Unstable build feedback thread

[Mystomex]

That's a terrible way to play, btw. The game is designed for loss and recovery, you're totally neutering it.

I'm gonna redesign how permadeath is presented. Maybe on by default.

  What makes this a terrible way to play?  As far as Im aware games are meant to be fun, if save scumming is fun for him then how is that terrible? This style of play is a choice its not being forced on anyone.

As Madman said:

Now that was uncalled for. A lot of people like it unforgiving and brutal (excluding me). If you don't like it, that doesn't make its design terrible.

This works in this situation too. A lot of people like save scumming, If you dont like it that doesnt make it a terrible way to play.

[XghosT7]

Tynan is somewhat right, but then again if the person that is playing it is having fun then it doesn't matter. I personally play the 1.0 unstable with saves on but i'm still learning the game so most of the time i'm like "Hey, i'll save now and try this, if it doesnt work then im reloading", makes me learn the game in a much faster pace.

[Talys]

Nearing the 7th year in my current colony on 1.0, Cassandra Hard - Base Layout: https://i.imgur.com/fU7zchA.jpg

It has often been brought up, but I waited til I got enough experience with those - Uranium as barrel material for sniper turrets is a bad choice:
- Started with two sniper turrets guarding a (straight, long) entrance to my (mountain) base - they're extremely powerful and do a great job with slowing down attacks
- got lucky with the LRMS scanner and got a lump of ~1300 Uranium (it was the only LRMS find in 6 years, got a jade one a couple days ago, you might want to look into that)
- Expanded to 4 sniper turrets later on since I had the materials to replace the barrels several times (or so I thought)
- it has been now 3 years without getting any uranium outside of a super rare trade since the LRMS doesn't do his job, and I didn't even bother with the Ship yet - it seems to be an exclusive "or": either ship to burn all your uranium, or sniper turrets - can't have both with how rare the resource is

I'd recommend either switching the barrel material to plasteel (since you can actually get those from traders, instead of gambling and tons of fails - maybe increase the barrel costs if it's plasteel) or making Uranium avaiable more often (preferably through trading, since you want to enforce caravaning).
The rarity of Uranium makes Sniper turrets (despite being the superior defense weapon for long straight corridors) not worth in the long run, since you're guaranteed ot run out of it quickly with how often attacks happen (unless you shut them down for manhunter and "minor" raids, but that's not really good either)

Anyways, hope that helps with some feedback

[vzoxz0]

Huge annoyance: Time slows to 1x for the entire duration of a raid or similar event. That is not how it works in 18b -- it will eventually speed back up after a brief window.

[Wanderer_joins]

Cassandra extreme, tribal start, temperate forest:

1: tribal raid sneaking in through an open door, 1 colonist killed, a few downed. In the aftermath one colonist ran wild

2: lost a caravan of 2 guys, 1 killed, 1 probably downed, the temp map closed instantly. It seems to count as only one colonist lost on the ramp-up. In the colony colonists had the colonist killed -3 and colonist banished to death -6 for what  i think is the surviving, downed one

3: a chased refugee, which was incapable of violence, i draft him next to a psychic ship, the following tribal raid killed him (and wrecked the mechs)




Edit: follow-up, i also lost a caravan in an outpost, both pawns were downed, captured, same thing at home, kidnapped pawns also count as downed whereas the net result for a captured or kidnapped pawn is closer to a killed pawn than a downed one for the colony on the long term.

[Boboid]

Bloody hell.. experienced an infestation on a flat map for the first time in ages.
https://imgur.com/a/HZrBor3
17 megaspiders, 25 spelopedes, 28 megascarabs, ~175k wealth, 16 people.
~160 days in, Cass, hard, arid 60/60, flat, tribal.
Playing almost exclusively melee with 1 hunter and.. Rabe picking up a minigun there for crowd control. His combat log is ridiculous and has over 110 hits on insects from that fight.
Did some quick reloading to check his stats - he did ~1200 damage!

Clean up was a bit of a mess with a number of infections and one seriously damaged eye but overall it went way better than I thought it would.
To be honest I haven't got a clue how you'd clear that size infestation, in that mess, without significant melee power or some benny-hill-kiting-shenanigans.
As it stands I was amazed that nobody died. That's the kind of fight you expect to have to play over at least once for a tactics revision if nothing else.


Actually upon looking at this mess with fresh eyes I suddenly realize I had 2 antigrain warheads just sitting on my floor ~10 tiles east of the fight. Bloody lucky those didn't get hit by a minigun.
Think I'll move those

Have to say that spears really are the weapon of choice at the moment and they did great vs those evil bugs. The AP on spears is sufficient to simply ignore the armor of the bugs entirely with the exception of the Megascarab - they however are so flimsy that virtually any melee weapon will gib them.
Quite a lot of the megaspiders in particular died with brain or heart injuries from spears. If I'd been using maces there I'm almost certain I would've lost that fight.

Edit: It's worth noting that I was well aware that my wealth was accelerating out of my control (I'd spent a lot of time caravaning around and not enough time selling my excess crap) and I'd recently had a massive haygrass/devilstrand crop finish growing almost simultaneously.
I'd also just finished equipping everyone with shield belts.

Further Edit: It'd be really nice if wounded pawns would lay down in Hospital beds in preference to medical sleeping spots. If you have a mix of medical bed types it can be quite fiddly to get people in the objectively better beds.

[Madman666]

Over 70 insects on 16 people is kind of insane. And thats with 175k wealth only? I wonder what ll be on wealth 400k. I do admire you surviving this hell with melee oriented colony. Amazing job. That insane amount would be 100% the end for me. And thats isn't even extreme, lol.

If i didn't see that screenshot, i'd say thats bs. No matter how i look at this, i can't even imagine me surviving with such hive amount.

[Boboid]

Over 70 insects on 16 people is kind of insane. And thats with 175k wealth only? I wonder what ll be on wealth 400k. I do admire you surviving this hell with melee oriented colony. Amazing job. That insane amount would be 100% the end for me. And thats isn't even extreme, lol.

If i didn't see that screenshot, i'd say thats bs. No matter how i look at this, i can't even imagine me surviving with such hive amount.

I don't even blame you, it honestly felt like a very sudden game ender. I absolutely crushed the last attack (Siege with 2 doomsday rockets ~ 20 people - baited the rockets with excellent shield belts) simply by running over the top of them with melee weapons vs guns.
It was completely one sided. Can't say the same about that infestation, sheesh.

Edit: Here's the wounds - Bloody lucky overall https://imgur.com/a/2y3OvyU

[Zombull]

That's a terrible way to play, btw. The game is designed for loss and recovery, you're totally neutering it.

I'm gonna redesign how permadeath is presented. Maybe on by default.

If the player is having fun, how can you tell them they're having fun wrong?

I'll never use permadeath, because frankly the game has too many bugs and bullshit mechanics that can lead to stupid deaths and other situations that I just don't feel are legit. That doesn't mean I always reload when a pawn dies. But I don't judge those who do. Going back and restrategizing toward the goal of everyone surviving is a perfectly reasonable gameplay style, imo.

[gadjung]

With harder geothermal reach river start feels even more enforced.

You know, there's generators,solar and wind ?
I think it's not game 'enforcing' You, but would say You 'limiting' yourself and not liking it.

It's finally viable to build any of that while getting research towards Geothermal, especially while playing as a tribe.
I must say it was rewarding to have Electricity researched after ~40 days, putting first wind plant and have some normal lights in cave-rooms instead of torches. Not usual speed run to Geothermal, and having everything electricity-powered by this time.

And as Madman666 i agree that having no research pawn hinders research progress - BUT - since i have pawns that are capable in other fields (mining/fighting/medic/growing) i can easily offset that by having enough time for research because other tasks are going fast and pawns are alive and more-or-less healthy.

About permadeath - i would leave it as opt-in.
Mostly, because game got one thing very well - players get attached to colonists. So it's one thing to loose the pawn You don't care about, other the one that survived from beginning (without a leg or two). And some players like to have happy little games rather than having everything ruined by this stupid yorkie bite.

[EvadableMoxie]

Just finished a very short and depressing run.  I don't feel like I misplayed so much as the game simply decided I was done playing it for now.

Cassandra Extreme, in a tropical jungle.

Things start promising when I capture 2 raiders with 10+ melee.  I rushed for Flak and had 3 melee fighters all kitted out in full flak with maces by around day 35 or so.  I have 2 crafters with decent shooting backing them up with the bolt action and revolver, and was debating if I should push for microelectronics now when the disasters happened.

It begins with a raid of 8 raiders. The downfall of the colony results from a raider Kat, who has molotovs.  While my melee deals with the raider in front of them in melee, they start throwing molotovs into the mix.  I have to move up to engage her which lets other units in the kill hall shoot at my melee.  I do win the fight, but I take a lot of damage in the process and 2 pawns nearly burn to death.

This wouldn't have been bad in and of itself, except that a melee ends up losing an eye to friendly fire, and my best pawn, a too smart brawler loses both an eye and a leg.  That turned out not to matter as she immediately had a break from the pain and reverted into a wild woman.  My tamer promptly minor breaks into a daze so that I can't even try to fix it, and then my newly wild pawn, one of my melee fighters and my own doctor who is still sane/injured are hit with sleeping sickness. 

With time, this might have been salvageable, but Cassandra decides I'm done and sends a sapper raid at me to finish me. This raid comes only 70 hours after the previous raid.  Had I had even 1 more day to recover I might have survived, it was a close fight as it was.  Even if I had survived though, I know a colony death spiral when I see one, and I don't know if I could have recovered.

I hope I just had bad luck and that the old days of never being able to actually fight with your pawns due to the threat of permanent injury have not returned.

So what went well: On the plus side, I think my strategy of rushing for flak was good. I felt like I was well equipped very early.  Rushing for Microelectronics doesn't really make much sense to me, since there isn't a whole lot you can even do with it without earlier techs. Maybe a shield belt rush might be viable but I'd probably rather just have smithing and machining early.

What I could have done differently: I should have replaced my wooden defenses with stone earlier.  I had the stone but was prioritizing other projects. I should have considered a raider with molotovs to be a major threat and played around it.  Beyond that, there wasn't much I could have done.  The breaks occurred due to pain, which might have been avoidable if the fight went better.  Nothing I could have done about sleeping sickness but it wouldn't have been so bad if the fight went better and the breaks hadn't happened.

[Madman666]

I don't even blame you, it honestly felt like a very sudden game ender. I absolutely crushed the last attack (Siege with 2 doomsday rockets ~ 20 people - baited the rockets with excellent shield belts) simply by running over the top of them with melee weapons vs guns.
It was completely one sided. Can't say the same about that infestation, sheesh.

Edit: Here's the wounds - Bloody lucky overall https://imgur.com/a/2y3OvyU

You know, while admire you overcoming this crazyness, i really think this isn't how it should be on hard and maybe not even on extreme. Its weird that infestations actually scale with wealth in the first place (at least with raiders its justified by them knowing you have a lot of crap hoarded, so more will join to try and steal it), but ok, let them scale. But not to this extent. Whats this? Like... 20 friggin hives? Its at the level of that Arachnid mod, that sent game-ending waves at you. Yeah i know that with armor rework you can survive lots of hurt coming your way, but thats still excessive. Heaps excessive.

[Awe]

Anybody else seen meal production delay...to be...too slow...?

No. And having so much cooks at 1 priority is weird practice and must lead to big delays in prodiction. Lets theoretise a bit: Colony wake up. Some of your guy start cooking, others cooks goes for secondary jobs(mining for example). Then your first cook decide to eat and free stove, your miner decide to cook and goes all 3-4 hours from that far mining site to that stove. All this time stove is blocked and not working, pawns waste a lot of time on unnecessary walking, etc. So far best practice is dedicate one job to one pawn and make secondary tasks as much "close" to main tasks area as possible. (like cooking -> cleaning/hauling, farming -> hauling, etc)

Also if you have issues with temperature because of frequent walking between kitchen and freezer you just need to add heater to kitchen and cooler to freezer 1-2 additional devices not a big issue. Also double wall around freezer and airlock helps.

[iamomnivore]

I also don't really like the research change much and think making it x2 longer will achieve nothing, but make it just slow, while lategame researchers will still eventually be promoted to janitors which i find incredibly dissapointing. There really should be a way to use intellectual skill for the good of the colony aside from researching. I just can't believe a good scientist can stop being useful after a while at all. I'd like a more substantial research system rework, but oh, well. At least its straightforward enough - i'll just apply x2 research speed as a scenario condition and be done with it, so nothing critical.

I've long thought that Intellectuals could play the role of "Psychologist / Therapist" to help prevent or cure Mental Breaks. To help clear up Rivalries or reduce insults against certain colonists. This could require certain furniture to accomplish and the "therapy" could require maintenance, like animal training does. I'd think of these "therapies" like status buffs that only serve to counter the indicated "problem." Just a thought. Any others on this? Could get way cool.

[iamomnivore]

Nerf hits early game hard. The stack of slower experience gain and slower research mean that without a pawn with very good initial stats that you can dedicate to research you are very screwed.

Isn't this just part of the game? Isn't this normal? If one starts the game with a poor research pawn -- one knows what they're getting themself into. Let's not cheapen the game so that someone can have awesome hunting, building, growing, etc. and then also have decent research, even though other priorities were made -- because the game helped you do it. Can we avoid adding "crutches" to the game?