Unstable build feedback thread

[Ser Kitteh]

@Boboid

The assigning of crafting to certain colonists still doesn't work. They still leave unfinished items around and considering there'a a dozen bills lying around in total, Bob in Smithing will work on power armor in one lab and go off to make grenades in the workshop.

That's the thing, even if you assign a Colonist to do one thing, it does override their smith/craft/tailor bill. Sometimes I forget I didnt set the grenade crafter to one person and I'm running a raid and wondering why a job isn't finished. What if one pawn levels up enough they ignore the level limit you place on the grenades?  It's micromanagy as all hell and watching Let's Players do it is also a hassle because talking and gaming is very hard.

Setting one priority over others work too, but then you need to keep track of who you want to do what. What if I want Jack to craft components for a day? Oops, forgot to turn off the tailoring priority and now Dave with 3 crafting is wasting devilstrand making shoddy dusters because he
finished cooking and I forgot to turn it off.

I too know that you can hover the priority but it'd be nice if there's a big THIS USES SMITHING sentence atop panel for benches. While it IS doable, it is far too micromanaget to my liking.  Two crafters are fine, but I have five on hand and they do other jobs too like cooking, growing, etc. It's a lot to keep track of, and while I know this is a colony management game, there are certain QoL features I'd like to see implemented.

[TheMeInTeam]

Also be careful - armor rework has non-trivial implications for the utility of deadfall traps.  That might not be something on which you can rely to carry vs these numbers.  Micromanagement adjustments to the AI changes will be consistently the most robust/rapidly adaptive .

Out of curiosity, I tried a mountain town again with the usual single deadfall spam entrance, and this has been my observation as well.  Worse, sappers are now grenading traps, which I don't remember them doing.  Deadfalls do work as a nice stopgap to get to turrets, though, and as an impromptu defense for stuff like psychic ships.  Although now that you can move mini turrets maybe it's better to just build powerlines everywhere lol.  Autocannons are seamingly like the best long term defense now.

Finally got around to more current build (well, was until 2 hours ago anyway).  The new armor pen is interesting, though unfortunately nearly all of my fighting this session was mechanoids or offensive raid to pick up an incapped refugee.

I got a TON of incapped refugee quests this go, ~5-6 inside a year.


Cas being her usual self:

Fights to the death with sappers are no joke.

https://i.imgur.com/OQaDUTK.jpg

And this is why I like Cas over Randy, much more relentless.  Three days later I get a siege!  Much cleaner though.

https://i.imgur.com/sc0pNNQ.jpg

Note this is still extreme from tribal + NB, and bad as the sapper situation was, none of the pawns were damaged in either of these.

Mechs are still handled same way now as in B18 - out range or out maneuver their slow warm-up guns.  Bagged a couple centipedes with 2 revolvers and an AR post armor-update.  They still sponge.  I was worried it would be worse with the armor update but it feels pretty similar to usual.  Maybe fighting them with snipers is a bit less painful now?  Doable regardless.

[Greep]

So, I've had one of the new multi-attacks.  Looks like it was 7-raider and 3-sapper.  I'm not sure the fleeing mechanic is working correctly in the double attacks, but I might have missed something.  I had to kill all 7 of the 7-raider group.  The 3-sapper group had a "take stuff and leave" when one died but kept attacking anyways until all of them died, at which point it said they would flee.

[TheMeInTeam]

Some raids literally never flee now, not sure that's intended.  The tribal sapper raiders in my screen shot above fought to the last man.

Not a bad variant sometimes though.

[awful-normal]

I just finished my first play-through of 1.0

Started with original 1.0 build and finished on build 1946
Storyteller: Cassandra classic
Difficulty: Medium
Map: Large hills with year-round summer.
Total play time: 49 hours 27 min
Final population: 17 colonists
Colonists killed: 6
Left on spaceship on day 447
Final colony wealth: 445,698

My thoughts on a few things:

Difficulty:
- I actually found the difficulty to be much harder than I anticipated.  I usually play on Randy extreme and my plan was to do a quick play-through on Cassandra medium just to get a feel for the 1.0 build.  Instead, my colony teetered on the brink of total failure for the first couple of years and I never really felt secure at any time during the 49 and 1/2 hours it took to launch Kjelt into space.  This was my first vanilla play-through in ages so I'm sure that's part of it but I also feel that the overall difficulty was more intense.  Some of the things I was dealing with early on have been revised in more recent builds such as nerfing the centipedes (thanks for that) and no longer downing food poisoning victims.  I read the post about how overall difficulty was lower but that cheese tactics would be less effective.  I'd like to think I don't use those kinds of strategies and I still feel the difficulty was harder. 

Deep drilling:
-The nerfing of the deep drills was the biggest change to the feel of the game IMO.  The lower yield coupled with the "too deep" infestations routinely destroying all my drills and the need for turret barrel change-outs made getting enough steel the definite rate limiting step of progressing in the game.  I wouldn't say that made the gameplay harder necessarily, but I would say that it made the game feel like more of a grind.  I combated this by picking up any pawn with passion for mining (roughly 8-10 for the majority of the game) and a team of 15-20 dogs for hauling.  Even then, I eventually found myself wishing the game would just be over soon.  I'm not pretending to know what the ideal length of a play-through should be, but this one felt long to me.

Too deep infestation:
-That's what she said?  But I digress... I didn't mind this addition for the most part but I did feel that it was too frequent.  I didn't keep track of every event but I found myself getting around 3-4 of these new infestation types per year.  I liked that they didn't seem to scale with wealth so they were manageable but the thing that made it more of a setback was loosing all my drills every time this happened.  Which was not infrequently.  I tried spreading my drills over several patches of steel which helped but meant more micro-management. Also, it would be awesome if the infestation critters showed up on the new wildlife tab.  The little guys kept getting away from me and I could only find them by waiting for someone to get bit.  I didn't care for the stone drilling once the main resource was depleted mainly because it made deconstructing the drills more of a pain.  I had to unforbid, then power off to keep a miner from trying to use it.  Then deconstruct.  Any error in this sequence led to giant piles of unneeded stones 10 min later.

Autocannon turret:
-Love it.  The buff given a couple builds ago was needed.  I think the cost has also been increased since then which is appropriate.  Having a 2nd turret type with a min range made defense planning more strategic.  I like the barrel change requirements.  One thing I noticed is that my colonists wouldn't do the barrel changes as early as I would have liked them to and this led to guns going down during raids.  Would be nice to be able to control this somehow without micro-managing.  Otherwise, I hope they stay as-is-ish.

Caravans:
- I think the value of the caravan request quests has bounced around in a few different builds and was most recently nerfed (could be wrong there).  In any case, even at the higher values I still didn't take any of these offers.  The risk of leaving my colony less well defended and possibly loosing valuable colonists early-mid game made the risk too great.  Later in the game, nothing was really tempting enough to get me to take even a small risk.  For me, the issue is that a lot the things that came up were not particularly useful (I'm thinking of a silver spear, luciferium, masterwork parka, etc) and the value wasn't high enough to justify going to get them for the purposes of selling them given the 50% loss when selling.  For me, they would need to be much higher to be tempting.  Overall, I thought the changes to caravaning were great.  Especially the "form caravan" screen.

Escaping on the ship
-I definitely like the idea of one last major hurdle to survive a million raids while waiting for the ship to start and I think it adds to the feeling of completion once it's over.  That said, I got 19 raids over those 15 days.  I did survive, but barely.  For medium difficulty I thought this might have been a little excessive.  But I guess that's the point.  And I did learn a thing or two to try next time.  Overall, I liked it.

Other random things:
-Having colonists rebuild before repairing was a solid add.  Having them re-arm deadfalls before other hauling tasks would be equally awesome.  Especially when getting raids every 5 min while starting the ship.

-Having the poison ship radius of 50 tiles made it pretty easy to ignore completely.  I had one land earlyish on and it sat there for 400 days until I left on the spaceship.  Legend has it, the poison ship is still there to this day.

- I had approx 15-20 Labradors and thought training decay was easily manageable with 1 trainer.

- I liked the friendlies aspect of the game.  Makes diplomacy more important and they actually made a difference in several raids.  Great changes to diplomacy in general.  Felt balanced.

- For some reason I only had 1 escape pod in 7.5 in-game years.  Not sure if this was some bad RNG luck or what but usually I get a lot more.  I also usually play on Randy so that might have something to do with it. 

- I got a ton of "right on top of you" mechanoid raids.  Like a lot.  In general, I like these raid types as it forces me to come up with new strategies for how to deal with combat inside of my base without blowing everything up.  But they seemed out of hand.  I think at one point I got 5 or 6 in a row which got old after a while.  So many dead dogs.

- Much better control of animals during battles.  Feels good.

- Did we nerf high-explosive mortars?  I don't remember seeing that but they seemed less effective.  At one point I shot literally 100 of them in 16 shell volleys into 2 simultaneous raids and they basically had no impact on the battle. 

-Charge lance is awesome.  Build time and materials seem balanced to me.  As do the new armor types.

-I liked the deflection chance for armor rather than the previous method.  It's intuitive and easier to factor into an overall defense strategy, IMO.

-Advanced component and build level requirements seem fair enough.  Glad to see the advanced component requirement for the multi-analyzer was removed though.  I feel like there are enough gates early on without having to wait 2 years for a trader to come along.

-As others have mentioned, adding chair to deep-drill doesn't improve comfort level. 

Overall, I thought my first go at 1.0 was great!  In the end, this game is so flexible that there's no way I can imagine not being able to play it in a way I find entertaining.   Thanks, Tynan!

[Tynan]

awful-normal, your writeup is incredibly useful, thank you for taking the time!

Lot of first-post heroes in this thread.

I guess it's inherent to what we're doing here, but I'm really hoping to see more of this kind of full-game writeup, especially starting with newer builds. Since balance has changed so much, it's hard to know exactly how to place the feedback that's mixed across several builds.

My main concern about what awful-normal said what the sense of deep drilling being grindey. How can we alleviate it? I'm open to ideas here. My first thought is to make more infestations and balance that with faster drilling, but that seems kind of punishing. Or make the drills tankier so the bugs can't destroy them easily. Hmm.

[Boboid]

@Boboid
The assigning of crafting to certain colonists still doesn't work. They still leave unfinished items around and considering there'a a dozen bills lying around in total
...
..

Would you mind sending me a few screenshots of your base/workshops, the bills you have listed, and your work/priorities screen in a private message? Or even better a copy of your save game so I can see for myself the issues you're having?

I strongly suspect that there is an elegant solution using the existing systems that will minimize micromanagement considerably. If everything is set up correctly it should be a totally painless experience.

sense of deep drilling being grindey. How can we alleviate it?

How is the deep drill infestation event handled? Is it treated like a standard threat event like a raid? or is it a % chance to trigger per X amount of time spent drilling or per extraction?

If either of the latter then more drills means more infestations, increasing the radius/cost and probably durability of drills seems fine.

If it's treated like a standard event then.. I guess buff the drill health or have the insects prioritize people over structures. A brief pause between appearing and immediately chewing on the drills would go a long way.

Personally I have a tendency when deep drill infestations appear to just huddle around them waiting for the bugs to appear and instantly gib them with gunfire which seldom destroys the drill.

[Greep]

Personally I would limit infestations to only non-steel drilling, and make them more powerful.  Sort of a mines of moria/ dwarf fortress "you got too greedy mate" thing.

Just want to pipe in: I also found mortars pretty lackluster, although I'm not sure if anything actually changed, they were more of a late game thing to  deal with hordes.

[Mutineer]

Did anyone notice any immunity problems? I got rescue quest, Heal him he got an infection. He is in bed under roof and treated by L5 doctor with herbal medicine. Infection and immunity started at 0-0%. Now it is in 70th% and I behind 6%. I did not miss a single treatment, so basically I had no chance.
That was not my experience from past. Anyone else noticed infection changes?

[Wildfire628]

From what I've experienced in my run which generally has a very dirty kitchen, there has been absolutely no food poisoning as of late despite the poor hygiene. Perhaps food poisoning chance from poor/good room cleanliness should be an offset rather than a factor, but then there will be oddities such as level 20 cooks having the same poison chances as level 10 cooks in the same room.

Any cook would struggle with food poisoning in a dirty kitchen. In my mind cooking level is about how they handle the ingredients, so an offset for never cleaning the kitchen would fit well.
Personally, I've never had a reason to exclude my butcher table(I'd also prefer to see the debuff off the table and have butchering make a larger mess to be cleaned to balance it) once I get the kitchen set up because after about 6-7 cooking it seems to become almost negligible(even outdoors). I'll have to play around with it when I get a chance.

[awful-normal]

Hey thanks Tynan.  I grew up on age of empires and diablo II and I would say this is my favorite game of all time.  Kudos! 

As far as the deep drills go, I would agree that they were probably OP before.  IMO the simplest remedy would be to have pawn mining speed and/or yield scale more aggressively with mining level.  This would keep the early balance similar to the current level which I thought was challenging but fun and eliminate the need for a large number of skilled miners mid-late game.  Other things I thought might help with the "grindey" aspect would be to just make the yield a little higher.  Another option might be to have more deep steel near the center of the map where people are most likely to build bases.  This would at least alleviate the hauling aspect and would bring the infestations in closer to established defenses. 

I liked the addition of the "too deep" infestations.  RNG is a factor here so it's hard to say exactly how frequently they are occurring but for me, having them be less frequent and more dangerous would have helped make them a little less annoying.   

[East]

I finished the naked Cassandra extreme yesterday. (1.0.1946)
The game took about 33 hours.
So I think I can talk about overall play and finishing.
Personally Traps and Turrets have limited play that they do not use because they are not fun.
For reference, I have 2364 hours of playtime as a hardcore gamer + twitch streamer who likes RIMWORLD. I hope you will see this article from that perspective.

[ life ]

-The watermill was very good in the past but I think it fed nerf too much. Given that it costs more to protect the watermill, has limited geographical conditions, and is relatively expensive, it will not pay for a small number of watermills. I think we need to reduce the watermill penalty range or increase the amount of production electricity.

-The biomechanical system was fun to restore the fingers. Can you make the pelvis possible?

-The message tab was very nice. It is good to have a record, but it was regrettable because the number of the contents to be recorded was limited. I would like to greatly ease or eliminate the numerical limitations.

[ World Map ]

-I do not know where the sleeping bag use. The meaning of existence is blurred. If you take a sleeping bag, you might want to change the world map's travel time from fixed to fixed at 6 o'clock.

-It is difficult to deal with infections and diseases while traveling the world map. If you have not taken phenozaycillin, the onset of the plague on the world map will immediately be the death sentence. I wish there was a weakened version of penozycine. Even the plague ...

-The frequency of events was high at the beginning, but it fell off to the level of B18 in the late game. The first time was a lot of fun, but I do not know if this is the original or if I have adjusted the frequency with the patch.

-I am very pleased that the range of events has been reduced and the travel time of the World Map has been reduced. I wonder if the scope of events can be reduced more.


[ battle ]

-Difficulty has increased more than twice as much as the B18. Especially, Centipede of Mechanoide is more than twice as effective as bodily sensation. Centipede's vitality is below 10% and it stays in a zombie state which does not die.

-The weapon's stopping power concept was quite interesting. I tried to combine various weapons and it was very useful. Conversely, an assault rifle and charged lifle felt weak. The overall enemy armor has risen, but on the contrary, the firepower of these two flagship rifles has remained intact or weakened. It was even worse because there was no stopping power.

-The inability to move across pawns in combat invites the extreme stress. There are too many cases where a battalion is canceled due to a sudden battle. That is, there are too many cases in which my command is not executed. Another pawn is commanded to go back and then stops. Move away from the pawn in battle to the enemy as long as you can not get lost. I am too stressed on this and would like to return it to B18 again. I was too irritated to control more than a certain number of pawns.

-The late raid cycle is very strange. Four consecutive mechanoids dropped into the base and the interval was 2-3 days apart. Drop attacks require more recovery time than other attacks. The continuous drop attack was too bad.Immediately after the corpse was processed, the raid came in.

[ Final Battle ]

-Put power on the ship. I started attacking once a day and went beyond the middle of the timer, and I was attacked twice a day. I could not handle the corpse, and I did not even have time to eat. I fed the food alternately and continued the battle, and the mood fell to the bottom as a death penalty for family relations. I used various drugs in order not to go crazy.

The enemy's weapon continues to accumulate and the value of the property rises vertically.

It was a problem from the moment the mechanoid's base dropped and the inside of the base got smashed and lost all the means of restoring the mood. No matter how well prepared, you can not prevent the inside of the base from being destroyed. And there is no time to recover.

On the last three days, I raised my pawns to go-juice. The last day lost two pawns in a frenzy. Finally, six out of 12 people were able to escape.

Well, if the developer intended it ... it was fun but it was hard and it was a tiring finish because I sacrificed half of my friends.

[ For developers ]

-You will be able to see the raid cycle through the save file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nunio0eb4zert0i/bearhunters.rws?dl=0

-It is the final 4 hours game video. Through this, you can experience the enemy's raid cycle or the difficulty of the last battl.
https://youtu.be/25SrC_5oopQ

-If you want to check the entire game flow, check the video playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOqh8HZjKd1OB69fIkb67dZZIEQBQuFot

[Wanderer_joins]

I'm year five, have the ship research complete. I think i'm getting into the steel grind part of the game:

• the ship for 20 colonists is worth a total 10k of steel if you factor in components from scratch
  
• a deep drill at best gives back around 200 steel with the drill
• a real good source of steel are quest (~500 steel per camp)
• i consider building a secundary mining colony for speeding up the process

Well, infestations may destroy the drill -> more grind. That's also without remote drills which are destroyed by raiders. I've had three deep infestations with two drills so far. It seemed somewhat balanced.

You could make deep drills moveable with a longer install/ uninstal time (at least longer than the time required for ants to spawn after the warning), and as you said, increase drill speed. Moving the drill will remove the 'drill tax' and also significantly increase drilling efficiency since you'll be able to drill all the tiles of the desposit when a drill for weird placed 3-4 tiles wasn't worth it.

Side note on the autocannon: it's useful with it's high armor penetration against mechs, but you've to build it in the open, and i've lost 3 plasteel autocannons (1 destroyed three times in a row). Not much i could do against the 20 scythers scattered around, they just went for it, not much i could do either against psychic ship + drop pod mechs, they were simply too many, i could have saved one against a single ship (~4000 pts) but it was because it was a tanky autocannon, a 400 HP steel autocannon would be wrecked too.

With the new change with even higher steel cost and lower hit points, if i rebuild it it will be well protected in a bunker, which means a narrower field of view and a necessity to bait mechanoids to it.

That said i really enjoyed the change in the armor system and ranged wepaons. Though it feels like you're throwing rocks at centipedes when you use assault rifles or miniguns, it feels more realistic. And melee combat with good armor is a legit strategy. I usually had 1:1 good melee / good range pawns and ended up giving miniguns to melee guys. Now there is a first line of melee pawns which draws the firepower and deals with the first line of scythers/ lancers and pirates in melee fight.

Regarding the quests: now that we've bionic parts, they really feel easy mid -end game, there should be some sort of progression in rewards and difficulty. easier early on, harder later.

Regardins caravaning:
-bedrolls have little to no place when you can build wooden beds, and no debuff when moving without beds
-i'd like to see multiple pawns being able to load a single transporter
-i've seen 2 out of 3 pawns enter pods well before the loading process was complete, they should enter last, when everything is loaded (they don't help, and they starve inside the pod meanwhile)
-when sending gifts with pods to faction bases, there should be something indicating how much goodwill you'll gain before actually sending the pod

[Greep]

Regarding that video above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25SrC_5oopQ&feature=youtu.be

This seems like some pretty broken A.I. at 22:00-24:00, just completely abandoning their attacks after shutting doors like that.  Possibly not something than can be fixed for 1.0, but this looks like it needs improvement.

[Madman666]

I also quite like the added threat part to deep drilling via insect spawns. Though i do feel the grindy part @awful-normal mentioned. For me the grindy part is all about constant steel shortage (armor replacement, barrel replacement for turrets etc.) forcing me to try countering that with deep drills, which end up mauled by insects, requiring more steel and components to replace them - its a vicious circle which massively adds to grindy part.

I suggest several things:
1) Making deep drills much more resistant to attacks giving ample time to gather suppression team to deal with insects without having to rebuild several drills all the time.
2) Slightly increasing the yield of deep drills, while making them even more dependant on mining skills. (I liked that idea "skill over quantity").
3) Adding alternative ways of getting steel (not via trade, its way to RNGesus dependant) - like adding a research project to upgrade long range mineral scanners, allowing it to search for specific resources of your choice (not only jade, gold, silver, but also uranium, steel and plasteel). Making those deposits significantly more rich, so that player has more reason to send out mining teams.
4) Make long-range mineral scanners find something much faster, like once every 15-20 days, not 30.

Honestly i was always surprised why those scanners couldn't find steel. It totally should be able to generate both steel and plasteel deposits on the world map.