Unstable build feedback thread

[alxddd]

I'll echo others here as well and say that just like you see an option to build an End Table and Dresser when you select a Bed, or Tool Cabinets when you select an appropriate workbench, it'd be nice to see the same for Vital Monitors for Hospital Beds, Transport Pods for Pod Launchers, Fermenting Barrels for Breweries, Hoppers for Nutrient Paste Dispensers, Sun lamps for Hydroponics Basins, Batteries for Wind Turbines and Solar Panels, and maybe even Stools, Dining Chairs and Armchairs for Workbenches, TV's, and Dining Tables.

[SchizoidCrow]

Storyteller: I switched from Cass to Randy.
Difficulty: Savage (on my last post I said 'Rough', actually meant 'Savage', the renaming confused me)
Scenario: Crash landed
Biome/hilliness: Temperate forest, mountainous.
Commitment mode: Nope.
Current colony age (days): 227
Hours played in the last 2 days: 15?
Complete mod list: Progress renderer.


I never used IEDs before 1.0 (0.19?). Since I used to get the occasional colonist activating spike traps, so I thought that maybe having automatic explosives all around my base wasn't in the best interest for my colonist's well-being. But with the latest changes, I have bit more trust in traps, and since they seemed cheap I tried them. I am in a mountainous region so there are a lot of natural chokepoints in my area that I can take advantage.

What I've seen with IEDs is that they are inconsistently decent but situationally strong. Because of the way enemies move (out of formation, getting ahead or behind the group, separating into several smaller groups), IEDs more often than not are only going to trigger to one, two, maybe three enemies, which can be significant or not depending on the type of threat and the stage of the game, unless you have a very good placement, that is going to be an inconsistent but decent value; and there is the more rare situation when you get a whole group in an explosion, that's really powerful. It's not going to do much against big bugs, centipedes or big animals (such as elephants), but it will kill or severely damage humans and human-sized animals. That's good enough reason to use them. At the cost of two shells per unit, they're still cheap to produce in the midgame, and if you're willing to butcher human corpses, they can mostly pay for themselves using the biofuel refinery to get the fuel to produce more shells and exchange the leather for steel.

I don't think that the use of IEDs is limited to enclosed spaces, though they do benefit from them. Artificially creating chokepoints outside the main defenses is not a difficult thing to do, even in flat regions. Using them in open areas it not terrible either, there are areas that are bound to get frequented by enemies, like in front of a turret line.

It's similar to mortars in that rating, though I'd say mortars are inconsistently weak, their explosions are less potent than that of an explosive IED, it may not even kill a single human with okay-ish armor. They still are situationally strong when you hit a big group, which actually happened to me recently. A tribal raid with 35 enemies, where two mortars damage enough of them that the rest of the battle was a complete slaughter (figuratively and literally). Only four or five escaped. I got this message the next day:


Overall, I'd say IEDs are in a good place right now. For me, they provide a decent amount of value without trivializing raids.

Edit: I forgot a couple of things I wanted to mention.

1.- Can we have a 'allow human leather apparel' check, like the 'allow tainted apparel' in the outfit assignments? I want to give my bloodlusted colonists human leather clothing, but also don't want to force them into clothing.

2.- It would be nice to be able to smelt plate armor.

[mlzovozlm]

for me, with the current deafall/spike trap pacing

3 layers of spike, with wooden walls in between to route the raiders, a layer of IED next to perimeter wall, by the time those sapper wander there, they've already cluster up so it's effective enough

IED 're effective against infestation, since they spawn in large

you may also put wooden walls under digged out hills on the map then fill them with spike, IED, wooden floors, etc.

once a explosive IED explode, it'd cause the overhead of those hill to collapse, instantly kill those raiders, or incendiary IED which burn the wooden floors & walls & raiders

basically, just use it where it matters, where they don't run in line like AOE or Starcraft marching :/

[bbqftw]

It's a nice thing about roof traps in conjunction with IED. Even a regular roof has damage to one shot a neck. Which is enough to get it nerfed at some point in the future.

I am curious what you meant re: sapper since generally the rest of the group hangs back several tiles away from the sapper character. So I am having difficulty visualizing a setup where you are reliably nailing the big group.

I will experiment with standalone walls, see if that works for path manipulation.

[mlzovozlm]

normally the sapper(s)'d get separated from the group by going in 1st, & taken out by the 1st few spike, the cluster's actually what the IED(s) for, and the purpose of the spikes 's also to keep off the annoying wandering wild animals (though i don't know if they actually trigger IED like they do with spike, i never tried IEDs in middle of nowhere before

[DubskiDude]

How do I enable the fun points graph + the rest of it?

[bbqftw]

Development mode on, then go to history and check debug graph

[m44v]

normally the sapper(s)'d get separated from the group by going in 1st, & taken out by the 1st few spike, the cluster's actually what the IED(s) for, and the purpose of the spikes 's also to keep off the annoying wandering wild animals (though i don't know if they actually trigger IED like they do with spike, i never tried IEDs in middle of nowhere before

Animals don't step on IED or traps unless maddened, I only saw them triggering spike traps if placed in a 1 tile corridor.

[Greep]

Since the IED thing was brought up more:  It is difficult for me to want to test things without patch notes.  If IED damage was increased I'm not going to know that, and my gut reaction will be to assume it wasn't and just that it costs double now for something that was mostly mixed success at the 1 shell price.  That reduces potential feedback a bit.

[Nynzal]

Summary of two runs with the same goal: AD raiding and ship launch

Storyteller: Randy Merciless
Commitment Mode
Biome: start was probably temp forest
Scenario: naked brutality
Time: couple of hours
Complete Mod List: Numbers, Private Hair Style Collection

Since I saw a post here about a succesfull AD raid run with ship launched, I wanted to try it myself.
Since I mostly play on merciless, I chose it here too. Should not have chosen commitment mode, since the start and a bunch of other stuff is a big roll of dice.

So i started with the naked pawn, good with shooting and traits that at least have one mood improvement.
At first just set up camp, get some food supply. I did not notice before that a bow required crafting 2, cost me a lot of time to make and cancel knifes to get to 2, since the pawn had not a lot other skills besides shooting. Big annoyance, I will pay attention to that the next time.

After the pawn is established and has the first clothing I opened an AD. If unlucky and those are mechs -> pawn dead, if insects hit and run with a bow still kinda works. Best outcome are enemies in cryptosleep, because friendlies just dont attack insects. Also, an enemy pawn incapable of violence still is aggressive, chases and attacks on his own - feels weird.

Even after some equipment, ADs are pure chance with one or two colonists. The very small can contain a bunch of mechs and large ones can be pretty much emtpy - so there is no telling how big the threat is.
This is the point where I regret commitment mode, since I am testing limits reloading would be nice.

Anyway, I end up with power armor and at least bolt action rifles - good weapons are much rarer than everything else or I was just unlucky.
First run was just one pawn up until the end at the hidden ship site, the other one 3 up until there.

While traveling, I noticed that food poisening due to dirty cooking area is unpossible to prevent if cooking on a camp fire. I had times were my pawns got food poisening every time they are in the recovering stage and was stuck at places for a looong time. With a static colony I never had problems, but with this traveling it is huge. Bad cooking has also an impact but if I wanna survive I need military pawns, not gourmands eating all the food. Even flooring the surrounding 3 tiles and always cleaning did not help, maybe it even got worse.
Regarding campfires, some control how much heat they emit would be good - everyone can keep a fire low or let it burn hot; maybe add some options to control fuel consumption after it is build. That way it gives some temperature control. Now I can only put it inside if its below -10°C and still might need to keep the door open.

Another temperature thing is I had two pawns get "slept in the cold" when the room was constant over at least 15°C with comfortable temperatures between -2 and 50°C. Sounds like a bug.

Sometimes pawns would refuse to use the table with stool to eat although it was 8 tiles away, not occupied, no restrictions and hunger bar above the lowest. Could not figure out why, redrafting no help, doing sth didnt help either. Next meal was good again ...

I am unhappy about the muscle parasites and those other weird illnesses: I have no clue how long they are there, they dont get worse or better and they dont seem to require bedrest (apart from increases tiredness) so they just make a pawn worse by giving -15 mood from pain and feeling sick. So what I am missing here is some form of control: Give us some information in what state this illness is or add the possibility to research it with a doctor to gain info about it - something so that a pawn is not in danger of breaking for a completly unknown timespan.

Upon reaching the ship loaction the real trouble begins. Basically founding a new colony with decently equipped pawns on a tile that already has huge wealth, raiders never below 10 in numbers and since I started traveling right away, almost no research and no colony infrastructure. Before the first raid comes I dont have enough time to establish food (due to biome, shrubland) and beds so they dont break all the time. Also decontructing half of the ship doesnt help much, although it gives a few starting resources.
No defense mechanisms means raiders just run for the ship or batter through the walls surrounding it to destroy the ship - note that I did not start launch sequence. Or if colonist are outside they get swarmed. Also there is something weird happening with pawns retreating behind doors: Even if the distance between melees at the door is two tiles and they have a ranged weapon, they just run back to the closing door and engage in melee combat. That is quite frustrating and ridiculous.

I could safely say that both attempts failed at the ship site, because I was unable to defend and raiders just smashed the ship to pieces.
As people said before - less destructive and more pawn and item oriented raids would be cool - see a pawn vanish ebhind a door, smash it and capture him instead of smashing stuff and then just leaving without a gain for the raiders. Maybe only the pirates try to destroy everything and just burn the place.

So all in all with my setup, where I reach the ship site with just equipment seems unpossible to manage. One destroyed required part means I have to research ship building which kinda kills the point going there and spending years researching turrets, IEDs, mortars kills the fun part of it making a run on the run
I am not sure what I need to change to keep the spirit and still make it work on merciless difficulty - turning that down a notch would be a possibility but not what I am looking for.
For now, the huge wealth spike and that I have to defend all the vital parts of the ship are the challenges.


[attachment deleted due to age]

[Koek]

Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Rough/Tribe
Biome/hilliness: Temperate forest, permanent summer/flat.
Commitment mode: yes
Current colony age (days): 450
Hours played in the last 2 days: Too much to admit
Complete mod list: none

We are the tribe of Koek. We fought, we adapted and finally we fled this hellhole of a planet.

and this is our feedback.

I don't know which version I started playing this tribe, but it has seen quite a few updates the past week.

-Early raids were quite easy, although it didn't give me a lot of prisoners due to most of the raiders dying instead of going down. When the raids grew I had more raiders going down, which slowly gave me a good pool of pawns to recruit from. Eventually I ended up with 16 living colonists and 3 casualties.

-I had to suffer 3 toxic fallouts, one during a volcanic winter, which were more of a bore than anything else. It is a deadly event if it comes too early for a tribe, but with sufficient preparation at every point during the run it is very manageable. A big freezer and a smaller one which stores excess haygrass for the animals and a sunlamp or 2 which are only roofed up during fallouts and volcanic winters did the trick.

-After the early smaller raids they started to get bigger, which gave me a few upgrades over the recurve bows I was still using. I never researched great bows because the weapons the raiders brought me were better and I decided to rush for bolt action rifles instead. I think it would be a good thing if great bows were easier to get for a tribal playthrough. Perhaps some love for some changes on the research tree for tribes are in order here? Because why should I research great bows when raiders bring me sufficient weapons untill I can craft those myself? Tribes need other research first to survive some early game disasters like fallouts or mechanoid raids. Key researchs has great prerequisites in general, like the weapons when going for turrets

-Mechanoids: the early raids are very dangerous for a tribe, but when you eventually research turrets and get geared up they become much more manageable with proper defensive setups. They stay deadly until the end though, so lost limbs, deadly rng storylance shots and a few unguarded moments still take their toll. Some balancing seems in order tbh. More armour options (read dmg reduction vs evasion) are always welcome. There is fun and FUN

-Traits: I like the transhumanist one. Early game the mood penalty is easily manageable and lategame they need very little mood management due to the increasing mood buff.
I eventually had 2 chemical interested colonists, which were less of a chore than I remember. Maybe because I improved on my gameplay. I gave them the best bedrooms and gave them a work and useage schedule which gave them ample time to see to their needs to keep their mood as high as possible to mitigate the amount of useage binges to a minimum. I still like to skip pawns with this trait, but the ones I recruited had skills I needed at the time and were quite good overall, so it was worth the chore.
Ascetic is a very welcome trait, but harder to manage if they get in a relation with with a greedy or jealous (a trait which I try to avoid especially when I already have a greedy pawn, due to wealth increasing incoming danger vs mood management). Ascetics keep your wealth low and thus raids easier.
Undergrounder is not worth to aim for. My full time researcher did not have that trait and I never got any problems from that pawn, even though he was indoors most of the time. Maybe a good trait if you play a mountain base with very little outdoors interaction. Either have the outdoors mood bar to drain faster or just get rid of this trait.
I never use abrasive pawns. Increases the amount of social fights and are simply a walking mood debuff. Harvest for organs and banish
I tend to avoid the more negative traits in general (ofcourse), but some combinations make the bad traits a non issue, like Very neurotic and Psychically deaf or Ugly and Kind, the latter of which is a nice walking mood buff.

-small suggestion: I'd love to have the option of right clicking on weapons and apparel and designate them for hauling priority and smelting. Saves me some hassle with the smelting menu.

-Hauling: When the kitchen is busy all of my pawns free for hauling were in my freezer merging stacks and wasting a lot of time in general. This could use some love, since I love how stacks are merged, but my pawns freaking out in the freezer because they have to move meat with every meal created is tedious to watch. especially when moods are dropping because other areas are a mess.
Less restacking, more cleaning please No suggestions on how to fix this though. Good luck.

-The 15 day ship warmup. I removed all work schedules and had all my pawns on 'anything' 24/7, to have them deal with their minor breaks because of the sheer amount of corpses laying around and them having to fight through sleep schedule times.
I read a post suggesting a 'victory' mood buff after winning against a raid. Don't know who it was or in which thread (sorry) but I'm all for it.
In general I liked the 15 day chaos. My most critical moment was when 10 scythers dropped into my hospital, wrecking everything all while a sapper crew was advancing on my walls. The scythers managed to cut a power conduit, shutting down my western turrets, ofcourse the way the sappers came from. No idea how I didn't lose pawns during this ordeal

-Raids: Normal raids become easy with a decent setup
Sappers can be baited into your turrets or bottleneck themselves to death in the hole they make. No problem at all.
Sieges are just a weakened raid if you drop some mortars on them. Easy.
Mechanoids are a pain, but manageable when you learn to counter them. A shootout is a no go before getting long range weapons (maybe I should research those greatbows after all ). As long as they don't drop inside your walls they can be led into a killbox I guess (which I didn't use this run, or ever tbh)

-I kept social fight to a minimum by refusing pawns with negative traits like ugly and abrasive and by having universal recreation time, forcing everyone into my recreation/dining room giving them daily moments to interact with everyone. Most pawns had all positive thoughts about everyone else, that is, until the cheating and divorcing started. Unfaithful bastards

-I managed wealth and mood by combining a few rooms, like dining+recreation. Maybe it is worth trying a baracks next game, making it easier to keep wealth low and impressiveness high. Don't know, no further thoughts on this.

-Drugs management: I haven't used anything other than beer and smokeleaf and mostly used it to boost mood at critical moments and for trade. since having a chemical interest pawn (and 2 later on) I got rid of all the strong stuff asap.
A small suggestion: give us checkboxes in the drug policy tab for minor/major and extreme break risks. In combination with the % slider it gives us an easier, less tedious, menu game

-In general I'd like to see a more polished and intuitive menu. Small things like having the wildlife tab open and clicking on animals in that list without the menu closing for example.
-On the work tab, when hovering over 'hunt' it just says the average of both skills. I'd like to see the Shooting skill and passion added to this.
-When adding a bill at a workstation to create a weapon, I'd like to see the weapons damage and range added to the big 'i' icon and/or the details tab in the list of bills.

My most memorable moment this run was when my lvl 19 crafter got storytold in the heart by MY OWN charge lance, which was wielded by my full bionic (2 archotech eyes and 1 archotech arm) colonist Sam. Thanks RNGesus. Happy times.
Petra, you will be remembered.

I love to hate this game and sometimes I hate to love it. Rip my time and rip my mood when something goes wrong. Next time I'll play a harder biome or randy rough.

Thanks for a great game Tynan & team, hope you keep improving it. Good luck handling all the feedback in your search for a well balanced game.

Cheers

[Teleblaster18]

Regarding maximum range, it just refers to the maximum targeting range.

The gameplay reason they can miss beyond this range is because to do otherwise would add a bunch of complexity to the math around miss chances. Depending on how it's done, it could look weird, cause more damage in some particular situations, or open up weird game-y tactics.

In fiction, you can imagine it any way you like. I'd just call it them knowing not to shoot past effective range, just as real soldiers don't shoot at targets they could theoretically hit just because it's too far to be effective for their weapon.

It's not worth adding the interface, balancing, tactics, AI complexity to make this work so as with many many other cases we're sticking with the straightforward max-range/miss the same at every range system. There's many more important things to focus on.

Thanks very much for taking the time to address this. 

One addendum: if you feel it's prudent, would it be possible to have the Range description in the weapon stats page reflect this? Just a brief description of the fact that the "Range" stat and the corresponding graphic "halo" is the maximum range that a weapon can be used to target, but that projectiles can travel further than this distance.  Currently when you mouse over the "Range" entry on any weapons stats page, it's blank.

Thanks again. 

[mlzovozlm]

...

i like the drug idea, considering not everyone has the same break risk level, & it's fast, rather than bunch of sliders, & i actually dont even know which point of the sliders i should even put for each of them & the drug :|

so newer players 'd be even more confused, i currently just stick with ~37%-40% recreation/mood then manually 've them use drug if needed immediately

[Koek]

...

i like the drug idea, considering not everyone has the same break risk level, & it's fast, rather than bunch of sliders, & i actually dont even know which point of the sliders i should even put for each of them & the drug :|

so newer players 'd be even more confused, i currently just stick with ~37%-40% recreation/mood then manually 've them use drug if needed immediately

Exactly, and as it is now I struggle to get the exact % I want on the slider. Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't adjust it using the arrow keys and the slider is just too finicky.

[protobeard]

Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness: Jungle with a small river and mountains
Commitment mode: No, though I play in that style
Current colony age (days): 25
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~8
Complete mod list: None

Short Story About Food Poisoning

Context: I started with a lvl 4 cook, cooking in a room with dirt floors (-0.95 clean). I did not see food poisoning until day 19 (I started cooking around day ~8), then hardly a single day went by without multiple incidents. From day 19 on at least one person was in some stage of food poisoning at all times. I didn't last long enough to get my kitchen cleaner and see how that impacted things.

day 19: 2 food poisonings (Ally, Perfection)

day 22: 2 food poisonings (Ophelian, twice) - Ophelian got food poisoning, then went on a food binge when it hit major. Having had food poisoning serveral times, that's about the last thing I would do if I mentally broke down during it. That being said, it was pretty hilarious to watch her get through 3/4 of a meal, then drop it and vomit everywhere, then pick her meal right back for try number 2. Then... get food poisoning a second time from that meal. Literally: drop meal to vomit, pick meal back up and start eating, recover from food poisoning, finish meal, get food poisoning. I was crying with laughter.

day 23: 2 food poisonings (Opelian, Perfection) - Openlian got food poisoning with her morning meal. That was 3 meals in a row for her. She must hate Ally (the cook) at this point.

day 25: 1 food poisoning (Ally)
    - Raid. *Everyone* has food poisoning at this point (one recovering, one intial, one major). Move speeds 2.02, 1.01, 1.01. One of my colonists literally didn't make it to the fight, despite being in her bedroom when it started. Thank goodness my husky is trained and we're on rough, so I only need to down one raider. We survive.
    - I take a refugee event late in the day, since there are visitors and a war caravan around to fight for me. I get a luciferium addict
    - I push my luck and hunt some elephants (I'm pretty much out of food due to food poisoning at this point), thinking that the war caravan will help if things go badly. They do -- but it's not enough. A herd of elephants pounds down my doors and everyone is gored to death.


Other notes:

   
• I think buildings are breaking down without a warning message. I'm not sure if that is intended or not.
• Jungle with caves: 2 sets of ants broke out of hidden areas. It's the first time I've seen that.
• Hunting panthers trigger 2 sets of ant attacks on my colony.
• Is it intended that when a pawn vomits it cancels their task, even if forced? I queued up 5 "refill passive cooler" tasks to a pawn with food poisoning, then watched her grab some wood, walk out of the storeroom, vomit, drop the wood, cancel her current task, then go back into the storeroom to grab wood for the next "refill passive cooler" task. She only successfully refilled the final passive cooler, leaving me to re-assign the first 4 again. It seems like she should vomit, drop her wood, and retry her current task. Assuming the task was assigned manually. (Edit: I tried this a second time with only a single task queued up: she returned to her current task after vomiting. So maybe this is an interaction with the task queue?)