Unstable build feedback thread

[mndfreeze]

I just had a new tribal game start and the very first trader said I was doing poorly and left me 23 gold.

I'm struggling to eat, not make jewelry. lol.

Is this new or have I just never seen it before?  I do love random positive effects though.  It's nice having some RNG that isn't out to kill me.  Though one could argue that cassandra is just giving me gold to increase my wealth to game her own systems to kill me later.

Damn AI trying to meta.

[5thHorseman]

I just had a new tribal game start and the very first trader said I was doing poorly and left me 23 gold.

I'm struggling to eat, not make jewelry. lol.

Is this new or have I just never seen it before?  I do love random positive effects though.  It's nice having some RNG that isn't out to kill me.  Though one could argue that cassandra is just giving me gold to increase my wealth to game her own systems to kill me later.

Damn AI trying to meta.

It's been in since 1.0 started I think. You tend to get the stuff early. Someone gave me 15 medicine and it was very welcomed. Surprised youv'e not seen it before, but it does tend to only happen in the very early game while you are - in fact - struggling.

[mndfreeze]

weird.  Yeah this is a first for me.  I guess it's possible it happened at some other point and I missed it while dealing with something else, but thats unlikely.  Any notification blips, bleeps, letters, or other indicators something bad just happened are pretty heavily imprinted in my brain, lol.

Well, neat.  Hopefully next time they can leave me food, or a gun to hunt with.  Gold makes terrible soup.

[Greep]

Either something changed with sapper A.I. or I just got lucky, but half of the sappers just walked into my main entrance.  I think this even happened with a previous one as well.  I'm wondering if this is related to having IEDs surrounding all the walls, or maybe just having a non-standard maze entrance.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Syrchalis]

I think the backstory "game developer" should at least give some intelligence and crafting, because math and paper prototypes. (Obviously im butthurt as a gamedev myself that it's such a bad backstory, yes I know it's supposed to be funny and a meme so I'm fine with it =p)

[Greep]

TBF you don't need exactly need a degree to make games and I'm pretty sure a game dev couldn't craft a t-shirt to save his life.

Edit:  Actually having worked in that field a bit myself, if you want realism, you should add forced hediff (alcohol addiction).  Or maybe just add that to EA games developer 

Edit: Also, OMG.  Sappers in all direction is such a cruel raid type.  Probably the only spread out raid I care about.

[Teleblaster18]

Storyteller: Cassandra Classic
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness:  Temperate Forest (Permanent Summer) - Flat
Commitment mode: No
Current colony age: 432 days
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20+
Complete mod list: None
v.1982

Game Notes/Graphs:

-I hope I didn't vent too hard about the Infestations earlier;  that one genuinely threw me for a loop, though.  I'm doing my best to report gameplay experiences, the good and the bad, and that one was...really, really bad.

-Had Friendlies intervene in a Siege for the first time; they wiped out the Pirates completely.  It was very enjoyable to watch, and it was a big help.  I remember seeing something similar in B18 on one legendary occasion (which I'll have to relate somewhere else, but it was one of the most memorable moments I've ever seen in the game).  The Friendlies are a lot stronger in 1.0, and I hope they show up for some Mech Raids.

-As others have already reported, I got a cryptic message that a non-colonist had come down with Gutworms.  There were no other pawns on the map at the time. 

-I completed a Trade Request for 6 Mech Healer Serums (for 44 Pants), and just got another Trade Request for another 6 Mech Healer Serums (for 7,400 Hay, which cleaned me out);  I'm extremely happy that there's a good deal of items that fix the irretrievable in 1.0...it feels like a nice give-back, and I hope it continues.   

-Had an inexplicable mood problem tonight with a colonist.  I can't figure out what could possibly be causing this pawn to almost break, after looking at her stats.  Keep in mind, she's also a Night Owl, who is asleep during the proper hours, and had been since 11:00, in-game time (this screen shot was taken at 15:00, game-time):






The graphs for tonight's play (Debug and Wealth):


-

[Polder]

Storyteller: Cassandra
Scenario: Naked Brutality
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Tropical Swamp / Flat
Commitment mode: Yes
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20

I haven't finished this playthrough yet but it's getting boring because it's too easy. I'm on day 232 with 96k wealth and 9 pawns and am starting to get all the techs needed for a starship. There are no economical or military challenges. I do have occasional mood breaks but think this is mainly due to choosing to have one very impressive barracks instead of separate sleeping rooms. Ironically there often were minor problems with food production because I can't seem to balance between over and underproduction of food crops. I also had some difficulties and deaths during caravaneering, mainly due to illness and mood breaks.

The beginning was challenging of course, but then it just became easier and easier. I suspect this is due to a combination of things. Wooden traps are overpowered in biomes with abundant wood. A few versions back, something was changed about the raid scaling and this made raids a lot easier. I built traps along the outside of my buildings and laid down a concrete path through traps, and enemies prefer to walk on concrete rather than swamp terrain. The slow movement in swamps also makes it so that approaching raiders spend more time exposed to my weapon fire. "Door cheesing" is too strong against melee enemies or enemies with slow-warmup weapons. Having a perimeter wall or surrounding all important things with walls is a strong tactic because the AI doesn't know how to handle it: the raiders will spread out and bash walls, achieving little to nothing, while they can be killed off one by one (with or without door cheese). My economy is a little too good: yayo is highly profitable with no downsides so far (shouldn't this attract drug lord pirate raids?), raiders provide a steady supply of adequate weapons, wooden traps are too good for too little resources and work, herbal medicine is enough for almost any medical problem, and raids are ineffective at reducing wealth. Components were a bottleneck until the fabrication bench was unlocked.

I try to keep all pawns on a penoxycycline every 5 days schedule because diseases can be really nasty in combination with other events or problems.

I did do a fair amount of quests on the world map, but had little motivation to do quests that involve saving a person because most randomly generated pawns are not worth saving.

I built an uranium slug turret to see how good it is and it seems very powerful: it killed a lancer, scyther, centipede coming out of a poison ship with barely a scratch.

To illustrate how easy raids are, on day 228, I got a refugee chased event and as experiment, decided to hide my pawns in the base. The raiders triggered about 8 traps, managed to kill one isolated light turret, moved on and started shooting at another turret and then fled due to losing too many people. Stripping a downed rsider gave me a good flak vest, good flak jacket, normal simple steel helmet, cloth t-shirt, good camel pants, almost all at high durability. They also left two normal machine pistoles, 3 steel spears and a steel gladius and some silver. This raid caused very little loss of wealth (94 steel, 280 wood). Without doing the math, I suspect I got more resources/wealth out of this than I lost. See the raid.jpg screenshot to see the aftermath (the attackers came from the left)

Smelting weapons is annoying and can't be automated the way I want (which is, keep a well stocked armory with weapons for different ranges and smelt any excess, beginning with the weapons of the worst quality, then of lowest durability. It would be nice to have a way to designate items in the stockpile for smelting or destruction.

Another pain point is not being able to see the terrain type while planning base or creating growing zones. It would be nice to have a view mode for terrain types similar to the view mode for roofs.

Having meat for survival rations and/or fine meals is important. I noticed that elephant tusks sell for a lot less now, and that rhinos and elephants seem to move faster. Even with that, I still think hunting rinos and elephants is overpowered. There are too many of these animals on the map in tropical swamps, and they respawn fairly quickly. Hunting an elephant takes relatively little additional time compared to hunting a monkey, but yields a large amount of food and top quality leather.

Rhino and elephant leather is almost as good as devilstrand which takes research to unlock and is a pain to grow even with permanent summer. Flak jackets are stricly worse than devilstrand dusters and only a little better than a rhino leather duster while not covering the legs. This doesn't seem right because flak jackets are harder and more expensive to make, at least with current hunting balance in an animal rich biome, and they slow people down. Part of the problem may be that we can't make a flak jacket out of better materials than the default.

The mad animal event is appropriate early in the game but later on it's not threatening and somewhere between nuisance and irrelevant. Up the difficulty of this or stop triggering it after a certain point.



[attachment deleted due to age]

[Koek]

Playtime: 10ish hours past 2 days
Colony age: started 4 or 5 updates ago.

Transhumanist trait:
I have a transhumanist who at the moment has 3 bionic parts.
First one was an ear, which removed the no bionic mood debuff.
Second her heart, which gave me the first mood buff saying she had 1 part and wanted more.
Third an eye and now the mood buff says 'two artificial parts are better than one, I wish I had more'

It seems the count is off on the mood buff.
Just saiyan.

Cheers

edit: I just gave her a 4th bionic part and the mood buff says 3 parts, so the count is really off here.

[Raxbit]

Storyteller: Phoebe
Difficulty: Medium
Biome/hilliness:  Tundra - Large Hills
Commitment mode: No
Current colony age: 221 days
Hours played in the last 2 days: 10 hours

I've noticed one possible bug during my play test, I had bought a wolf from a trader and didn't have the Handling skill required to continue its training so it's wildness reduced to zero and it left the colony, the possible bug is that I think the wolf was trapped in its previous assigned area as it refused to go outside my storage area after leaving my colony, in the end it bit one of my colonists and had to be put down.

I've been enjoying the new builds alot, I've always played rimworld at a slower pace and enjoy the survival and micromanagement aspects of the game and the new changes have made it possible to win battles without resorting to killboxes, that being said I think enemy AI needs something more unpredictable, I had came up with all sorts of defense plans for different attacks and found every fight to go down the same way, I think enemies need a little more character.

[Awe]

Lol. That was rude. 1.0.1982

[attachment deleted due to age]

[seerdecker]

Wooden traps are overpowered in biomes with abundant wood.

I agree. The main annoyances are the mass-rebuild required when there's a manhunter pack, and the need to surround them with graves (or build roofs) to protect them from fire. Since traps are less valuable than they used to, spamming them has less impact on wealth.

Some ideas for nerfing. Add a per-pawn trap-awareness flag that has a chance to become set whenever the pawn or someone else triggers a trap. Or, set the trap-awareness flags on map entrance, with the odds based on the total number of traps (deployed or not to prevent cheese). Once a pawn is trap-aware, they never trigger traps, and they attack the traps if they get in their way. I would remove the per-rearm cost, to make them viable in all biomes again, and reduce the damage they do.

Also, it would be nice to see some blitzkrieg-style attack for the smarter raiders. They pick an attack vector and all of them blast their way in that direction. It would be more difficult to counter.

[bbqftw]

In a case where colonist is arrested and mental breaks before being 'released', there is no option to attempt arrest.

Can make the difference in situations  where they break with untended disease.

[Greep]

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Sea Ice
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): ~420
Hours played in the last 2 days: about 16

Another 2-3 years of sea ice.  Wealth starts to rapidly accumulate as I get a second hydroponics basin to pump out flake finally, which initially allow me to buy out bulk traders of the much needed steel, and later various other things as well, including a nice triple rocket in case things go really bad.

Out of necessity due to lack of steel, I've ended up building a turret killbox instead of a surrounding cannon field, and recruiting only shooters and eating everyone else   This actually is overwhelmingly better than a cannon field I'm finding.  There's a bit more risk with sappers, but usually sappers just annoy you if you can't deal with them and it's not worth building and extra like 20 cannons for IMO.  One such case broke into my store room and took some thrumbo horns.  Bad but not exactly terrible.

Rather annoyingly for an entire year and a half my LRMS gives absolutely nothing.  Then when it gives me something, it generates an ambush causing me to lose it and walk back for a week.  Then 10 days later it makes a lump, which I send an attack force for just in case, and there's no ambush lol.  I feel for something that uses advanced components it could be a little more reliable.  While I'm forced into using it on sea ice since there's no deep drilling, I think I'll end up just using only drilling on any other map, since I think my previous experiences were just good luck.

Starting on year 7, and getting bionic warriors, I can see why people favor this route more than mass colonists and turrets:  The raid sizes are considerably lower than on a normal fort, and my bio-warriors are excellent.  One of my dudes has 5.25 running speed, a charge lance, full marine armor, 2 bionic eyes, and is trigger happy.  Needless to say, she kicks ass.

Mine fields are absolutely excellent at completely wrecking manhunting swarms.  Before decent armor, these are an absolute bane on sea ice.  However, while the 20 snow-hares nearly killed my fort off in year 2, a swarm of cats later on never even got to my doorstep, and I have no issue fighting 2-3 thurmbos even if they don't bunch up.  IMO this is as it should be: giant swarms of dumb things shouldn't have to be fought if you have proper defenses.

Because I'm more reliant on actual shooters rather than my mass of turrets, I've been using drug policies to keep their mood up.  Psychite tea every other day at 45 mood, alcohol every day at 35 mood, and smokeleaf every day at 25 mood almost completely eliminates all mental breaks.  I had one tantrum during a psychic drone in all this time.  This is a lot less fun than the sheer chaos I'm used to, but it feels necessary.

Cannibals are absolutely, ludicrously, insanely, why on earth are this good, overpowered.  If you restrict them to not be allowed to enter the main food stores, and give them a nutrient paste machine filled with human meat, and give them a shirt and pants of human skin, you're looking at the equivalent of lavish meals every day with no food poisoning and no cooking, and a psychic emanator.  Oh and essentially free food and leather.  Oh and your other colonists get -6 mood every now and then after a raid.  Yeah that's just silly.

Raids haven't been tooooo eventful.  One of my guys gets kidnapped when I accidentally find out he was mining a meteor during the haywire drop pod raid.  Another got storytold by a storytelling lance as I rush to activate my turrets during a mechanoid drop pod event near my outside beacon.  This happened in the span of like 4 days which is where that massive spike down in adaptation is from.

One rather amusing case was a very randy event.  One raid struck and then immediately, probably withing the span of in game 15 minutes, a sapper raid from a different faction happened.  They attacked each other, the regular raids won, and the proceeded to chase the fleeing sapper that were running off the map.  Just a hilarious anecdote.

Edit: Arg.  No wonder I keep accidentally entering god mode whenever I dev mode for the debug graphs. My screenshot key is ; >.>

Also, I think sea ice might be a little easier than in past iterations: Slag chunks giving double steel has a huge consequence on this biome, as nearly all of your early steel is coming from cargo pod slag.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Firestonezz]

Storyteller: Cassandra Classic
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness:  Temperate Forest (Permanent Summer) - Flat
Commitment mode: No
Current colony age: 432 days
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20+
Complete mod list: None
v.1982

Game Notes/Graphs:

-I hope I didn't vent too hard about the Infestations earlier;  that one genuinely threw me for a loop, though.  I'm doing my best to report gameplay experiences, the good and the bad, and that one was...really, really bad.

-Had Friendlies intervene in a Siege for the first time; they wiped out the Pirates completely.  It was very enjoyable to watch, and it was a big help.  I remember seeing something similar in B18 on one legendary occasion (which I'll have to relate somewhere else, but it was one of the most memorable moments I've ever seen in the game).  The Friendlies are a lot stronger in 1.0, and I hope they show up for some Mech Raids.

-As others have already reported, I got a cryptic message that a non-colonist had come down with Gutworms.  There were no other pawns on the map at the time. 

-I completed a Trade Request for 6 Mech Healer Serums (for 44 Pants), and just got another Trade Request for another 6 Mech Healer Serums (for 7,400 Hay, which cleaned me out);  I'm extremely happy that there's a good deal of items that fix the irretrievable in 1.0...it feels like a nice give-back, and I hope it continues.   

-Had an inexplicable mood problem tonight with a colonist.  I can't figure out what could possibly be causing this pawn to almost break, after looking at her stats.  Keep in mind, she's also a Night Owl, who is asleep during the proper hours, and had been since 11:00, in-game time (this screen shot was taken at 15:00, game-time):






The graphs for tonight's play (Debug and Wealth):


-

Regarding the first screenshot, moods don't change when pawns are asleep. The white arrow indicates where the mood will slowly rise/fall to when the pawn is awake.

The night owl trait only gives a mood boost when the pawn is awake at night, not when sleeping during the day. The mood boost would be useless when a pawn is sleeping anyway.