Unstable build feedback thread

[TheMeInTeam]

I just want to add that I completely disagree with this notion. If you want easier combat, just lower the difficulty. That is it.
If you leave in those cheesy tactics, many people feel like they should use them. They are fun. For a while.

I'd like to see evidence that someone claiming a tactic is cheesy knows what cheesy is.  Even in their own terms.  I don't think you do.  I don't think Teleblaster does.  And I don't think Tynan does.

Why do I think that way? Because to this point, not one person has taken the time to frame the term in a way that distinguishes "cheese tactic" from "gameplay" in any meaningful capacity whatsoever.  Meanwhile, the thought process is a deviation from the stated process for balancing Rimworld!

Put another way, that's at least three people now (actually more) that are straight up claiming with a straight face that the act of opening and shutting a door intentionally is cheese in Rimworld, and that somehow tuning the HP of a door changes how this interaction works in practice.  No sell.  For there to be a legit (IE coherent) case, that criteria must exist and it must anticipate and separate normal game actions from alleged "cheese" consistently.

You'll find it's hard.  I suspect you can't do it.  Usually people start along the lines of "abusing the AI", not noticing how this suggests most raid logic shouldn't exist at all.  But maybe you can, beating the odds set by hundreds of people before.  Maybe it's not impossible.  Let's see.

[Tynan]

I don't believe that the term "Prosthetic Heart" is grammatically correct: I'm pretty sure that prosthetics only refer to external replacement body parts.

The defintion of prosthetic I got is: "a device, either external or implanted, that substitutes for or supplements a missing or defective part of the body."

[Greep]

Well at least someone gets to enjoy the apocalypse.  I was like.. HOW IS THIS GUY HAPPY?!  That being said, the end of the game is really insane.  I don't think I'm going to make it xD  4 days 5 raids    Guys can't even have time to eat, sleep, rearm cannons, and tend wounds.


[attachment deleted due to age]

[Tynan]

TheMeInTeam, almost anything that is real and important can't be perfectly, crisply defined. They don't need to be to be important and meaningful concepts. Compare arguments:

"Cheesy tactics can't be strictly, perfectly defined therefore the concept is meaningless and kiting a thrumbo between two doorways for 30 hours while killing it risk-free with short bows isn't really distinguishable from fighting a positional battle with multiple raiders, therefore trying to increase non-cheese tactics is foolish."

"Porn can't be strictly, perfectly defined therefore the concept is meaningless and a close-up video of multiple naked people having sex isn't really distinguishable from a video of a couple talking at a restaurant, therefore trying to exclude porn from any space is foolish."

I've seen the same content-free argument - that definitions aren't perfect therefore goals are meaningless - wrongly applied to game cheese tactics, porn, racism, sexism, gender, communism, Naziism, extremism, terrorism, politics, religion, and everything else people argue about.

It's a "fully general" argument in the sense that it can be used to attack almost any position on any topic. Also, notably, while this argument is usable to attack any idea, it cannot be used to actually create any positive meaning, only break down meanings.

It can be used universally way because anything real is complex and has fuzzy definitional boundaries. If we excluded terms with fuzzy boundaries from our discussion, we would literally not be able to say anything about reality.

The fact that the argument works no matter the target means that it is a specious argument. (If any argument can be used to take any position, it logically cannot be correct since it cancels itself.) It's just a meaningless attack tactic used to break down structures of meaning, drawn from Marxist dialectic, which works in some cases because it's easier to make the argument than to explain why it's so completely wrong.

Reality: Cheesy tactics, while we can't hard-define them, exist all the same as porn, religion, and terrorism. And we can and should determine the meaning of that any take action in accordance with that meaning. In this case, cheesy tactics fill player time that could be spent in more rewarding ways, and I want to shift that time from tediously and risklessly killing a Thrumbo with door-cheese to engaging with stories and game system in deeper, more varied, more storyful, more memorable ways.

---

Leaving aside the content of what you're saying, which is not rule-breaking, the tone of how you're saying it is. Consider this your warning: The way you're continually hammering this point with an aggressive tone and taking personal potshots at me and others is now a combined rule 1 and rule 2 violation.

You may post in this thread, but if you make anything personal, express hostility or anger towards anyone or anything, you're likely to earn a ban. My friendly suggestion is to take a few days time out.

If you do post again, either tell a specific story about something that happened to you in game, or give a concrete suggestion for a specific change you'd want to see in-game.

[Admiral Obvious]

I don't believe that the term "Prosthetic Heart" is grammatically correct: I'm pretty sure that prosthetics only refer to external replacement body parts.

The defintion of prosthetic I got is: "a device, either external or implanted, that substitutes for or supplements a missing or defective part of the body."

I think there are two types of heart "solutions" which aren't full bore transplants. I think there's a "synthetic heart" which would be a full replacement of the heart itself as a type of "advanced" heart. We haven't perfected synthetic hearts yet. Then there's a "mechanical heart" where you have an implanted machine which helps to regulate the heartbeat. It's not quite the same as a pacemaker either. I don't know too much about it, but ice met a few people with the latter.

I think synthetic would be a more proper term for organ replacements over prosthetic, though it doesn't really matter much.

[Tynan]

The term "prosthetic" has a bit of a game mechanics meaning too, though. It denotes a certain tech level of artificial parts. Prosthetic -> Bionic -> Archotech. Hence the choice of prosthetic. It makes all the parts of each tier group together nicely on lists.

[Admiral Obvious]

The term "prosthetic" has a bit of a game mechanics meaning too, though. It denotes a certain tech level of artificial parts. Prosthetic -> Bionic -> Archotech. Hence the choice of prosthetic. It makes all the parts of each tier group together nicely on lists.

Indeed it does. Just my 2 cents on the topic.

If it's a matter of helping the player know "prosthetic is tier 1" that's fine to keep it as it is. I don't mind either way, I'm just having fun with each patch as they come along.

[Boboid]

On the much lighter and objective subject of grammar - The Jealous trait.
Modern english has mashed Jealousy and Envy together but strictly speaking Jealousy is a fear of losing something while Envy is the desire to have something you lack.

You might Jealously guard your treasure, but you wouldn't Enviously guard it.
Envy is more about coveting things.

There's also a small typo in the shield belt research description "which use momentun-repulsion"
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In other news the plate armor cost change feels about right, it still requires a lot of research but once that's done it feels fairly efficient to slap on some armor, particularly for melee focused pawns as they typically eat a bit of extra gunfire and the extra blunt resistance when compared to clothing is more relevant.

In my melee-only game (using a gun to hunt occasionally but that's the extent of it) the transition from steel armor to shield belts was pretty harsh but I think that was mostly due to a significant wealth increase caused by the first devilstrand crop.
Suffered a bit of a trader drought as well which bad luck.

Overall once shield belts are available melee is in a pretty excellent spot against anything short of coordinated volleys. Shield belts even do a pretty good job of mitigating doomsday rockets. The abundance of heat armor on most high-end equipment makes inferno cannons considerably less likely to cause a critical failure spiral too.
It's still quite finicky to get 10+ pawns meleeing the correct targets even in an open field, a search-and-destroy style feature would be useful. On average I'd prefer melee pawns to have the option of always attacking the closest target.
Currently you can kind of achieve this by setting pawns to attack when confronted with an enemy and de-drafting them but.. then you've obviously de-drafted your pawn and need to re-draft it to exert any control over it. It also occasionally causes pawns who are too far away from an enemy to just go about their day harvesting crops instead of fighting.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that melee skill levels up really fast even without a passion. Melee passions aren't particularly uncommon in any case but I don't feel the need to restrict my recruitment based on them which is nice.
---
I finally got to play with the Tough trait a bit and.. only cow it's ridiculously desirable. It's applied before armor mitigation which is a real doozy. Bringing a 10 damage shot down to 6 and then down to 3 is a big deal.
I'm not quite sure what - if any - effect it has on armor durability, I tried to test to see if it reduced the durability loss of armor but completely failed. There seemed to be some variance and decimal-pointing going on that I couldn't account for in game.
Overall it probably shouldn't reduce the durability damage that armor takes, as its effect is already extremely strong.

[bbqftw]

TheMeInTeam, almost anything that is real and important can't be perfectly, crisply defined. They don't need to be to be important and meaningful concepts. Compare arguments:

"Cheesy tactics can't be strictly, perfectly defined therefore the concept is meaningless and kiting a thrumbo between two doorways for 30 hours while killing it risk-free with short bows isn't really distinguishable from fighting a positional battle with multiple raiders, therefore trying to increase non-cheese tactics is foolish."

"Porn can't be strictly, perfectly defined therefore the concept is meaningless and a close-up video of multiple naked people having sex isn't really distinguishable from a video of a couple talking at a restaurant, therefore trying to exclude porn from any space is foolish."

I've seen the same content-free argument - that definitions aren't perfect therefore goals are meaningless - wrongly applied to game cheese tactics, porn, racism, sexism, gender, communism, Naziism, extremism, terrorism, politics, religion, and everything else people argue about.

It's a "fully general" argument in the sense that it can be used to attack almost any position on any topic. Also, notably, while this argument is usable to attack any idea, it cannot be used to actually create any positive meaning, only break down meanings.

It can be used universally way because anything real is complex and has fuzzy definitional boundaries. If we excluded terms with fuzzy boundaries from our discussion, we would literally not be able to say anything about reality.

The fact that the argument works no matter the target means that it is a specious argument. (If any argument can be used to take any position, it logically cannot be correct since it cancels itself.) It's just a meaningless attack tactic used to break down structures of meaning, drawn from Marxist dialectic, which works in some cases because it's easier to make the argument than to explain why it's so completely wrong.

Reality: Cheesy tactics, while we can't hard-define them, exist all the same as porn, religion, and terrorism. And we can and should determine the meaning of that any take action in accordance with that meaning. In this case, cheesy tactics fill player time that could be spent in more rewarding ways, and I want to shift that time from tediously and risklessly killing a Thrumbo with door-cheese to engaging with stories and game system in deeper, more varied, more storyful, more memorable ways.

---

Leaving aside the content of what you're saying, which is not rule-breaking, the tone of how you're saying it is. Consider this your warning: The way you're continually hammering this point with an aggressive tone and taking personal potshots at me and others is now a combined rule 1 and rule 2 violation.

You may post in this thread, but if you make anything personal, express hostility or anger towards anyone or anything, you're likely to earn a ban. My friendly suggestion is to take a few days time out.

If you do post again, either tell a specific story about something that happened to you in game, or give a concrete suggestion for a specific change you'd want to see in-game.

You are correct, there is a definition for cheese. It is "stuff I don't like."

I will point out that TMIT gave a number of constructive suggestions for improving raid behavior and unpredictability. Just because he is effective in breaking your vision to a degree that even most extreme players do not achieve doesn't mean he's wrong.

Incidentally, your envisioned positional battle against raiders is as full with AI manipulation as thrumbo looping.

Things like intentional cover placement to get no cover shots, breaking LoS by watching AI targeting behavior, maximizing Xv1 interactions, arguably even knowledge of the peek mechanic and its various effects all involve some or large measures of AI manip.

[TheMeInTeam]

Let me start off by apologizing.  When I get into something I do lose control of my tone sometimes, and I realize this is a flaw that interferes with my ability to be constructive, to the thread or even for myself.  At no point have I actually felt hostile to anybody, but reading over the posts...not a good look for me.  I should be able to get my point across w/o resorting to that.

To make this more succinct, less hostile and actually on topic:

- It's not true that I made a fully general argument.  Bugs, crashes, even porn actually do have criteria/definitions that allow people to anticipate future observations that fit the category.  These are almost always self-consistent to one person.  Several of the other terms too.  Cheese does not, unless we're talking about food, it's not even *broadly* defined in context of one person using it multiple times.  Building on that,
- It is my impression that a focus on this resulted in a mistaken change based on stated premise - in other words, if there are actions you wish to eliminate from Rimworld the particular door change does not accomplish that goal.  For example if we hold the "kill thrumbo with bow and pathing abuse" is undesirable for the game, no HP value for a door gets rid of the tactic.  You can do it with 1 HP wooden doors at will.
- Suggestion: There are two parts to this.  First is whether to give doors some HP back and/or how much they "should have".  For this part I don't know, it depends on other factors including part of below.  But what I do know:

If you want to shut down consistently free trades from opening/shutting doors, it's the point of interaction with the door that would most benefit from alteration.  One/some combination of these would change the picture a lot more than HP changes:

- Make doors close more slowly (wood/steel at 200 ticks for example), allowing all but the slowest weapons shots in the interim.  Leave opening speed the same so it doesn't bleed base efficiency.  Maybe autodoors can be faster, giving a little boost to using them.
- Have raiders carry their aim on pawns behind doors through, continuing to shoot the door like manhunters, maybe longer.  This would make the HP value more meaningful too.
- Similarly, enemy melee sometimes attacking doors or waiting for a chance to rush in would disincentivize open/shut door play a bit.

I don't have a good solution for thrumbo/manhunter pathing manipulation, shortening alternate path checks won't solve it...a second door is still free hits.

Incidentally, your envisioned positional battle against raiders is as full with AI manipulation as thrumbo looping.

This is, unfortunately, true.  Especially once you know how the AI prioritizes cover.  It's free trades regardless and I think the AI itself needs to be made intentionally less predictable to address it.

And now that I've stated a case with less making a fool of myself, I'll take your suggestion.  Apologies again.

[Admiral Obvious]

You are correct, there is a definition for cheese. It is "stuff I don't like."

I will point out that TMIT gave a number of constructive suggestions for improving raid behavior and unpredictability. Just because he is effective in breaking your vision to a degree that even most extreme players do not achieve doesn't mean he's wrong.

Incidentally, your envisioned positional battle against raiders is as full with AI manipulation as thrumbo looping.

I'm pretty sure the definition of cheese in gaming is "a strategy or use of mechanics which isn't be foreseen by the opposing player or developer which will guarantee a win, but can easily be defeated if the opponent knew of the strategy before hand".

Like, in one of the war games I play, I have 5k resources. I build a balanced army with a mix of everything. My opponent uses exclusively attack helicopters which overwhelm what would be a reasonable amount of AA a reasonable player would bring, as well as a sweeping counter the rest of the army leading to the choppers steamrolling.

Cheese is basically an exploit of the game mechanics, and is usually detrimental to most of the parties involved. It however is up to the developer to set artificial limits to stop, or at least reduce the viability of cheese tactics.

For doors, there probably should be a mechanic which for a short period of time which prevents a door from closing if something is in the process of transitioning into the tile. That might prevent some degree of "door cheesing" provided you can still block it with the pawn in hand to hand combat.

[Greep]

So, made it to the 5 day mark.  The odds of myself making it to launch are 0% at this points, too many deaths and mass carnage. 

While I'm having fun, this definitely needs to be toned down IMO: I've had more raids in the past five days than in the past 2 years.  That kind of "haha, if it's your first time, you just lose" works well in something like they are billions where the game is an hour long or so, but it's a little disappointing after  a 40 hour game.  An "insane challenge" would have been fun rather than something that makes all of the rest of the game look kind of silly.

My fort currently looks like below 

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Tynan]

Incidentally, your envisioned positional battle against raiders is as full with AI manipulation as thrumbo looping.

Things like intentional cover placement to get no cover shots, breaking LoS by watching AI targeting behavior, maximizing Xv1 interactions, arguably even knowledge of the peek mechanic and its various effects all involve some or large measures of AI manip.

I've never said "AI manipulation" is a problem. The whole point of having an AI is so players can work to manipulate it.

A move you can do over and over, to win risk-free against threats that are supposed to be far more powerful, is a problem. That's cheese. Not the stuff you mentioned, that stuff's all fine and is the point of the game.

"maximizing Xv1 interactions" is not the same category as "kite a thrumbo between 2 doorways for 30 hours and kill it risk-free with bows". Both are "AI manipulation", only one is cheese.

[Tynan]

...

I should note that I never intended the door health change to completely solve every issue with door-based cheesy tactics. I'm aware that a full solution would require some heavy AI changes (e.g. enemies take overwatch positions on doors when they see your guys go in, things like that).

The thing is, "change the health of the door" takes me about 5 minutes, while "heavy AI changes" takes potentially weeks. So I choose to at least try the 5 minute change first. Nobody ever thought it was a complete solution, so to state that it's not a complete solution is not disagreeing with me at all.

It'd be really useful from my point of view to hear just more straight up play stories. A lot of this discussion seems to resolve around people criticizing changes based on their guesses about what my expectations or intent was for those changes. It's just not that productive, and I don't have time to explain every detail of every experiment I'm running, every plan we've got backlogged, and so on.

Please, please, just tell me your experiences and your suggestions for changes to make - but criticizing my thought process is meaningless because you don't know what my thought process is and it's not practical for me to constantly update everyone on it. To assume my thought process and then criticize that assumed entity is just yelling at clouds.

I'd like to get this thread back on track and end the side discussions. Please make posts that are directly experience based, not assuming others' thought processes, and not responding to arguments with arguments. Other posts may be deleted.

I do want to reaffirm that overall this thread is very useful. Thanks to all those who participate, especially writing nice play stories. The process continues to run well.

[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.

I just want to add that I completely disagree with this notion. If you want easier combat, just lower the difficulty. That is it.
If you leave in those cheesy tactics, many people feel like they should use them. They are fun. For a while. But then it becomes a boring chore. It essentially removes element of a game, and instead add something you have to do every time, just to render one part of the game pointless.

Pawns getting hurt and scarred in different (weird, funny, etc.) ways is part of the game. Losing is part of the game. If you want to play the game in a different fashion (render combat pointless) just mod it out. Completed game should have all of its elements meaningful.

That's not really my point...the difficulty of combat is kind of irrelevant to me, in the context of this game.

My secondary point (and a distant second) is that "cheese" can have a place in this game, IMO...where it categorically doesn't in a game that absolutely requires razor-sharp balance (a competitive RTS like COH2).  Many experienced players already forgo those methods, and there's absolutely nothing compelling them to use them.  I'm an experienced player, and in some games I use them, sometimes I don't.  I don't feel guilty in the least when I do. It entirely depends on my mood, and what I want my game experience to be.

My real point is that I feel that the focus on combat is somewhat dominating the stage, and that there's far less discussion and emphasis at the moment of other gameplay elements which make the combat worthwhile in the first place.

That's all.