Unstable build feedback thread

[Awe]

Turret accuracy/cost tradeoff seems off, or something.

The uranium slug turret is listed as having 98% accuracy which I take to mean should be missing 1 shot every 50. I just had an ibex doe manhunter event happen and watched a sniper turret ineffectively waste nearly its entire barrel-change worth of uranium peppering the ground around all the ibexes without hitting them. If the most accurate turret in the game can't hit things it kinda confirms the instincts that maybe these things aren't actually worth the investment/power drain.

98% is base value. And its affected by range, weather, cover, size of target. So uranium turret is mostly anti-large kind of defence. Like centipedes or thrumbos.

[Chicken Breast]

So I finally downloaded 1.0, and just wanted to share a few things right off the bat before posting about playthroughs.

I love the UI streamlining, and the changed graphics. Very well done, and just what the game needed at this stage. It may seem superfluous to some, but I like it.

One typo I noticed when starting my first new game on 1.0 is when picking Randy Random on Savage. The description for Savage (which may be used for all storytellers, I just always play Randy usually) misspells 'experience' the second time, missing the third 'e'.

The highlights and designations changing from square shapes to round was also a good aesthetic choice, in my opinion.

[mcduff]

Storyteller: Pheobe
Difficulty: Medium
Biome/hilliness: Boreal Forest
Commitment mode: no
Playtime in last three days: 8/9 hours?

Turret accuracy/cost tradeoff seems off, or something.

The uranium slug turret is listed as having 98% accuracy which I take to mean should be missing 1 shot every 50. I just had an ibex doe manhunter event happen and watched a sniper turret ineffectively waste nearly its entire barrel-change worth of uranium peppering the ground around all the ibexes without hitting them. If the most accurate turret in the game can't hit things it kinda confirms the instincts that maybe these things aren't actually worth the investment/power drain.

98% is just the base accuracy.  It probably loses accuracy over range like everything else, and then there is cover and weather. Most things aren't accurate at long range in this game, even master snipers with full biotics rarely get above 70% at actual sniper range.

I don't think sniper turrets are very good.  The accuracy issue is only part of it.  Sniper range is the safest range to be at, so it's a range I can put pawns at and have them be pretty safe, so why do I need a turret that costs me uranium with every shot?  Because it's most effective at range, placement is tricky and even if you get a good placement you pretty much need to have other turrets or pawns in front of it, which will get friendly fired.   Short range turrets make a lot more sense because you can use them to tank while your pawns stay behind them.  You can rebuild a turret a lot more easily than a pawn, so that makes sense.  But sniper turrets are totally backwards, why would I risk pawns for a building?

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to use them properly but they feel like a resource sink that doesn't pay off as well tbh. I've said a few times that a minigun turret would actually feel a bit more useful and worthwhile.

[jchavezriva]

Is this a feature or bug?

Can insects spawn under normal roofs connected to mountain roofs? Because i had a straight line of 7 mountain roof aprox in a room with 100+ normal roofs.
Then i saw the notification, jumped to the room, saw every corner of it covered in the smoke caused by insects tunneling up and savescummed the fuck out of there.

I think there wasnt a single actual mountain roof spot with that smoke.

[jchavezriva]

Oh and have you increased the death on downed chance? It is getting really hard to capture raiders...

[Broken Reality]

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to use them properly but they feel like a resource sink that doesn't pay off as well tbh. I've said a few times that a minigun turret would actually feel a bit more useful and worthwhile.

Yeah I'm struggling to find uses for turrets other than sapper deterrent and most of the time I don't even do that anymore. I am trying an idea to use sniper turrets in wide hallways through my base, put them at a cross section that is open to the outside and design the interior of my base as combat ready (lots of doors for firing points and corridor lined with sandbags for cover. Not got to sniper turrets yet but it was proving usable with just colonists (getting raiders in to range of chain shotguns with ease helps a lot)

[seerdecker]

In 1.0.1982, pawns ignore their assigned zones. My hauler is suiciding by venturing outside with the manhunter pack.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Greep]

Yeah it's always been the case that pawns will always go through zones they aren't allowed to, they just won't do tasks in those zones.  So you gotta be creative in how you lay out your doors.

[Teleblaster18]

In 1.0.1982, pawns ignore their assigned zones. My hauler is suiciding by venturing outside with the manhunter pack.

To add to what Greep wrote:

If the only way to get to their destination is to go slightly outside of their assigned zone, they'll do it.  This was also the case in B18, and there's no workaround: otherwise a colonist would be essentially trapped in the assigned zone permanently.

[threephi]

One of my colonists caught the flu while in a caravan, and the pop up said he was an animal.  That's just rude!



[attachment deleted due to age]

[Greep]

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Sea Ice
Commitment mode: yes
Playtime in last 2 days: ~16

Another 2 years of Sea Ice, the neverending saga.  Last gripe about raid formula and I'll stop:  After ignoring wealth/rampups for a bit, I ended up fighting 10 centipides, on sea ice.  After a really boring 40 minute slugfest of pausing and unpausing over and over to kite and finally making it, I have simply come to peace with the fact that the raid formula is kinda borked in a way that's unfixable, and metagming is just how you play vanilla.  I then burned a few tons of leather and shot 2 of my weakest colonists.  In the next 2 years, raids have been doable.

Focus at the moment is making the best possible defense in proportion to raid sizes:  Making everyone a terminator in heavy armor, and importing craptons of stone, every stone I can buy. This has been accomplished with trading drugs for steel and LRMSing for plasteel.  After 2 years I have about 25 bionics installed, legs for everyone, arms for crafters/cooks, eyes for terminators.

To keep wealth down, I'm hording corpses and then butchering them when traders come.  Flake is immediately sold to any trader because the silver has a better raider to value ration than flake.  If I get too much silver I start making flooring to buffer my unbelievably impressive uber room.

Some notes on LRMS:  Things seem a bit out of balance now that I have strike forces that are capable of taking on the lump ambushes.  Unfortunately, there's no patch notes anymore, so I can't tell if this is due to changes mid gameplay or what.  Some examples:

-8 Boomalopes (yikes!  Almost had to abandon) <- oddly high
-4 sleeping mechanoids <-seemed right
-2 turrets and a dude <- extremely easy and free stuff
-2 dudes and a turret and a mortar <- pretty easy, risk getting one hit with a mortar though.

Notably, the turrets lump are extremely easy with an advanced fort:  Not only can you just utterly crush it when you have shielded guys and power lances, you get like 500 free steel.  Mortars are kinda scary since they get off a shot before you can get into range, though.

Additionally, I am crazily enough getting "low expectations" (not even very low!) on a simple attack force of 4 guys:  this is due to to their high quality armor and guns.  It feels weird having to send psychite tea and various luxurious for a dirty mining expedition.

Other than the centipede force of doom, raids have been pretty simple.  The only crazy one was a scyther horde immediately followed by a manhunting deer horde, which I had to exit my fort to troll them a bit while I reset traps.

Oh also, I've finally got my fort completely green!  Everything's powered by windmills 100% now, no chemfuel needed ever, except for mortar shells.  10 windmills and 3 battery blocks behind separate power switches will do that   Still have them installed in case I get a catastrophic drop pod event or something.

The huge spikes downward and immediately upward on the graph toward the end is caused by power armor raiders going raiding.  Legendary power armor is expensive   The drop down in wealth at 460 is me torching half my storage facility, though.

Oh and after  5 years of living together, the 2 cannibal lesbians ended up in a failed romance and are chugging down drugs 

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Sirinox]

Storyteller: Pheobe
Difficulty: Medium
Biome/hilliness: Boreal Forest
Commitment mode: no
Playtime in last three days: 8/9 hours?

Turret accuracy/cost tradeoff seems off, or something.

The uranium slug turret is listed as having 98% accuracy which I take to mean should be missing 1 shot every 50. I just had an ibex doe manhunter event happen and watched a sniper turret ineffectively waste nearly its entire barrel-change worth of uranium peppering the ground around all the ibexes without hitting them. If the most accurate turret in the game can't hit things it kinda confirms the instincts that maybe these things aren't actually worth the investment/power drain.

98% is just the base accuracy.  It probably loses accuracy over range like everything else, and then there is cover and weather. Most things aren't accurate at long range in this game, even master snipers with full biotics rarely get above 70% at actual sniper range.

I don't think sniper turrets are very good.  The accuracy issue is only part of it.  Sniper range is the safest range to be at, so it's a range I can put pawns at and have them be pretty safe, so why do I need a turret that costs me uranium with every shot?  Because it's most effective at range, placement is tricky and even if you get a good placement you pretty much need to have other turrets or pawns in front of it, which will get friendly fired.   Short range turrets make a lot more sense because you can use them to tank while your pawns stay behind them.  You can rebuild a turret a lot more easily than a pawn, so that makes sense.  But sniper turrets are totally backwards, why would I risk pawns for a building?

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to use them properly but they feel like a resource sink that doesn't pay off as well tbh. I've said a few times that a minigun turret would actually feel a bit more useful and worthwhile.

It actually proved itself quite useful in my last mechanoid raid. While mini-turrets barely hit anything and mostly played decoy, sniper turret actually hit some targets. (Could we have a score for turrets like we have for pawns, I wonder?) And while it wasn't 98% hits, more like 50%, but it is a lot already in comparison to other and due to damage and AP when it hit it was devastating.

Both mini-turrets and autocannons were unable to reach lancers in the open field so sniper turret covered them.

[Seyeght]

Not sure if this has been reported, or if this is intentional, but... I get the same colonists every time. Previously even if I used the same seed, and even the same site, I would get a random list of colonists. With the latest build, if I use the same Seed, and any site on the planet I will always get the same exact started pool to choose from.

[Roolo]

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Sea Ice
Commitment mode: yes
Playtime in last 2 days: ~16

Another 2 years of Sea Ice, the neverending saga.  Last gripe about raid formula and I'll stop:  After ignoring wealth/rampups for a bit, I ended up fighting 10 centipides, on sea ice.  After a really boring 40 minute slugfest of pausing and unpausing over and over to kite and finally making it, I have simply come to peace with the fact that the raid formula is kinda borked in a way that's unfixable, and metagming is just how you play vanilla.  I then burned a few tons of leather and shot 2 of my weakest colonists.  In the next 2 years, raids have been doable.

[...]

From reading this and the rest of your post, I have the impression you don't really like the difficulty you're playing at, and therefore end up keeping it artificially low, which you don't even seem to like doing. I don't know your wealth levels and how many pawns you have, but 10 centipedes is something I'd expect for merciless a couple of years in, and doesn't need kiting to dealt with. I really advise you to lower the difficulty and try to pretend that you don't even know about adaptation/wealth scaling, just create whatever you want, seems more fun to me than keeping the difficulty artificially low all the time.

[Greep]

I'm not mad, just annoyed with the weird design is all, especially the sudden jump in difficulty for seemingly no reason because bulktraders were two years apart this time.  That's so bizarre.

In any case I'm done talking about that and just modded it out for my future games and am just playing the way it seems to be designed for this one.