainly would have made a big difference on the sapper raid, though.

I spent 10 drop pods and 1 launcher which is 670 steel and 11 components, total. There was 162 components at the site.  If we wanna say a component is worth 12 steel that's 1944 steel worth of components, versus 802 steel spent is 1142 steel in exchange for about 300 chemfuel.

Now, had I optimized I could have cut it down to 8 pods. Each pod is 60 steel and 1 component or 72 steel total, so that would have been 1286 steel.

Steel is really precious but overall that's kinda bleh. Had it not been an outpost with 12 defenders I wouldn't have had to use 4 soldiers, which also necessitated 4 pods since I couldn't leave myself vulnerable for long by walking.

I've changed it to silver, I'm curious how much raw silver I can get.  I've been buying up all the stun/insanity lances and doomsday rockets I can because raids are just getting ridiculous at this point.  I'm also going to see if I can keep all the factions at allied via gifts for defensive assistance.  Still trying to adapt to the spear nerf.

its funny that if you play the game in the non 'terrible way' (according to dev), just how many mechanics turn into noobtraps. Even high-risk high reward lines are typically frowned upon with such modes especially after midgame, to say nothing of low reward high risk lines.

I get that sense with latest prisoner recruitment change too. Opportunity cost evaluations just don't seem to factor into the scalings, and many false choices continue to be introduced.