Unstable build feedback thread

[Boboid]

Quick piece of Scyther feedback -

Their tendency to get separated from their slower mechanoid friends makes them hard to judge properly.
They really do range from mild speedbumps that get gunned down immediately to " Oh my god there's three killer robots in my hospital and 6 of my pawns have the flu "

Other than that I don't personally find them particularly threatening but.. it's a fine line. They've got serious fiasco potential as they'll cut down multiple pawns in melee if you can't get control over the situation quickly - 8 scythers dropping into the middle of your base can do some serious damage.
Those same 8 scythers running in from the edges of the map are a laughable pile of scrap.

As it stands because they're almost always separated from Lancers and Centipedes Scythers have to either reach critical mass or attack you in such a way that's hard to deal with - A caravan ambush, a drop pod attack, ect.

I definitely prefer them being separate entities from Lancers, the ability to melee Lancers and shoot Scythers is a basic but satisfying combat strategy
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I found that in my melee colony I didn't have any issues beating them to death with maces, though they were certainly the enemy type most likely to cause serious injury or death. Mostly they're so flimsy that ~5 pawns can instantly gib them with good melee weapons in a single volley.

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The uhh.. gun quality bonuses are pretty freaking noticeable.
The moment that you're able to manufacture guns there's serious incentive to brute-force excellent quality weapons which isn't the best experience. The incentive to create quality weapons was already fairly high, the current changes really tip the balance and encourage you to dedicated a lot of your manpower/wealth on gun manufacture.

It's not just efficient from a combat perspective - selling off all the lower quality weapons effectively lowers your wealth which also increases your colonist's strength relative to attacks.

To be perfectly frank I'm of the opinion that weapon quality should probably only increase the damage of Masterwork/Legendary ranged weapons.
Being able to reasonably consistently churn out good/excellent quality weapons currently makes the game exponentially easier. The fact that both Damage and AP are increased in addition to the accuracy bonus is.. a freakin' doozy.
There are also some important break points, like (Good) Bolt Action Rifles being able to destroy someone's liver in a single shot which generally makes combat a bit more volatile.

I like the idea behind high quality weapons being better in ways beyond simple accuracy bonuses (after all, the gun can only be as good as the pawn if only accuracy is affected) but as it stands the current changes make virtually all player-used weaponry ~15-30% better and it's really noticeable.

Surprisingly my melee colony was broadly unaffected by the ranged weapon quality changes but I'm mostly putting that down to Shield Belts and my ridiculous 32 population.

I will admit that it's occasionally very cool to go "OooO that raider has a high quality gun.. wait.. oh god he's got a high quality gun!".. but on the other hand it does require you to actually look at all their guns to do that

[Tynan]

New build!

Still lots to do.

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Fewer ranged weapon qualities have damage impact (only awful, masterwork and legendary.)
Apparel burning bill now excludes belts by default.
Ascetic and gourmand traits are exclusive.
We now send a letter after you research ship basics explaining how the sequence works.
Remove unused ResearchProjectDef.descriptionDiscovered.
Rebalanced points scaling for world challenges.
Tuned some healing rates.
Adjust wild animal spawn rate and manhunter chances.
Points value of one pawn scales somewhat with wealth. So late-game pawn reduction will reduce threats a bit more (hopefully making post-losses recovery and caravans more reasonable).
Rebalance charge/assault rifle to have 3-round burst, rebalance pistols slightly.
Mad animal letter label names the animal.
Make waterproof conduit cost 3 steel.
Fix: you require construction skill to build a Tube TV but not for a Flatscreen TV.
Adjusted some gun ranges.
Adjust weapon index ranges.
Slight buff to assault rifle.
Adjusted quality variance in gear generated for NPCs.

[DubskiDude]

Assault Rifles are truly the thinking man's gun.

[Grimelord82]

Cassandra rough \ Mountainous \ 20/60 Boreal that gets down to -20F \ River + dirt road.

I'm also going to chime in on leathers and duster/parka vs flak jackets - It's not just bears that are elite leather. Megatherium and Thrumbo are even better! I've only had 7 thrumbo show up in 4 years, but that's enough to outfit a colony of 10-12 in 100% sharp resist dusters or parkas. I have 9 thrumbo parkas and 12 heavy fur dusters above normal grade right now, for 13 colonists.
Then you get the occasional man-hunting event. I've had both sloths and bears come knocking in 10+ packs so far. Even without manhunter packs, I harvest 3-4 bear and sloth a year. Elite leather isn't rare, with those rates.

The flak pants and vests are great, but the jackets need a niche.

Now that my first crop of Devilstrand finally came in, everyone is dressed like Stone.

Stone is the wall upon which Scyther hordes break. He and his Warg Gracie can usually take out 3-4 if they come at him one by one. Tough is an even better trait than Brawler, for getting into things, it seems.

Edit Build 1958 is out. New build, time for a new unmodded colony. Will report back!

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[Madman666]

God, how nice it is to have three-shot assault rifles back! Thanks, Tynan. Also I ll proceed to experiment with world events scaling as soon as I get home and provide some feedback once again.

Also please do consider adding comfort to quality clothing once again. Legendary and masterwork versions of it at least - most legendary items have distinct advantages now, making it worth of trying to get them (more damage, rest effectiveness, etc). Clothing only has armor rating, which will still be worse than dedicated armor. So a unique advantage for quality clothing would also be nice to have.

[Dargaron]

Aw man, I just sold off my one Assault Rifle, and now I learn that they're back to three-shot? Well, time to get a-crafting and try them out.

[DariusWolfe]

So I had a thought earlier when I was reading feedback about armor slowdown. If it matters, for context I've moved and fought in both steel plate armor (SCA; not FULL plate, though I've worn it once, but still plate) and various forms of flak vests and kevlar helmets, with swords and rifles.

Now, plate armor is going to slow you down. It just is. It's heavy, it's bulky, and it's designed to protect more than it is to give you a full range of motion. It's great against cutting, fairly decent against blunt, and so-so to straight up useless against piercing. But at the same time, you can absolutely sprint in plate armor and if you're used to it, you can run or jog for a good amount of time when necessary.

But modern protective armor, like flak vests/jackets/pants etc. are bulky, they're heavy, but they're also much more flexible and when fitted properly (and I don't mean tailored; I mean strapped and adjusted to your body) they're easy to move in and once you're use to them they don't slow you down much.

What I can attest these armors do is tire you the fuck out. What about if, in lieu of a speed decrease, they give you penalties to food, rest and comfort consumption?

An additional thought, though it may not worth the effort to implement, but it's interesting anyway... Modern body armor takes forever to put on... ONCE. Once the armor is adjusted and strapped for your body, it's literally 30 seconds to put on both vest and helmet; flak pants aren't really a thing in the U.S. Army, so I can't speak for those. The best we have are knee and elbow pads, but those don't stop bullets. If armor could be assigned to a pawn, similarly to how beds are, then having them put it on the first time could take a LOT longer, as would switching armors up willy-nilly, but putting on their assigned armor would be a lot quicker.

I think these changes would create the paradigm you're looking for, where pawns aren't wandering around in full armor all the time, but put it on before a raid or for a dangerous hunt. The former (rest/hunger/comfort degradations in lieu of speed penalty) seems like it would be easy to implement, at least.

[Scavenger]

God, how nice it is to have three-shot assault rifles back! Thanks, Tynan. Also I ll proceed to experiment with world events scaling as soon as I get home and provide some feedback once again.

Also please do consider adding comfort to quality clothing once again. Legendary and masterwork versions of it at least - most legendary items have distinct advantages now, making it worth of trying to get them (more damage, rest effectiveness, etc). Clothing only has armor rating, which will still be worse than dedicated armor. So a unique advantage for quality clothing would also be nice to have.

I agree on both accounts! Now that weapons have a unique secondary effect, accuracy and damage, it would be swell if clothes had armor/temp resist and happy thoughts! Could make it really stand out too, see a world event and think, "Wow, that would really help calm down my skittish pacifist researcher..."

[Fuglypump]

A drop pod raid happened with mechanoids inside the base and it was really easy to defeat because all of the enemies were the ranged lancers instead of the melee scythers. drop pod mechanoid raids should be primarily melee enemies and have few ranged enemies to make it more of a threat for close quarter combat.

[whitebunny]

Just here to thank you thank you for bringing back 3 shot burst assault rifle and to humbly ask you to look into something: Often times i gamble my naked brutality pawn's life on the very first seconds by opening an ancient ruin upon landing; If i get hives instead of mechanoids sometimes i walk away with a legendary charge rifle or power armor on the first minute of the game which is weird.
My suggestion: Just have the hives have some angry insects actually guarding the loot because as it is i can just destroy the hives and walk away with endgame loot before i build a campfire.

[Wintersdark]

What I can attest these armors do is tire you the fuck out. What about if, in lieu of a speed decrease, they give you penalties to food, rest and comfort consumption?

From what I understand, the issue isn't a matter of appropriate penalties to dissuade constant armor use.

The problem is that if you have penalties on your armor, then the alternative is to only wear armor for raids.  But this is awkward and tedious micromanagement - armor on for raid, armor off again afterwards - that just makes raids more annoying. 

The solution can be "have pawns automatically suit up/remove gear after fights" but that has it's own design difficulties and is a big mess of potential problems.  There's a lot of work that would have to go into armor being actually worth wearing without involving tedious micromanagement to get the most out of it.

Similar logic applies to the parka.  It used to have a work speed penalty, and now it does not.  Sure, "realistically" parkas ARE large and bulky and annoying to work in.  However, "realistically" you'd just take your parka off when you went inside, and put it on when you went outside.  This would either (again) require tedious micromanagement or a lot more design work (where do they put their coats?  What if they're going in and out frequently? which coat is theirs? What if they need to exit by a different door?  yada, yada, yada).

It's not that these issues are not solveable, but rather that it's not really worth solving them for such trivial gain - just the "realism" of some coats/armor having some form of penalties to wear effectively because reasons.

[Greep]

Played a bit more of my deep underground base, was annoyingly also sick so only about two seasons.

Another siege comes, this time a fair amount bigger.  Since I'm fully in the mountains, I'm not really forced to deal with it, but I may as well since they still have no snipers.  A single guy with a rifle takes care of it, although he gets pretty close to becoming mortar food in the process.

Randy apparently was confused, and thought I was launching a spaceship in the last 24 hours, and threw 3 raids following an initial raid of a refugee in the span of a day.  I only take two hits as the killbox is pretty efficient; however, one of those hits was a shot straight to the heart with a sniper rifle through plate armor, so I lose the second of the two miners I embarked with.  Not exactly stellar for a mountain base.  Considering that crapstorm would have probably ended a normal base I guess I should be grateful I was in the mountains 

On the other hand, either I'm just not used to mountain bases, or outdoor needs got insanely higher in 1.0.  Pretty much everyone is going insane and I'm constantly sending people outside for nearly an entire day just drafted sitting around, so work is going at a snails pace.  It's honestly kind of sapping my desire to play it out, although that probably has more to do with just being sick xD  Below shows the absolutely brutal mood graph.

Hopefully there's another player out there cowardly brave enough to play a mountain base to confirm this feeling.

Steel needs are becoming difficult to deal with and since I still need hydroponics for the second winter, traps, armor, weapons to deal with infestations, and more turret upkeep, I end up breaking down and mining for steel adjacent to my base perimeter rather than walking like 10 miles to get to the steel outside.  If I get an area revealed in a really bad way I'm just going to have to deal with it.

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[dritter]

My feedback on Scythers, and kind of just Mechanoids in general:

I don't have too many issues dealing with them personally.  Like someone else also mentioned above, since I play on large maps, the ship part lands quite a distance away, and then when I aggro them, the scythers get pulled much further away from all their support like the lancers and the centipedes.  Due to the stopping power effect of some weapons, if the scythers actually manage to make it to my sandbags, I can just kite who they go for back and wipe them out.  Usually the lancers still haven't made it to my defenses, and so they can't even capitalize on one of my colonists moving away from the cover.

However, should I actually do something like place sandbags near the ship and attempt to take them on fairly, I typically get stomped.  The scyther is really strong when it manages to engage my colonist, but honestly, the biggest worry is that its taking one of my guns out of the fight.  The biggest threat of all the Mechanoids in my opinion is the inferno cannon wielding centipede.  I've posted about it here and there (not here, usually on reddit), and I'm not sure if its just me, but I can't stand the mechanic of a colonist getting lit on fire, and then running out in the middle of all the gunfire and getting lit up not only from the other mechanoids, but also from some of the turret and fellow colonist fire.

Thats just me needing to rant about fire.  Anyways, aside from the inferno cannon, as long as my colonists stay behind cover, centipedes are easy, and I usually focus the lancers over them and only take them on when all the lancers are dead. 

I think lancers are in a really good spot right now personally.  The charge lance isn't so amazingly accurate that it domes a colonist every time it shoots, but its decently so, and it has a large amount of armor piercing and damage that makes it just threatening enough that I have to worry about that next shot taking off a limb.

[Wanderer_joins]

Rebalanced points scaling for world challenges.

I've just done a speedrun, crashlanded, extreme, to test the quests. Now they are always worth it. Quests used to be relatively harder than home threat until mid game, now they are easier, even early game. Even if you doesn't like the item, you should just go there to clear the quest at some point, to get the diplomatic reward and get another bandit camp.

On a side note, the letter has not been updated, you often get more than 1 item, and only one is displayed in the letter and on the world site.

I like the change, but with the new curve + the nerf on wealth points (1 -> .75 -> .6) they may be slightly too easy. Btw, the new balance between wealth and colonists is a positive change, colonists didn't weight enough and i used not to feel the raid discount after a near wipe.

[NagashUD]

Scythers are ok here, still a big threat but not unbeatable