Unstable build feedback thread

[Syrchalis]

So, 2 things:
-I built a trade beacon blue-print to get the radius, then built a wall to be my warehouse that perfectly encapsulates the radius, thus the beacon was built after. For some reason it's not letting me place a roof in a 5-tile area shaped like a plus over the beacon (see pic), despite the description saying "can be placed indoors". Luckily my goods that aren't under that unroofed plus are still considered "indoors (unroofed 5)" so they aren't actually breaking down. Kind of sucks though because of the temperature reg, now that room is perpetually ambient. Also, the option to place a zone around the beacon still included that unroofed zone, I shrunk that section away just to be safe (also a great feature putting it on the zone like that!)

-I guess because I updated in unstable, I (as a colony start) no longer have electronics and microelectrions researched, but both are 2/3rds the way done, while my machining research was redacted with 700/1000 points. Guess updating the costs mid-colony kind of "broke" some stuff 
"sorry boss, we don't know how to build AC, but here's a solar panel!"

Glad to see the constant work though, I'm truly hono(u)red to see my shotgun feedback incorporated!

This comes up a lot. If you surround an orbital beacon zone with walls they can't support the area in the middle. You need a pillar (aka a single wall) to hold up the roof in the middle.

[Awe]

All grenade raiders are nasty. Like, really nasty.  The AI will grenade it's own troops, but it doesn't matter because they don't need to survive or even win the fight. They just need to take a few good pawns away from you to have a victory.  That said, it counters the super heavy melee defense strategies really well, so maybe they need to be that deadly.

But purely grenade raid is so funny. All you can do to win is just run with 1 guy non stop near enemies, so they are just blow themselves.

[Jibbles]

Sniper turret now consumes Uranium instead of steel.

Hmmm...

I dunno but i think making it consume Uranium is rarer and expensive for the sniper turret.

Making the sniper turret when it requires uranium for barrel changes means it's not even worth it for players as they will stick with the autocannon turrets or mini-turrets.

Maybe changing it to comsume plasteel or components would make it alright.

Simply not worth it to me.  Instantly deconstructed sniper after the update.  Plasteel is hard to come by in my current game, mountainous map. I've been having to buy it lately.  Tho not a bad idea, I still wouldn't use it if it consumed plasteel.

Research rebalance: Increase simple research bench to 75% speed factor. Slower research skill gain. Double research costs of everything including and beyond multi-analyzer. Increase research costs of electricity, microelectronics, geothermal, long range mineral scanner.

Don't understand why hospital bed is locked behind microelectronics with 1200 points to research.  Vitals monitor can stay where its at.
1000 for trees while planting them takes insane amount of time?
Slower research skill gain is concerning.
I think the layout is more interesting for the most part, but the points for late research...
I really dislike it if the rebalance is to just to prolong research. That's what happened here right?
It felt somewhat okay in previous games but tacking more onto it comes off stupid slow and a chore if that's the case.
Not sure of the effects from the boost in simple research bench tho.
Still researching the ship in my game and I'm several years in! I'm tired of waiting. Oh well. Won't build it this time.
Starting a new game cause there's been so many changes since I started it.

[iamomnivore]

The door changes have made it pretty easy to cheese an extra shot while the enemy is giving up on trying to get through the once open door that your colonist previously occupied. When the door is slowly closing, the approaching raider or animal starts walking away from the door thinking its closed while your colonist starts lining up the shot knowing its open. You can get a few extra shots (depending on the weapon) off before the door closes. It's very easy to cheese the doors now, and the slower the door the easier it is. Big heavy manual stone doors work best as they take the longest to close. I think it is an issue where the raider thinks the door is fully closed when he should probably be trying to put his foot in it to stop it from closing.

So my question to the Big Man is, is this intentional or accidental behavior?

Hmm. It's a good point. There may be a balance in the slower opening. In the last couple of days I've noticed how laboriously long it takes a colonist to get to the door and get through it (to safety.) Many times, with anything that has a moderate wind-up I find the shot doesn't go off or is always intercepted by the door? Do you notice this or am I crazy? In practice, the change has made it quite a bit harder for me to get colonists to safety and cheese, in some ways. Hmm ... careful balance, this.

Currently, it's feeling fair in my games. Fielding a lot more wounds on pawns trying to take cover from faster enemies / animals. Most recent example is setting off a small cluster of Gazelle's into Manhunter, while hunting. They were close to the base. There was nearly no way to cheese this without taking many wounds. Finally, did though -- I wouldn't consider it a "cheese" victory.

[Jibbles]

I agree, balance doors with caution. True, sqeezing in that extra shot isn't something I do tho it happens at times. It goes both ways, they land a shot on me while waiting for the door to close. 

[MoronicCinamun]

So, 2 things:
-I built a trade beacon blue-print to get the radius, then built a wall to be my warehouse that perfectly encapsulates the radius, thus the beacon was built after. For some reason it's not letting me place a roof in a 5-tile area shaped like a plus over the beacon (see pic), despite the description saying "can be placed indoors". Luckily my goods that aren't under that unroofed plus are still considered "indoors (unroofed 5)" so they aren't actually breaking down. Kind of sucks though because of the temperature reg, now that room is perpetually ambient. Also, the option to place a zone around the beacon still included that unroofed zone, I shrunk that section away just to be safe (also a great feature putting it on the zone like that!)

-I guess because I updated in unstable, I (as a colony start) no longer have electronics and microelectrions researched, but both are 2/3rds the way done, while my machining research was redacted with 700/1000 points. Guess updating the costs mid-colony kind of "broke" some stuff 
"sorry boss, we don't know how to build AC, but here's a solar panel!"

Glad to see the constant work though, I'm truly hono(u)red to see my shotgun feedback incorporated!

This comes up a lot. If you surround an orbital beacon zone with walls they can't support the area in the middle. You need a pillar (aka a single wall) to hold up the roof in the middle.

Yeaaaaaaaaa, I just realized that when I tried removing the beacon to see if that changes it, I feel like a moron XD
It's never been an issue because I've never actually had this "effective" a use of space.

[MoronicCinamun]

Okay, here's a genuine concern:
Once you've smoothed a natural stone wall (a great feature btw), it's treated as owned and thus if you have to mine it, your colonists will try to repair to it, undoing the mining, requiring a lot of right clicking to get it done. I suppose having it set to mine should disable repairs on it.

[gadjung]

is it a feature that it's impossible to train/tame animals wolfs with meals/processed foods (that they eat) ?

[iamomnivore]

Sniper turret now consumes uranium instead of steel.

This brings up a concern I've been having -- Underutilized elements. Uranium may be rare and difficult to find but, I still want to feel like it's important to _something_. I think it's important that we feel each element has more value than "Make Art, Sell." This change is fantastic, in that it further purposes a game element / resource.

With that said, will we be seeing any more additional purposing and integrating of lesser-used elements? Could we see small amounts of gold integrated into high-tech items? Could Uranium be further integrated into high-tech items (maybe the pulsers and such, with an "internal power source"?)

One more concern, on this topic, is the mention of "Tools." This comes up on the Machining Bench and possibly other text locations. We have weapons and armor but, nothing I would consider a "Tool." Will we be seeing any of these in 1.0? Is there even a concept for these Tools? Could we see equipable Spanners (bonus to construction and crafting), Chainsaws & Sickle (trees / plants bonuses), a Rucksack / Handtruck / wheelbarrow for additional hauling, Snowshoes / Skis for mitigated snow / ice movement penalties, Miner's Helmet (providing portable light for the working pawn), Maybe glasses as a low-level tech option to reduce vision injury penalties, and so on.

Buff lavish meal mood impact.

This is quite nice. The mood buff was already a rock-solid boost but, I had begun finding the amount of work involved in keeping those lavish meals available to the colony was overwhelming a burning passion 13+ dedicated cook -- with no injuries (With optimal Zone setup) D: Makes all of the investment really pay off!

[Madman666]

Using uranium as a turret ammo was a good change? O_o Now thats one crazy statement if i ever seen one. That turret was already of debatable use, with it missing 3\4 of the time, while costing a crapton to rearm and now it chomps your uranium supply, instead of steel. Kind of funny really.

A proper use of such rare and exotic resource would be adding several high-end glitterworld things to craft and build to make life a bit more convenient and tolerable, not sticking it into a gun barrel.

[Zombull]

Bug (still): When a pawn is set to mining and constructing, it will get stuck in a loop if attempting to mine a smoothed wall block. It will stop mining and repair. Then mine again. Then repair its damage. Then start mining again...

[Teleblaster18]

All grenade raiders are nasty. Like, really nasty.  The AI will grenade it's own troops, but it doesn't matter because they don't need to survive or even win the fight. They just need to take a few good pawns away from you to have a victory.  That said, it counters the super heavy melee defense strategies really well, so maybe they need to be that deadly.

What you wrote validates my own experience with Sapper raids.  If you go back a few pages, you'll see an update that I wrote where a Sapper raid colony wiped me on 11 of 12 attempts.

Sapper Raids can be like mice stumbling through glue traps - the moment that any of your colonists are within melee range with an enemy, they lose the ability to disengage quickly, and can't use their far more powerful ranged weapon to kill the enemy and get free...hence the "glue trap".  All of your colonists that are engaging with even a single Pirate are now "stuck" to that Pirate, and the Grenade sapper now just frags the whole bunch.  You know a grenade is going to be coming, you can see the grenade's path, you can assign your pawns to move away from it, but it's too late, and there's not a thing you can do to counter it. 

The problem becomes compounded when an incendiary is launched at the unavoidable blob, and your guys are now on fire.  The obvious thing is to say "Well, don't blob up."...but therein lay the problem:  the "blob" is often extremely difficult to avoid, even when you're taking specific actions not to blob up.

In my case, every attempt to engage the grenadiers and incendiary launcher at range were being countered by two snipers (one sniper rifle, one bolt-action), who were regularly one-shot insta-downing my guys in cover.  You have no choice but to attempt to close distance to counter...and now, you're likely back to being "blobbed" to a single pirate, where your guys become target practice.

Close combat attempts were even worse off (letting sappers blow through walls in rooms, then engaging in multiple directions from doorways with shotguns), because of the limited mobility and limited space to avoid getting "stuck".

[mndfreeze]

By the way, is it intended to allow colonists to enter a mental break just after leaving another one? In less than a second?

Should be impossible. That's weird. Will have to look.

What was the second mental break? Pyro firestarting or gourmand eating or chemical interest drug binge?

I also had this happen about a week ago, not sure which build it was and I don't remember which breaks exactly, but I had a colonist break and then when she finally collapsed from exhaustion the second she woke up she broke again due to starvation.

I'm also getting some breaks currently (sad wander and hide in room so far) when the mental state is well above the half way point for those pawns.  Thought it was odd but I might just not be understanding the breaks well enough.

In regards to what someone else said about arid shrubland and wood, I'm also having major issues on this new tribal shrubland run I started yesterday.  Passive coolers are a must, animals are decimating the few plants and trees around.  I started growing some cactii in a wall off area, but they take FOREVER to plan.  My 11 growing pawn can MAYBE plant 2 in a day cycle at most.  It's way to slow IMO.  I'm all for it being slower than other crops, but 2 a day doesn't even keep up with just a campfire for cooking and a few passive coolers.

[gadjung]

'open door' strategy works pretty decently still, i would say AI should kind of rethink their path during raid when there is only 1 path leading to 'center' of base. Also, raiders should adjust their move speed so they are less spread while taking same path

Situation : i get raid, i leave door to farming area open (so raiders prioritize this way) and place pawns so they cannot trigger ranged weapons of raiders.
when enemy enters door he gets blocked by melle pawn, since he's in 'range' for shooters i can take him down quickly, since he's in door he blocks path for other raiders thus i don't get swarmed by other enemies


[attachment deleted due to age]

[Boboid]

Made techprofs more common as quest rewards.

So maybe it's just me but.. I really dislike Techprofs. Every one I've ever personally used has given me something trivial or irrelevant like Beer Brewing or Coloured lights. Or smokepop belts :/
Because they give you a tech completely at random the only way to avoid wasting them is to research tech you don't really want or need.
You can obviously sit on them until you've whittled down the research list to mostly things that are post-mutli-analyzer but.. that's not very satisfying or practical.
I'd take a research neurotrainer over a Techprof any day.
---
On the subject of world quests rewards - Just thought I'd throw in that the variance is pretty massive in terms of how difficult the reward would be to acquire under normal circumstances.
~15 days into my current game I had an outpost quest for which the reward was a legendary bolt action rifle. Defended by 3 chumps and a turret - what a steal. It's extremely hard to obtain legendary items so naturally I went after it and was absolutely ecstatic.(even though I'm running another melee colony)
~20 days later I received an outpost quest for 2900 silver. 4 people, 2 turrets, quite doable - The reward however didn't entice me at all.

97% of the time if a quest offers an item that I can not obtain through any other means - Vanometric power cells, orbital bombardments, psychic emenators ect I'll immediately start going through the mental gymnastics required to complete it. You can really only get a finite number of these items and only from quests. Legendary items - combat items in particular fall into a similar category.

If a quest offers me a Good Charge Lance, a Prosthetic Heart, and an Excellent Alpaca wool T-shirt I'm going to go "Well that's a disappointing waste of a quest" and promptly ignore it unless it's extremely efficient for me to pursue. The total value might technically be higher than the Legendary rifle but the availability difference is massive.

Mostly it's not an issue as these quests eventually disappear - Though there are times when you're at the maximum number of a particular quest type which prevents new quests appearing, effectively artificially limiting your access to the.. more interesting toys? I guess is a good way to categorize them
Bandit camps in particular suffer from this as they don't ever expire.

Don't get me wrong - In most cases quests offer something that would be otherwise extremely hard to obtain and fun to acquire. The exceptions to those cases can feel pretty mediocre by comparison however.

Wounding rebalance: -Adjust the artificial chance of avoiding limb removal due to damage overkill. Make it damage def-dependent, so cuts and bites are great at limb removal while bullets are less so. -Reduce blunt stun duration 3.5 -> 2. -Rebalance and review other wounding code.

So many melee changes, struggling to keep up >.<
Bites no longer having a 1.25x modifier is pretty nice, Thrumbos can't do 41 damage torso-destroying bites anymore which is a pretty big deal now that their higher damage bite attack occurs more often.

By and large the stun change has been noticeable but overall I'd describe it as more fair - One stun doesn't instantly decide a melee combat quite as often anymore but it's still a very effective way of keeping enemies from retaliating, particularly when applied from multiple sources.

Power Claws are much more satisfying and useful which has been brilliant. They feel like a viable alternative to bionic arms, although with a high tier melee weapon they are still a bit worse overall than a 2nd bionic arm.
Unfortunately a second power claw is really inefficient. Mechanically it's fine, it's just not particularly intuitive and could lead to some unfortunate mistakes.

Spears.. Spears.. Spears.. I'm sure you know from XeoNovaDan's testing post that spears really do kick the crap out of centipedes - Suffice to say this is really weird and throws a wrench into the otherwise fairly interesting melee balance Tossing in some centipede internal parts that affected say.. movement or manipulation would mitigate the brain-sniping a bit. Surely centipedes aren't hollow after all

Frankly having used spears for ~110 days in my current game I've noticed that they do spontaneously kill humans more often than I'd expect from steel weaponry as well.
Missing stomachs, livers, -that sort of thing- instantly gibbing an enemy and surprisingly consistently.. To be honest I've always thought it's a little weird that you die instantly when your stomach is destroyed given that in real life you can live without a stomach.
It's very much part of a different discussion entirely but possibly some thought should be given to adding I don't know.. intestines? so the lack of a stomach doesn't kill someone instantly Or indeed some sort of "This person is missing a vital organ, fix it in X time or they will die" system which would of course be much more complicated to implement.
--

Has anyone found a solution to the ramp up graph not showing for pre-existing saves? Feels bad not being able to show it without ditching my current game.


Edit: Forgot something about melee control - When multiple colonists are drafted and selected with the same type of melee weapon the only available hotkey for attack is B, when multiple melee weapon types are selected that is replaced by the H melee attack hotkey which is also used to give an override melee order to ranged weapon users.
It'd be really nice if that could be standardized.. Having to switch between which hotkey you use based on which weapons you happen to have selected is pretty tedious.