Unstable build feedback thread

[Madman666]

I'd rather have weaker traps, that you can set up once and rearm, than yet another one-use constant drain on resources. And having to rebuild them each time a raid comes is just way too bad. As it was previously said it just makes some maps that overflow with cheap resources yet again better to live on than others where resources are scarse, because security options are more dependant on resources.

I guess it goes well alongside current threat generation system, since you have to allocate a lot more resources to defense than earlier, that are actually lost completely (barrel change, consumable traps), which make your defense stronger, while your "combat useless" wealth less. But i really don't like that kind of balancing. It forces you to pour way too much resources and labor to just survive next onslaught, rather than develop your colony

[Greep]

Hrm.. Well, the trap change kinda destroys any possible use past the very early game due to scaling threats, will probably just have to restart my older save because it will pretty much just doom the fort (might actually start a tundra game anyways since I haven't played a super hard map yet).  Or wait till an update that removes it while I'm modding    Normally I'd just see how I'd adapt to a change rather than work out the theory only, but this is kind of a killer for that particular strategy.

The main issue is that that the purpose of a trap corridor currently is to cut down on maintenance of turrets on higher difficulties.  It felt kind of balanced to me because you still needed to build turrets anyways to deal with drop pods and sappers so it is an investment that only pays off after a while, and by itself doesn't solve everything.  The only thing unbalanced about traps currently is it's clearly superior to an all turret strategy. 

I personally would just prefer traps being more expensive so perhaps they mean more of a long term investment.  As it stands now, this means turret only is the only "heavy security" possibility, with traps just being something you might use to survive until turrets.  If death to the trap corridor is what you're aiming for this will get rid of it, though.

Just some math on traps to explain the reasoning: I think you would expect a trap in the corridor to trigger about 20 times before getting huge influxes of steel trade/LRMS/Drilling/etc.  If they cost half, are single use and need work to be rebuilt, and do double damage, they're about 5-8 times less effective until you've got a comfy late game fort.  So this is just a nuke rather than a nerf as far as a trap maze is concerned   Like maybe I can see people using a trap maze behind turrets as an emergency fallback, but that's kind of an extreme late game fluff.

OTOH, I can see this style of traps working if they were super cheap and half work, like ~15 or so cost.  Or just adding your stuff to trap re-arming, like 5-10 or something.  That second thing would be preferable I would think, although probably a bit of work.

tl;dr This kills the deadfall maze, will end up needing to try and build a new strategy out of IEDs for late game traps to work.  Maybe not a bad thing?  Either way, I think 20 stuffed traps is a better starting point as that also kills a deadfall maze.

[Razzoriel]

there'snt much provided to really "analyze" if the 8 yorkshire really "make" a 19 pirates raid "turn into" a 31 one
since the 2 raids' types can be fundamentally different, the 19 might 've been sapper or raid with doomsday, while the 31 one might 've been "just a normal pirate raid with "normal" weapons", then there's the increase in wealth during the gap, etc. etc.

The 31 raid had a doomsday weapon and a tri rocket luncher. I know cause thats the reason my game ended.

Maybe you should have a psychic lance ready for those guys. Insanity Lance on tri-launcher = raid gone.

I really hope the game isn't intend to work like this, i.e. "if you happen to have the *one* good counter to X event, you live, otherwise, your colony is gone".

Well no, you have plenty of counters.

You can use Psychic artifacts. You can snipe the rocketeers. You can charge them with shield-users (which block explosive damage). You can use your Jogger pawn to kite the missiles and receive less damage. You can use Joe the Violent/Dumb/Skilled Labor refugee as the target. You can send Mini-me, the deadly squirrel that self-tamed as a target. You can position a forward-turret.

There are plenty of strategies. I've suggested the most direct approach to deal with those guys.

[logikzer0]

Food poisoning doesn't feel realistic, fair or fun.  Cassandra Classic, Survival Challenge, Crashlanded.  I have a colonist with a cooking skill of 4 and single passion that upgraded to 5.  Entire colony still got food poisoning (incompetent cook) and then we were raided and got destroyed.  These meals were simple meals made out of rice and potatoes and it just doesn't feel right for a meal like that to give that many people food poisoning regardless of cooking skill.  However, level 5 cooking says "significant familiarity," which to me feels like you shouldn't be tainting potato and rice meals at all!  It would be alright if having food poisoning in 1.0 wasn't so brutal.  The food poisoning mechanic in 1.0 is wrecking the early game for me unless I specifically choose a good cook.  Feels wrong.  298 hours of RimWorld for me, first post because this is seriously affecting my enjoyment.

[Toast]

Been playing more on my arid map, and have thoughts on the new "refillable" wood passive coolers. I use them when there's a heat wave, which is one a year so far, just to supplement my regular electrical coolers--we're not tribal, so we don't constantly need them, but they work great to temporarily keep the beer from spoiling, avoid slept in the heat debuff, etc. After the heat wave is over I don't need them anymore, so one of two things happens: either I manually mark them all for removal, or I forget to do that and my pawns waste A LOT of my scarce and valuable wood supply refilling them, and then when I realize what's happened I get none of it back. It would be nice to have a toggle on passive coolers for "Auto-refill on/off", kind of like the one traps have for auto-rearming.

Come to think of it, the same toggle would be great for torches. I have some set up in my fields in places where I don't want to risk fire from electrical cables (it's kind of hilarious that cables are more of a fire hazard than an actual open flame, but whatever) and my pawns waste a lot of wood trying to keep them filled in the rain. It would be nice to tell them not to bother until the storm passes.

While I'm thinking about hauling jobs, I just want to say that the new ability to autonomously grab stuff to be hauled en route to doing a new task is probably the greatest part of the entire update and I mean that completely sincerely.

[Polder]

Play report:

Cassandra Extreme, Naked Brutality, flat tropical swamp without river or road but relatively close to a friendly town. This was with the patch that made traps one-use items.

Zack was my starting pawn with fairly good skills all around, but sadly, very low social skill. He was able to set up everything that was required for immediate survival and even managed to place two steel traps. The first raider instantly died to a trap. It turns out that these new traps are pretty good at relieving some or all the pressure of raids, even if they're material intensive. On a tropical swamp wood is extremely abundant and so I continued to rely a lot on wooden traps.

I did have some problems with raiders preferring to set fire to my crops rather than walk into my trapped alleys. In response, the most important growing zones were walled off. Mad animal events and animals turned manhunter due to hunting did often set of traps. I can see how that could be a problem on maps without as much wood.

A medicine cargo pod drop arrived at some point which proved very helpful to deal with disease.

As far as reserch goes, I researched the techs to unlock the heavy SMG first. This turned out to be a complete waste of time since raiders provided plenty of bolt action rifles and machine pistols, which are the kind of weapons I wanted. Heavy SMGs would be even better than machine pistols but I did not have enough components for producing my own heavy SMGs in addition to setting up a freezer. Machine pistols in trap riddled alleys worked surprisingly well though.

I was unable to recruit more than a pawn or two due to several limitations. Many raiders were psychological or physical wrecks not worth having. I even saw a 83 year old with multiple health problems whhich I found amusing. Some of the potential recruits would only be able to contribute as melee fighters and I had enough melee fighters already. I would have wanted to recruit a few passable raiders from later raids but nobody in my colony had good social skills, so I used some of the medicine to harvest organs instead. Not for selling but for my own pawns.

Smoke weed proved useful in dealing with psychic drone and the effect of organ harvesting.

It all went horribly wrong when a siege raid appeared in the evening, just as my tired pawns wanted to go to bed! I had no wake-up, so I made the decision to let them rest a bit and then send them out with bolt action rifles. Unfortunately I was a bit tired too at this point and let the mortar fire a shot into my base. It was a direct hit against Zack, my starting pawn and my only good cook and researcher. It instantly killed him and injured another pawn, who was my second shooter. At this point I decided to send my only two shooters to try and stop the siege. They succeeded, but one was wounded in addition to also being slowed down by armor, and wasn't able to get back to the base. The raiders decided to kidnap him. That left me with only three pawns, two meleers and one shooter.

At this point I stopped playing because it was apparent that I was tired and making mistakes. It may be possible to recover from this disaster but I strongly suspect that the next raids will be devastating due to lack of firepower. Traps alone are not sufficient, and melee pawns are not very useful without shield belts which I don't have, the nearby town doesn't have, and which will take a while to research and produce on my own due to my main researcher being dead. With wake-up or my own mortar this would have been much easier.

Anyway, all considered I like these new traps but wonder how good they are on maps with scarce wood. There is a nice variety in raids. Early smithing/gun smithing seems good only for simple helmets (too many filler techs?). In fact, had I rushed microelectronics I would probably have had shield belts by the time I needed them. I continue to hate how hard it is to get that pawns I want or need (why do so many pawns that are trigger-happy or careful shooters have very low shooting skill and no passion?). There are too many animals join, mad animal, animal self tamed events. The animals skill is still not very useful other than for specific playstyles (my hunter with 11 in animals still very frequently triggered manhunter in animals he was hunting). I find animals mostly a nuisance to deal with and just keep one or two pack animals and butcher the rest. I do like the idea of setting up a farm with cows and pigs but it seems costly with questionable benefits.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Chelsey]

Suggestion time!

Been playing for years, and I have to say that overall I am loving 1.0.

I especially love how the "smooth walls" job was incorporated into this version, but I would really love to see it separated from "smooth floors". In other words, "smooth surface" should be broken up into two separate designations: smooth floors and smooth walls. Sometimes I just want to smooth only the floors, or only the walls, and not have the whole map cluttered with the smooth surface designations, slowing down construction. At this point, it's not really difficult to pick and choose which surface gets smoothed but I find it clumsy and inefficient. Would love to see this made into two separate tasks.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Keep up the good work!

[Eterm]

Story time:

Cassandra, rough.

Temperate Forest + River + mountains.

Firstly, I looked hard to find a mountain without caves but despite this, there are still a couple of caves (plus insects) on this map. I wall off part of the map to avoid insect incursions and get to work on my base.

Day 6 or so it's all going well enough, I've got a freezer built, a large rich soil area planted up and a basic room or two. I suddenly see one of my colonists under attack the other side of the map! I realise that what happened is that our friendly hunter gave up hunting a muffalo and went to sleep. This muffalo wandered into a cave and died next to a nest.

Our non-violent pawn has wandered right into the middle of a insect nest to try to haul away the dead muffalo, leading to her premature death. As a rule I never reload but I felt cheated out of a playthrough this time. I reloaded the auto-save and marked forbidden the muffalo.

A few days later and the insects have been 'helpful' taking care of the occasional raider. I've set down some traps near to catch the odd wandering insect and any mad animals. The muffalo are still herding around the insect cave.

I decide to try to wall in the cave better. But even at the very edge of the cave the insects are aggro'ed and kill my colonist trying to put up the wall. The colonist stands no chance, the insects are fast enough that as soon as one hits it is game over for them. 

This time it's my fault so I accept her fate but there's no coming back from this, I'm still at only 3 colonists at whichever day I'm at, some time toward the end of summer I think, and the dying pawn is the wife of one of my other colonists. The inevitable loss of both my only good construction worker and taking a long debuff is going to kill off this attempt hard.

I really need to re-evaluate how I play, the jump from medium to rough is proving far too difficult.

That said, I'm enjoying the trap changes. I think I preferred the previous version but the current traps are nice and deadly. Unfortunately even with "auto-rebuild" on they're not rebuilding in the current patch.

A single steel trap can take down an early game threat reliably. Almost too reliably, none of the raids got near my base because of "random" traps carefully laid near cover. As soon as I open fire they dive for that cover and die.

[bbqftw]

I am somewhat puzzled by all the concern about devilstrand.

If you look at the armor / EHP relations, armor values around 50% or below have very low relevance to combat efficiency. And 51% was the value of the old excellent dstrand duster.

Considering Flak Jackets and pants are 40% sharp base, are they ever worth even wearing, let alone producing?  Seems like you might as well not bother with them, then.

Indeed.

If you are worrying about what duster / jacket to make and all of your pawns don't have flak vests, you have your priorities very misplaced...

[Jstank]

Phobe Chillax Extreme Commitment mode ( I turn it over to Randy for part 2!)
Year-long growing temperate forest.
Naked and alone start on with a Tribe
This is the first time that I was actually successful in building a colony on my scenario.

TLDR: Traps are still really good, although you need to engineer them in a clever way!

Here is a comprehensive test of the new trap system. As you can see this maze was pretty effective. Even when it is made of wood it withstands even smart raiders. Raiders actually run through this and hit every single trap I laid out for them while ignoring other targets. The other thing that I found was that the cost of rebuilding them didn't affect me whatsoever. All in all, there are 17 tests of this maze as I played through the game.

I cut out all the boring parts for the video and only showed the raids. Each raid has real game context before the raid. Testing how well the trap system helps out even with sick, injured and pissed off colonists. This is part one. I will upload part two later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDo9q9ojJtU&feature=youtu.be

[Truman]

If you are worrying about what duster / jacket to make and all of your pawns don't have flak vests, you have your priorities very misplaced...

Except that flak vests are gated behind 2900 research points. Inclement weather isn't.

[Syrchalis]

What I am missing right now is WAGONS.

Even tribals should be able to put wagons behind their pack animals. I understand a muffalo can't carry 200kg - but it sure can pull that. Weight restriction is a big problem for me when caravaning, or better said the last big problem. Interface is good now, speed is reasonable, etc..

It would be rather easy to implement. It's just an item with negative weight essentially - maybe it might have a speed debuff? But I would rather put the cost into the actual resource cost. I wouldn't mind if a wagon would cost the same as a watermill (minus the components).

The minimum would be a wagon for pack animals, though I wouldn't mind a smaller, cheaper version for humanoid pawns to pull.

This would also open up some new fun events: Broken wheel - you get a small scenario map and have to fix up the wagon. If you take too long you will get attacked... repeatedly. And the reverse: You find another caravan with a broken wheel and can decide to ambush them as they aren't prepared or help them out and get a reward.

Also... the density of faction bases feels a bit sparse. I always have to choose to play in a tile I want (terrain, biome, stone types) or near several faction bases... basically can never have both and that's a shame. It means I end up NEVER trading a faction base or attacking a pirate base.

[Wintersdark]

Actually, if it doesn't take too much work, switching the downed adaptation to permanent injury adaptation would help out legit players and simultaneously get rid of the exploit.  My 6 guys with eyes shot out and prosthetic arms aren't too great but they weren't even downed 

I've always wondered if there's an adaptation/colony wealth scoring consideration for pawn value. 

I mean, when you have your best pawns not downed or killed by just permanently injured in substantial ways, you end up with lots of pawns most of which are basically useless... but I fear pushing value up due to pawn count. 

This comes up fairly frequently for me, as it's not uncommon for particularly bloodthirsty and suicidal raiders to rush in close (particularly in the early/mid game before I've got lots of well armed and armored pawns) and do significant amounts of permanent damage.

[EvadableMoxie]

You mean cheese tactics other than keeping yourself poor to limit raid size? I'd define that as a cheese tactic, personally.

Could you perhaps provide some gameplay examples in 1.0 of people playing and consistently beating Cassandra Extreme? Or at least provide even some anecdotal evidence to back this up?  How many hours of Cassandra extreme have you played in 1.0? How many times have you escaped? What strategies did you use to be able to do that consistently?

All of them, so, like, 100 hours?  And never had anything unwinnable, using a mountain base killbox and micro. Plus there's cheese that makes door abuse look tame.

Could you share some information regarding that? Your experiences seem to be vastly differently from mine so I'm really interested in hearing how you're playing differently.

[etoon]

Tynan, are bionic livers and kidneys planned? I have a druggie colonist that ruined her liver on beer. She cancer and cirrhosis. I can't find a liver on the market anywhere and all the, ahem, donors keep dying during the, uh, vetting process. She's doing ok for now but I do worry about her future.

I would recommend changing grid usage to grid excess since that's what the number really represents.