Unstable build feedback thread

[mndfreeze]

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.

Its less about countermeasures and more about interactivity. Whats the point of having something thats totally random, with no way to interact, prevent, or have to think/play around being in the game?  By your logic there could be events that just pop up and say 'everyone died, game over' and it should somehow be OK and we should just live outside our comfort zone..  Tornados just need more added to them if they are going to be in the game because they are an all or nothing kind of event.  Toxic fallout?  Manage your roofs and outdoor time, have to spend time thinking how to handle food crops, sickness, etc.  Risk management is there.  Tornado? Just hope RNGesus spawns it elsewhere because if it comes near you're just screwed.  Other then running your pawns manually away from it and hope there just isn't much fun, building, planning, or anything really associated with it. 

As for predators, I've said this before. I'm totally cool with animals that hit starving starting to hunt colonists, but we need a pop up warning and pause before it happens.  This is not the same as the manhunter or revenge stuff that I think some people are mistaking it for.  When a predator gets hungry it gets HANGRY and if your pawn is anywhere close to it, closer then other wildlife, you tend not to find out until after its already biting his face off and get the colonist needs treatment pop up, and at that point he's pretty much dead unless he was already geared for melee war.

If you play on any of the biomes with a lot of wild life, like temperate for example, one of the "easiest" and recommended ways for a new player, it becomes quite impossible to micro manage watching every single predator on the map and see who is near hungry, or try to hunt them all out (manually or via priority hunting) because new ones will spawn in on the map edges fairly quickly.

I do like the changes to hunting otherwise.  It's nice that I can send someone out with a bolt action and have them hunt bears with less risk of getting eaten every single time.  And requires less micro managing on my part to manually have to draft a group and run around hunting them.  Colony sims like this should not be one giant game of micro management. 

[5thHorseman]

After playing the current build for a few hours, I really like where the raids are with respect to my ability to handle them. I'm challenged by them and they are interesting to deal with, without (yet at least) completely overwhelming my colony after a previous raid that was well under 1/4 the threat level (all perceived, of course, but man I had some crazy rampups of raids in past versions).

I don't know if it's that I'm getting better or what, but I don't think so. Before I was bored with raids because they were too easy, up until the point where one stomped me to death. Now they seem to roughly follow my preparedness for them without ever being super easy or super tough.

Cassandra Regular in a 50/60 mountain forest. AKA easy mode because I'm a wuss

[Tynan]

New build!

I'm sick, so slowing down slightly in recent days.

----

Added translation info window on main menu.
Fix: World refugee quest incident not related to population intent.
Chance of infection is reduced for small wounds.
Adjusted threat points curve to be a bit less brutal in the early-midgame.
Adjust trap mechanics.
Added flak armor research.
Reduce animal leather amount (but keep it higher than B18). Reduce mechanoid butcher products. Slightly faster wall building and mining. Extend door close time. Speed up thrumbo.
Reduce parka armor.
More apparel covers the neck.
Integrate flak jacket art.
When a predator is hunting a colonist we now send a letter.
Needs tab is now hidden for wild animals.
Predators can now hunt humanlikes at medium difficulty or above.
Ancient shrines now always contain mechanoids or hives.
Quality now affects ranged weapons damage and armor penetration.
It's no longer possible for visitors/traders/travelers to arrive if there's already a hostile but non-hostile to player group on the map (e.g. visitors from another non-hostile to player faction, but hostile to other visitors). The same applies to called traders (they'll wait before entering the map).
Made shield belt more common among quest rewards.
Armor slows pawns a little bit once again.
Rebalance melee a bit, standardize cooldowns.
Buff all sharp melee weapons' damage ~10%. Refactor and correct melee weapon debug table.
Adjust some biome plant densities.
Adjust some biome animal densities.
Remove efficiency malus from power claw.
Rebalance Alphabeavers.

[Teleblaster18]

It's no longer possible for visitors/traders/travelers to arrive if there's already a hostile but non-hostile to player group on the map (e.g. visitors from another non-hostile to player faction, but hostile to other visitors). The same applies to called traders (they'll wait before entering the map).

Hope you feel better soon, Tynan, and thanks for still plugging away at this while you're under the weather!

Regarding tonight's (this morning's) update - is there any chance of reconsidering the change above?

I can see good reasons for removing that event for gameplay balance (free loot/free faction relations improvement if you save the wounded), but (to me) those are much less important than how cool it is seeing two hostile factions shoot it out.  It really is very entertaining, and memorable. I'd personally be fine if you could find a way to get rid of any player advantage, so long as they continue to rip each other to shreds.  Just a thought...   

And - thank you very much for re-introducing Predator attacks.  I never thought I/we would be asking for someone to bring back grizzlies tearing our faces off, but...here we are.

Feel better.  We can harvest you some new kidneys IRL, if it'll help...the Dark Web is only ever a click away.

[Greep]

Don't kill yourself, a build a day doesn't keep the doctor away   Working yourself half to death is for when you fully release a game

[Zombull]

Tynan, it's looking good! Sorry you're not feeling well.

A note about bridges. It seems odd to not be able to build flooring on bridges. It says terrain can't support that, but it's a piece of carpet for heaven's sake. Some of us are weird and want things to look pretty. Building in swamps almost requires the use of bridges as foundation and not being able to pretty them up makes me kind of sad.


Poking around in the TerrainDefs I think I understand the technical limitation. Is overcoming that on your too-long list of things to do already? Maybe give TerrainDefs a way of "inheriting" certain affordances if they're provided by the underlying terrain?

[mndfreeze]

New build!

I'm sick, so slowing down slightly in recent days.

----

Chance of infection is reduced for small wounds.

Tynan feeling his own mortality with illness has granted us an infection nerf! praise the gods!

Adjusted threat points curve to be a bit less brutal in the early-midgame.

yaaaaaaaay! my tribe might survive a lil longer now.

Adjust trap mechanics.
Added flak armor research.

oh gnoes, one more thing for tribes to have to get through to survive?

Reduce animal leather amount (but keep it higher than B18). Reduce mechanoid butcher products. Slightly faster wall building and mining. Extend door close time. Speed up thrumbo.
Reduce parka armor.
More apparel covers the neck.
Integrate flak jacket art.
When a predator is hunting a colonist we now send a letter.

Hurray for predator letters!

Needs tab is now hidden for wild animals.
Predators can now hunt humanlikes at medium difficulty or above.

Well shit.....LOL

Ancient shrines now always contain mechanoids or hives.
Quality now affects ranged weapons damage and armor penetration.
It's no longer possible for visitors/traders/travelers to arrive if there's already a hostile but non-hostile to player group on the map (e.g. visitors from another non-hostile to player faction, but hostile to other visitors). The same applies to called traders (they'll wait before entering the map).
Made shield belt more common among quest rewards.
Armor slows pawns a little bit once again.
Rebalance melee a bit, standardize cooldowns.
Buff all sharp melee weapons' damage ~10%. Refactor and correct melee weapon debug table.
Adjust some biome plant densities.
Adjust some biome animal densities.
Remove efficiency malus from power claw.
Rebalance Alphabeavers.

Neat.   I haven't even seen alphabeavers at all since 1.0.  I was starting to think they got removed.  Not super happy about armor slowing pawns down again but that's fine with me. It's how it was in prior versions anyway. 

Thanks!  When I get off work I'm going to start yet another new tribe start and prepare for misery and pain.

[JavaWho]

I hope you are feeling better soon @tynan .. I know this must be a challenge to keep up with. 

I am truly interested to see the new changes ... but ...

"It's no longer possible for visitors/traders/travelers to arrive if there's already a hostile but non-hostile to player group on the map (e.g. visitors from another non-hostile to player faction, but hostile to other visitors). The same applies to called traders (they'll wait before entering the map)."

... this saddens me

BUT .. i am also happy predators can return to being proper predators once again.

[Madman666]

I can see why you'd want traders to wait until one from rival faction leaves to avoid exploiting faction relations and bloating of colony wealth via all the free stuff they drop. But nevertheless this change is no fun at all Its was really funny and hilarious to watch them shoot each other, while also wrecking your stuff with nades and incendiaries. I d much rather have them drop relations with you if they encounter each other on your land due to you working with their enemies.

Good thing predators are dangerous again and with notification it won't be quite as annoying as it was when they just killed someone and you couldn't do anything, cause it was way too late.

Also get better soon, Tynan, and don't push yourself, we need you healthy and creative

[East]

Suddenly the armor is nerf. Plate armor -0.8, power armor -0.4 ,flak jaket -0.12 ,flak vest -0.12, flak pant -0.12

1.0 start. I like it because the movement speed of the armor and the parka has increased.
But now it slows down again.
It is impossible to change during the battle, and the speed of the world map movement is also problematic.
Is it for reality?

[Madman666]

-0.4 and -0.8... Damn. Well here goes the concept of us keeping everyone armored for added survivability. With such a speed penalty survivability is what will suffer the most.

[Tynan]

Please play with it before theorizing.

(It's actually just bringing back something that was in B18, after all.)

[Madman666]

I didn't use much armor in B18, because it took ages to craft and squirrels could still take your eyes out despite you using it. On that front current mechanic is much better. But it won't take much playing (or theorycrafting on that matter) to say that in this game a slow pawn is a dead pawn.

[Tynan]

Same thing I said early in this thread - before you react to something you see on a change list, it's worth considering that it may be 10 times weaker or stronger than you imagine. If it's 10 times weaker, your opinion would be different. But there's no way to know until you play it.

In this case, the human move rate is 4.61 c/s. Flak armor removes 0.12 each. That's a 2.6% slowdown. Wear all the flak armor and then your pawn moves 8% slower than usual. You can make that up with a bionic leg, etc.

It's not that big a deal, I think, but I want to see it play and balance it going forward. What's not useful is experience-free theorizing, so I'm asking that everyone please not do that.

[mndfreeze]

I'm so happy I have a little less of a chance of dying to a rat scratch on naked brutality now.  I might make it a whole season this time.