Unstable build feedback thread

[PleaseBro]

I don't know why people are complaining about recruiting cause in 18B everyone had 99% difficulty so it really ends up taking about the same time as this patch's random % and the "resistance" thing.

[Rockchecker]

I've missed a few updates, so I'm not sure when this changed, but the "Character" tab is now labeled "Story". I don't know why that was changed, but the new label doesn't make sense to me. Maybe "Stats" would be better? It's not a huge deal, since the tab is still in the same place, it's just... weird.

[erdrik]

(Ive now updated to the latest version)

Started a new colony.
There was a hive in a cave at start, and I decided to leave it alone till I felt safer taking it down.
I could do it now but I wanted to wait till I could recruit some backup. After a few days I heard an animal screech I hadn't heard before. I paused to look for it and found my dog being attacked by a megascarab. I thought it was odd because I had specifically ensured the colonists avoided the cave the hive was in. When I looked at the cave there was a dead warg and another dead megascarab. Both of the Mega spiders were en route to the colony to attack my dog. The dog was right next to my colony and no where near the hive. One of the spiders also had injuries from the warg.
I suspect the warg tried to kill a megascarab then got killed by the rest of the hive and that aggro-ed the hive on me somehow?

Fortunately, because the other spider was severly injured from the warg, I was able to dispatch them with little injury. The Dog survived.

[DubskiDude]

I've missed a few updates, so I'm not sure when this changed, but the "Character" tab is now labeled "Story". I don't know why that was changed, but the new label doesn't make sense to me. Maybe "Stats" would be better? It's not a huge deal, since the tab is still in the same place, it's just... weird.

Tynan changed it because of the lack of letter space. But "Stats" does make more sense than "Story".

[Lanilor]

Not so much a playthrough story, but still perhaps some relevant feedback. I've been thinking about the reasons I stop playing a colony. The reasons tended to come down the fact that some aspect of the tedium involved in managing the colony didn't scale well as the colony expanded. To be fair, managing the colony does tend to scale very well for the majority of tasks. However, some of the interfaces like trading and forming caravans become cumbersome to navigate when the colony is large (oops I forgot to pack the bedrolls again).

Some micromanagement issues also arise when the colony is large.
- Replacing walls/doors with a different material is annoying to do.
- Manually selecting pawns with a break risk to consume drugs can become tedious as the game goes on. A setting where pawns consume if and only if they are at a break risk would save some pausing and micromanaging at least for my play-style.
- Tending pawns with non-bleeding wounds like cracks and bruises without micromanaging the medicine used also becomes a chore. Letting pawns self-tend only those wounds would save some doctoring micro. Better yet, assigning certain medicines to certain ailments would be amazing.
- Last time I played a colony the default behavior for traps had auto-rearm off, argh!

I think that's an interesting perspective. I usualy lose interest somewhere after the midgame when the colony is established and there is less stuff for me to do and the colony gets too big (because the framedrops are annoying).

For your micromanagement problems, there are mods that do exactly that. Well, at least for B18, but since they are quite popular and helpful I'm pretty sure they get updated. And the drug below mood is already an option in the drug schedule.

--

I think the tab name story fits quite well. It was weird at first because the skills are not story, but they come party from the story so it's ok. I understand that "Character" was too long and "Char" was just weird. "Stats" would work too, although then the story part is missing so the same deal.

I can't say anything to the latest recruiting changes since I didn't get any prisoners in a long time.

I noticed a few times already that during crafting something when it gets near to the end, the progress bar disappears. I think it's at around 85 or 90% but only sometimes. I haven't noticed a pattern for it yet. Is this a known bug? Or should I try to get any more information on this?

I'm now 100 days in my current game and had no trade offer quest at all. There were 3 item stashes and quite a few prisoner resques, but no trade request.

My current graphs are attached.
(naked start, cassandra extreme, arid small hills with river)
And a timelapse of the base if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmhtLtieQNE

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Tynan]

Thanks for the timelapse and graph screenshots Lanilor. Very useful.

There might actually be a bug too, pop adaptation should be rising in that last graph but it's not. Need to figure out why.

[mndfreeze]

Tynan can we please get a small art change done to blight? I'm severly colorblind and while it stands out decently well on most plants, on cotton specifically it's really hard to see because the shapes and color are similar to the plant.  For colorblindness, high contrast differences are usually best. 

[Razzoriel]

First poison ship after the update. My colony was fairly poor, so I drafted my 6 pawns, all with bolt-action rifles, a revolver, a greatbow and a shotgun. A scyther and two lancers popped up. As soon as the scyther went down, the two lancers managed to hit a 11% chance into two pawns and instagib them with a charge lance shot to the neck.

Not sure if necks are now easier to hit, but that was pretty depressing to watch. Not even sure if pre-changes to neck HP they'd survived.

[bbqftw]

Unmitigated neck shot against charge lance was always a kill, even on old patches with higher HP and 1-hit protection leaving necks at 1/30 or 3/30 was a kill since part efficiency of neck reaches 0% at 3/30 (or 2/20 now)

All hail the storytelling lance.

[Razzoriel]

Unmitigated neck shot against charge lance was always a kill, even on old patches with higher HP and 1-hit protection leaving necks at 1/30 or 3/30 was a kill since part efficiency of neck reaches 0% at 3/30 (or 2/20 now)

All hail the storytelling lance.

I was fine with one colonist down. But two, from two lancers being lucky roughly at the same time was just too much... gotta get those plate armors ASAP...

[Tsevion]

Well, so I've been playing a colony since some of the earlier 1.0 releases, and it's generally been going well... but launching the ship is god-damned impossible. Cassandra Hard. My first attempt was 6 years in. About 18 people at the time. I saved before I started so I could go back.

For the first few days it went all right, a bunch of raids but nothing I couldn't handle... but then it just keeps coming, averaging 3 raids/day. Never more than 16 to 18 hours between raids. I finally died to an extreme psychic drone driving all my males insane (because you can't really counter -48 mood), combined with 2 sapper groups from both sides and a mechanoid drop right in the base... all at once.

So I resolved to make more defenses, get more allies and be more ready. Today I tried a second time. 10 years into my colony. My colony is well defended, inner walls, out walls, two trap gauntlets, scattered turrets. 26 colonists, all fairly well armed (Charge/Assault Rifles a few Lances/Sniper Rifles, Plasteel Sword and Spears on melee), and well armoured (8 in Power Armor, the rest in Devilstrand Dusters, Pants, and Shirts with Steel Advanced Helms, and Flak Vests).

First time I got a pretty normal mechanoid raid, followed by pirates dropping right into my base. The pirates had at least 3 doomsday launchers, that they then fired off in close quarters, hollowing out the interior of my base and killing 4 or 5 pawns. Not wanting to lose the entire center of my base, with all my production and a lot of my most valuable stuff, I said fuck it, I'll try again.

So I reload, and it begins again. Mechanoid raids... approximately 3 per day. Because of the speed of centipedes, literally I'd be finishing up one mechanoid raid, and another one would start. After 13 raids, on day 4 a full Scyther raid drop right into the center of my base, notably right in my hospital and pretty much ended things.

I had all 4 factions allied, and I tried calling for help, but they sent near useless parties of 4-6 people, not even very well armed. Against 8 centipedes and another 8 scyther/lancers they did effectively nothing.

I'm not sure how this is supposed to be possible without some ridiculous cheese. Your colonists barely have time to sleep and eat, much less heal, repair or rebuild. So if you take any damage, to either your colonists or your facility you'll eventually die, as you can't recover at all. I don't know what the goal here is, maybe launching the ship is supposed to be impossible without things going exactly right... but the difficulty jump between normal play and ship launch is a rather immense gap.

For the moment I've given up on launching a ship is it's just absurd. Maybe I'll try a few more of the new starts.

[NotTheMattGuy]

Thanks for the timelapse and graph screenshots Lanilor. Very useful.

There might actually be a bug too, pop adaptation should be rising in that last graph but it's not. Need to figure out why.

FWIW:

The population graphs barely seemed to move/work in my saves from earlier builds.

They are noticeable in colonies that I have started on the new build version. Perhaps this is why?

[Teleblaster18]

Teleblaster, I would love to hear something specific that drives your impressions.

It's also important to account for the fact that every game gets boring eventually. So your feelings may just be based on the fact that you've played so much already.

2,000 hours on a game like this (or any game) is extremely exceptional; I consider it a decent success if a player hits 30 and a high success if they hit 100.

Thanks for addressing my comments, and just to reiterate:  doing a true self-assessment, I'm really not anwhere near my threshold of burnout for this game.  It's still enormously enjoyable, and within my current game, which was a Cassandra/Naked Brutality/Rough start on Boreal Forrest, everything up to the mid-game has not really proved to be frustrating.

With that having been said, I'll state an impression, after a reasonable amount of trial-and-error:  the transition from the "early" game to the "mid" game is seeming to be noticeably more susceptible to colony collapse than B18.  I consider that transition phase to be not one of, but the most vulnerable time in any game that I've yet played: where production is beginning to get ramped up, food supply is becoming stabilized and sustainable, an animal adjunct to colony production is just starting to become integrated into the larger picture, and where base security first becomes effectively viable - but none of these goals have been put into full implementation.  It's the most "wobbly" time, so to speak - where the colony is truly most vulnerable, and it feels far more "wobbly" in 1.0.  Speaking personally, it's also the break-even point:  where I feel that enough time has been spent in the game that I'm fully vested in continuing onwards with that colony, and where early game preparations should begin paying off to accomplish goals and counter threats effectively.

I have to preface everything that I write after this with the knowlege that some impressions that I have might currently be OBE, and I want to stay away from theory-crafting completely.  I'll usually refrain from commenting until I'm positive that my impressions can be borne out through repeatable events, over the space of several updates.

When I made the comment of "Death by 1,000 Cuts", I was referencing a number of smaller changes that I feel have almost a synergistic/magnifying effect on each other that attack the early portion of mid-game specfically, and that I haven't really seen addressed yet as a whole.  I think these generally are much more difficult to quantify, since reading code to determine their actual gameplay effects isn't possible.  I also can't state that I can identify every one of the factors as of yet, or that, since 1.0 is fluid, that some of these items haven't been changed so that their effect is totally different.

If you can keep in mind those caveats, I'll try to give my impressions with some concrete examples, and how they interact with each other.

One of my early-game goals is to build an animal work corps for hauling purposes that will become active in mid-game.  This has two dimensions to it: facilitating base expansion and efficiency, and just as importantly, setting the stage for caravan efficiency:  having animals haul on temporary camps greatly magnifies a player's ability to exploit those maps' resources.  Now, what changes in 1.0 act as a newly-introduced impediment to that specific goal?  There are a few that I can pinpoint immediately - some obvious, some less so.  In the obvious category:  training time must be allocated to keep animals under your control.  Boars, who are essentially self-sustaining, can't be used in 1.0, so another reasonably viable early-game animal has to be substituted: Dogs are most viable IMO, but certainly not self-sustaining.  This requires additional work for kibble production, which requires hay production and hunting to be sustainable, even on a small scale.  Sowing times are slightly longer, but hay (and all items, for that matter) must now be both roofed and enclosed to prevent accelarated degradation.  Hay storage times have been shortened. 

Now - I'm not stating that you can't accomplish the goal of building an animal hauling corps;  I'm in the process of doing it.  But, consider how many new time-sinks and variables have been incorporated into the process in 1.0 for what would arguably a relatively small colony (mine is currently at 7): waiting for Dogs to become available, Wildness Training, increased sowing amount and frequency, and an increased urgency to haul what's been harvested (a side note: it is possible to lose a majority of a harvest of hay now due to the unroofed/unenclosed degradation requirement: just add an accelerant to the mix - rain - and a common scenario of having colonists unavailable to haul because they're getting wounded at a greater frequency). 

Printed out, those new variables don't look so difficult to overcome, but the combined effect of all of these changes I've found is quite real.  I believe it's safe to say that the process takes more time.  Is it a more enjoyable process than B18, or a more tedious process?  I'd weigh in that it's more tedious, by comparison.  Now a second look: is it simply tedious, without any frame of reference to B18?  Again...subjectively, I'd have to say yes.  Does the increased time investiture spill over into other game elements?  It has to: the one inelastic element in the game is time.  More time spent doing odious tasks is less time that you can spend on other, and equally important tasks.  Lastly, and possibly most importantly - is the process a more robust one, where there's a longer-term payoff for the increased effort, or does it introduce more opportunities for easier degradation and collapse?  I feel that it's more fragile, because it almost has to be - introducing more variables into any system increases the possibility for those variables to cause problems.

Now - take this same analysis process, and look at other facets that are necessary to progress through the mid-game (e.g., consolidating potential wealth into applied wealth in the form of base expansion and security, normalizing and sustaining food supplies for colonists, updating a power grid, updating weapons and armor among others) independently, and see if the same assessment can be reached - and consider at what stage of the game the effects (if any) are felt most.  I don't want to make this already-long post longer, but I believe the same conclusions - time sink and fragility of existing systems- are valid in a number of different aspects of gameplay, and to me, they seem to reach their schwerpunkt right about at the same time: the early stages of mid-game

In no case that I can think of do any new 1.0 elements prevent you from doing what you would in B18...they just take longer, feel more tedious, and make a mid-game colony's equilibrium - the point where you can start actualizing goals effectively- harder to reach.

The common refrain would be: ratchet down game difficulty/go to Phoebe.  I'd counter by saying that if what I'm experiencing has validity, and I believe it does, these are systemic issues that will transcend difficulties - the same effects will be "baked in" to gameplay at any difficulty.  Time sinks and increased system management tasks don't nerf.

Moving on from those observations and impressions to a different issue - I stated a concern that the game was moving from a "Use the tools provided, because there's a solution" to a "guaranteed loss in the name of storytelling" perspective. 

I'll apologize publicly for that statement, which in retrospect was made in haste - I know that's not the intent.  I know that the balancing process is ongoing.  However, just to set context:  I was coming off of a multi-hour combat scenario.  My 7 pawns, adequately armed and adequately defended, had an open-field Mech raid - 3 Cents, 3 Lancers, 4 Melee.  Using a combined-arms approach from cover, I killed all but two, but in the process had 6 of 7 colonists badly wounded (2 lost limbs, 1 fully incap'd).  I sent all wounded colonists to bed to heal up, get their peglegs, and all ambulatory colonists continued to leave their beds, despite every effort to command them to "rest until healed" (removing all work priorities, setting all schedules to sleep, in addition to the "RUH" command.  The idea was to finish off the 2 remaining Mechs when everyone wasn't so banged up.

While my colonists were not obeying orders, a second Mech Raid of 7 Melees dropped through the roof of my hospital.  Needless to say, this was a colony-wipe, after about an hour and a half of trying everything I know to combat it.  This second raid took place within several real-time minutes of effectively (although incompletely) defeating the first raid.

Upon reloading from the point where everyone was in the hospital, I managed to heal up 5 of my 6 colonists (one was still incap'd), when very shortly after, a 29-strong All Sniper with Flak Jackets raid occurred...at which point, I contributed my last comment.

[tubs]

There's a bug where one can still build adjacent traps!

The exclusion zone is removed from a trap *while it is being built*, and the new trap's exclusion zone does not take the in-progress trap into account.

[Golden]

I just started a new game last night to try something out and the survivor that I captured cannot be released.  This isn't something that happened before yesterday's update.  I don't think I'm running any mods that affect prisoners.  I was wondering if anyone else has had this happen.

I did have a previous capture of a raider that I healed up and released.  I currently have 2 prisoners, one I am trying to recruit (another raider) and the new one that just healed up (an escape pod survivor) and I want to release her.

I am running Phoebe and builder with reloading allowed, since I wanted a smooth start.  It hasn't been that long in the game, maybe a few weeks.