Unstable build feedback thread

Started by Tynan, June 16, 2018, 11:10:34 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

HomelessAbe

Made an account just to say I've been playing the unstable build since I think it was 1.0.1949 and I've thoroughly enjoyed all the gradual changes and adjustments over time and have had fun watching how they've changed the game on the day to day and how I've had to adjust on the fly sometimes. Maybe I missed it but is there a more consolidated change log somewhere? I know the intent is to sort of keep it all on this thread and more low key, but kind of a pain scrolling through the thread trying to find what I've missed and what's been changed, especially if I don't check it every day.

Either way, I've been enjoying the changes for the most part and have been running the same colony since I first tried out the unstable build and we're 21 years in with around 20 colonists (phoebe on the second hardest, as it appears the name of the difficulties has changed). Nothing has come across as too unbalanced in my mind so far and anything major has been quickly rectified. Anything unbalanced I've probably just chalked up to the difficulty level, though I think just about every raid I get these days is mechanoid, can't remember the last time I've had just a pirate raid.

A lot to remember in the span of such a long playthrough, though if anything interesting occurs during my game in the current and future builds that seems relevant from a developer stance I'll be sure to mention it. Keep up the great work!

BlackSmokeDMax

Quote from: HomelessAbe on July 24, 2018, 10:09:24 PM
Made an account just to say I've been playing the unstable build since I think it was 1.0.1949 and I've thoroughly enjoyed all the gradual changes and adjustments over time and have had fun watching how they've changed the game on the day to day and how I've had to adjust on the fly sometimes. Maybe I missed it but is there a more consolidated change log somewhere? I know the intent is to sort of keep it all on this thread and more low key, but kind of a pain scrolling through the thread trying to find what I've missed and what's been changed, especially if I don't check it every day.

I have one on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/1729827777335846049/


cactusmeat

Colonists are still slaughtering boomalopes and boomrats in melee range, yet they are smart enough to not do so when hunting. Surely this isn't intended?

BlueMarble007

Possible bug: I'm pretty sure this isn't blocked by any tree...

Boboid

Haven't had a lot of time to play so I decided to do some more focused testing with deadfall traps rather than mess about with my standard games.

My conclusion is basically that if you're playing on Survival Struggle or lower and in a biome where wood is naturally abundant(including 30/60 growing) that wooden deadfall traps can take care of the majority of raids for.. 2-3 years. Entirely possible it's longer than that I just haven't had the time to test beyond that in my 4 games.
Sieges require you to snipe or otherwise damage them to agro them, drop pods require that you say " hey look at me " and then kite them. That's it really. They're so lethal and consistent that you can quite easily determine how many traps you need to kite a group through. Even just maiming them with 1-2 traps is sufficient to reduce their threat level to near 0 - Especially post-shield-belts.

On average raiders die to ~2 wooden traps, double for anyone in power armor. Those that survive 1-2 are pretty severely maimed and not in a state to fight back very effectively, and often a very small number of shots/melee hits is sufficient to down them. 80 wood per raider is a pretty good ratio in my mind.

As for placement/strategy since trap corridors aren't as effective as they used to be due to the number of raid types that attempt to circumnavigate them in one way or another I've found the most effective strategy is to just.. surround all your structures with traps. 1-2 layers is usually sufficient.
Hell I've even got a lot of them indoors, adjacent to doorways and in my large hallways. They've considerably cut down on the stress of on-your-head-drops.
I'm willing to lose a bit of pathing efficiency inside my colonies in exchange for a cheap trap that will at the very least maim an enemy that stands on it.

Given that the pathfinding is happy to hug player built walls to get around them and it prefers faster floored areas to walking on dirt it's pretty easy to determine where the AI is likely to walk - Easier still when kiting.
---
As for biomes where wood isn't effectively infinite but can be grown reasonably easily ( Arid 60/60 growing period for example ) the cost-to-damage ratio of wooden traps is still pretty good.
Planting ~4 trees per raider is strictly speaking a lot of colonist work time but neither the trees nor the wood/traps themselves are worth a lot. There's obviously opportunity cost but having more ways to directly tie colonist work to defensive capability is good.

As for steel traps - Well 1 steel trap per raider is usually sufficient but I'll confess that I prefer the wooden traps. Severe maiming is often enough. It's entirely possible that as raid density increases conversion to steel traps in the late game is preferable. As I said I haven't experienced that.

In terms of strict value steel traps are more damage-per-cost and so when given the option of buying materials for traps steel is the right call. Assuming of course that you have sufficient steel for other purposes. Given the ease of availability via trading of steel it does seem like that transition would be worthwhile and inevitable for any high-traffic areas where your traps are always being sprung.

Spewing wooden traps over large areas simply for coverage is probably always going to be at least viable even so.
---

The one thing that I thought I'd mention is that traps and turrets really don't synergize particularly well in my experience. It's often better to have raiders chase you around corners and through trapped areas than it is to have them fighting stationary turrets. It's not so bad for melee raiders as they'll attempt to close on turrets and inevitably stand on nearby traps but.. for ranged ones...

You can certainly clear a very large area open area of all cover and throw down huge fields of traps as glorified landmines which raiders will stand on as they try and seek cover behind your turrets but often they'll run around in something similar to single file which can prove to be limiting.
IEDs are better suited to the task especially as raid density increases.

All of this is fine - Turrets not being force multipliers is perfectly sensible. It's more that it feels odd that traps are most effective when NOT using turrets simply because you always want the enemy force to be moving.
Hybrid defenses of course DO work, traps that are stood on are not less effective when backed up by gunfire of any kind. I just don't think it's strictly speaking the right call to encourage raiders to stand still at the moment :P

---
As for stone traps - I've only used them in my fields because both wood and steel(!) traps are flammable.
I don't mind losing a crop to raiders but I do mind my traps catching fire :P
I haven't had the chance to test a no-wood biome and see how your stone chunk reserves handle being constantly turned into disposable traps.
I'd be interested to see how a 6+ year colony with deep drilling and constant trade caravans with allies handles traps. I genuinely wonder which material ends up being used the most. You can produce a LOT of stone chunks with deep drilling after all.
A prison yard is certainly a slightly more elegant solution to Cabin Fever than mine...

I just chop their legs off... legless prisoners don't suffer cabin fever

Walkaboutout

Quote from: BlueMarble007 on July 24, 2018, 10:55:18 PM
Possible bug: I'm pretty sure this isn't blocked by any tree...


It is, there's a tree underneath the blueprint footprint of the solar power generator on the north side of the wind turbine.

Greep

#3726
Randy Merciless, tundra no growing, small hills.

Half a year into a tundra map.  My initial strategy going in was to double up on research so I can get drilling/LRMS for money since mass flake is kind of off the menu even with mass greenhouses.  I accidentally started without a single non-hostile town anywhere in sight so I'm really on my own in the start.

I'm surprised that so far it's actually been easier than normal maps, I guess this is because of the considerably lower wealth accumulation.  So far I've had to deal with just a 3 lynx manhunter pack, a poison ship with one centipede, and my starting raid with one dude that I recruited.

Normally if I start out with a single or no shooter I just kinda pray that I get turrets before the second raid, but doubling researchers really sped that up a lot.  Probably going to do that in future starts.

The only thing I really hate about this game so far is the hunting:  You're forced into it on tundra, and of course drafting and mass killing is the only real way to go here.  Especially with the increased speed of prey, I don't really get why rolling the dice with undrafted hunting was made even more unappealing.

Regarding barracks:  Since the disturbed sleep easing I feel like barracks are just the way to go, and now with the +2 additional mood they are simply a no brainer and kind of surpass all other strategies for rooming.  If your pawn doesn't have a crippling mood issue, throw him in with the others.

My idea with trade was I was going to wait until a peace talks with my enemy and then start trading with them or until I got enough cargo pods to get them to neutral and buy the 20 gold for the analyzer. 

But then I got 4 bulk trade ships in 48 hours  8)  So yeah.

Not much else yet, was distracted with other things.

[attachment deleted due to age]
1.0 Mods: Raid size limiter:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42721.0

MineTortoise:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42792.0
HELLO!

(WIPish)Strategy Mode: The experienced player's "vanilla"
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=43044.0

HomelessAbe

Quote from: BlackSmokeDMax on July 24, 2018, 10:34:18 PM
Quote from: HomelessAbe on July 24, 2018, 10:09:24 PM
Made an account just to say I've been playing the unstable build since I think it was 1.0.1949 and I've thoroughly enjoyed all the gradual changes and adjustments over time and have had fun watching how they've changed the game on the day to day and how I've had to adjust on the fly sometimes. Maybe I missed it but is there a more consolidated change log somewhere? I know the intent is to sort of keep it all on this thread and more low key, but kind of a pain scrolling through the thread trying to find what I've missed and what's been changed, especially if I don't check it every day.

I have one on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/1729827777335846049/

Awesome, this works great enough for me. Thanks for doing the legwork on that.

HnDn

Here are two consistent things I've noticed during my current colony:

  • Pawns path at the edge of the road instead of on the road. Sometimes they choose a path that'll have them walk along the edge of a river. Both the road and the river are roughly vertical lines. From limited testing, they would only path on the road if the designated location is right in front of, but not on, the road. I realize that the designated tile is not shown in the image but I thought it would make it too difficult to see the path line. Whenever the pawn, Xue, comes back from stealing insect jelly, she would always take this path. When she goes to steal insect jelly, she would first walk to the river's edge then down toward an unseen bridge to cross the river. The numbers could entirely work out that these paths are slightly faster, but intuitively, I'd expect the road to be the faster route when going in a straight line.
  • Pawns choose not to eat on a table when [assuming] the temperature is too high. I do not have an image for this. My current set up has a separate building where all the meals are cooked and left inside. There's a table outside. From memory, I've noticed that when the outside temperature is 30+ C, they choose to eat the meal standing up inside the kitchen building and not on the nearby table outside. This part is inconsistent, but the pawns sometimes still choose to eat a meal inside a cool area when the meal is left outside or near the table. Both pawns used to be nude, but now only one is nude.

One last note: I posted a while ago that I had a visiting tribal pawn spawn at the head of a river inside a mountain. Recently, I had an escape pod refugee that swam up the river to leave the map.

[attachment deleted due to age]

xrumblingcdsx

Played on 1.0.1972, Sea Ice, for 1 year, Randy Random Merciless Struggle & Commitment Mode solo:

Recap: I was going for a role play solo survival on the sea ice. Haven't played heavily since A17 and wanted to see if it was still viable or challenging. I would say sea ice and the game in general feels easier now, but getting steel is more difficult since there were no mechanoid events in year 1. Another 10 steel and i would have been able to start smelting steel from my large collection of chunks. The steel would then get food production off the ground, but even without it I only had to resort to (1) cannibal meal. This occured after my colonist had a food binge and some unwanted visitors right before the coldest part of the year when few animals or raiders come to visit.  I didn't really feel threatened at any point in the game from raids. My pawn with (6) in shooting and a charge rifle was able to handle every raid without any real difficulty or need for medicine (I think wolf got wounded once from a mad wolf ironically).

Day 04: Mental Break (Food Binge)
Day 04: 1st Raid
Day 19: 2nd Raid
Day 19: 3rd Raid (16 hours between)
Day 23: 4th Raid
Day 38: Mental Break (Food Binge)
Day 42: 5th Raid
Day 49: 6th Raid

Above i listed my raids. I had a total of (6) raids even though my graph below only shows (3) for some reason, is this purposeful? it would be nice if the graph accurately portrayed raids and bigger events.

Both of my mental breaks were food binges but both happened when i had excess food. Is this intentional?

Still a little irked that neutral factions eat my food stores. I could see this being acceptable for an ally, but not a neutral faction.

I wish we could vet the colonist joined event, i immediately dismissed him and got a mood debuff that sent me into my second mental break. They never even spoke or saw one another.

There were a ton of Quality of Life improvements i noticed, is there any chance we will get some sort of condensed storage? The need to keep all of my perishables indoors now on a map with limited resources is difficult.


Greep

Dang look at those weapons.  This a new strategy or just the weirdest luck ever?

[attachment deleted due to age]
1.0 Mods: Raid size limiter:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42721.0

MineTortoise:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42792.0
HELLO!

(WIPish)Strategy Mode: The experienced player's "vanilla"
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=43044.0

fritzgryphon

I don't know if anything changed, but I get raids with matching weapons sometimes.  All melee, all grenades, or all ranged.  One time I got 13 raiders with all sniper rifles.

Greep

Quote from: xrumblingcdsx on July 25, 2018, 01:52:20 AM

Both of my mental breaks were food binges but both happened when i had excess food. Is this intentional?


It would be normal if your dude has the gourmand trait.
1.0 Mods: Raid size limiter:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42721.0

MineTortoise:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42792.0
HELLO!

(WIPish)Strategy Mode: The experienced player's "vanilla"
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=43044.0

Tynan

We're gonna add some feedback indicating the cause of mental breaks.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Tynan

New build! Still lots to do.

Thanks for everyone giving experience-based and thought-through feedback. Boboid I much appreciate your look at the traps.

Turned out there were some issues in the raid timing generator, it's been fixed so Cassandra should be more consistent now than ever before.

As always the changelog is here for reference but please play it before commenting. This thread is specifically not for theorycrafting (though you can theorize all you want elsewhere of course). Thanks all.

---

Misc text fixes/adjustments.
Remove drill building sounds from wood construction.
Misc balance.
Speed up: -Speed up research 10%. -Speed deep drilling 10%. -Cocoa tree yield adjusted, harvest speed adjusted. -Shift plant work from sow to harvest and speed it up a bit. -Adjust some build speeds. -Made prosthetics and bionics a bit cheaper. -Remove smelting and cremation research. -Devilstrand research is cheaper. -Increase mineable yields. -Improve power armor insulation. -Animal taming/training chance improved. -Made the ship buildings cheaper. -Double snow clearing speed. Factor it by unskilled labor speed. -Increase uranium prevalence.
Traders sell everything at normal price. Trade price base adjusted. Orbital traders carry 30k silver.
Bring back early-game time-based points reduction for year 1. Move the first raider's special conditions into the intro incident maker. Minor storyteller tweaks.
Fix: Adapt days can rise above max.
Deadfall trap damage count is now constant at 5, varying damage amount by stuff. This will also make trap AP vary naturally by stuff.
Fix: Overlapping and mis-timed raids on Cassandra. Fix: Too many mad animal incidents.
Adaptation is no longer affected if your own pawns down each other when not mentally broken (to solve exploit where the player does it on purpose).
Fix: Colony animals hunt and kill rescued refugees/pawns.
All quest letters are now blue.
All quest letters, if just one reward is present, now give a description of the reward.
Bandit camp letter now says how many enemies are at the site. Bandit camp now gives the total value of all the rewards. Sites listing rewards now also list their total value in brackets after the rewards.
Fix: Exotic traders sell 1-2 hyperweave in some cases.
Exiting refugees now know about and avoid player traps.
Death on downed chance no longer applies for rescued pawns.
Fix: Colonists automatically shoot prisoners you're trying to rescue.
The "Chased refugee" letter now lists the number of enemies and their PawnKinds.
Orbital bombardment explosions are now more likely to hit near the center. Orbital bombardment is now 20% longer.
Fix 3365: Error thrown when two hostile factions meet
Fix 3532: Exception filling window for RimWorld.MainTabWindow_Restrict: System.NullReferenceException
Fix: Targeting ground causes errors.

Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog