Unstable build feedback thread

[bobthegiant]

Cass - Hard - Naked Brutality - Permadeath

After 30 days, I haven't gotten anyone to join or recruit? Within expected probability?

I'd expect one or two by then, but you may have gotten unlucky or made some mistakes. Any more info on what happened would be helpful (e.g. ever took a prisoner? Ever got a wanderer or refugee event?)

No, nothing. No attempt, in anyway to add an additional pawn. Had 1 boomalope and 8 terriers self tame. I've had one set of two visitors, which were killed by nearby bugs (they started shooting at them). Three raids of one pawn, two, and two all which died.

I'll continue playing the save to see what happens.

[Bolgfred]

Cass - Hard - Naked Brutality - Permadeath

After 30 days, I haven't gotten anyone to join or recruit? Within expected probability?

I'd expect one or two by then, but you may have gotten unlucky or made some mistakes. Any more info on what happened would be helpful (e.g. ever took a prisoner? Ever got a wanderer or refugee event?)

No, nothing. No attempt, in anyway to add an additional pawn. Had 1 boomalope and 8 terriers self tame. I've had one set of two visitors, which were killed by nearby bugs (they started shooting at them). Three raids of one pawn, two, and two all which died.

I'll continue playing the save to see what happens.

Just had 3 rescue pods in 2 my last game. The one before I had only a single one in 150 days

[seerdecker]

Thanks all for the info on the armor. The in-game information is quite misleading. Personally I like how the new armor system works. In my current playthrough, it makes a big difference when enemy pawns are armored. They walk through my traps and come out with only minor wounds. It feels realistic. I assume traps have no armor penetration?

Here's my proposal to make the system less inscrutable to players who don't dig into the source code.

1) Remove the 'overall armor' statistic. I understand the desire to make the system simple for non-power-gamers, but this statistic is unhelpful even to them. It encourages the player to pile on multiple layers of clothing to get this number higher, whereas the player would be better served by putting on one good piece of armor.

2) Fix the armor description to match the in-game calculations. Or, if it's too complex, remove the in-game information entirely. No information is better than incorrect information. Here's my suggested write-up.

The armor rating reflects the odds that the armor will reduce or entirely deflect the damage. Many attacks have armor penetration that will cancel part of this armor rating. In general, it is better to wear one good piece of armor than multiple layers of poorly armored clothing.

[Show me the details]

The game computes the damage reduction as follow.
Armor = ArmorRating - ArmorPenetration
Roll two random values A B, each between 0 and 99.
1) If Armor < RandomA, no damage reduction occurs.
2) Else if Armor/2 < RandomB, all the damage is deflected.
3) Else, half the damage is absorbed and half is converted to blunt damage.

When multiple layers of clothing are worn, the steps above are performed for each layer. In particular, the damage is reduced by half each time step 3 triggers for a layer, and nullified entirely when step 2 triggers for a layer.

[Edit: fix formula, had misunderstood bbqftw explanation]

[Aerial]

The armor rating reflects the odds that the armor will reduce or entirely deflect the damage. Many attacks have armor penetration that will cancel part of this armor rating. In general, it is better to wear one good piece of armor than multiple layers of poorly armored clothing.

[Show me the details]

The game computes the damage reduction as follow.
Armor = ArmorRating - ArmorPenetration
Roll three random values A B C, each between 0 and 99.
1) If Armor < RandomA, no damage reduction occurs.
2) Else if Armor/2 < RandomB, all the damage is deflected.
3) Else if Armor/2 < RandomC, half the damage is absorbed and half is converted to blunt damage.
4) Else, no damage reduction occurs.

When multiple layers of clothing are worn, the steps above are performed for each layer. In particular, the damage is reduced by half each time step 3 triggers for a layer, and nullified entirely when step 2 triggers for a layer.

[Edit: fix typo in formula]

This is the first description of the armor that I have actually followed, so I vote yes that this be included.

And thank you  seerdecker :-)

[seerdecker]

I'm pretty sure I screwed up somewhere. I can't reconcile all the numbers bbqftw has obtained. I apologize if I posted more bad information here.

[Oblitus]

Multi-layer armor can be made much more reliable by absorbing armor penetration each time it is used in a calculation. But even that there should be an extended breakdown that would show per-part armor.

[mcduff]

Flak would become more useful and interesting if it wasn't just a fixed set of items but plates sewn into existing clothes.

If you could make a devilstrand duster with steel plates or bear leather pants with plasteel plates that would be an interesting extension of the system, especially because it takes ages to get to power armour.

I find myself rarely using or making the flak pants and jacket tbh because they're so bad on temperature.

[Admiral Obvious]

Ugh, that patch broke my entire game again. It was the mod "While you are up" which was checking all pawns constantly for the job "friendly chat" (obviously), took me 30 game starts and mod enabling/disabling to figure it out, since the error logs were useless.

Anyway... as I said, the option to befriend a prisoner and make him easy to recruit once you choose to (plus a reliable way to skill up social) is really appreciated. For social one could focus more on the internal colonist - colonist relationships, but I already said that a few pages before.

Isn't while you are up baked into the game already?

[Peto2]

Started naked brutality on rough. Awesome experience, even though short (only 1 year, because of my stupidity). Experienced three manhunter "packs" (I got heart attack when I read it, but then it was only A chicken... then A raccoon and A chinchilla, fun!). One toxic fallout, which took about one quarter of the year. Sadly, downed animals in toxic fallout rot immediately after being cut to death, but I was fine. Some visitors and traders, two raids consisting of one person, the second one bested me (my pawn was weak from food poisoning and got downed very quickly).
Got a few recruitment options, but they were all bad, so I only rescued them. (I wish there was an option to rescue even hostile faction members, because I usually play super nice, and an option to deny rescued person to join colony) EDIT: Now as I think of it, there probably is an option not to recruit downed and rescued pawn, I remember something from the patch notes, I'm not sure, maybe I am confusing this with banish option. Nevertheless, it would be awesome if I could also help but then not recruit people fleeing from pursuers. I am sad every time I deny an 80 year old person... banishing seems a little bit harsh, even though it practically means the very same thing)

What frustrated me was construction limitation. No possible recruits had high construction skills, nor my pawn, so I had to build redundant things just to level him up to build freezers etc. This was the only tedious thing I encountered, but I guess it's okay. Maybe a better thing would be to include quality of some things like freezers, where high quality would mean perfect efficiency, while lower quality would be... well, worse. But that would mean a new mechanic and it's not so important.

All in all, very enjoyable, naked brutality is awesome. Got an idea, but probably for modders, where there is no recruitment available, but research is much faster. Some experience like in The Martian by Andy Weir. RimWorld gets better and better. Today I'll start another run, hopefully longer.

[mcduff]

Well. That was unfun.

My hunter triggered a boar revenge which, because for some reason my pawns hadn't reset the traps, meant three out of four of my pawns went down. That would have been a problem but manageable, except I got a "manhunting hares" event which meant the one who was being a doctor got taken down too. One of the ones she'd managed to tend before collapsing with blood loss then went on a murderous rage and killed the other one, so now there's only one colonist left and he's an escapee who is pretty much a hunter/cleaner.

I feel like Cassandra Medium is *waaay* too quick to stack events tbh. That's a couple of games I've started on it now and I just get chains of events that beat the crap out of my colonists. This is, as well, at the end of the first winter, so not like everything's even properly set up. If it was on hard or tough or extreme then it would feel fair enough, but medium should surely give you a little bit of breathing room before pounding your colony into the dirt?

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Sirsir]

Put watermills behind research.

Remove friendly chat prisoner interaction mode since it's purposeless and confusing..

I feel like you may have killed the watermills. Their big edge was they were a consistent power supply you could get from the start. Even if they are cheaper to research than batteries, Windmills+batteries are pretty strong.

Also I used Friendly Chat quite a bit. Both to build positive social interactions before recruiting (weird that you get better control over your pawns social when they are prisoners than when they are colonists), and just to keep withdrawling prisoners in prison for awhile before I recruit them, while still training my wardens.

And hey look, ALL of my colonists Elephant, Rhino, and some Heavy Fur clothes are now tattered xD Lost like 40% 'freshness' or whatever its called.

[DariusWolfe]

The last time I had a caravan ambushed it was by one, 6 year old rooster.. with a bad back.. and two scars.
https://imgur.com/a/SzlW3Ni
He was as delicious as he was foolish.

On some level it feels a bit like a bug. We could set the minimum threat higher. But I also feel like these kinds of incidents are too amusing to give up.

Second this. If circumstances can randomly combine into a situation much more difficult than the sum of their parts (and they can) then sometimes it's nice to have these comically weak 'threats', and stuff like lightning strikes hitting individual rats, and other random-ass silliness. Rimworld can be a pretty grim game at times, so having stuff to laugh at is nice.

[Razzoriel]

Put watermills behind research.

Remove friendly chat prisoner interaction mode since it's purposeless and confusing..

I feel like you may have killed the watermills. Their big edge was they were a consistent power supply you could get from the start.

All electrical sources should be gated behind reseach, wood-generators being pretty easy to unlock. This is a step towards a good direction.

[FrodoOf9Fingers]

Breaking the rule a bit to comment on the changelog... but friendly chat for prisoners was not useless. I often have a prisoner or two that I don't want in the colony to train my wardens on until I get a prisoner I like. I don't typically kill or release prisoners, especially if they are from a non-pirate faction that share my language.

\end rule breaking

My runs are doing alright. I'm playing hardest difficulty naked brutality with a custom scenario set to tribal tech. I wish I had a way to  make a freezer as a tribal, even a fridge would be nice. I know the box cooler works for avoiding heat stroke, but some way to preserve meats would be a great bonus. Mina be salts maybe? Or a fridge  (not freezer)?

Defense in the mountains is somewhat boring, relying on a maze of spring traps. Infestations get baited into a room then burned. The hardest things I dealt with were ships and drop pods. For ships as a tribal, it would awesome to be able to call on allies before the console. A caravan to a neighboring city to ask for help to kill a ship would be nice (since I have a few days).

To live, I find myself running away rather often and abandoning my home. I typically don't make it past winter. Which is expected for the difficulty, good job.

I know difficulty has been a discussion recently, but instead of making more enemies, making them smarter would be the way to go. Now, I'm not saying rewrite the waves of enemies, but keep track of the damage a wave of enemies does, and weight the chance of that type of attack higher based on previous success. Make the storyteller a little smarter. Maybe rename the difficulty levels to hostility of the story teller levels to get peoplenty away from choosing hard because they are pro gamer. This is simular to factorio biter aggresiveness.

All I can say for now from my phone, good luck!

[Oblitus]

All electrical sources should be gated behind reseach, wood-generators being pretty easy to unlock. This is a step towards a good direction.

Why? Electricity is already a quite big research. Also, the crashlanded scenario is balanced with immediate access to electricity in mind. The current state already makes it extra difficult in areas with little to no trees (read: not forest).