Unstable build feedback thread

[Boboid]

The general argument against hydroponics comes from component investment which is relevant unless you've already stabilized a winning position.

No, his argument does not come from component investment and the definition of "stabilized winning position" is so fluid that it might as well be meaningless.
Flatly stating that hydroponics are redundant because sun lamps exist is at best disingenuous and at worst an out-and-out lie.

There's also the consideration of rice labor costs.

Bordering on irrelevant unless you're assuming that space isn't a factor.
That's still costing you crop density to grow corn under a sun lamp.
Moreover longer growth cycles are intrinsically riskier.

The reason theorycraft is often frowned upon is because most theorycraft is bad or ignores relevant factors.

I covered this already. People are intrinsically lazy in their responses which just bloats the thread. It's my fault ultimately.

In addition to power, you have pretty disparate resource costs to set up between the two, more maintenance (more breakdowns from more electronics), and more vulnerability to events hurting them (crops can be saved via hasty campfire, no recourse for solar flare killing crops in hydroponics though).  You have to actually research hydroponics too.

None of this makes hydroponics worthless, but it does mean that on maps where you have enough 100% or better quality soil available, indoor growing with soil is a better deal than hydroponics.

But given the design of difficulty between biomes making hydroponics a bad deal compared to soil is a reasonable tradeoff.

You might want to double check that breakdowns are tied to the number of electronics you have rather than to a map/world-wide-timer like virtually every other event in the game. You may find that you get exactly as many breakdowns with 1 lamp as you do with 1,000 for example. I'm not honestly sure myself.

Even with enough standard soil hydroponics still offer you the option to reduce your colony's footprint at the cost of an initial resource cost and ongoing power. Space saving is a hard-to-quantify factor.

My intention is not to prove that hydroponics are strictly better in any given situation, it's to simply point out that sun lamps do not in of themselves negate the need for or very existence of hydroponics.

[TheMeInTeam]

True, so is placement freedom.  And it's definitely still cheaper in steel/components to power additional sunlamps than to make hydroponics.  Labor cost is relevant to both sides of the equation (rice has a hauling burden compared to alternative crops, but hydroponics have more flexibility in placement), and so is space.

However we're getting a bit away from this issue anyway.  For changing hydroponics to be worthwhile, we have to establish that the current state is inferior to a practicable alternative implementation and why that is the case.  With something like a strict QoL issue (animal hunting colonist) I find the case relatively easy to make.  For hydroponics, I don't even have high certainty on its intended design use cases, while most everyone agrees it does have at least some use cases at present.  SHOULD it be more efficient than soil, when the latter is an alternative?  If so, why?  Is the research cost a valid counterweight?  How much more efficient before it's too good?

I at least can't firmly establish a gameplay basis for changing it (IE an alteration where using it vs alternatives is a more interesting/harder to make choice), and I've yet to see others manage from that perspective.  That goes for 1.0 and long before it in this case...things like waterwheel or battery nerf don't change much here (a little bit for waterwheel due to placement consideration for soil vs hydroponic).

[Greep]

So far I've had about 4 "digging too deep" infestations, all from the same chunk of steel patch.  These are pretty annoying, although I'm not sure if it needs more balancing.  So far each of these is nothing my dudes themselves can't handle, but because it's a shock and my dudes aren't there, they usually take out an autocannon before I get there.  So I've lost about 1500 steel, and gained about... 4000 steel.  Not too great.

There is, however, an extremely easy way to prevent large amounts of damage from them I've just figured out although I've yet to try out:  Simply building a walled room w/door around your deep drill should contain them in order to give you time to prepare correctly.  However, since the idea behind the infestation I'm sure is to shock the player, the fact that there exists an easy workaround to prepare against a weak infestation kinda would make the event just an annoyance.

Edit: I've also had nothing but mechanoids, infestations, and manhunter packs, which is pretty weird.  And the raid scaling feels weird, but I can't tell if this is just randy being annoying.  I geniunely don't know what I can do about this o.O: (wealth 170k, day 140)

Guess it's time to whip out the triple launchers.  And at least they're still dumb as a brick splitting half their pack to go chase one guy -___-



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[JavaWho]

I do not know if this is intended but the buff for burying a colonist is a sarcophagi no longer exists. 

[Boboid]

True, so is placement freedom.  And it's definitely still cheaper in steel/components to power additional sunlamps than to make hydroponics.  Labor cost is relevant to both sides of the equation (rice has a hauling burden compared to alternative crops, but hydroponics have more flexibility in placement), and so is space.

However we're getting a bit away from this issue anyway.  For changing hydroponics to be worthwhile, we have to establish that the current state is inferior to a practicable alternative implementation and why that is the case.  With something like a strict QoL issue (animal hunting colonist) I find the case relatively easy to make.  For hydroponics, I don't even have high certainty on its intended design use cases, while most everyone agrees it does have at least some use cases at present.  SHOULD it be more efficient than soil, when the latter is an alternative?  If so, why?  Is the research cost a valid counterweight?  How much more efficient before it's too good?

I at least can't firmly establish a gameplay basis for changing it (IE an alteration where using it vs alternatives is a more interesting/harder to make choice), and I've yet to see others manage from that perspective.  That goes for 1.0 and long before it in this case...things like waterwheel or battery nerf don't change much here (a little bit for waterwheel due to placement consideration for soil vs hydroponic).

To be honest I can't justify a change to hydroponics either. At 280% at any rate.
Currently they're somewhere between viable and necessary depending on your map's soil availability and for the most part they offer those maps a way to grow things at roughly the same rate as an 60/60 growing climate.
I think that's a good place for them to be as it means food - in the long term - can be reasonably stable across all environments.

In terms of interesting decision making.. well there's not too much of that intrinsic to the growing system.
Strawberries are terrible as food because eating raw food is wildly inefficient.
Corn reduces labour but has a riskier, longer growth cycle.
Potatoes work in crappy soil.
Hydroponics work everywhere and condense fields at the cost of a reasonable amount of steel and power.
That's really the end of it.
Short of adding infestation-style events specific to the way people grow their crops there's not much else that I can think of. Admittedly a huge, mutant plant growing in your hydroponics does sound hilarious.

[Awe]

Is it wad, or not? Missed shots hit your own guys ignoring shield/armor and adjacent position....

PS Also, fourth winter going. All researches is done, just rebuilding my base for sitting a few more years before start shipbuilding. 320k wealth, almost 20 pawns. Infestations are easy at this point and also bring a lot of moneys via jelly. Mechanoids a bit more entertaining. Mainly because of centipede toughness. Scythers/lancer easier than before. Main troublemaker is sappers. Especially with nerfed cloth doors.

PPS Jelly cant be caravaned to other setllements because weird food consumption still here and jellies consumed even before pemmican. 

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[Boboid]

It's my understanding that shots fired from adjacent pawns will not hit that pawn as a result of the bullet intersecting with their path. They're not included in the cover calculation.
That chain shotgun fired at the megaspider had a 0% chance to hit either of the shielded pawns when fired over the top of them.
However that shotgun missed, scattered 1 tile, and hit Doc as a result.

Shields have always had a 1 tile deadzone, shots fired from within 1 tile bypass them. That shotgun was fired from within 1 tile.

I guess now that guns all have a 1-tile-deadzone that shields don't really need it except for fringe cases like that.

[Greep]

Whoo, beat the 14 centipedes with only one death and 0 autocannons lost   And she would've been saved if she had a helmet xD  So hard appropriately equipping randy colonist hordes, especially with all the steel going into cannons :/

Edit:Yeah I also had this happen to someone with a shield attacking a centipide in melee, somehow got hit with a minigun.  I guess the minigun must have fired right as he was approaching.  Very unintuitive :/

[bbqftw]

Is there any particular reason psychic drone debuff was increased to -24 (with hypersensitive, -43... good luck tanking that with anything but a wedding)

Was there some storytelling component gained from inducing extreme breaks with very little (viable) counterplay?

I suppose this is what I signed up for while playing NB/extr - so far my solutions for counterplaying this are:

* Chain raid ancient dangers and stockpile soothe pulsers.
* Caravan off the map / cryosleep. Early in the game, this can result in fighting off 1v8 or 2v8 raids as early as late month 2 / early month 3. Latter is probably doable, but I thought Tynan was trying to discourage cheese...? At 1v8, it just means trading off one RNG for another.
* Tank the extreme breaks. This is an unsatisfying resolution, as good outcome would have nothing to do with skill - just rolling well.

Incidentally, the option I picked was 2, and got raided as the caravan was moving to leave. Defeated raid with zero damage taken, yet it feels empty knowing that RNG completely dictated the resolution of this situation.

[Argonaut]

It's a long post and i havent read everything soo idk if this was mentioned.
Autocannon turret range seems to be 2 tiles different when planing to build compared to the built version.

[Boboid]

Was there some storytelling component gained from inducing extreme breaks with very little (viable) counterplay?

You can always put on Psychic foil helmets, they reduce psychic sensitivity by 90%.
They're fairly common in trade caravans and aren't particularly expensive.
Yayo and similar are reasonable solutions as well.
Soothers/caravans/cryosleep are pretty low down on the list of counters to drones.

[bbqftw]

I was listing specific counterplay for early year 1 NB/extr starts, none of the things you mentioned except possibly rolling early ancient dangers to buy foil helmets are relevant.

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm not sure how often foil hats are found in outlander towns.  In the few 1.0 runs I've done I've had an opportunity to buy them in year 1, but I haven't made dedicated efforts for them and have way too little data to suggest how often they're an option.  They are cheaper than most armor though, 600 silver or so?  I forget exactly.  After abusing a thrumbo to death you can get one or two if an outlander town carries them.

You can use caskets in ancient dangers or go caravaning, but I don't like leaving the base 100% compromised like that.  It is a pretty strong event to eat early game.

Got a TIL moment recently when I realized you can't use psychic artifacts on raiders that are psychically deaf.  Makes sense but had never tried it previously :p.

[East]

Hydroponic is something that will be used only in special terrain anyway.
Mostly just increasing farmland is more profitable than hydroponics.
But it is an attractive option in places where it is difficult to secure land for farming.
Exceptionally Hydroponic attractive crops is devilstrand. I really want hydroponic plant is devilstrand. but can't they grow very slow but can't plant hydroponic.

The only thing I want to ask is remove to reduce the speed of the hydroponic when pawn are passing.
It seems really unnecessary for the speed to decrease.

[Tynan]

Thanks for the ongoing feedback.

Of course it's useful, but let me just ask people to keep things as non-argumentative as possible. This thread is for chatting about this video game for fun, and giving (experience-based) feedback on an upcoming build. Please do share your logic and opinions, but remember arguing on the Internet is like nuclear war: The only winning move is not to play.

EDIT: BTW I checked, there is no change to wolf trainability, they all have advanced, and have for the entire public unstable phase. Kind of a fun test for theorycrafting here, at least.