Unstable build feedback thread

[Greep]

heh, this is a bug, but it's pretty funny too:

(muffalo was taken by bandits on a caravan)

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Broken Reality]

As for killboxes on the plains now, yeah there just is no point.  But my general cannon spam is going quite strong   They really are insane, in a good way.  I just killed 14 centipides with only mild assistance.

Seems you use only autocannons spread out and that is A LOT of autocannons. Your actual base seems to be less than a quarter of the screenshot most of it is growing plots. Infestations if easily handled before are now even easier. Before you got no time to react now you do.

Given how things are (Tynan has said he has 12 pages of notes for things to work on so as he said he may well be already working on issues we have now) mountain bases are even better than in B18. Every other terrain type got nerfed and mountain got a buff big time.

[Broken Reality]

Hi,
Just wanna say, love the game.

I have a few questions on trading, things that seem to have changed but i have't seen any patch notes referring to such a change. Albeit, i realise I could have missed the post.
1/ In the unstable build, has the ability to trade 'tainted' or 'worn by dead person' gear been changed? I've not been able to sell any clothing with this mark since the new build.
2/  Thrumb horns... again not had any trader who was willing to buy these since 1.0.

Thanking anyone who can help/comment in advance.

Keep up the brilliant work

Not sure about the thrumbo horns but the tainted apparel not selling is intended AFAIK according to patch notes.

[Dargaron]

"Give us what we want, or your unusually-hairy colonist gets it!"

Also, holy carp, that's a lot of Devilstrand/other crops. How on earth do you store all that stuff?

[Greep]

I'm selling like 3000 silver worth of stuff every comms-called-caravan, 2 caravans every 4 days.  My storage is actually nearly empty atm   Like I said, the cannons eat a lot and cost a lot to build.    I do agree mountain might be easier.  But the economy on flatter maps is quite good.

A lot of that is also psychite farms.  600 psychite ends up getting turned into one tile of flake for storage.

Edit: Raid balance definitely needs tuning.  Last year and a half or so:

3 mechanoid drop pods on top of me
1 mechanoid drop outside base
1 poison ship
1 psychic ship
~2 infestations
~3 drilling too deep

Not a single pirate raid or tribal raid.  It does make things more difficult, but it's really samey, and I'm not getting any new colonists.  I think all but one of those mech drop pods was in the latest release, so this is using the "fix" to the raid tuning 

Edit: Going to go flip off one of the tribals.

[bbqftw]

Two Scythers are reasonably easy to deal with either kite the melee ones or melee the ranged. My new tactic for tribal starts is Day one to two - build a hut, get some food and healroot and make some steel or stone clubs.Then I open the ancient danger and fight the contents. I usually have 2-3 ranged and 2-3 melee.

Scyther outspeeds even luciferium pawn, so you are relying on getting mobility damaging shots on approach, which is far from reliable even with good shooters. H As far as I can tell, mech pain doesn't seem to affect mobility either (at least at low 10%), so you are looking for very specific hits - thorax shots don't cut it. Furthermore, hits aren't guaranteed to cause aggro switches. So I am skeptical of consistency of strat, especially when you can crack ADs containing 4-5 scythe/lancers that infinite aggro you until you leave the map. Of course, you can play around these with specific constructions, but you mention nothing about this.

[ashaffee]

I also agree from playing the game on extreme on randy and Cassandra, plus dropping it down to rough on both. That the difficulty in this game has never felt better. Past players may need a warning that the previous difficulty they are use to or story teller might not suit them anymore because of these changes but it feels to me any person of basically any age can learn to play this game on the lowest difficulty.


There are minor tweaks that could be made to certain guns/armor but I bet that is already on your to do list. Overall any chances to the actual story teller difficulty would remove the huge amount of enjoyment I am receiving out of 1.0. You've already fixed every way I died at the beginning of this patch that felt cheesy. 

[jamaicancastle]

heh, this is a bug, but it's pretty funny too:

(muffalo was taken by bandits on a caravan)

I would be 100% in favor of letting raiders who decide to loot steal (docile) tamed animals. And then try to sell them back to you, of course.

Just hope that they aren't good enough to walk off with your thrumbo.

[Zombull]

Has this been reported? This has to be a bug.

Playing Crashlanded and was given a warg pet. Warg gets hungry and goes hunting an emu. Emu Revenge! Emu bites warg. Warg flees, now Emu is manhunting and comes after my colonists half way across the map.

10 minutes later: Same thing happens.

10 minutes later: Same thing happens, this time with a megascarab.

[stretch611]

Has this been reported? This has to be a bug.

Playing Crashlanded and was given a warg pet. Warg gets hungry and goes hunting an emu. Emu Revenge! Emu bites warg. Warg flees, now Emu is manhunting and comes after my colonists half way across the map.

10 minutes later: Same thing happens.

10 minutes later: Same thing happens, this time with a megascarab.

I mentioned (in an earlier post) about a Warg fleeing after trying to hunt a squirrel. He bit it, the squirrel turned manhunter/revenge... and the Warg fled.

Definitely not how a predator should act. (IMHO)

It was near my base, and the Warg did turn back and start to attack... but only after I drafted my colonists to deal with the squirrel. (and the warg was set to follow its master into combat.)

[Zombull]

WTF!? Now the warg charged into the prisoner room and killed and ate the prisoner!?!?

[Broken Reality]

Two Scythers are reasonably easy to deal with either kite the melee ones or melee the ranged. My new tactic for tribal starts is Day one to two - build a hut, get some food and healroot and make some steel or stone clubs.Then I open the ancient danger and fight the contents. I usually have 2-3 ranged and 2-3 melee.

Scyther outspeeds even luciferium pawn, so you are relying on getting mobility damaging shots on approach, which is far from reliable even with good shooters. H As far as I can tell, mech pain doesn't seem to affect mobility either (at least at low 10%), so you are looking for very specific hits - thorax shots don't cut it. Furthermore, hits aren't guaranteed to cause aggro switches. So I am skeptical of consistency of strat, especially when you can crack ADs containing 4-5 scythe/lancers that infinite aggro you until you leave the map. Of course, you can play around these with specific constructions, but you mention nothing about this.

Scythers die fast. I have had a starting melee pawn one shot a scyther with the starting jade knife. As a starting tribal colony I have taken out an AD with 5 scyther variants with 3 clubs and 2 bows. Mechanoids suck vs melee specifically blunt. The only ones that are scary at all are the melee ones and they still die fast (this is on close range fighting, long range lancers are nasty unless you line of sight them, which you should be doing). Crack an AD and you can normally equip your melee pawns with power armour or at least flak. Tribal you have 5 people you can send v 2 scythers, crashlanded you even get a set of armour to protect your melee pawn to start off with.

What specific constructions do you want? Are you talking about tactics? Things I build? Skills and equipment? From your post it sounds like you are not using terrain to your advantage possibly. (to crack AD I don't build any walls/doors or traps, just use positioning and the chokepoint that is the hole I just made in the wall)

My latest run on the last patch I did a tribal start, 3 melee pawns and 2 ranged, cracked the AD and killed the scythers/lancers, healed up and then popped the 6 caskets and got 3 sets of power armour and 3 full sets of flak (pants, jackets and chest) and 3 chain shotguns (at some point in these two fights one of my pawns lost a leg lucky there was an archeotech leg in there for me). Set up nicely for the rest of the run. Tunneled in to the mountain through the AD (which is now my new base, lots of free space) and found a second AD while mining for rooms.

You said you had 4 pawns. Even if one cannot fight they can be bait / kite the enemies to give you flanking or advantageous shots. Unless you pick pawns with no combat skills at all it should be doable. Worth risking a caravan for? Possibly. Don't forget you have quite some time before the mission expires (had 20 day + timers IIRC on missions like that). Use that time to prepare armour and weapons (hope for more pawns to join as well).

I wouldn't crack an AD as crashlanded early personally as you already have decent weapons ( and now armour) but as a tribal start it is well worth it as you won't get gear that good for a long time and you have the manpower to handle it.

[Teleblaster18]

Feedback from players on the ludeon forums is mostly hardcore players, even a lot of the lurkers finally posting are also hardcore players you'll notice. 

This cannot be underscored enough, IMO.  Posters here and on Reddit are almost certainly not a statistically representative sample of who plays the game.  Plus, there's enough hyperbole and exaggeration mixed in with genuine high skill that one can get the false impression that B18 was too easy at any difficulty level.

[bbqftw]

Two Scythers are reasonably easy to deal with either kite the melee ones or melee the ranged. My new tactic for tribal starts is Day one to two - build a hut, get some food and healroot and make some steel or stone clubs.Then I open the ancient danger and fight the contents. I usually have 2-3 ranged and 2-3 melee.

Scyther outspeeds even luciferium pawn, so you are relying on getting mobility damaging shots on approach, which is far from reliable even with good shooters. H As far as I can tell, mech pain doesn't seem to affect mobility either (at least at low 10%), so you are looking for very specific hits - thorax shots don't cut it. Furthermore, hits aren't guaranteed to cause aggro switches. So I am skeptical of consistency of strat, especially when you can crack ADs containing 4-5 scythe/lancers that infinite aggro you until you leave the map. Of course, you can play around these with specific constructions, but you mention nothing about this.

Scythers die fast. I have had a starting melee pawn one shot a scyther with the starting jade knife. As a starting tribal colony I have taken out an AD with 5 scyther variants with 3 clubs and 2 bows. Mechanoids suck vs melee specifically blunt. The only ones that are scary at all are the melee ones and they still die fast (this is on close range fighting, long range lancers are nasty unless you line of sight them, which you should be doing). Crack an AD and you can normally equip your melee pawns with power armour or at least flak. Tribal you have 5 people you can send v 2 scythers, crashlanded you even get a set of armour to protect your melee pawn to start off with.

What specific constructions do you want? Are you talking about tactics? Things I build? Skills and equipment? From your post it sounds like you are not using terrain to your advantage possibly. (to crack AD I don't build any walls/doors or traps, just use positioning and the chokepoint that is the hole I just made in the wall)

My latest run on the last patch I did a tribal start, 3 melee pawns and 2 ranged, cracked the AD and killed the scythers/lancers, healed up and then popped the 6 caskets and got 3 sets of power armour and 3 full sets of flak (pants, jackets and chest) and 3 chain shotguns (at some point in these two fights one of my pawns lost a leg lucky there was an archeotech leg in there for me). Set up nicely for the rest of the run. Tunneled in to the mountain through the AD (which is now my new base, lots of free space) and found a second AD while mining for rooms.

You said you had 4 pawns. Even if one cannot fight they can be bait / kite the enemies to give you flanking or advantageous shots. Unless you pick pawns with no combat skills at all it should be doable. Worth risking a caravan for? Possibly. Don't forget you have quite some time before the mission expires (had 20 day + timers IIRC on missions like that). Use that time to prepare armour and weapons (hope for more pawns to join as well).

I wouldn't crack an AD as crashlanded early personally as you already have decent weapons ( and now armour) but as a tribal start it is well worth it as you won't get gear that good for a long time and you have the manpower to handle it.

Are you talking the infinite aggro one, or the one that are leashed to the ADs? The one that will chase you across the entire map is the dangerous variant, the other type is far less dangerous.

In any case, meleeing a scyther = subject to spontaneous amputation. It is fine to discuss inconsistent strats but nice to label them as such. Thus I mention constructions that would allow you to bail if you run into truly dangerous AD variants.

I haven't actually tried cracking ADs with anything but NB starts (will try some CL tonight), but for NB it feels like more of a necessity more than anything.

Nevertheless, I will test out blunt weps vs. the mech variants. Its interesting, even if its inconsistent it can be useful.

[Boboid]

Armor penetration is derived stat that is based on damage and scales linearly with it.
I actually can disregard armor mechanic for sniper rifles.

Sorry to be rude but... that's not only technically untrue but shows a misunderstanding of the underlying mechanics.
Armor penetration (currently)wanders somewhere in the range of 145-155% of weapon damage. There are however exceptions.
Unless the AP %'s are identical (Which mostly isn't the case) you have to consider them.

Here's an example:
The dps of an AR at short range is 7.38, CR 8.47, 16/22% AP respectively
Vs a 100% sharp armor flak vest 84% of AR and 78% of CR shots are affected by armor, therefore half of them deflect and half of them do 50% blunt damage. Essentially all shots affected by armor do an average of 25% damage.

16% of AR's dps is unmitigated (1.18), 84% is reduced by 75% (1.55dps) (2.73)
22% of CR's dps is unmitigated (1.86), 78% is reduced by 75% (1.65dps) (3.51)
Vs an unarmored target CR's do 14.7% more dps than ARs
Vs a flak vest CR's do 28.5% more dps than ARs.

And these numbers change significantly as you alter the armor value of the target.
As for your assertion that:

Proper sniper shot is essentially a free action

That's ridiculous. That's like saying " If my opponent has no arms, legs, or eyes, I could make him a great mushroom omelette with a side of elephant ears."
Being able to manufacture any given scenario does not mean that the the infinitely large number of other scenarios cease to exist.
There are times when the AP of long range weapons matters, end of discussion.
If you want to compare various weapons in various scenarios then that's fine, but make sure you've got your math right and make sure you're accounting for scenarios outside the ones that you're imagining but not communicating. Otherwise you're just spreading misinformation disguised as fact with poor underlying math.

Feedback from players on the ludeon forums is mostly hardcore players, even a lot of the lurkers finally posting are also hardcore players you'll notice.

This cannot be underscored enough, IMO.  Posters here and on Reddit are almost certainly not a statistically representative sample of who plays the game.  Plus, there's enough hyperbole and exaggeration mixed in with genuine high skill that one can get the false impression that B18 was too easy at any difficulty level.

Can't help but agree, but at least it's reasonably transparent. It's undoubtedly part of the reason that Tynan is so keen to get first time poster's thoughts. We all derive what it is to be normal by constantly looking at the people around us and if all those people are constantly raving on about how they only play tribal extreme on ice sheet then that's going to have an effect

As mentioned though it's fairly transparent, and there are ways for experienced players to step back and take a fresh look at things. Assessing why they know something or do something in particular is always a good start. Why do you hate non-violent pawns and when was the last time you actually recruited one for example.