Unstable build feedback thread

[erdrik]

... i think it would make more sense to at least make the clothing break-down-able into their base components (with adjustments for synth/hyper/devil so it doesnt get OP) so they could be re-crafted.  ...

While I am for recyclable apparel, I think a good balance compromise would be that it always returns a version of the "Patchwork Leather"("Patchwork Leather" for leather based apparel, and "Patchwork Cloth" for Cloth(including the synthreads, ect..) or Wool based apparel). That way you would always be able to turn tainted clothes into something usable or even sell it off, but it won't ever be as good as just making something new from scratch.

[Greep]

Is there any way to befriend an enemy in 1.0 other than waiting for peace talks/ prisoners?  I'm finding it difficult to bring this faction over to neutral:  sending a caravan gives the text "attacking X" when I make the initial waypoint.  Can I still gift them when I reach there or am I wasting my time moving over there?

Edit: The comms message suggests I can gift at their town.  This makes the journey message a bit confusing.

[Ser Kitteh]

@Greep yes you can reach their colony and gift them stuff or just drop pod stuff.

[I Am Testing This Game]

I'm a mediocre player on Cassandra extra hard, using reloads to avoid restarting when I wipe due to lack of game knowledge.

The rationale behind the increase in raider death rate was that incapacitated refugee quests were now more viable as a form of recruitment.

Some feedback on those quests and a related bug:

Mid game, 10 pawns, not too much research, but nice self sufficient base, bolt action rifles, pistols, machine pistols, flak vests and pants.

Incapacitated refugee quest, guarded by manhunter pack.

So far, I've had good luck against manhunter packs, giving all the starting armor and a thrumbofur duster / thrumbo horn to a decent melee and standing in doors, shooting over his shoulder. He effectively tanked packs of grizzly bears and foxes. He also kills unarmored raiders very effectively.

So I send my best melee, another decent armored melee and a good shooter with a machine pistol to rescue the refugee, thinking I'm sending a lot of combat power. It certainly would make it a lot harder for me to defend my base, having those guys gone.

Needless to say, they're not even close to being able to handle a pack of 8ish elk with blunt attacks, with no reachable choke point. That's why I'm using reloads; it's very, very easy to die while caravaning, unless you have the meta knowledge of having faced that situation before.

There's no way I'm killing the elk, even with save scumming. I can't send more people or my colony would be too weak to defend itself.

They run faster than me, I can't kite them and kill them, but it turns out you can kite them to a corner of the map, exit the map, then immediately zone back in some where else. It's possible to do this repeatedly and reliably grab the refugee and escape while the other characters distract, although it may take a while and I had to reload many deaths before I got the timing down.

Now the bugs come in. First time I saved the refugee, two characters had left the encounter map and the character who was rescuing the refugee was the last one on the map. As he exited the map it said "Caravan Lost", and the refugee was lost with it. The character himself rejoined the others safely, but the refugee was somehow deleted from the game. Seems like a bug.

Next time I carried the refugee to the edge of the map, but made sure my other characters were still on the encounter map before trying to carry her off. For some reason she was inexplicably dropped at the edge of the map, just as the character exited. However I was then able to zone back onto the map and carry her off.

In later attempts, I was able to carry her off the map successfully by making sure the two other characters not carrying her zoned back into the encounter map before the character rescuing her exited.

I'm not sure if it matters or not, but it may related to whether I was "capturing" her or "carrying" her, both options popped up at different times.

Balance feedback: It seems like either this is meant to be a late game option where you could bring overwhelming force or you are meant to have meta game knowledge of cheesy kiting tactics or you are meant to save scum.

Frankly, it still doesn't seem to be on par with the part of the game that takes place in your base, in terms of balance and polish. Without save scumming or serious meta knowledge, caravan quests are still a good way to die quickly.

Speaking of save scumming: Now that you can't shoot in melee, predator attacks feel like a pretty poor mechanic; you just have to remember to keep checking the animals tab and sending out manual hit squads and there is essentially zero risk, but if you forget about this routine task, it's easy to have a very random death with little recourse.

Apparently there are quality of life mods that address this by giving an alert, those could be coded in, but an alternative would be to allow the use of a few small weapons like knives (and maybe pistols) as sidearms, while also increasing the melee DPS of rifles and shotguns, which are, after all, commonly used as effective clubs. Also, making it so slowdown only happens when a blow hits and does damage. Even if it's good for specialist snipers to be vulnerable, characters who both have good ranged and melee skills seem overly vulnerable, just because they can't do much and rifles have terrible melee dps on par with a revolver(!).

It's probably too late for bayonets but it's worth considering that muskets really took off in popularity when they became effective melee weapons.

The game feels pretty good in a lot of respects right now, I like the armor system, I like how melee is useful, but shooters do seem overly helpless at times, which kind of encourages you to try and limit your fights to base defense scenarios where you can use a few melee "tanks" to hold doors. It's fine to say that a melee should be able to beat a ranged if he can close in, but a guy with a rifle who also has good melee skill is effectively tied up by an untrained person who closes to melee range, that seems questionable.

His DPS is higher while unarmed than while he has a bolt action rifle equipped!!!

[Greep]

@Greep yes you can reach their colony and gift them stuff or just drop pod stuff.

This doesn't appear to be true anymore if it was in the past.  I caravaned to them and it automatically attacked them  and reduced relations 50 more xD

And this is what I get on trying to move there again:

Actually this could be due to being incapable of social.  In any case this should give a warning if you're just going to autoattack in that case.


[attachment deleted due to age]

[ChJees]

It seems like the best way to make friends in 1.0 is to gift your would-be-friends smokeleaf joints . And people say drugs do nothing good.

[5thHorseman]

It seems like the best way to make friends in 1.0 is to gift your would-be-friends smokeleaf joints . And people say drugs do nothing good.

I have a strict no-drugs policy and lock all my drugs in a forbidden room, specifically for purposes of gifting. Those potheads on the other side of the lake LOVE me!

[Tynan]

Storytime!

Just a short one. Once again I had to start over due to semi-corrupted save (it's not actually corrupted just EdB Prepare Carefully isn't working anymore since .1950 and you cannot remove the mod from an existing save).

Tribal, Temperate Forest, Large Hills, River

First trader caravan appears, a pirate trader with a slave "Walls" who is the mother of my researcher. I can't afford her, since she is 1800 silver and I just started out, plus she has bad stats and traits despite being the most expensive (wtf?). Worse yet, she is 43 and her son 41.

Okay, well, can't do nothing about it.

A few days later a trade caravan from the same faction came, now Walls was the LEADER of the caravan and not a slave anymore. And the caravan is a combat supplier. Damn, that must be one heck of a woman. From slave to caravan leader and also abolishing slavery as a whole just to ascend her caravan to combat suppliers.

I laughed for a while at this one!

[Polder]

So I played a lot lately and improved my skills. I was finally able to make decent progress on NB, Extreme Randy, arid biome start. Randy is easier than the other two storytellers.

I start on a road, not too far from a friendly outlander settlement, so that I can buy medicine. This can be done very early because male elephants drop valuable tusks. This also lets me afford some decent weapons. It is much easier to get weapons in this way than researching and building them on my own (I'm tempted to say that the do it yourself to approach is only a last resort). It is also much better to buy a television than to research and build it myself.

Short bows are a must in a NB start. It is a little frustrating that short bows require 2 crafting and that raising crafting isn't easy in the beginning now that cutting stone blocks doesn't give crafting experience (maybe it should give experience until level 4 or something). A short bow enables hunting without high risk of retaliation. Hunting is a must because berries are scarce and won't feed more than 1-2 colonists.

Caravan requests can be very rewarding but are often not fulfillable and sometimes not worth the time because I simply do not need the reward.

I found prisoner rescue missions to be much harder raids, with such high risk that they aren't worth attempting. Based on a low sample size, the number of enemies in this kind of mission is about twice the number of colonists I have and they are well armed, and my side will lack the advantage of fortifications.

During my last attempt, I was able to build a nice air conditioned granite fortress, with stone floors and six colonists (I was picky in who I let in, and raiders die a lot now).

In the end my colony succumbed to a combination of a strong pirate raid with poorly planned defenses resulting in several deaths. A few days later a poison ship I had been ignoring started affecting my crops and I felt like I had little choice but to attack. I totally underestimated the mechanoids and they killed everyone. This was at about 20k wealth.

[Jstank]

That doesn't make any bit of sense. If this person spent his life scavenging through wreckages to find interesting stuff, then WHY THE HELL CAN'T HE HAUL!?

There are a lot of backgrounds that disable hauling in this game and most of them don't make any lick of sense at all. Before we wrap a package on this game can we dial back the amount of disabled hauling that occurs in characters? It should really only be for health reasons that these pawns can't haul.  EX: Bad Back!

[Maxamilius]

Can I suggest increasing the reward from outpost quests a bit? There are two outposts that have spawned near me since the latest update, with 14/15 enemies, and the rewards for these are 500 silver/28 luciferium. Those aren't remotely worth the risk, especially as 15 enemies is much harder when you're attacking and they're defending. I would honestly expect about 5x those rewards for that level of risk.

[ReZpawner]

Storytime!

Just a short one. Once again I had to start over due to semi-corrupted save (it's not actually corrupted just EdB Prepare Carefully isn't working anymore since .1950 and you cannot remove the mod from an existing save).

Tribal, Temperate Forest, Large Hills, River

First trader caravan appears, a pirate trader with a slave "Walls" who is the mother of my researcher. I can't afford her, since she is 1800 silver and I just started out, plus she has bad stats and traits despite being the most expensive (wtf?). Worse yet, she is 43 and her son 41.

Okay, well, can't do nothing about it.

A few days later a trade caravan from the same faction came, now Walls was the LEADER of the caravan and not a slave anymore. And the caravan is a combat supplier. Damn, that must be one heck of a woman. From slave to caravan leader and also abolishing slavery as a whole just to ascend her caravan to combat suppliers.

I laughed for a while at this one!

I sense a new article for Rock paper shittyjournalism - "Game developer laughs at slavery". Just in time for 1.0 too!

[Polder]

I am playing Extreme Randy NB again. 20 days in, I get a mission to destroy an outpost. At this point I have one colonist, and the outpost has 4 enemies and presumably several turrets. The reward is an AI persona core for which I have no use at this time. I don't think I could realistically win this even if my colonist had amazing combat stats. With excellent equipment and good skills it would be possible but still risky.

This is just one example but it's representative of my experience with destroy outpost and rescue pawn missions. It could be that later in the game they are worth doing but in the early game they clearly aren't.

[Tynan]

New build. Bring on the theorycrafting experience-based stories and feedback! Thanks for all given so far, it's very useful. We've got a lot of tasks we're still working through.

----

Hive killed insect jelly 100 -> 60.
Alphabeaver hunger rate 6.0->4.5.
Turrets research cost 400 -> 300.
Door health 250 -> 140.
Shotgun armor penetration 6%->9%.
Fix: Non-square buildings with defaultPlacingRot east or west draw with distorted proportions on the menu.
Hydroponics can now be built on bridges. Set hydroponics basin def direction back to same as B18 (it points the way it faces) and use defaultPlacingRot=east to make it align visually with the benches in the menu.
Basic work type now starts active for everyone.
Fix: Tribals can build chess table.
Clarify penoxycyline.
Rebalance: Infections less likely at low tend quality and more likely at high tend quality.
RaidBeacon endgame sequence threat frequency now scales with difficulty.
Adjusted crafting quality output to produce better and less random results.
Changed quality gen data output from text to table.
Shift various ranged weapons' firing delays a somewhat from warmup into cooldown to reduce cheese and counterbalance not being able to use them in melee.
Fix: One explosion is not enough to detonate artillery shells.
Made non-mech factions a bit more common in late game raids.
Hydroponics fertility 230% -> 280%.
Made outdoors need a bit stricter.
Rename trait Tunneler -> Indoorsman.
Rearrange research layout a bit.
Adjust animal skill gain rate from tame/train down a bit now that it's repeatable.
Ship startup sequence raid frequency reduced a little bit.
Reduced ship advanced components costs.
Fix: Food poison cause unknown not translated. Some XML cleanup.
Rename ultratech medicine -> glitterworld medicine
Balanced some bionics and archotech body parts a bit.

[Boboid]

SoOoOo..

Tried to launch a ship on day 453 with 309k total wealth and 9 (bionic'd up the wazoo) transhumanist colonists on V-hard. (Switched from Hard on about day 300 when I was well ahead of the raids)
I was a bit concerned that my wealth-to-manpower ratio had got way out of hand and that in reality my base was by and large not particularly well designed or defended (On purpose mind you)

To say that it was a failure would be to miss the opportunity to describe it as "A clusterfuck of biblical proportions"

I had two orbital power beam targeters, 4 doomsday launchers, 3 triple launchers, a tornado launcher, 4 insanity lances, 140 medicine, 300 herbal medicine, 2 spare bionic arms, legs, and eyes. 60 go-juice and enough wake-up to keep the entire population of Sweden woke for a week. 5 res mech serum and 1 healing serum.
I briefly considered using my stock of luciferium before starting but thought that would be gross overkill.
Couldn't possibly have been more wrong

All my pigs died on day 1. So things were immediately looking up. Someone had to absorb that incoming rocket fire after all. They were delicious.

I'd used all the disposable weaponry except the tornado launcher on day 4 and one of my colonists was at 2/10 brain which was very slowly being tended to by luciferium. The healing serum having been used on a similar case on day 3.

My freezer and its contents were set alight by a centipede who dropped in and immediately fired upon my chickens on day 6.

Ran out of res serum on day 7 due to wave after wave of sappers with rocket launchers finally cracking my autocannon defenses out front. With no animals to hurl to their deaths and injuries mounting I was becoming rather concerned at this point.

On day 8 a tornado generator was... inadvisably deployed too close to my base during a last minute panic. Virtually everyone was killed in the ensuing chaos.

Ramos however was doing surprisingly well, the Rooster was still alive(albeit very badly burned) and we'd found some more precious minerals Just 7 days to go!
https://imgur.com/a/nyLahVz

Suffice to say I'll be either turning down the difficulty a tad for my last spaceship push or seriously reworking base design to something more appropriate for the rather large difficulty spike
Was extremely fun however and I'd heartily recommend being overwhelmed by ravenous hordes of dropping mechs and swarms of doomsday launchers.
Worth noting that there's about 50 different things I could've changed to more effectively prepare, so this is by no means a criticism of the difficulty or the system itself.

---
Overall I have to say that the late game is considerably more enjoyable with easier access to trade and subsequently many of the toys you seldom got to even see let alone play with in earlier versions such as the rocket launchers, soothers/lances ect.

I never found resource acquisition to be a problem even when outfitting colonists with 5+ bionics each, partially due to my artificially low population brought on by only recruiting transhumanists.

However most of my resources were as a result of trade being extremely profitable if done right (Neutromine can be purchased and sold as Wake-up for a reasonable and very consistent profit as every bulk goods trader has some and will buy wake-up, might want to look into that.) and the ability to convert manpower into useful materials, supplies, and fun toys such as Doomsday launchers and luciferium felt quite satisfying.

If I had a criticism of the late game at all it would be the sheer amount of time it takes to make the advanced components required to build the ship parts. 72 advanced components before factoring in structural beams and caskets is just a lot of raw crafting time. Again  my low population factored in considerably. Most of my time was spent acquiring wealth which could be converted to raw resources but not into advanced components.

Additionally I have to say that despite trade being extremely effective I at no point ever deliberately set out to trade with a settlement via caravan simply because the risks were never justifiable.
I did however send a single colonist on occasion to a settlement (via drop pod)to see what it had for sale (Looking specifically for rare objects like Archotech limbs) and would occasionally as a result send out a very small caravan after the fact to purchase these.

Edit: Just my luck as I post this Tynan goes ahead and re-balances bionics and the ship raid frequency.

Further edit: Forgot to mention that it's fairly easy to accidentally call in multiple caravans from opposing factions and have them fight on your doorstep as a result.. Or in your hallway.. or your freezer.. Or in one case a colonist's bedroom.
Mostly this is harmless.. Sometimes it's a royal pain in the arse. Very occasionally it's extremely profitable if a pack animal happens to die before the fighting scares them off.