Faster travel: Bikes and/or Horses

[zollern]

In order to make bigger maps work, i. e. your colonists not getting tired and hungry because they have to get to the siege or hunt and haul far away from their beds and stoves, we need faster or more durable colonists. The option of faster colonists seems easier to implement such that the game balancing is not completely broken (if the colonists get too tough, the game is too easy). To make them faster, I suggest to use bikes or horses.

Bike

• Bikes are made on the machining table. Seems more logical than making them a build-able item, but that would also be possible.
• Bikes can then be mounted (code from manning mortars can be recycled here). Mounting takes a short amount of time such that bikes are not always used for every small step.
• When mounted, bikes provide colonists with 100-200% movement bonus (can maybe be linked with some trait or skill?). This also means that grass and the like will reduce overall movement as well.
• "Half-defenses", i. e. everything you can use for defense but also climb over (sandbags, chunks), are impassable with bikes.
• Riding a bike, you cannot pass through doors (I understand that this might be complicated due to the fact that bikes could be stockpiled both inside and outside the base. So this is definitely a maybe).
• Bikes also allow normal transportation of items (so max. 75 of resources, 1 of rockets/meals and the like). Especially transporting meals will be beneficial for surviving meals.
• Research might allow for more transport capacity/faster bikes.
• Shooting from a bike is possible, but only if the skill level is above 10 or the like. Accuracy is reduced.
• Bikes cannot be used for defense.
• Bikes can be destroyed. They naturally lose integrity with time and can (can't?) be repaired. Not being able to repair them maybe is a possibility of balancing them.

Horse

• The horse is a new animal spawning in packs, not unlike the muffalo. It roams around, it eats plants. Gives around half(?) the meat of a muffalo.
• Unlike the muffalo, horses are fast and also can, when fleeing from hunters, leave the map with the whole pack. They do not attack hunters.
• The horse is tame-able. The mechanic for this would have to be implemented, making this probably a much harder implementation than bikes. I'm not sure if taming is planned? For the sake of a completed suggestion, here an idea for taming:
  
  • New order: Tame.
  • New structures: gate and sleeping spots for animals (hay). Effectively making stables.
  • New animals in the stable are like prisoners and need to be tamed after being held captive. Tamed animals will not run away likely if the gate is open and sleep in the same spot every night.
  • Animals in the stable need to be fed food. Mood is not affected by the type of food eaten.
  • New item: saddle for mountable animals.
  • Tamed mountable animals allow for being saddled. Mechanically one could think about gear for animals.
  • Animals in the stable can also be marked for hunting. One could think about making it a melee-hunt at that point (cut the throat).
    
  • Plan A: Animals marked for taming are hunted in a usual manner, but are likely to be incapacitated. They can then be rescued and be brought to their new stable. They are like prisoners, need to be doctored. Seems relatively easy to implement, but is rather cruel .
  • Plan B (more complicated, probably more fiddly, but less cruel): When an animal is marked for taming, a colonist (either new skill Taming or using Hunting (seems somewhat logical as the first dogs were probably used and tamed by hunters)) takes food and tries to approach the animal.
  • The animal will approach the colonist with a certain probability p (depending on skill) or run away respectively, making the colonist retry. It makes sense for a horse to run away more often than a muffalo.
  • The colonist then tries to lure the animal back to the base. Startling the animal (shots fired at other animals) at this stage will result in a failure.
  • It will be lured to a free haystack to sleep in. It is then in the process of being tamed.
• A saddled horse can be mounted by colonists.
• It is very much like the bike-suggestion otherwise.
• Unlike bikes, it can move over the half-defenses. It can also be used as a meat-shield, so that it gives defense.
• If being shot while mounted, it can get a panic attack and run away, throw down the rider etc.

Looking at both lists, bikes are probably easier to make. If one opts to make them in the machining table, it would result in kind of a new type of item: can be crafted, can be put in a stockpile and is movable. While I feel a lot of code can be copy and pasted for bikes, I have absolutely no idea how much complexity bikes or horses would add to the pathfinding algorithm A*.

So, that's my suggestion for bikes and horses, hopefully it's extensive enough for a good approximation of how complicated it is to implement. IMHO, we need faster travel or at least the possibility of transport or otherwise, sieges are just the death of colonies because they are unreachable.

Any questions or suggestions? Just shoot them, I'd love to discuss with you!

[GreeboCherry]

I like your ideas, they are good, horses especially. But I would replace bike with vechicles. Something like podracers from Star Wars I or vulture from Starcraft or bikes let's leave it for a while.

How should this vechicles be controlled?
a) Should they be manually opereted by player - "Jim, take this horse and ride there, then I'll order you to dismount and you should hunt this muffalos"?

b)Or should vechicles be assigned to characters as a gear? And Jim would just take his vulture whenever he goes hunting or to haul something from far away?(I think about "parking place zone" where they would leave vechicles and or horses when going inside)

c)Or should there just be vechicles avaible for all collonists  and they would use it whenever they need?

Option b sounds good for me, plus button next to draft that would allow or forbiden using mounts/vechicles at specified moment("Jim, get out of this flying can and take cover!")

[BetaSpectre]

Rail car system FTW.

[zollern]

I like your ideas, they are good, horses especially. But I would replace bike with vechicles. Something like podracers from Star Wars I or vulture from Starcraft or bikes let's leave it for a while.

Thanks for your suggestion!
I opted not to suggest vehicles like that as Rimworld has a Western-style feeling to me. It's less science-fiction and more surviving on that forsaken rock. To me, it feels a lot like the series Firefly. Getting high-tech vehicles should be (if at all) a high tier technology for people who want to make the Kessel Run (you reference Star Wars, so do I! ). Horses feel the most Western-ish, but are admittedly hard to implement the way I envision them (but maybe someone else or Tynan himself has a better idea), so a bike would be a simple gadget to build. There's not as much technology in bikes as there is in podracers, thus constructing them in a simple colony feels more natural. (Admittedly, since Alpha 5 you can research space-ship parts)
But that's just me, maybe podracers are a better choice.

Regarding your control options, I see where you're coming from with (b), but why shouldn't colonists just share their vehicles? I guess you thought about a situation where a hunter shouldn't be forced to go by foot only because the grower takes the transport vehicle all the time to water potatoes in front of the colony's gates.
By requiring vehicles to be parked at designated zones (in order to gas them up, maybe) one could circumvent that colonists always take them, i. e. colonists have to make a detour to get to their vehicles, then. Plus, making it take time to mount/unmount would help with this, as well.

[sirdave79]

Bikes and Horses, awesome idea. If it had to be only one I reckon horses, for the western feel. I was thinking of horses whilst watching youtube videos. A lot of stuff wasnt getting hauled after the start and lots of long hauling jobs taking place.

I would love to see horses in the game. Bikes probably would be easier to implement. Side cars would be nice. And carts for horses, allowing hauling of maybe 4 items at once. Hell I want both, but if it had to be one id pick horses.

I like the idea of a bike/horse "parking zone". You could maybe set a tile distance threshold for a job/colonist to "grab a bike/horse" in the zone. So you could make sure that colonists nearby dont use them for short range jobs. Id also allow a character to be permanently assigned a horse. I think however a horse should "wait outside" in this case, as horses charging around inside houses and/or narrow corridors would be something you wouldnt want to happen.

Horses should maybe be available from traders also. If they can keep slaves alive im sure they can keep a horse alive. Traders should probably also bring other livestock but im going off topic now....

[StorymasterQ]

You know what would make for faster travel but without meddlesome other objects like bikes and horses? Something that a colonist can equip that makes them actually move faster. Something like a power armor or maybe a JETPACK!

When equipped, terrain doesn't have any movement penalty, or perhaps a movement bonus instead.