Unstable build feedback thread

[zizard]

In 1.0.1982, pawns ignore their assigned zones. My hauler is suiciding by venturing outside with the manhunter pack.

To add to what Greep wrote:

If the only way to get to their destination is to go slightly outside of their assigned zone, they'll do it.  This was also the case in B18, and there's no workaround: otherwise a colonist would be essentially trapped in the assigned zone permanently.

Being trapped in the assigned zone sounds great to me.

[mlzovozlm]

i just found out that, eventhough there can be multiple animals bonded to 1 colonist, the mood only account for 1 'master of xxx', meanwhile, if i sell 'the extra' (or let 'em die in a fight), i get debuff(s) :|

1 of my colonist, Megumi, 's got 4, husky+retriever+boomalope+thrumbo, bonded to her

[Teleblaster18]

Storyteller: Cassandra Classic
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness:  Temperate Forest (Permanent Summer) - Flat
Commitment mode: No
Current colony age: 466 days
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20+
Complete mod list: None
v.1982

Notes:
-Smokeleaf Joint production is in full swing.  Also, in an anticipated run on munchies, I've also started a Cocoa Farm. 

Tonight's Graphs:

[mlzovozlm]

Randy Rough
Mountainous - Temperate Forest - Perm. Summer

1 thing i strongly suggest+support is the ability to slaughter downed insects & the mood buff after winning
my current run's gone for 7 years, 35 colonists, all the clean up after raid & infestation 're extremely risky, as there're too many bodies to haul to 'graveyard', everyone ends up having 'seeing rotting corspe'(max) & 'seeing corpse'(max)

meanwhile, with a 60-something-hive infestation, it takes forever to maul down the hives as they dont detoriorate like in .1961 anymore, now they even spawn more if you ignore the hives. That's annoying, the area around the hives & the area where the colonists make a stand always turn into a mess, they get extreme mental break just by standing there, & shooting or meleeing all those downed insects take forever too, so the cleaning-up may very well take much more time than the fighting itself & make your colonists break, not the actually raid/infestation itself 

and also, if you ignore the downed insects, all those unsuspected colonists/animals 'd end up getting munched by the getting-up insects

[EvadableMoxie]

Storyteller: Cassandra Classic
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness:  Temperate Forest start
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age: 119 days
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20
Complete mod list: None

After escaping the planet fairly easily on Cass Rough NB, I decided to do an experiment to see if it was possible to do it on Extreme, with some additional challenges.  I edited the scenario to disable all events where you gain pawns and changed to a tribal start.  I then used Prepare Carefully to create a pawn with the Punk childhood and Game Developer adulthood, resulting in all 0s for skills.  I gave him no traits and no passions, just 0s across the board.  I dubbed this pawn Sad Larry and so Larry's adventures began.

The first Larry was lucky.  There was gold in his starting biome.  After gathering up a good amount of berries he mined it all out and then went to the nearest neutral tribal camp where he traded it for a recurve bow.  With that in hand, he began hunting Alpacas to make clothing and bedrolls.  Unfortunately, he didn't get very far as he caught gut worms right around the first fall.  Gut Worms was a death sentence.  -10 mood from heavy pain and another -5 tacked on for being sick would have been hard to deal with on it's own, but it also doubled his hunger rate while also making him vomit up even more nutrition.  He was trapped in a spiral of having to spend all his waking moments getting food just to not starve.  Still, I tried to fight through it, hoping maybe I could get enough wealth off animal pelts and make it to a outlander base and buy glitterworld meds.  Sadly, it was not to be as Larry then caught the plague. That was just too much, and Cassandra went Rapsutin on him.  He broke from pain being plagued and gut wormed, then a raider knocked him out, then a wolf came by and started to eat him while he was still alive.  It was a race to see if the plague or the wolf would kill him first.  Plague won, narrowly, as the raider burned down his house.

Larry the second did quite a bit better.  He mined jade from his starting location and then traded for a bow.  He likewise hunted and got a bedroll and some tribal wear. He also got an early drop pod of Penoxycyline which was nice. He then popped an ancient danger. Things were going well until a stray shot hit the cryo pods and woke up 5 hostile soldiers.  Larry beat a quick retreat while the mechs and soldiers fought among themselves.  Larry caravaned off-map and the soldiers just wandered around until they starved to death.  Larry came back in and grabbed himself a normal LMG and normal power armor as well as some luci and assorted artifacts. He then traveled to an outlander base and traded it all for a medical neurotrainer, which got him from 0 to 5 medical. 

He then went on a raid of an enemy base guarded by 2 pirates.  Building a small room to door peek with let him take them down rather easily.  The prize was a techproof core which was used to research electricity, and a joywire which was later sold.

Larry at this point started focusing on stockpiling pemmican for the trip to the ship.  During this time, an alpaca self tamed which was very helpful as it let him carry a lot more food.  He traveled back north, passing the same outlander camp.  This time he sold his power armor as it was slowing him down too much and picked up a pulse rifle, cloth parka, cloth tuque and some medicine in exchange.  Thus armed, he headed north.  He had a lot of issues with his recreation bar bottoming out and causing mental breaks and as a result he had to stop a few times for food as he ran out during the trip.  Eventually through, he was near the ship and made a pit stop at an area of temperate forest nearby to restock on food.

Once he arrived, things were actually pretty tense.  His recreation was bottomed out, the ship map had no convenient ruins to use, and he had to fight off about two dozen animals which kept trying to take his food.  All the animal corpses plummeted the beauty of the area giving him -15, on top of the -20 from no recreation and he broke.  Thankfully no raid happened and he survived the break.  Eventually he managed to get a decent base set up and a basic perimeter established, however in the meantime he was hit with Fiberous mechanites.  The actual effect wasn't a big deal, but it meant -20 mood from intense pain and sick.  That meant he was at risk of breaking no matter what.  I couldn't start the event in such a condition so Larry hung around all winter and into spring.  Finally when the mechanites were cured, I fired up the reactor.

Larry did not last long.  The last time I did it on Rough, I was getting 2-3 raiders per raid.  The first raid I got this time was 7 raiders. with roughly the same amount of wealth.  Larry held them but not before they broke down his wall and started fires.  Larry barely recovered before the next raid came along, 4 sappers.  Larry dropped one easily but then he simply kept missing shots after that.  He couldn't land a hit if his life depended on it, which incidentally it did.  Even if he had landed the shots he needed to repel the sappers, I could tell he wasn't going to make it.   Even abusing door peeking, he just simply couldn't kill them before they busted down the walls.

I think I'll need a need new strategy if I want to try this again.

[Toast]

1 thing i strongly suggest+support is the ability to slaughter downed insects
shooting or meleeing all those downed insects take forever

Can you mark them for Hunting? Since Hunters now execute downed animals with a simple neck cut.

[mlzovozlm]

the only thing you can do atm is to manually draft & shoot 'em or poke some sticks to 'em, & shooting downed animals 're soooooo inaccurate, it take 4 guys highly-skilled, with rifles, standing 5 tiles away, 30s~1min to kill 1 :|

[Dargaron]

the only thing you can do atm is to manually draft & shoot 'em or poke some sticks to 'em, & shooting downed animals 're soooooo inaccurate, it take 4 guys highly-skilled, with rifles, standing 5 tiles away, 30s~1min to kill 1 :|

I think if you stand 1-2 tiles away from a downed enemy, you get something like a +400% "Execution" accuracy buff.

[Lanilor]

Scenario: Tribal start
Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Survival
Biome/hilliness: Arid, flat
Commitment mode: no (for testing branches, commiting in the main game)
Current colony age (days): 153
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~10
Complete mod list: Progress Renderer, Simple Stockpile Presets, Single Plant Texture Patch

- Heavy SMG at the same research as autopistols and machine pistons is weird. They are quite good now in some situations and I think they would fit better at "gas operation".

- I had 3 mechanoid drop pod raids recently and so far my conclusion is they are annoying but not much a challence. They always landed on my stockpile and damage materials. That's not impactful on the game if I craft something out of the stuff, but it reduces market value / sell price and just looks/feels bad damages stuff lying around from such incident (obviously a subjective thing only for people who care about this). It's fine if something get's damages while fighting, but yeah, from drop pods it's somehow just annoying. On top of that the enemies are way weaker than normal. Of cause this is good to a certain point because they surprise one right in their base, but 3 lancers (1. drop), 3 scythers (2.) and 4 lancers (3.) are not that much a challenge at that points in the game. The scythers may be the hardest one when one can't position well in a chokepoint so they might deal a reasonable amount of melee damage. Any other mech can just be tanked by any colonist to block them from using their weapon while my guys shoot them down quickly. I only had a causality this fight because friendly fire and multiple lancer hits focused on one leg of my brain damaged guy and destroyed it (which I wanted to replace anyway, so no big deal). Not sure if it's just bad luck that half of my latest raids are drop pods, but it feels too much. In fact I'm waiting for a strong normal raid since a season or so for various reasons and now I can probably wait for another cycle. I think in-base drop raids are a nice additional challenge and for variaty, but they shouldn't be the standard later. If it's to counter killboxes, keep in mind that many killbox bases are unter overhead mountain anyway, so it won't have a huge effect.

- Following that there is not much to do currently. That comes partly from the tribal start, so research is just so slow. I only have 2 colonists with research passion and a 3rd one without passion researches too since the beginning (started at 2 and is not at 13 int), but research is still really slow. I don't havee a problem with slow research alone, but with nothing happening in a colony. I do every quest if it's somewhat reasonable, start a trading caravan every few days and also don't have many colonist where it was normal to have free time. An "ask ally for a random quest" on the coms console might be an idea on the cost of reputation and/or silver.

- Can randomly ate my wakeup, got a overdose of course and chemical brain damage. This is already quite known in the community. Is this intended or just a long-lasting bug?

- When someone is crafting a weapon, the bill is blocked with the crafter/name. When that guy downed, the block on the bill was removed (but the block on the item still exists). Result: Another crafter starts to craft a second item of that bill (even if it's set to 1x).

- I notices there are also no letters for breakdowns now. I guess it is tied to the infection no letter bug.

[dogthinker]

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness:  Temperate Forest, flat (river, road)
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age: 193 days
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~10
Complete mod list: None

OK, finally something bad actually happened to the colony. See cliff-like 'fun' graph... It's about how I feel about it too, haha.

Psychic ship part. The colony had already destroyed two of them, easily. This one though... About 8 scythers, 8 lancers, 8 centipedes (2 with inferno). I had 4 colonists killed outright within about 10 seconds, and it got worse from there... The screenshot is after tactically advancing in a retrograde direction, to stabilise the situation, followed by a couple of raids (on go-juice) to try to retreive the most critically injured downed pawns before they bled out.

Sounds fun, right? It is, it would be. Except...

Feedback 1: two of my animals went beserk (bonded master died?). Cute reaction, except... They were on the other side of the map. This felt a bit weird. Maybe this reaction should only happen if the animals are actually drafted and/or can see their master go down.

Feedback 2: rescuing pawns from an active firefight is very frustrating, as it's very difficult to manipulate the pawn's pathing. Specifically, I had some pawns that would be very easy to rescue if I could choose the route the rescuer would take once carrying the pawn. They could've dragged the pawn into cover, and then taken a safe path to the base. Instead, they pick the shortest path to a bed... Even though that path is basically suicide. Ideally I'd like drafted pawns to have 'pick up downed pawn' and 'drop downed pawn' orders, so I can choose the pathing manually in these sorts of situations.

Feedback 3: Inferno cannons... I find them SO unfun to play against. I like them in principle... But the pathing that burning colonists choose to use is much too frustrating. See the screenshot for an extreme example. Fitz was hit by inferno cannon in the doorway. Instead of diving back into cover (or towards the two colonists standing in arms reach, trying to put the fire out), he has instead decided to run 15 tiles north, go through a closed door, then come another 12 tiles back south, so that he can stand next to his attacker, THEN beat the fire out.

Earlier in the fight, another colonist caught fire. He was relatively safe in cover, near another colonist that could help, and even close to a river. Nope, run directly out of cover, straight across a continuous hail of charge blaster fire that the centipedes were already putting down. It was basically instant death.

I don't mind how hard the encounter was. I misplayed it. I was a bit too blase because I'd dealt with the previous two ship parts so easily (i.e. without even losing a limb), one of which had been very recently. There's definitely counterplay
- If I'd just armed two colonists with EMP grenades instead just one
- If I'd built one of the new turrets (although I try to play without turrets or traps, there's enough tactical depth in this game that I enjoy trying to play positionally instead of relying on overpowered fixed positions)
- If I'd popped firefoam on my positions before opening the ship

So, that's fine, I don't mind the initial slaughter, that's a good lesson. But suicides from minor burns, and the brave but insane rescue paths make me feel a bit salty


[attachment deleted due to age]

[rdshen]

Storyteller: Cass
Difficulty: Whatever Rough is currently called
Biome/hilliness:  Taiga
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age:
Hours played in the last 2 days: bout an hour
Complete mod list: None

Feedback 1: ...

Feedback 2: ...

Feedback 3: ...

Agree 100% including not liking turrets all that much. It's fun to succeed in this game from good tactical decision making. Sometimes it makes sense to take control out of the hands of the player, but pawns really need to be smart about what they decide to do in those situations or it just feels annoying having a star colonist lose a leg because they ran away from friendlies into the open and got lanced.

Also weird bug. "Kraus, Medic", who is not in my colony has gotten sleeping sickness and then plague in about 1 hour play time. Jump to location doesn't go anywhere and is greyed out. She also isn't the target of any rescue operation. Old-ish save though so maybe just a hiccup there.

[Gadfly]

Started a naked brutality, site randomly chosen, no rerolling pawns. What we got.

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness:  Temperate Forest Flat 30/60 growing
Commitment mode: No
Current colony age: 497 days
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20 -25
Complete mod list: None

Starting of, botched construction, incapable of cooking, yukky meals, oh I can craft some decent weapons and research them.

Gifts, it started of with 241 silver, well thanks, maybe some medicine with the next trader. Second one a good LMG, then a normal assault rifle. Two pawns with decent weapons and so early.

Then... some friendly people arrived.

You have been chosen, behold the sacred golden plate armor of Southwest Heba Marsh. You shall be the protector of this holy relic.

Thing sold for 8900, it proppeled me into midgame, but the raids..
It is still visible on the wealth chart when I got it and when I sold it.

Resources:

Components, advanced components and plasteel are the resources that are holding me back. Chemfuel , leather and drugs are moneymakers. It's a bit harder now to slaughter people but that would also be a good source of income. Chemfuel, leather might be to powerfull.  Few clicks on the wildife tab and you're done.

All 15 of us are almost complete bionic except for a few ears, It's not so heavy on plasteel, but the components and advanced ones got me 3 level 19/20 crafters.

Hyperweave/Thrumbofur, I can keep my guys in thrumbostuff, 5 man with recurve bows (tried it with short bows, failed) complety in the open, no door cheese, are capable of taking one down, no bionics or fast walkers or something.

Thrumbo sounds nice I guess, it's mostly tactics not what you are wearing. Power armor is there for the mistakes. Devilstrand is quite good for fire tough, but to much effort when I can train shooting.

Inspirations:

It's nice having a comfy chair, but it's nicer to have a powerfull gun. But in 8 years time we got 1 legendary and 4 masterwork charge lances. Doubt if you should use them for armor. Trade one is a bit weird, recruitment can be prepared for. Trade might be good for if you move out. did not try that.

Tactics:
50+ OP turrets + mortars. Turrets hold the enemy in place then a carpet bomb does the rest. Melee units, rockets and the flamepede are the biggest enemy of larger turrets. Better have a horde of scythers around a turret then a horde around my pawn. Protect your turrets and the turrets protect your pawns, might be a good one here.

The smaller one's can be used as fodder.


https://imgur.com/xNgVH8m

https://imgur.com/Ya3TfHE

https://imgur.com/n3wMbjE


https://imgur.com/ytcST26

https://imgur.com/Kh23PS2

Trouble with showing pics, hope this works, haha

[5thHorseman]

I think if you stand 1-2 tiles away from a downed enemy, you get something like a +400% "Execution" accuracy buff.

Maybe 2 tiles, but if you stand 1 tile away your people lose all ability to shoot at the defenseless creature lying in front of them.

[Koek]

But the pathing that burning colonists choose to use is much too frustrating.

Don't you just love it when your burning colonist decides it's a great idea to run towards 4 centipedes. I'm still not over how my Mosquito actually survived that without permanent damage

[dogthinker]

I think if you stand 1-2 tiles away from a downed enemy, you get something like a +400% "Execution" accuracy buff.

Maybe 2 tiles, but if you stand 1 tile away your people lose all ability to shoot at the defenseless creature lying in front of them.

Can you flag insects for hunting? (I've been on flat maps for the last few patches, so, no insects)

If so, you can have a hunter run around slitting throats.