Unstable build feedback thread

[Sirinox]

Re: centipedes.  Well in previous versions they also had 2 weaknesses:  slower movement and they got seriously shredded by explosions.  So early game it was easier to pot shot them, and late game you could go to town on them with your rocket launchers or grenades.  Both are still an option, just not quite as good anymore.

They are still quite slow, around 3 times slower than healthy pawns.

But aren't grenades suppose to get you in range of their weapon? I know there are ways to use them somewhat effectively on centipedes, but I feel like they are quite situational. And I tried rocket launchers few times on them in beta, but results were unsatisfactory imo since the rockets don't work like high-explosive anti-tank warheads against armor, they designed more like anti-personnel.

I found that aside from killboxes mass snipers/rifles shooting from max distance or splitting and ambushing with EMP grenades and melee while they are stunned give best results against them, same both in B18 and 1.0

Centipedes without Scyther support should be vulnerable to melee, or else what's the point of scythers at all?

Scythers supposed to quickly close the gap and be deadly in melee, but vulnerable to ranged weapon, staggering and somewhat squishy, lancers supposed to be fast and dangerous in long range, but vulnerable to melee and flanking, centipedes supposed to be tanky and "very effective against bunched-up static defenders" (quote from the description), but slow, easier to hit and vulnerable to hit-and-run outranging outspeeding tactic.

Also, they aren't being "casually" taken out by two random pawns. This is a master at melee combat, wearing the most up-to-date Spacer armor available, backed up by the most deadly close-combat weapon available.

Still just two humans against tanky machine about twice their size, not even utilizing their main advantage over it — speed.

[ChJees]

In my recent playthrough i can't shake the feeling the game never once gave me a break.  (Play on Rough)
On top of recruiting prisoners is nigh impossible now. Where i before could recruit with some difficulty the prisoner at 20% difficulty to get my fifth colonist i now can't. Also I find it still too risky to leave my colony even one or two colonists short early on while I still struggle to gain above 60k wealth.

The game was a lot more enjoyable before these tweaks. At least I did not feel punished for trying to gain colonists then. The slower research did not affect too much how I played.

If anything I discovered how helpful having a small army of Alpacas are. They somewhat offset the extreme manpower shortage I got. Make me wish I could more finely control them so they would immediately come to the aid of the handler and attack anything melee them.

tl;dr: The playthrough so far have felt like a long winded "Screw you.". A lot of struggle with few enjoyable moments.

[Boboid]

On the subject of drugs in general - It'd be nice if the Addictiveness stat on drugs was better described.
Given that addictions can only kick in after hidden tolerance thresholds are passed the Addictiveness % is really just misinformation.
It's pretty detrimental to a new player to think that Wake Up has a 10% chance of causing addiction on every dose regardless of context.
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As for centipedes.. *shrug* I think a lot of it comes down to expectations.
If you expect most things in the game to be roughly as tough as a human then you're going to make all sorts of mistakes when dealing with centipedes.
If you expect them to take a lot of time to beat down and treat them like the slow, awkward, clunky blobs that they are they're not particularly deadly. Though perhaps they risk being tedious.
As with all the mech types critical mass is ultimately the most important factor. If you can overwhelm centipedes with combatants then they're not an issue.
If you can't bring enough firepower to bear or there's simply too many to be overwhelmed then it's a fiasco.

There's a bit of middle ground between those two states but... not a lot in my experience.
One or two extra centipedes or extra colonists - or dogs for that matter - can make a difference all out of proportion to their stats in isolation.

[Greep]

Well, when things go wrong in rimworld, they tend to go wrong spectacularly 

So I end up getting an infestation before I've really built my long term solution for them.  This time there's 21 hives instead of 12, so I figured the best solution is a burnout.  This goes... very badly.  Usually I use wood for this, but since I'm in an arid shrubland, I end up having to use my crops.  Unfortunately, my chemfuel is currently surrounded by bugs way to deep to even do a suicide bombing.

At first I try burning 1600 rice, thinking that'd do the trick, and it doesn't quite do it.  Since that at least gave them heattroke and a very high temp, I figure 3000 corn would be just enough to light the hives and cause a chain reaction, or at the very least cause them to pass out and die.

This.. just BARELY does not work.  All of the bugs get... -95% heat stroke instead.  And since I took too long the hives start reproducing. 

So basically... I'm just making an ever expanding wall between me and the bugs at this point 



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[bbqftw]

Why shouldn't they? Aren't they like crawling tanks? Large, heavy and slow plasteel armored heavy war machines. Why should they be reliably downed with just two pawns fighting them in such straightforward way? I recall in earlier versions to fight them unstunned in melee with even larger squad was a way to get at least few casualties.
Even their description mentions that they are vulnerable to mobile hit-and-run tactics, not to be casually downed by two armored pawns.

I suggest instead of massing autocannons you supposed to stun and/or outrange them.

Because if you recall, the reason that the door opening speed and hit points were nerfed was because popping in and out of doors to shoot was seen as tedious micromanagement. However, that's exactly what I did to deal with the other three centipedes: I had my Chain Shotgun pawn pop out of a door, shoot the centipedes, then run back inside before it could fire. It took FOREVER, and on a larger colony (such as the 11 centipede raid that EvadableMoxie screenshotted on the previous page) would be mind-numbing tedium.

Centipedes without Scyther support should be vulnerable to melee, or else what's the point of scythers at all?

EDIT: Also, they aren't being "casually" taken out by two random pawns. This is a master at melee combat, wearing the most up-to-date Spacer armor available, backed up by the most deadly close-combat weapon available. I'd expect such a team to take out at least one primary ranged combatant when attacking from ambush, in close quarters.

this door thing shouldn't work unless you are dealing with 3x minigun centipede, since both HCB and inferno cannon has well enough of a short warmup time to punish a door opening

[EvadableMoxie]

I don't really have expectations regarding Centipedes. I don't know if they are intended to be killed 1 on 1 or 2 on 1 or 5 on 1.  All I know is I got 11 of them dropped on me with a colony of 12 people.

I don't really care if the solution is to keep them at the current level of HP but greatly increase their point value so you don't get nearly as many, or to nerf their HP down so you still get a bunch of them but they are easier to deal with.  Either works.  All I know is that what I experienced was something that wouldn't be consistently beatable without massive turret cheese.

[Kalre]

"Screw you."

Pretty much summs 1.0 for me at this point, and yes, most colonys have very few enjoyable momments, is sad

[zizard]

Mitigated charge lance to the liver is no fun at all, from an enemy that the game is allowed to spam in the dozens. Normal power amour has about 75% chance to do nothing against this type of instant kill. Plus you increased the liver hit chance from 1.5% to 2.5%. Furthermore the death text is incorrect; it says beaten to death even when it's a gunshot, because it turned into blunt damage. I'm sure this is the part that will get fixed with high priority. Like others said, game is going "screw you", let's instakill your full power armour shooter in the name of storytelling. If I reload this BS I am playing in a terrible way too? Fine, then this is terrible design.

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[EvadableMoxie]

Just had a mechanoid drop pod raid... that landed on my mortar shell stockpile and destroyed 200 HE shells and 3 anti-grain shells while doing 0 actual damage to the mechnoids.

Why exactly do landing drop pods detonate mortar shells!? There is absolutely zero I could have done to prevent this.  If they were under a mountain they could get hit with an infestation.  If they aren't, they can get drop podded. What if I had been on a flat map with no overhead mountain?

The worst part is the actual mechnoids did almost nothing, just 2 pawns lightly wounded.

"Screw You." indeed.

[zizard]

Just had a mechanoid drop pod raid... that landed on my mortar shell stockpile and destroyed 200 HE shells and 3 anti-grain shells while doing 0 actual damage to the mechnoids.

Why exactly do landing drop pods detonate mortar shells!? There is absolutely zero I could have done to prevent this.  If I put them under a rock roof, it I could get an infestation popping up on them.  If I don't, they can get drop podded.

The worst part is the actual mechnoids did almost nothing, just 2 pawns lightly wounded.

"Screw You." indeed.

You should see my previous post when ALLY pods dropped on my mortar shells. Putting it under a mountain is the only counterplay, since insects do not attack items.

[EvadableMoxie]

Just had a mechanoid drop pod raid... that landed on my mortar shell stockpile and destroyed 200 HE shells and 3 anti-grain shells while doing 0 actual damage to the mechnoids.

Why exactly do landing drop pods detonate mortar shells!? There is absolutely zero I could have done to prevent this.  If I put them under a rock roof, it I could get an infestation popping up on them.  If I don't, they can get drop podded.

The worst part is the actual mechnoids did almost nothing, just 2 pawns lightly wounded.

"Screw You." indeed.

You should see my previous post when ALLY pods dropped on my mortar shells. Putting it under a mountain is the only counterplay, since insects do not attack items.

And if you're on a flat map, "Screw You." I guess.

[xrumblingcdsx]

Hey Tynan,

Love what I'm reading here. Plan to play this unstable branch tonight. I'm a little late to the party, I know. I'll post some comments after my initial playthrough. But here are some observations from watching others play it.

I typically play Sea Ice, which doesn't give me any geothermal energy. And because wind and solar are unreliable sources of power I typically build a lot of ship reactors to power my hydroponics. They became quite expensive in a previous version and it takes a long time to build them for little reward. Any chance their power output could be tweaked, their size could be decreased, or another generator could be added that's more in line with endgame and the sea ice gameplay.

Bases still look like massive stockpiles. Is there any chance vanilla rimworld will incorporate storage options for those of us who like more compact bases? IE storage crates or chests? I imagine you would have done it already if you had the intention of doing so, but I've never heard your reasoning behind not doing it.

I like the fixes to reseeding. Before my maps always looked barren and this drove me to playing snow covered maps. And when it was released, I almost exclusively played Sea Ice because of that.

Love that we can now move all benches around. Can't express how painful it was to delete them on sea ice games when ur base starts to expand.

[Dargaron]

Still just two humans against tanky machine about twice their size, not even utilizing their main advantage over it — speed.

Indeed: so tanky that you get a whopping 20 Plasteel from disassembling the things. You only need the corpses of five such massive and imposing war machines to make one set of Power Armor. Seven if you want head protection.*

*Uranium and Advanced Components not included. Some assembly required.

UPDATE: So, the next Poison Ship chunk had four centipedes, four scythers and two lancers. I deployed all my turrets to the northern side of my perimeter wall: ten miniturrets, with two Autocannons on either corner (only two actually participated in the battle). That's as many miniturrets as I can line up without the explosions overlapping. These were backed up by two shooter pawns, one with a specially-made Excellent Sniper Rifle (I'm on hydroponics, so I was able to wait until Bigvee finished making a sniper rifle before popping the Poison Ship Chunk), one with a Good Charge Lance. I triggered the whole thing w/ a mortar barrage of three HE shells. Attached is what a Centipede looks like after tanking a High Explosive round to the facial region.

Between the two, the Autocannons managed to kill one Centipede: one autocannon got taken out semi-early by minigun/charge blaster fire, despite being surrounded w/ sandbags. The other autocannon ran out of barrel integrity mid-way through the battle, while there were still three centipedes up. It had something like 60 shots left when the battle started: I didn't want to refill it beforehand because the cost for repairing a barrel that's fired once is the same as replacing a fully-exhausted one.

The ten miniturrets failed to stop even a single scyther from getting into melee range, so I'm now down five steel turrets. I sent my melee pawn to ambush a Lancer that was hanging in the back: then I got to watch as she got beaten down by a lancer in melee combat. Admittedly, this time she was recovering from a Plague, but the pain penalty from Minor Plague shoudn't make an enemy ranged specialist suddenly on par with a power-armored melee specialist. And no, the lancer didn't actually get to shoot at Bigvee: she managed to get close before it switched from targeting the turrets.

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[bbqftw]

Mitigated charge lance to the liver is no fun at all, from an enemy that the game is allowed to spam in the dozens. Normal power amour has about 75% chance to do nothing against this type of instant kill. Plus you increased the liver hit chance from 1.5% to 2.5%. Furthermore the death text is incorrect; it says beaten to death even when it's a gunshot, because it turned into blunt damage. I'm sure this is the part that will get fixed with high priority. Like others said, game is going "screw you", let's instakill your full power armour shooter in the name of storytelling. If I reload this BS I am playing in a terrible way too? Fine, then this is terrible design.

this is a great story, you rolled 5 or less on a d100. Story told!

I am glad I spent my time learning completely uninteractive ways to kill opposition, because that's far more important in this patch version than actually knowing anything about the cover system or actual fighting.

[Greep]

I completely wall myself off hoping maybe mechanoids will attack and go through the hives or something.  Not my luck.

So... friendlies decide to "help" out againt the hives.  This just pisses them off and causes them all to go around to my front gate and overrun the area.

Everyone's going to die, so I have them hang out and then start taking all the flake so at least they can die while high right?

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