Unstable build feedback thread

[Oblitus]

Yeah, as per my edit above, I'd like to see predators simply go "Manhunter" (with all that entails) when their hunger dips to "starving".  It makes sense (if it's starving, your plump, juicy pawns are gonna look extra tasty), and it *works* because your other pawns and turrets will help defend a pawn being attacked instead of just ignoring it.

Manhunting does not really work here as it is now since manhunters don't eat downed pawns. They don't even finish them off. Which actually makes manhunter much less of a threat than a predator. Manhunter's victim almost always can be saved, but a predator aims to kill.

[XeoNovaDan]

I've just finished my run, successfully evacuating 10 out of my 12 colonists from the planet. Play settings were as follows...

Storyteller: Cassandra Classic, Rough, Permadeath
Scenario: Naked Brutality
Location: Temperate Forest (40/60), Flat, Ancient asphalt highway bisecting a Huge river
Time Taken: 467 ingame days

I've also attached some screenshots (excuse the JPEG on some; had to get under 600 Kb somehow). If you're wondering who Sheba is, she's a timber wolf who ended up sustaining two brain injuries (3/10 brain, one from an ibex leg, another from a deer leg), as well as multiple missing body parts (her jaw, an eye and so on); she was so weak that she'd even fail to hunt rats owing to her absolutely atrocious 8% melee accuracy.

Now, I shall share my experiences and thoughts throughout this run...



The Ending: If there's one way to describe the ship ending sequence in 1.0 unstable, I'd have to say that it's certainly engaging yet borderline punishing in terms of difficulty. I've been willing to sacrifice a lot more over my colony's final 15 days, knowing that this is the final push before ultimately escaping the planet (or hopelessly perishing). Raids are frequent enough for the most part that they keep you on your toes, allowing just enough time to recover, but not enough to get comfortable.

That being said though, the final 24 hours were particularly difficult to get through, getting four mechanoid raids (one haywire, three centre-drop) within the space of about 10 ingame hours; there was no recovering, basically being one big battle. In fact, I probably wouldn't have made it to the end if if wasn't for the fact that all 12 of my colonists were decked out in full sets of power armour, mostly of at least good quality. At the end of the onslaught, I felt weary, along with how my colonists probably would've felt if they were real people.



Raids: The new raid types (groups and haywire pods) throw a refreshing spice into the mix, and kept me on my toes too. However, I've also found it challenging to keep track of enemies with both of these raid types, especially with mechanoid raids since mechanoids don't have red name tags unlike hostile humanlikes. As a result, I often ended up missing one or two enemies post-defence when experiencing the mechanoid variants of these raids, only noticing them when they kill a colony animal or start harassing a colonist.

As various others have pointed out too, I've also found centre-drop mechanoid raids to be somewhat common, even with the latest build. While challenging, it can get old over time. Pirate raids were rather rare in my experience until the very endgame after 'befriending' both the hostile tribe and the rough outlander union. Most of my big threats were either mechanoids or outlanders.

Regarding death-on-downed, I'm torn: one part of me agrees that this is overtuned since I've been hard-pressed to find decent recruits from raids, but another part of me somewhat likes this since it's a 'beggars can't be choosers' type of deal.



Weapons: Melee weapons have definitely become much more viable in 1.0 compared to B18, owing to their DPS bump as well as the nerf to ranged weapon melee DPS and the fact that all ranged weapons have a minimum range of 1.5 (why these are defined per weapon def rather than just the abstract bases for ranged weapons still baffles me, but I digress). I've generally stuck to gladii rather than longswords though since they're significantly cheaper while offering most of the performance, but this is just classic diminishing returns and is fine as it is.

There are two main things that I'm not so keen on though: the changes to weapons like the assault rifle, and ranged stagger. Two-burst shots with the AR and CR just don't feel right in my honest opinion considering that the real-life equivalent (at least for the former) would have a burst mode which fires 3 shots. Subjective, I know, but I personally would've preferred treating the AR as an 11-damage weapon and just define its AP based on that, while leaving it as a 7-damage weapon with a 3-shot burst, and similarly with the charge rifle.

Ranged stagger is a whole other beast though, and I definitely believe this should be changed. A 95-tick duration of slowing down a pawn to 1/6th of their normal speed regardless of the difference between stopping power and body size is very potent, and I've personally found that the ability to stagger has been a significant factor in deciding what weapons I use. In this run, bar a few exceptions, I've generally stuck to the revolver and bolt-action rifle until mid-game (completely avoiding the heavy SMG which I used to favour), then transitioning to LMGs and charge lances. The only non-staggering weapon that I'd really consider using after this run is the minigun due to its very strong DPS and the fact that it matches the assault rifle in range.

It's also odd that a longbow can stagger centipedes, yet a high-powered sniper rifle can't.

Suggestion and all, but I'd personally replace the flat 95-tick duration a method call that does something like this:

• Pass stoppingPower and target's bodySize as parameters
  
• Assign a variable who's value is determined by this: (stoppingPower - bodySize) / stoppingPower
  
• Make a SimpleCurve with the points (1, 1), (0.8, 1), (0, 0.2)
  
• Return the product of: 120 * SimpleCurve.Evaluate(variable)
  
• In return, all weapons will have a stoppingPower, maybe their damage * 0.1. Of course, there may be some special cases like with shotguns where you could multiply by a further 1.5.

I've also found rocket launchers to be woefully underwhelming when I or the AI used them, practically bouncing off of power armour due to their mere 5% AP, similarly with mortar shells. Sure, power armour is meant to be strong, but it shouldn't be able to render rockets virtually useless. It'd also be nice if AP per damage varied per damage type; stabs would be more effective at piercing armour than cuts, for instance - this'd also give spears and iklwas an interesting niche.

Regarding turrets, I've used all three existing turret types in my run. Thoughts on the two new turret types are as follows...

Autocannon Turret - its practicality as it stands is fairly limited, only really being able to get hits off against mechanoids and 2+ bodysize animals; it's pretty weak against anything else. Then again, I can see how this'd be design as almost specifically an anti-mechanoid turret owing to its AP - it goes down easily in mechanoid fights though with pretty much any mechanoid type, owing to its 200% target size and the fact it's somewhat flammable. However, it's a waste of steel even having it bother in non-mechanoid/large animal combat, but I could also just set the turret to hold fire.

Sniper Turret - Not so much a sniper turret but rather a long-ranged quasi-machine gun turret with its high fire rate and damage seemingly compensating for its poor accuracy at its optimal distances. I thought that the autocannon turret was niche and barely practical, but this takes things to a whole other level. It misses most shots against anything that isn't a large target, which means that maintaining it becomes a huge burden on steel if not micromanaging that 'hold fire' functionality.

On the note of maintenance though, I do like that turrets now have a tangible upkeep, and this'd also open up more opportunities for modders to make interesting and unique turrets.

Finally, relating to weapons, it'd be nice if the 'Destroy weapons' bill didn't default to allowing orbital beacon weapons to be destroyed. I thankfully caught a colonist in the act of doing so, but other people may not notice so if they have a smelter with said bill active, then they go and get an orbital weapon and get confused about where it's gone once returning.



Apparel & Textiles: While I do really like the condensation of textiles, some of the changes to apparel I've found slightly less desirable, and I'll go through each individually.

Materials - There's a notable discrepancy between leathers/fabrics and wood/metals: inspect heavy fur, then inspect plasteel. While this has no gameplay impact since leather and metal are strictly separated, it certainly does affect the flavour. I have no doubt that heavy fur is strong, but I highly doubt it'd even be as strong as steel at a given thickness, let alone plasteel. It gets worse with textiles like thrumbofur and hyperweave which both apparently massively surpass plasteel. Perhaps reduce the StuffPowers and increase the factors of general clothing items, because this is lItErAlLy UnPlAyAbLe.

The Flak Jacket - I was skeptical of it when first seeing it, and that skepticism remains right now: why the flak does this even exist? It doesn't fill any new niches, and I'd much rather take a bearskin (or better) duster which offers very similar protection levels but has vastly superior insulation and covers the legs! Sure, the flak jacket covers the neck, but frankly so should ordinary jackets, dusters and parkas.

Apparel balance in general - I'm still not sure why apparel movement speed and work speed penalties were removed. Additionally, there's no longer any differences between parkas, jackets and dusters when it comes to protection amounts, when there used to be in the past (parkas < jackets ~= dusters). I feel that this has removed some of the depth from the game, which isn't a good thing, but that's just because of the type of player I am.

All of those issues aside, and ending this section on a positive note: I do quite like the new armour system. While there are cases where something like a sniper rifle bullet could tear through power armour as if it were made out of paper and perforate one of the unlucky victim's vital organs, it's been made quite a bit clearer and the blunt conversion mechanic is nice.

Also, unlike the flak jacket, flak pants are a nice addition to the family!



Animals: This run has been particularly animal-heavy, and I've enjoyed doing so. Unfortunately there's still the issue with malnutrition when there's a large amount of animals and relatively few reservable food piles (zone restrictions to encourage kibble eating), but that's relatively minor since the animals will be force-fed once they pass out from extreme malnutrition. I like the upkeep required to keep animals trained since it's both a balancing act and also helps combat handler skill decay.

Another addition that's pretty neat is that animals can get diseases, which again favours per-unit strength rather than a boar zerg.

In combat though, especially with gunfights or predators when hunting, I've noticed that animals can quite quickly accumulate brain injuries which soon renders them practically inert - this also being not being helped by the removal of trauma savantism for animals which used to give them a second chance of sorts, as well as a manipulation boost which benefitted their melee accuracy. I've had a lot of animals either die from brain injuries, or from 0% consciousness as a result of a brain injury, pain shock, and usually 'severe' rather than 'extreme' blood loss (this also being a cause of confusion for newer players). I have adapted to the latter though by having really quick doctors patch them ASAP without using any medicine.

Tail loss also seems to be common, with most tailed animals losing their tails before anything else.

It's also hard taming new animals once the colony has a lot of predators since the predators will still hunt animals that have been marked for taming whenever possible. Perhaps there should be a food preferability offset for cases like this, only being applied if the predator is obedience-trained. On the other hand, this could be seen as a counterbalance.

Also although it may be intentional that animals aren't meant to be smart with food selection, perhaps they could be a little smarter if, again, they're obedience-trained; it gets quite tedious with zone restricting large amounts of animals. This'd also give obedience training more of a purpose outside of being a prerequisite.



Caravanning: Probably one of my favourite changes for 1.0 is the much-improved caravan forming UI, much-improved caravan rewards, and the ability to forage on the go. Quality of Life here has definitely improved, and it's a pleasure to see caravans automatically go to their first destination once exiting the map, which, it's also nice to see that they go to the part of the map that corresponds with their designated world travel direction.

While I occasionally caravanned in B18, I snapped up many opportunities in the mid-game to caravan since the rewards were too good to pass up. That being said though, and as is typical with late-game, offers soon became less tempting (why have an excellent pump when you can make an excellent LMG).

It's also great to see that packaged survival meals are now viable travel rations, and I've always ensured that I built up a decent stock of them when going on mining expeditions or just bringing large parties in general; I previously avoided them like the plague due to their expenses and the fact that they had less per-gram nutrition than pemmican. Thanks for changing this!



Plasteel: With the emphasis on plasteel being rarer, I don't feel that this has really been achieved; I still have no problems with filling up my plasteel reserves in storage from mechanoid raids alone. Most of the time, turrets like sniper turrets would actually work out being cheaper than autocannon turrets in reality, at the stage one'd consider making them.



Miscellaneous Thoughts: This is just a list of various other thoughts which I haven't really built up on enough to put them into their own categories.

What I like:

• More faction hostilities. I had a savage tribal caravan (got goodwill from releasing prisoners) and gentle tribal caravan arrive at the same time and they started duking it out right outside my base, using my bunkers. Free goodwill, medical exp and items! Manhunter bears showed up right near the end of the fight.
• The new textures are gorgeous! larSyn did a great job.
• Many Quality of Life improvements! (Better Workbench Management, Allow Tool, I Can Fix It etc.)
• Click-and-drag medicine setting and checkboxing. This has saved me a lot of time!
• Bridges, watermill generators and underwater conduits make river maps actually have a noteworthy purpose
• Centipedes are actually worthy adversaries now, rather than a joke
• Recreation matters now! It's nice for it to actually be something to invest in to take full advantage of, rather than just slap down a horseshoe pin and forget
• Plant regrow mechanics are pretty good; no more grass halos with a barren centre!
• More lore references (e.g. archotech parts, johnson-tanaka drive research renaming)
• Tidying up of the research tree
• Flavourful social chat system! Some combinations can be pretty damn amusing.
• The new traits are pretty neat
• Hunting. No more shooting all 5 limbs off a quadruped just to kill it!
• Notifications being archived. Although I wish it could be made clearer that you can pin notifications, and that notifications go back further than a quadrum or so. A search filter would also be nice.
• Deep drill infestations add a bit of risk to deep drilling, rather than just mostly fire and forget
• Generalising 'Inspired Art' to 'Inspired Creativity'. I'll actually go out of my way to make sure that an inspired colonist makes the most of their inspiration (high-grade manufacture, investing in wake-up)
• Masterwork and legendary qualities feel much more meaningful than they did before. The condensation of quality in general too
• Minimum skill levels for crafting recipes. Creates interesting dilemmas for scenarios like Naked Brutality!
• The component assembly bench has gotten some love
• Pawns aren't inconsiderate jerks and no longer observe art in other peoples' rooms
• The ability to move around smaller workbenches
• Extension of the deterioration mechanics is pretty cool
• Production of prostheses and bionics feels reasonably balanced
• Soaking Wet is the new Ate Without Table. How dwarven! Even power armour can't save one from this thought.
• Space salmonella is no joke

What I dislike:

• The fact that traps can no longer affect colonists or allies. This is just illogical in general, and it just means you can spam traps literally everywhere without giving second thought to it - so long as you have the resources
• Predators no longer hunting colonists. However, this is basically irrelevant at this point.
• Some other renamings (e.g. difficulties, gravel -> sToNy SoIl). I feel that some of the game's flavour is being sucked out here
• Heavy SMG is an Uzi, which is a 9x19mm weapon - not a high-caliber round. A more suitable weapon would probably be something like the UMP45
• Continuous nerfing to watermill's powergen. Maybe increase it back to 1200W or 1400W, but make it require a 'Hydroelectricity' research project
• There still aren't really any ways to fix up animals other than healer mech serum. Even some really basic prostheses like peg legs and dentures would be pretty neat
• There's no way to reserve animal beds for strictly medical purposes (something which'd be useful to have with animal diseases due to the immunity gain bonus)
• Still somewhat skeptical of the fact that elite mercenaries can no longer use charge weapons

Conclusion: Overall, I've enjoyed testing 1.0 unstable, and having my fully-committed test run be under the new scenario is all-the-more satisfying. Sure, things will be a little rough around the edges, but that's to be expected for public testing; that is the purpose of it after all!

I do have some gameplay concerns, mainly with things like apparel stat simplification, and I sure hope that nothing else gets simplified to the same degree, but hopefully those concerns will go.

Thanks for reading!

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Greep]

One thing about autocannons xeo: they do definitely wreck centipedes like nothing else.  They're also kind of best used the same way you'd use turrets regarding accuracy:  Perimeter wall to limit range so the enemy has to get closish.  I find them actually best used with their min range right up against the gates so that even if they can't hit everything coming at them they always have a target and always hit centipedes who stay at the edge.  That requires a bit o fire support, but that's not a bad thing

Playing more of my own game, cabin fever really feels like its a relic of the time before infestations with the state its in regarding mountain bases.  It's pretty annoying having to draft pawns and push them outside.  I've allowed them outside to cloudwatch and put a horsehoe pin outside to force them out every now and then, and this is simply insufficient.

Limiting the debuff to -6, but making it much harder to remove, would at least make it so mountain players or players suffering a toxic fallout can just take the hit and deal with bad mood.

Or just make it very easy to remove and hard to put on so if pawns ever go outside it goes away.  Either way, I just hate the way it is now 

[mndfreeze]

I miss natural tornadoes. Once Tynan removed them, there has been only 1 feedback regarding this, who said that they were a useless addition. I have a conversation with other RW players discussing Tynan's updates and one of them said that he'd stop playing if tornado incidents don't happen in the final build.

I won't speak for his reasons, I will speak mine. I kinda liked this feature in B18. The thrill if it doesn't hit my colony. Twice I had to rebuild my power sources after tornadoes. Stone walls were receiving slight damage due to them, but it wasn't that serious. It becomes more of an issue with a larger colony, as it's more likely to hit your buildings. Maybe I haven't experienced this destroying my legendary beds or wiping out all my medicine but this incident may create many interesting stories.

I'd rather not have them.  It's not the tornado itself that's the issue. It's the fact that I have literally zero way to mitigate or protect myself.  Huge swam of bad guys comes down I at least can TRY to kill em, or traps, or use my brain.  Tornado is just pure random RNG with zero control for the player.  It's pray and hope it doesn't run right over the middle of your colony and auto kill all your colonists who were near it. 

If there were a lot more features built around the tornado, like ways to protect yourself or prevent it and it wasn't so RNG all or nothing than I wouldn't mind it really.

[Greep]

Wow it's... pretty amusing looking at that mood graph compared to mine.  I guess my colony is like some kind of viking berserker colony in comparison.   I think if I joywired everyone the mood would still be worse on average 

[attachment deleted due to age]

[mndfreeze]

Made new tribe with 1.0.1956. Flat area, tropical swamp with river. Extra hard Randy.

Wanted to grow cocoa trees. They suck. It takes too much time to plant them and result is unsatisfactory given growth time and used space.

Love how bridges work on such kind of map. It gives flexibility to build almost anywhere, but still it has huge price behind it even with ~infinite ammounts of wood around.

What's up with giant overpowered raids against my tribal colonies? All the time the same story: steady stream of weak raids and then suddenly this giant thing with doomsday launchers, power armor and miniguns... It looks off. Is this because I crafted that legendary wooden plate armor and masterwork marble table?

It's not just you.  I'm having a ton of difficulty with tribal games even on lower difficulty settings.  I posted about it in another thread.  For me the issue is scaling.  There is no waaaaaaaaay I can get my tech or even loots up fast enough to compete with some of the earlier big raids.  I'm struggling to even get electricity a lot of the time even.  It feels like the research numbers are not scaled right to the difficulty increase of the game and the addition of lots of extra steps to get to different places in the tech tree.  I'm usually still using bows or garbage pistols when dudes start showing up with decent armor and higher tier stuff, or when mechs start coming. 

[Yoshida Keiji]

could we please get some sort of an indicator next to pawn portraits if their caravan is idle? I seem to miss the notifications sometimes.
Also on the subject of QoL, why does the "haul things" tool only work on junk? Can there be a way to prioritize hauling collected crops from the fields?

+1

I also want a "Prioritization" of haul items, not just automatically based on proximity. Also, in early Lost Tribe game, I had issue with Building using wood. The construction would automatically prioritize walls, which is an optimal default I appreciated, but occasionally I wanted coolers/bonfire or other furnitures that required wood, but all would be "hauled" to the walls. I just stopped wall building for a while to get all other items done. The player should decide what is collected first, and what is built with or made with such resources first rather than an "unchangeable" game-self-set choice.

[JavaWho]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433845951
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433846166

I will set meals to a particular number and if the meal is not in the stockpile the cook continues to make more than the set amount.  I do not recall this happening prior, do not know if it is intended. 

This has happened in several biomes and various map types.  This particular run is Naked Brutality on Hard, but it happened on Cassandra Hard also.

Thank you

[Yoshida Keiji]

Animal predatory change. Check map for food, if none herbivore animal present, check for colonist pet, if none kill the nearest human for food. The point is we can avoid random predator eating our colonist, as the player maintain animal ecosystem on the map so the predator not ran out prey/food. Maybe add warning when last wild herbivore animal extict. If player kill all animal except predator, its their own fault if predator attack them

I'm just quoting one response, but I read many others and I'm glad people realized that removing Predators attacks flattens the game by completely taking out flavoring texture. By the read based on comments scan, it is easy to tell most people don't play harsh biomes like Ice Sheet for example. Any player who has ventured there and built a city wall around knows and loves with a passion to have Predators roaming around your base...simply because there's no need to traverse a whole map to hunt it but you just have it "right there" like served on a silver plate...

...and of course...this applies just the same for the TORNADO... Like really...

I played sooo... many games with Tornados busting through my base...and I said to myself "meh...", rebuilt what was destroyed...and just kept playing... The Steel Slags can easily be made back to raw steel.

I find it really hilarious how people ask for "countermeasures"... How do you want to deal with a tornado? By getting a Ghostbusters "Proton Pack" to suck it in?


Going back to the Predators... they always work for me as an "extra colonist", as they hunt for me without me having to send somebody, but only to haul their left overs to the freezer. How many times a predator hunted a raider? Or a trade caravan...and the surprise of it? People don't realize that removing predator attack on characters reduces storytelling to boring levels and how unentertaining becomes if get "alert notifications" for that... we are in the wild! We crash landed!...to the middle of nowhere...

Stop eternally living in the cradle, don't be forever in your comfort zone, go get the adventures.

[Greep]

I think most people would like it if it was just easier to know that predators were there in a common sense way your colonists would notice.

I'm pretty sure if your colonist saw a bear, he wouldn't derp around cloudwatching right next to it.

Regarding tornados, I think people were more annoyed that it could appear right on top of your colonists.  You can't rebuild corpses 

[Yoshida Keiji]

I don't mind dealing with predators. I just need to know they're there. Maybe just show a notification on screen any time a colonist sees a predator. Colonists with limited eyesight wouldn't see them as far away.

+1

This! I said it many times, and I will say it again...I'm an outdoorsy, I love nature, I go to the wild myself and with friends. Anybody who leaves the comfort of home knows it... when you are out there... we all tell each other what we saw outside and the dangers to keep others safe. I would love an icon display pretty much like love with a heart, a smiley for kind words... I would love to have a dialogue bubble of exclamation marks like this: (!!!)...as in saying spotted a predator while I was outside that triggers on everybody else as the witness gets into range of other colonists. Then based on the player customized task, one can know where the pawn was walking around and send a tracking expedition to hunt the threat.

We could also have cage traps for the big games...pretty much like in Real Life.

[Greep]

Well this is weird.  After breaking a siege some of the enemies start going for my base.

The others?  Shooting... caribou? Wha...?

[attachment deleted due to age]

[ChJees]

Well this is weird.  After breaking a siege some of the enemies start going for my base.

The others?  Shooting... caribou? Wha...?

What did the caribou ever do to them ?

[Greep]

Oooooh.. heh.. I think it self joined a while back and I must ave never rezoned it 

Looks like they rooted out my caribou spy 

[Fleurs]

I really love that traps can now be springed by animals (whatever happens - please dont take it away). But it's a bit exploit'ey on winter maps w/o any natural food for animals - they will all charge to get any food that I leave (see screenshot).

I don't think that "exploit'ey", since your screenshot show what is basicaly a big mousetrap, a piece of food, and a big trap on it. It is still working in our era. I'm sure a beartrap and some meat could catch some animal in the forest.