Unstable build feedback thread

[Greep]

Did some testing of my own and kill boxes are still effective, don't know what everyone is saying. Sappers are still an issue, but feel no different from previous versions. It`s still a massacre when a raid enters a killbox, and with a thick enough perimeter you can respond to any sappers in time to at least hold them off before you can fully respond. Only thing that has really changed noticeably is upkeep cost for turrets, and in my opinion they weren't what made killboxes good and you can do fine with just one colonist and MAYBE a turret to distract anyone who may get there before you.

In my personal opinion, we can't really "fix" killboxes without spamming sappers and sieges every raid, which will lower variety. We just need to accept the fact it will always be a thing and you can't really balance it without making the game less fun for others who don't enjoy that strategy. You're doing the right thing with more versatile raids dropping in and stuff.

My experience has been in that the upkeep isn't noticeable until you've mined out all of the raw steel on the map and then need to drill/trade, so it needs a long playthrough to really feel it.  Early game the crunch is components more than steel.  But late game, if you play deep in a mountain, you might have trouble affording steel and if you play an open map, you'll have problems making a killbox. 

Edit: haha, wondering why half my base is nearly shattered: update increased wood max hp but not current hp 

[I Am Testing This Game]

In the door melee situation you describe which funnels melee accessibility to one tile, I have noticed situations where enemy AI pawnstacks multiple units into a single pile, allowing 4+ to simultaneously attack a unit.

This doesn't happen all the time, but if it happens you end up with extreme damage spikes.

Have you not experienced this? Does the door tile prevent the pawn stacking?

Supposedly this doesn't happen anymore. It was in one of the patch notes, people can't stack.

So you can just put some armored, semi-disposable melee up front and have a bunch of guys shooting over their shoulder, while the melee raiders have to fight one at a time.

It's easy when it works, which it has so far for me in 1.0, but I haven't played enough to know if it works 100% of the time, there may be times when they stack.

(I would note that while this is pretty effective, it is pretty boring compared to door micro based tactical combat.)

[JimmyAgnt007]

When fighting in doorways, I dont have anyone in the door, i set it to stay open, then have 3 melee on the safe side, each able to hit that single attacker.  Then, have shooters behind them.  I think the two tiles in front of a shooter are safe, so you can have a LOT of guns aimed at the single door.  Thats how I deal with bugs 99% of the time.

Is this an exploit?  I dont think so. 

[SpaceDorf]

Hiho,

there is this stupid little thing that happened to me thrice now in the pawn overview menu right before the Game starts in honest.

- I changed the Nickname of a possible future Colonist
- I hit return to confirm the change
- The Game Starts before I even reviewed all People

Now I either have to life with bad colonists or redo the whole creation process again, trying to find that sweet spot on the planet again and all ..

Please prevent that from happening again.

[TheMeInTeam]

Supposedly this doesn't happen anymore. It was in one of the patch notes, people can't stack.

So you can just put some armored, semi-disposable melee up front and have a bunch of guys shooting over their shoulder, while the melee raiders have to fight one at a time.

It's easy when it works, which it has so far for me in 1.0, but I haven't played enough to know if it works 100% of the time, there may be times when they stack.

(I would note that while this is pretty effective, it is pretty boring compared to door micro based tactical combat.)

People *can* stack, but it's a lot less practical, more finicky, and dangerous because of how it will push pawns when the destacking is applied.  What can happen routinely is manhunters attack + switching off a door, allowing the next one to get an attack at a faster cooldown than normally possible.

To put it bluntly, melee is still not a good option on extreme, though it has some use cases early on with 5v1s on isolated raiders.  Even blunt attacks can cause bleeding wounds, which can then get infected.  Vs manhunters on that difficulty, it quickly becomes untenable...even in a 1 tile choke with lots of DPS having something like 30 caribou immediately replacing the last will wear you down.

The door nerf is silly...or rather the *way* it was nerfed is silly.  The number 1 reason they're so strong is how they manipulate AI pathing and targeting, not because they have a lot of HP.  I don't think there's a single theoretical door HP value that leaves doors usable and still fixes this problem...it basically has to be how threats interact with doors, because this is what the micromanagement uses to beat the AI.

Even with ~100 hp steel doors, alpha "9" strat vs manhunters is still killing them with open/shut door micro and shooting them.  To make this safe, make a corridor 1 tile wide to limit the #attackers.  Compare this to melee: it takes slightly longer to resolve the threat, but literally no pawn takes damage.  So long as taking damage is as punitive as it is in the game, any strategy that takes more of it is disproportionately non-viable compared to micromanagement or options that largely or completely avoid damage.

There's an offset problem to this though.  Make raiders too door happy, and you open up micro to freely potshot them from other door and/or turn all raid variants into pseudo sappers.  I think the best you can do is throw a little more RNG behavior into raiders in terms of firing on doors etc and make their reactions to player actions less predictable.  Door HP nerf isn't going to change the realities of the game unless it's so extreme that external base doors are an undue liability.

[MajorFordson]

Woo, I don't check the forums for a few months and THE FINAL UNSTABLE IS HERE.

Game is LOVELY, so much polish and little changes left right and center!

Something happened a day or two into my first game in 1.0, on normal temperate forest map. It seems like ALL of the animals decided to path out of the map at once. A bug? It felt really creepy, would be cool if that happened before some disasters, but it just felt like a bug!

[Bones]

Maybe if they could stop and retreat a bit, move to another spot on the map and harass the player. Then either give up and leave or to try breaking walls where there are no doors near them.

[Mehni]

The berry bush does not adhere to its selection box.

It's one of those "literally unplayable" things you know will pop up on reddit sooner or later.

Wish I had more practical feedback to give, but I haven't had time to play. I will say that over the past ~5 alphas I've seen RimWorld's focus shift. It used to be a colony simulator that generated stories because it was a pretty hardcore game. Now it's a story generator that simulates a colony, with the occasional (sometimes hamfisted) event mixed in that was designed to tell stories.

Hearing the same stories over and over again (dogs eating drugs, pyros going crazy, colonists returning to the wild) diminishes the replayability for me, whereas I enjoyed the more natural developing stories.

Objectively, RimWorld 1.0 is a much better game than before. There's more content, there's more polish. Every part of it is better. Subjectively, it feels shallower. There are a lot of systems, but especially some of the newer systems don't go in-depth.

Speaking of systems: There are a couple of classes that are internal which don't necessarily make sense to be internal. I'd really like access to Command_VerbTarget for a turret mod, TrashUtility for a custom raid AI mod and most conveniently the MedicalRecipesUtility, because I keep having to duplicate code or use reflection.

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[Sirinox]

I want to say that from playing experience I find it hard to utilize armor (mostly plate armor, but powered armor of low quallity too) in colder biomes. Now I'm playing in boreal forest and in winter even guys in power armor of normal quality are chilling at lowest temperatures, so I guess at colder biomes it even less of an option. Plate armor gives almost no insulation so it is viable almost only at summer in these latitudes.
Before I'd compensate it with less protective but better insulating wool button-down shorts and pants, but wool now is not much better at insulating then leather, and can't give them pants at all because armor takes the slot now.

Wool is nerfed too much too, I think. I understand why it has much less armor (despite wool gambesons are a thing), but with muffalo wool giving just 4 degrees more insulation and almost no armor I'd rather use leather for everything. Bluefur parka gives almost same insulation while much better armor, and wolfskin beats wool at everything. So I found myself not needing wool at all in current game.

I kind of miss different move speed and work speed penalties on different apparel so one could choose what to trade for what. Cumbersome but warm parkas made sense. And armor vests should definitely slow pawns as well, at least a bit, so one could trade mobility for armor and vice versa.

For the record, I want to say I absolutely love new armor system. Despite being skeptical about it at first, it's definitely more interesting then previous. Especially the part with turning affected sharp damage in blunt damage, no more thousands of small bleeding infected hare bites for armored pawns, yay! c:

When fighting in doorways, I dont have anyone in the door, i set it to stay open, then have 3 melee on the safe side, each able to hit that single attacker.  Then, have shooters behind them.  I think the two tiles in front of a shooter are safe, so you can have a LOT of guns aimed at the single door.  Thats how I deal with bugs 99% of the time.

With shields it's viable to have even 1-2 more rows of gunners. Pretty devastating.

[Perq]

Even more caravan stuff (yes, I've been doing some caravaning of late, new quests seem to show up, some of them are even somewhat worth doing):

When caravan creation is interrupted and pawn (and pack animals) have items on them, these items will not show as available to be taken with the caravan, until they are dropped on the ground (any storage area).
This is kinda annoying when you forget to add an item to the caravan, and now you have to wait until everything is unpacked, only to pack it again.
I think making all items visible (including those pawns are carrying, but not gear they wear) would help with this, maybe (?).

[xion1088]

I think I'll still need mods like Lush Meadow and Fast Growing Grass, my maps still looks and feel really empty after winter.

[Syrchalis]

Can't you just pause and send them? As far as I know they take what they have in their inventory with them (plus whatever you tell them to take). If you want to unload something you can manually unload it.

[Zoolder]

TheMeInTeam, I disagree with your statement about melee being non-viable in previous versions and this one. My dominant strat still depends on putting a heavily armored tank in a choke, and has for a while.

I basically couldn't imagine running extreme without melee. I almost always start with a brawler for this reason (Even though melee really takes off in the mid-late game when you have shields and strong armor)

Also, does higher penetration on weapons factor in to organ damage chance? I really think it should, I'm not seeing that it does. I'm noticing very few organ injuries and it would be cool to have weapons that could easily destroy a kidney, especially on someone without armor.

[iamomnivore]

Am I missing something, when it comes to Operations? I have a living outsider and no Operations tab even shows up. It's just not there ... Is there a legit reason for this? If not, looks like a bug.

Further, the Operations tab was missing while she was "Rescued" and then appeared when I captured her. At the same time, another "Rescued" individual DID have the tab. Both were in medical-assigned beds. Both in the same room. Same doctor. One had the tab, one didn't. Both have it now that they are imprisoned. Hope it helps. Thanks.



Thanks.

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[Teleblaster18]

I'd like to raise a point that I know is entirely subjective, but one that I think is critical to raise, after a few dozen hours of playing the various iterations of 1.0:

I consider the genuine genius of this game to be the ability for a player to indulge in the weird, the excessive, the outright ridiculous and funny.  I don't consider combat to be an end unto itself, but rather the means to the end: another hurdle to be dealt with, so I can get back to doing weird, hilarious and excessive stuff.  As a result, anything that distracts or frustrates me from my goal detracts from my fun.

It's not critical to me if combat is perfectly balanced, because I don't play this game for the combat...it's one element of a larger picture, and raids are one threat among many to be dealt with in the overall scheme of things.  As a result, I will use cheese tactics unabashedly so I can preserve my colony, keep my colonists safe, and continue to do ridiculous stuff.  I will build obscenely large trap mazes, with 24 turrets waiting in a killbox at the end - because there is something glorious and inherently satisfying about watching 50 pirates blunder into it.  I'll take a week, realtime, to build a 3-thick wall around my base.  I build slowly, play slowly, grow attached to my pawns, and want to keep them from dying by any means necessary...so that I can continue doing ridiculous things.  I can absolutely play this game without "cheese", and have - and often make a conscious and deliberate decision to use it for these very reasons...cheese is often hilarious, and lots of fun.   

With my personal ethos stated, my conclusion is this:  I know that we're in a phase where the game is being re-balanced, so the conversation is naturally being directed towards how combat is being re-vamped, how AI will path better to increase tension and remove "cheese" tactics, etc., and I understand the importance of that in it's context - but I personally feel that the camera lense is narrowing on this to a degree where the other, and for me, more important elements of the game are somewhat falling by the wayside in the conversation: the weird, the bizarre, and especially the hilarious.

Again: I'm speaking subjectively, but I would love to see the focus turn somewhat into how the game is expanding upon those elements that drew me to this game to begin with.  I guess it's a fundamental shift from the question "is it balanced/fair" to "is it fun?".  For me, fun in this game IS excess.  It's watching a Pirate's brain light on fire when they get hit with a Psychic Shock Lance.  It's hitting an Animal Pulser for the first time, not knowing what exactly it will do.  It's cracking open an Ancient Evil.  It's watching two factions battle it out in front of my base with incendiaries, with me running around putting out the flames through the crossfire.  It's the first time I discover I can harvest kidneys.  It's the first time I tame a boomalope, put him in my barn, and then realize it's got a heart condition.  It's Muffalos getting into the yayo while I wasn't watching.  It's Pirates running off with one of my colonists.  It's manhunter Capybaras.

In short, what I really hope the conversation will turn to at some point in the near future is an emphasis on those elements: a new version of a shock lance that's never been seen before, a new animal that does something weird, new gameplay elements that haven't been seen before which will make a player curse and laugh at the same time...and in equal measure with the attention that re-vamped combat is currently receiving. 

Thanks for listening and reading.