Unstable build feedback thread

[Tynan]

It is good to make the door less practical. But I need another alternative. There is no alternative now. sapper and base enemy drop and manhunter pack will absolutely depend on the door.

Even a fight with an early rabbit is dangerous. They are wounded and infected.

With good weapons and good armor, just fight and shed blood! Like a World Map battle! So I do not fight World Map until I have enough weapons and armor. It shows terrible infections and high loss rates.

Is not it fun to show different results depending on the control than just fighting with good weapons and armor?

This game is not an RTS game. Colonies die easily and can not be reproduced.
This is like running some kind of RPG or XCOM. The loss of each one is very large and the recovery of the wound is slow and dangerous.

I continue to report that the risk to the world map is great.

After you nerf an exploit-y strategy, the game will often become harder/too hard. The solution then generally isn't to bring back the cheesy strategy, but to redesign/rebalance game to be nicely playable without the cheesy strategy. So I may end up e.g. nerfing the manhunters, for example.

[Perq]

Played a longer session yesterday, fiddled with autocannons a little bit more. Seems it was simply me misunderstanding them at first - they actually work quite well if they are placed with their minimum range in mind. The process of working out their weakness is pretty interesting too. That said, I think the point-blank-turret-block (aka they can't hit targets that are in melee range) could make them even-less just place it and forget about it.

They are still pretty expensive, but I guess that is balanced given they enable you to have less people defending given spot. Feels like a good trade-off and choice to make.

About doors change - I think it is a good change. You can literally kick a wooden door out. They shouldn't be that much of a blockage for attackers. This also means there is more incentive to use stone doors in crucial positions (more choice = more fun, at least for me), at cost of slower movement.
This also makes placing doors a more strategical - you can't just put them everywhere so that pawns move easily, because they can also be weak points.

[Wanderer_joins]

Even the steel doors before the door patch were easily destroyed in the Manhunter pack. The health of the door patch is really low.

This video is the manhunter pack before the patch when the door was 250. In this video you will think again about weakening the door. Look until the ostrich is all caught.
https://youtu.be/Isi0s_yed0k?t=4h11m59s

But if you stay inside after the first door is broken you're safe. What bugs me and what i can see in my runs, is when the colonist decides to go for a walk outside the restricted zone, which i guess is what happens at 4:17:57 in your video and may have doomed more than one colonies

[East]

Armor has improved a lot. However, it is natural that there is little response to armor.
This is because no one is wearing armor.
I love rimworld. I usually see the rimworld twitch at the time of the rest.
Most streamers were not able to play until most armor was made.
The plate armor requires 250 steel. 250 steel! I will not think of making bad armor with it beacuse crafting staff stat is low.
People can not secure production staff, they are picking up weapons from enemy. And they wear a pair of clothes. There is no time and resources to make armor.

I make clothes, shave components, train crafting, and then crafting stat over 10 and build armor. It is natural. It's armor expensive and there's a lot to do. Most early production cuts stones.(However, cutting the stone does not increase the crafting stat. How could it be!)

[DariusWolfe]

While I think East strongly overstated the issue, it's a very legitimate point. I'm only now getting to the point where I regularly wear armor in-game, because of the high production costs; I'd rather spend resources on weapons than armor most of the time. I'd like to give a better answer, but I know that I'm almost never wearing armor (aside from the set that Crashlanded gets now) before the 1-1.5 year mark.

[Razzoriel]

I'm taking a bug report for the manhunter door thing.

Do you have any thoughts on your new armor calculations? Are you keeping that abomination, thinking on reverting, redesigning....

I'd have to hear some reason why, most people here seem to like it from what I can tell. Make sure you're aware of the latest changes since the unstable build.

A 50/50 fixed chance to deflect/halve-and-convert-to-blunt damage when you get the chance to reduce damage is too clunky. The suspension of disbelief leap into t-shirts made out of leather deflecting bullets is just too big. The fixed 50% reduction is pretty strict and simply removes the whole idea of surviving or having a limb stay attached to a body by a sliver. You already have damage that always deal full damage with no random mechanic whatsoever, so there's no grazing shots or attacks already...

I'm not gonna suggest you do anything, it's your own game. Just going to throw out that mixing both elements would be the best way to solve that; this way you can have bulletproof vests that won't deflect bullets but will reduce damage, or metal armor that can entirely deflect shots or go through. It's pretty clear that you want to make customizable projectile force by using the stopping power mechanic, then I'm not sure why you haven't thought of simply mixing both elements and make some sort of "ArmorDeflection" and "ArmorReduciton" hybrid system.

Kenshi goes a step-beyond these systems, and has a "coverage" stat on top of armor reduction and limb system. Trousers with 40% coverage on your left leg and 80% on your right leg, for example, would have a 40% chance to apply the armor reduction on every attack on the left leg, and 80% on the right. Of course, I'd say this is just another level entirely of complication, but it's another way of doing armor.

Now, I've heard some rumors that damage amount affects how armor rating works; I have not found that in the code you wrote anywhere, so I'll ignore that.

[Trallhatt]

About armor. In my play (of earliest 1.0 unstable) i crafted hi-end armor, not for everyone of my 10 colonists, but for the "tanks". Works fine.

Also, obviously i made sure to not use colonists lousy at crafting to create rather costly hi-end armor. I'm not sure why you would want to, or what you are thinking if you do. It's very easy to translate this to real life..

[Syrchalis]

While I think East strongly overstated the issue, it's a very legitimate point. I'm only now getting to the point where I regularly wear armor in-game, because of the high production costs; I'd rather spend resources on weapons than armor most of the time. I'd like to give a better answer, but I know that I'm almost never wearing armor (aside from the set that Crashlanded gets now) before the 1-1.5 year mark.

Guess it's a playstyle thing. While I don't rush armor I generally tend to go for armor before weapons, because weapons barely get better. Greatbows or high dps weapons (machine pistol/heavy smg) will do fine for a really long time.

[Polder]

My plans always include making a suit of flak armor and a helmet for my pawns, but the material costs are high and getting weapons, proper rooms, a freezer, advanced research bench, a proper hospital, walls, medicine, food supply, etc take priority.

[Tynan]

Why not use some wood plate armor?

[Polder]

Why not use some wood plate armor?

Umm that is a thing?

[Razzoriel]

Why not use some wood plate armor?

Umm that is a thing?

It is, and it deflects bullets, exactly how wood works in RL.

[Lanilor]

I'm now almost a year in in a new game and here a few experiences:
(Naked survivor cass intense)

- It was way harder this game to get new colonists. Half of the time I had only one and most of the rest only two. That also has reasons in this run since my first second pawn was old and killed by an infection and the second second pawn got shot by my starter colonists. Overall this feels right for me and fits the challenge better than previous versions.

- I had huge problems with the raider AI. Mostly after my pawn walks in the door and the door closes, the raider just stand still for 10 seconds and do nothing. Then they walk away to a wall piece or something outside to destroy it and when my colonist walks out the door to shoot a few times, they turn around to attack him. He walks in the door, everything begins from anew. Sure I couldn't use this, but a bit strategy for fighting should be possible, without feeling to abuse a bad AI. At least they should attack the door or be a bit more decisive on their plan to destroy something.

- The system where you don't lose reputation when visitors die of something else is really abuseable too. I just opended the ancient danger when a trade caravan was visiting and they killed the mechs for me. Easy way to obtain an excellent charge lance this game. (Also a short note of something related I heard in the discord: Calling two caravans from factions hating each other will result in them fighting and you can just loot a lot without losing anything.)

- Watermills are actually more challenging now. I can still rely on only them. I also dislike it that the hurdle for other renewable power is behind a research with solar and batteries. I simply can't affort much research, so water power is the way to go. I would like to see something improving here for more variaty. This sure makes rivers stronger and I feel it's just like mountain bases where poeple always go into a mountain now go to a river, which limits variaty. I don't want water power to be weaker, more that the system should have decent alternatives and not water standing clear out.

- Quests have huge impact in the game if you manage to get one. I don't know if this is intended and I'm not sure if this is even bad though. This game and last game I could get the first item stash which gave me an excellent weapon and a megascreen tele plus something else. In this game it waas a short 2 day trip with 6 manhunter cassovaries as defence. Was possible but risky with my two colonists.

- That leads to caravaning which feels nice now with the new system. I couldn't experience much of it but it was always fun and now it's even better with the UI and improves travel times. I often played with caravans to get ore from a near mountain with the set-up camp mod instead of deep drilling, which feel more realistic and provide additional challenges. The long range scanner now has something like that, but I'm not far enough in the game to use it, but for me that system could be even more enlarged so there are normal mining places on the world map for steel and maybe other resources. You travel there, mine ore (or maybe even the same for other resources like getting wood from a near forest for a desert base), get raided so you need to defend you stuff and bringing it home feels like a good archivement that brings you forward in the game with having material for building a lot of new stuff.

- Apart from the previous mentioned AI door problem, I enjoyed most of the raids. They were a good challenge but not overwhelming strong and with the large variety I could think of different ways to defend agains each one. So sometimes I chose open field battle, sometimes I open doors and fight inside my base, sometimes trying to flank, ...

- I don't build killboxed and never will, so I can't say much more to that topic from a bit ago. Normal defences work well enough and are more fun for me.

I recorded my playthough with daily map renderings and made a gif in case you are interested. For some reason imgur didn't work, so here is a dropbox link that needs to be downloaded, sorry (~10mb):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3wpx5ht990txfnw/base-1y.gif?dl=0

[Tynan]

Razzoriel, t-shirts won't deflect bullets, there's an armor penetration system.

If you've got a specific idea for an armor change please offer it, but before that I think it'd be worth actually playing with the system as it exists to understand how it works and how it plays.

A general reminder: The theorycrafting moratorium continues and theory posts not based on actual play experience may be deleted.

[East]

Why not use some wood plate armor?

I have to research the plate armor separately and it feels more like wearing a little more clothes than wearing it.
In the early 20~40 defense, there is no big difference in wearing clothes and feeling.

And the flak vest is worn by the enemy. Take it away.