Unstable build feedback thread

[ReZpawner]

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.

Yeah, but what if you wear like 8 flak jackets? then it would be like a 50% reduction. We should totally crunch some more numbers on some "what if" scenarios here.

More seriously though, with the latest changes, is there a specific way that you're hoping people will play? I only ask because a lot of the old strategies no longer work at all. Much like back in the days when scary and IED's were removed (the first time).

Any pointers?

[Tynan]

This is a bit theorycrafty but I'm curious: what was the idea behind it?

Making legendary weapons legendary.

Before we could only buff accuracy, but even if you take it to 100% there's a low limit to what it can do. E.g. assault rifle has 80% weapon accuracy, buffing it to 100% only increases DPS by a quarter. It'll still miss a lot because of the shooter, or cover, etc. A 25% buff isn't enough for legendary, we need more.

It's gonna get balanced, I suspect the quality impact is too high now but we'll see.

[Madman666]

I could argue, that Rimworld rarely contains normal humans (without health ailments that is) with unaffected move speed and that further -8% stacking with other penalties could mean a difference between dodging\escaping something or getting rekt, or that equipping every colonist with a bionic leg to compensate for wearing a flak set is a tad much, but i ll abstain from further theorizing as you asked.

Instead i'll switch to another topic of world map events scaling to your colony wealth. I did some experimenting with my colony of 15 people (Randy, Hard, flat temperate forest) and mining sites from mineral scanner and was unpleasantly surprised, that with wealth level of 200-300k (i had around 290k-ish when scanner picked up my first silver lump) sending anything less than 3\4 of my colony is a suicide run. The site said it was unguarded, so naturally i thought about an ambush. I send 5 solid people in power armors with assault rifles (1 medic, 3 miners and one dedicated soldier with 14 shooting) and 5 muffaloes to see what can i get.

Instead of getting anything of value as soon as i approached the lump (which was pleasantly big), i got jumped by 16 (!) raiders. It was a hilarious mess of a slugfest in completely open space without any kind of cover aside from occasional trees, some of raiders even with ranged weapons for some weird reason kept coming in melee range preventing my people from shooting. As a result i lost my hole caravan with their expensive equipment, marking the start of death spiral with constant mental breaks from having lost family members and friends, promtly ended by a drop pod raid of mechanoids finishing me off.

From those sad events i understood one thing - as long as world map scales to your colony, not your caravan, i won't come anywhere near caravaning system again. Its nice to know how many people are guarding some site in advance, but if they will always scale with what you have on your map, not what you can send out - your wealth will always stack faster and higher than your combat ability based purely on your colonists, since you can't bring defenses with you. Unless it was balanced around caravaning system being only early to midgame option, i strongly suggest revising the way threat generation works for events on the world map.

[XeoNovaDan]

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.

This has certainly improved in 1.0 from my experience, mainly since eyes no longer scar instantly. I've certainly felt the effect of this change in 1.0, where I'd have had many disfiguring and otherwise somewhat debilitating scars, but I didn't get a single eye scar in my run I just completed. A pawn with armour is barely slower than an unarmoured pawn though to be fair; this'd only really have a profound effect if they're super far away from your base as a raid approaches, or if you're kiting which is an AI cheese anyway.

Yeah, but what if you wear like 8 flak jackets? then it would be like a 50% reduction. We should totally crunch some more numbers on some "what if" scenarios here.

It's physically impossible to wear 8 flak jackets at one time, and that'd only be a ~20.8% reduction even if it were, unless you're somehow wearing something like 7 flak vests and 4 flak pants at the same time as well. Completely unrealistic.

...further -8% stacking with other penalties could mean a difference between dodging\escaping something or getting rekt, or that equipping every colonist with a bionic leg to compensate for wearing a flak set is a tad much...

One thing I really like about this change is that now one would mindlessly slap a full set of armour on a colonist at their own risk, rather than being a 'fire and forget' sort of deal. It's sort of a balancing act: "do I favour manoeuvrability in battle and only give them a flak vest, or go for the full cow and give them a flak vest, flak pants and a bearskin+ duster?". Also, the jogger trait fully offsets the speed penalty from having a full flak set.

...as long as world map scales to your colony, not your caravan, i won't come anywhere near caravaning system again...

Colony wealth scaling is fair, but I do agree that it should be discounted somewhat; even sending out just half of your colonists is a big risk to take. Especially with ambushes where you have very little time to position your colonists, unlike an outpost assault where you can coordinate a planned attack. Perhaps it could be like the old raid points system where item wealth is taken into account at an increased weight, if it isn't so already.

That being said though, I haven't really sent many caravans out since this particular change, so I'm just going off of my current experiences with the 'old' scaling, and effectively multiplying that by a factor based on what I've seen with newer world events on my map.

[Alenerel]

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.

Maybe it would be worth to put the buffs and debuffs in % instead of these almost abstract numbers of c/s, difficult to understand.

[mlzovozlm]

i think scaling base on caravans' strength/wealth not gonna work, since u may very well, send out 2 colonists with bare equipments for a load of nice reward

scaling on wealth isn't working nicely either, since wealth doesn't neccessarily scale with reseasonable ratio with defense/offense ability

let's have it scale on fighting capability of the colony instead, calculating base on the total number of armors & weapons & colonists available in the colony, weither they're equipped or not

[Madman666]

This has certainly improved in 1.0 from my experience, mainly since eyes no longer scar instantly.

This is a really nice change. The fact that hares no longer can like bite your eyes out in one unlucky attack is huge. Thanks to Tynan for that!

Colony wealth scaling is fair, but I do agree that it should be discounted somewhat; even sending out just half of your colonists is a big risk to take. Especially with ambushes where you have very little time to position your colonists, unlike an outpost assault where you can coordinate a planned attack. Perhaps it could be like the old raid points system where item wealth is taken into account at an increased weight, if it isn't so already.

That being said though, I haven't really sent many caravans out since this particular change, so I'm just going off of my current experiences with the 'old' scaling, and effectively multiplying that by a factor based on what I've seen with newer world events on my map.

World map events scaling to your overall wealth is not fair in the slightest. Its not like you bring your whole colony with traps and turrets to a fight, right? So why in the heavens would the game count your overall wealth not the wealth of people and equipment you send out? That would be fair. I guess i can see the problem of that approach - you can try cheesing world events by sending a couple people in mediocre equipment late game to circumvent most threats. But current idea of using colony wealth as an element of threat scaling just makes lategame caravanning absolutely not worth the risk. You don't even risk just your caravan, you risk both a caravan and a colony wipe.

If you wanna keep caravanning viable even late game - it should be possible to send out small contingents of people on mining and trading missions, without the risk of just sudden death via 16 raiders. I understand outposts having such high enemy counts - it should be damn challenging to take out someone else's base. But other events could really use a chill pill.

[ChJees]

I find it weird from a RP\in-game viewpoint that I can get the Peace Talks quest ~15 days in. Wouldn't the players colony be barely known at that point?

[Tynan]

I'm gonna curve the caravan incident wealth scaling.

It is appropriate for it to have some effect - a caravan from a 20 day colony will be much less equipped than one from a 120 day colony - but it needs to curve and ceiling differently. I just haven't balanced it since Ison put it in is all.

[mlzovozlm]

This has certainly improved in 1.0 from my experience, mainly since eyes no longer scar instantly.

This is a really nice change. The fact that hares no longer can like bite your eyes out in one unlucky attack is huge. Thanks to Tynan for that!

Colony wealth scaling is fair, but I do agree that it should be discounted somewhat; even sending out just half of your colonists is a big risk to take. Especially with ambushes where you have very little time to position your colonists, unlike an outpost assault where you can coordinate a planned attack. Perhaps it could be like the old raid points system where item wealth is taken into account at an increased weight, if it isn't so already.

That being said though, I haven't really sent many caravans out since this particular change, so I'm just going off of my current experiences with the 'old' scaling, and effectively multiplying that by a factor based on what I've seen with newer world events on my map.

World map events scaling to your overall wealth is not fair in the slightest. Its not like you bring your whole colony with traps and turrets to a fight, right? So why in the heavens would the game count your overall wealth not the wealth of people and equipment you send out? That would be fair. I guess i can see the problem of that approach - you can try cheesing world events by sending a couple people in mediocre equipment late game to circumvent most threats. But current idea of using colony wealth as an element of threat scaling just makes lategame caravanning absolutely not worth the risk. You don't even risk just your caravan, you risk both a caravan and a colony wipe.

If you wanna keep caravanning viable even late game - it should be possible to send out small contingents of people on mining and trading missions, without the risk of just sudden death via 16 raiders. I understand outposts having such high enemy counts - it should be damn challenging to take out someone else's base. But other events could really use a chill pill.

if it only base on the caravan you send out, then you may send out only 2 colonists for a quest, eventhou your maximum capability is 10, so that's not gonna work so great
instead i suppose a model something like this should do

let's assume the number of colonists is x, the total wealth is y, the total of fighting equipments (armors, weapons, turrets, etc.) you've is z

the max capacity (rate) of offensive capacity that you can "generate" 'd be calculated base on x & y be z1, similarly, z2 be the max for defensive

it'd be your best interest to keep your REAL fighting ability (z) relatively close to z1 & z2 as the incident involved fighting 'd take into account z1 & z2
e.g:
raids 'd send out the offensive with z1' (raider's strength) = 50%-100% (or more - depend on game difficulty & weither or not u sent out caravan) of z2
meanwhile, ambushes = 40%-60% of z2, meaning it's your best interest to send out half your offensive ability   

[Serina]

More apparel covers the neck.
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.
Adjust some biome animal densities.

Well done. I was going to post about wildlife density in tundra biome last night but something came up irl so I couldn't. Anyway, I'm glad this was adjusted. The wildlife in tundra felt a bit excessive. I could feed my colonists, animals, power 10 chemfuel generators and still have this much meat stockpiled: https://imgur.com/a/CLRxn29

I aggressively hunt wildlife on the map, excluding bunnies. Mainly to help train my shooters and whatever I can fit in the freezer goes in. However, it got to the point where I've had numerous animal corpses on the ground because my freezer was overflowing with bodies. Had so much meat didn't bother to grow potatoes for a long time and just fed everyone with simple meals since I needed to grow cotton for carpet.

I'm glad more apparel covers the neck. It's hard to equip everyone with power armor just for the neck cover in colder biomes because it doesn't give much insulation. The return of decrease movespeed when wearing armor doesn't bother me much as I tend to favor bionics over natural bodies. I'm glad parka doesn't decrease movespeed anymore like in b18. Hopefully that doesn't get reverted

Edit: Sorry, plate armor. Not power armor.

Also, not sure if this has been brought to attention yet but my last raid was day 157. I'm now on day 294 and still waiting. https://imgur.com/a/RMmu8RD

I did get a psychic ship 15th of Septober 5504 but that's about it. Someone else said they haven't been getting raids since they became allies/neutral with the other factions as well. I understand the other factions not raiding, but where are all the pirates? I don't even remember which faction raided me last, but I don't think it was pirates either.

[Madman666]

Thanks. I'll wait for it and then experiment some more, to offer more feedback once th changes are in. I regretted a lot that caravanning wasn't really worth it in B18, risk\gain factor wise, so I am glad to see it get some love in 1.0 and i d really like it to be still viable even if you manage to hoard crapton of wealth.  Those events just honestly need to depend not only on colony wealth but also on the type of world map site\event - as in outposts-bases - more harsh, since you have the tools and time to plan out an assault, while mining sites\refugees\road ambushes should scale with your party's wealth (makes sense that a rich caravan get a lots of attention, while refugees and mine sites aren't such juicy targets, until you mine it all out and try to haul back home).


Edit:
Your formula looks much better than what we have now. Though I won't claim i fully understand how it will actually work.

One small correction though - the game should only count fighting equipment that is on your colonists, to avoid spiking offensive force after a raid just brought you a big bunch of weapons. Well no, scratch that. You will be able to send naked people in, then change into armors to cheese it. Damn. Balancing is hard. 

Dunno how will you balance it in the end, but if you make it so that you can't cheese it, but will still be able to make use of caravanning early and late game with lots of wealth without being forced to send half or more of your people out, to just not die horribly on a first ambush it d be absolutely stellar.

[zizard]

I've noticed some of my colonists having persistent bad moods from minor pain (-5) caused by scars with just 1% pain. Feels like this should scale a bit more closely with the pain level.

[Tynan]

Some posts were removed; this thread is for discussing play experiences, not open-ended suggestions, theorizing, or questions.

This thread is not for discussing the change list. Discussions of or questions about the change list will be deleted. This thread is for discussing play experiences and giving feedback based on play experiences. You're welcome to make another thread to talk about the changelist if that's what you want to do.

[Sirinox]

Instead i'll switch to another topic of world map events scaling to your colony wealth. I did some experimenting with my colony of 15 people (Randy, Hard, flat temperate forest) and mining sites from mineral scanner and was unpleasantly surprised, that with wealth level of 200-300k (i had around 290k-ish when scanner picked up my first silver lump) sending anything less than 3\4 of my colony is a suicide run. The site said it was unguarded, so naturally i thought about an ambush. I send 5 solid people in power armors with assault rifles (1 medic, 3 miners and one dedicated soldier with 14 shooting) and 5 muffaloes to see what can i get.

Instead of getting anything of value as soon as i approached the lump (which was pleasantly big), i got jumped by 16 (!) raiders.

What was the difficulty level?

Well, 5 people with power armors and 5 muffaloes have a decent chance to shred 16 raider (~8 actually, because it's enough to make them flee), though not with risk or casualties, so it's as it should be imo. But I'd say they all should be at least decent fighters, some melee fighters could be useful as well.

It was a hilarious mess of a slugfest in completely open space without any kind of cover aside from occasional trees, some of raiders even with ranged weapons for some weird reason kept coming in melee range preventing my people from shooting.

You could sacrifice muffalos to save the pawns, 5 muffalos would beat the raiders coming close pretty easily.

As a result i lost my hole caravan with their expensive equipment, marking the start of death spiral with constant mental breaks from having lost family members and friends, promtly ended by a drop pod raid of mechanoids finishing me off.

That a nice tragic story too.

From those sad events i understood one thing - as long as world map scales to your colony, not your caravan, i won't come anywhere near caravaning system again. Its nice to know how many people are guarding some site in advance, but if they will always scale with what you have on your map, not what you can send out - your wealth will always stack faster and higher than your combat ability based purely on your colonists, since you can't bring defenses with you.

But you can. You can get some wood or steel with you to quickly build (implied you have decent builder in caravan group) some walls and/or sandbags. Stone chunks can be quickly moved around to make makeshift defense line in the few seconds you have while raiders come closer. You can take a butchery table (20 kg) for easily installable 3-tile 40% cover barricade, but I prefer shelfs for they have better tiles/weight ratio. Some alternative weapons to switch (like from snipers to LMGs), EMPs and grenades are also advisable.

Before approaching a reward or incapacitated pawn it's useful to prepare defenses, at least a small defensive line and a room to hide in for if you'll need a melee advantage.

Harsh, risky, but nothing impossible. Mid-End game colonies should be capable of sending help via drop pods, using battle drugs and get more better skilled and equipped in the top-notch gear pawns with caravans.

[attachment deleted due to age]