The balancing process

[Perq]

Still don't you think, that disabling a colonist with "max 10% consciousness" penalty for whole day is a bit much for not having a great cook or failing to force people to clean a kitchen? I mean you can't always micromanage, so cook cleans the kitchen first, then starts his job. Often you ll learn that your kitchen is dirty only when people are KOd already. And i assume cooking skill plays the most important part in it, so even if the kitchen is clean, if you didn't get a good cook at the start, or lost him along the way - you're kinda doomed.

Paste dispenser exists for a reason - if you have no good cook (and/or ability to make clean kitchen) use it until you can.
Also, instead of getting rid of mechanic (food poisoning being something you should care about), I think we should simply make AI better at handling stuff. It this case example being cook cleaning kitchen before cooking - or making it a toggle like self healing for doctors, so you can decide whenever cook wastes his time cleaning, while you have a dedicated cleaner.

I say lets expand mechanics  - not get rid of them.

Also: the read up about balancing - I give 10/10.
I'm used to reading people complaining about cheesy strats getting nerfed and saying that it ruins fun or whatnot. Maybe some people like this will get better idea about what balancing is about, and that sometimes nerfs are required it order to create a more complete and varied game.

[TheMeInTeam]

I've not seen much issue with poisoning since it went through a few tweaks.  It was pretty awful when this thread started.  Maybe I've just been lucky.

That said - ignoring food poisoning has been poor play in Rimworld for years.  When your pawn count isn't high taking that kind of penalty on them is a significant detriment to colony productivity early game, and that's when you least need such a hit from something you can control.

[Grimelord82]

Food poisoning is nasty, but there's multiple ways to mitigate it, so I don't see it as a problem.
I've been playing 1.0 unstable since the .1950 build, and a lvl 5-8 starting cook and here's what I've had to do.
1) Build 1950-51 or so. Ignored the problem, with my kitchen out in my growing/workshed area within 2 spaces of butcher table and dirt. Some poisoning, but still not very common. Just really bad when it happens but only ever 1 pawn at a time.
2) Put tiles down to improve walk speed, never got 1 space under the stove tiled for some reason. Still not an issue, just every once in a while.
3) Build 1953-Current. Woah! Big change or just RNG smacking me. Multiple days of "Food poisoning: dirty kitchen" and "Incompetent cook" despite them all being over lvl 10. I let that go on for a few days and figure it won't stop.
4) Build 1954+. Set up a hospital like room. Sterile floors, new isolated room without any stockpiles, butcher table still elsewhere. Food poisoning disappears from the colony.

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What I want to know is how to fight freaking lancers if you don't have shields+maces. I've had multiple instances of Flak jacket+pants+vest+simple helmet, behind sandbag+wall having appendages blown clean off from single shots. If it's an arm/leg it disintegrates and they go down. Torso/head usually kill them flat out. "Sapper crumpled due to lack of a head"

It's a very all or nothing mechanic right now. Armor doesn't help (I check the combat logs after lancer fights, and can't find any reflections like I see for other arms fire). Pets don't help (can't breed huskies/wargs fast enough so I can sacrifice two for every lancer I need to kill to get an un-shielded melee in range).
Can't turtle in the base, because that poison is killing half my crops or psychic ship is driving everyone mad....so I save-scum until every sniper fight goes perfect. Overwhelming firepower and lucky shots work for me as well as they do the lancers.

[TheMeInTeam]

If you can't use walls/micro to engage lancers in melee before they get shot just fight them in a way that lets you shoot them without firing back like usual.  It's not like they have revolvers or auto pistols that fire almost instantly.

[Oblitus]

What I want to know is how to fight freaking lancers if you don't have shields+maces. I've had multiple instances of Flak jacket+pants+vest+simple helmet, behind sandbag+wall having appendages blown clean off from single shots. If it's an arm/leg it disintegrates and they go down. Torso/head usually kill them flat out. "Sapper crumpled due to lack of a head"

It's a very all or nothing mechanic right now. Armor doesn't help (I check the combat logs after lancer fights, and can't find any reflections like I see for other arms fire). Pets don't help (can't breed huskies/wargs fast enough so I can sacrifice two for every lancer I need to kill to get an un-shielded melee in range).
Can't turtle in the base, because that poison is killing half my crops or psychic ship is driving everyone mad....so I save-scum until every sniper fight goes perfect. Overwhelming firepower and lucky shots work for me as well as they do the lancers.

Turret covered by sandbags in front of your firing line makes a great decoy. But this requires half-decent setup, which is too expensive if your base is on open. Well, and turrets, OFC. In my current crashlanded playthrough it took 110 days to recruit a pawn with at least a single flame research passion. Would take several more seasons to get to turrets - she has passion, but no actual experience.

[TheMeInTeam]

Turrets and batteries can both be repositioned, pretty quickly too.  As tribal you'll never get to them during the time the game is most challenging though.  Animals can sub as a distraction if you have the food, though who knows how such tactics get evaluated.

Open bases nearly guarantee extended periods of hiding against manhunters.  There's not a lot of counterplay for 40+ deer other than pathing manipulation to kill them or hiding until the extreme late game...and hiding w/o perimeter walls means lots of inefficient hauling or significant risk of mental break --> wander to death.

So typically one just bites the bullet and does pathing manipulation.

[Grimelord82]

I appreciate both replies. I listed the problem with a very narrow scope, and those are both good suggestions for JUST that issue.

I've never really tried pistols, but have some laying around.

Half the save scumming is due to what pops out of the ship. Centipedes of any variety make close engagements impossible until they are plinked down to being useless. As do scythers, but at least traps work on them.

I don't really have enough steel for sacrificial turrets right now. Or maybe I do and I just need to build a few of the damn things and stop hoarding.

[Oblitus]

Turrets and batteries can both be repositioned, pretty quickly too.

Only micro ones.

[TheMeInTeam]

Turrets and batteries can both be repositioned, pretty quickly too.

Only micro ones.

Of course, but when sappers breach you they're creating a choke, in a spot you can anticipate prior to breach.  If you actually have turret tech (with tribal starts it would be years 2-3 at earliest for me) you can definitely slap a miniturret positioned on a way that will cause raiders with guns to want to stop in the breached wall.  Depending on the 1.0 iteration this will literally cause a raider to block other raiders and minimize firing potential.

I do think movement in 1.0 needs to be fixed though.  It's kind of janky that you get green circles that don't consistently represent where the pawn will actually stop.  How much pawns and raiders are allowed to path over each other was a *significant* change to 1.0 and I don't know what the intended functionality is.  Since the stuff is inconsistent and stacking is still technically possible I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that how it is right now is still not completely WAD.

[Snafu_RW]

How much pawns and raiders are allowed to path over each other was a *significant* change to 1.0 and I don't know what the intended functionality is.  Since the stuff is inconsistent and stacking is still technically possible I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that how it is right now is still not completely WAD.

AIUI the idea is that pawns can path /over/ (not necessarily stacking) friendlies (at a reduced movement rate?) including animals, but not hostiles. This makes sense to me, but how neutrals are calculated WRT pathing I have no idea

[Albion]

@Tynan: what was the thought behind the latest research tree adjustments?
First you limit the point multiplier to industrial so tribals will always pay double and normal dudes research with the given value. This reduced various research points costs for outlanders.
However with the latest build you increased points cost by a lot for advanced tech meaning tribals need even more time to research the ship and fabrication bench than before.
Why not move back to the old system of multiplying by tech difference? That way tribals will still need to invest more research (50% more for spacer tech) than outlanders but not double the amount. It was a penalty but not a super heavy one.

[MoronicCinamun]

I like the DR/DT system. It's also used in UnderRail, which we were looking at.

There are some downsides though:
-Weapons with zero effect on a given armor. If enemy has such armor, it may be frustrating. If you do, may be boring. Can anyone comment on experiences in Fallout with this?
-Spam. Assuming any damage occurs, a high DR means that attacks may end up doing lots of tiny bits of damage. It's fine in some games but in RW each damage is a separate wound, and if they're spammed it can look bad and cause other issues.

Yea, this was a massive issue in the original Fallouts, especially 2.
A lot of it was the stuff being bugged though: in fallout 1 the "Armor piercing" rounds didn't actually have any modifiers, nor did the hollowpoints; they all functioned the same. In fallout 2, the AP rounds would ignore ~30% of the DR (but *not* the DT), while having the base damage cut in half, the HPs had the opposite, so the APs were just strictly WORSE against armor.

But regardless, what you said is a big problem: many weapons become useless. This was again less of a problem in fallout 1 because the main enemy was super mutants, who didn't really have armor, just hp. In fallout 2 though, the Enclave has the best power armor known to man, with things like 90%DR+20DT to Lasers. Now, this was implemented badly, because it would do the DR, *then* the DT; a 40 damage laser would get reduced by 90%, then have a -20, making a big fat zero. Critical hits could overcome this, but that's just a lot of boring min-maxxing; for the most part you are forced to use the handful of super high powered weapons to do anything at the late game, while a lot of guns become obsolete really early, some way before you can even actually obtain them.

So, perhaps Rimworld could use a DT+DR system, if DT happens first, then the DR, you'll have less zeroes that way. But All-in-all I don't like that system, but I figured I'd give you the personal experience. I think the current unstable system is pretty damn good, just needs more tweaking with penetration values and such. The "clothing shouldn't deflect bullets" thing I don't care much for, because 1. it's such a small chance when you factor in penetration, 2. like someone else said about realistically there is some merit because rounds can glance, and 3. it's a video game, plenty of stuff isn't too realistic, Balance > realism
Still thinking on it.

[Oblitus]

Yea, this was a massive issue in the original Fallouts, especially 2.
A lot of it was the stuff being bugged though: in fallout 1 the "Armor piercing" rounds didn't actually have any modifiers, nor did the hollowpoints; they all functioned the same. In fallout 2, the AP rounds would ignore ~30% of the DR (but *not* the DT), while having the base damage cut in half, the HPs had the opposite, so the APs were just strictly WORSE against armor.

But regardless, what you said is a big problem: many weapons become useless. This was again less of a problem in fallout 1 because the main enemy was super mutants, who didn't really have armor, just hp. In fallout 2 though, the Enclave has the best power armor known to man, with things like 90%DR+20DT to Lasers. Now, this was implemented badly, because it would do the DR, *then* the DT; a 40 damage laser would get reduced by 90%, then have a -20, making a big fat zero. Critical hits could overcome this, but that's just a lot of boring min-maxxing; for the most part you are forced to use the handful of super high powered weapons to do anything at the late game, while a lot of guns become obsolete really early, some way before you can even actually obtain them.

So, perhaps Rimworld could use a DT+DR system, if DT happens first, then the DR, you'll have less zeroes that way. But All-in-all I don't like that system, but I figured I'd give you the personal experience. I think the current unstable system is pretty damn good, just needs more tweaking with penetration values and such. The "clothing shouldn't deflect bullets" thing I don't care much for, because 1. it's such a small chance when you factor in penetration, 2. like someone else said about realistically there is some merit because rounds can glance, and 3. it's a video game, plenty of stuff isn't too realistic, Balance > realism
Still thinking on it.

DR/DT in Fallout 1/2 style is great. Sure, you can get invilnerable agains weak enemies if your armor is good enough. And? Tribals with clubs and bows shound not have any chance against power armor and heavy weapons. This is how progression works. I mostly hate Fallout 4, but there is one thing done almost right - power armor. They managed to make it feel like something that makes a difference, while in F3/FNV I always preferred light armor. In F3 there was literally no difference between power armor and top light armor, and in FNV said difference fallen in a gap between automatic weapons with weak per shot damage and powerful one-shots, so decent light armor with a few perks was enough to protect against any light weapon while letting you use stealth and granting movement speed boost.

Current Rimworld system is like one from F3, where any armor always would let 20% of damage through. You can get a power armor and pulse rifle, but a pack of manhunting hares would screw you up with ease. And this is just wrong.

[Catastrophy]

I don't know. I wouldn't bother so much about edge cases, @Tynan. These sandbox games are there to do all kinds of ridiculous things. Is natural for people to invent crazy things and unleash them. No need to chase minmaxers meta - there will always be one. Though I agree on the variety part - it should always be encouraged to try different things.
But I don't play unstable, I still have to catch up on the last version.

[MoronicCinamun]

(snip)

Yea, I have to disagree on some of that. I'm not sure what you mean by "current system" being like fallout 3's. if you mean the base game, yes, you're right. The 1.0 unstable, nah it's a lot more like the first 2, and it is a big improvement overall. Unless I'm misunderstanding you (which I tend to do a lot), it sounds like we both agree though that the current stable's armor system is pretty silly and the 1.0 is a vast improvement, just could use a little more tweaking.

Sure, *realistically* if you have power armor you shouldn't be hurt by clubs and rabbits, but that's not engaging in a balance sense, and as stated the balance of the game is way more important than power armor. That kind of progression system works in an rpg, but I'm pretty sure it's not really in the spirit of Rimworld. Of course the fact the armor will degrade when hit does balance a lot of that out, it probably would have made Fallout 1/2 much more in-depth too. And Tygan already expressed in this thread how while he kind of likes that idea he doesn't want to make stuff too complex.
I suppose I did say in my own post though that the OG fallout system but tweaked might work nicely. That system wasn't inherently bad, it just had some truly unbalanced/untested numbers (like the AP rounds which were strictly worse at everything, especially armor penetration lmao).

To be honest, I don't think Rimworld's power armor is like your typical Fallout/WH40k/etc. of big bulky suits, that's not the vibe it gives me. It isn't strength enhancing servos and plates but rather this neuro-mimetic stuff that allows it to be firm yet flexible; in other words it's less heavy by every definition of the word.

Have to say I do agree with you on fallout 4's power armor, I dare say the best depiction in any game I've ever played, seen, or heard of.