Just deleted RimWorld (temporarily) ... here's my feedback

[axefrog]

To clarify, I've deleted RimWorld because (a) it's tempting me far too much when I'm supposed to be doing my work - yes, it is that addictive! - and (b) I don't want to wear myself out on it at such an early stage of development and have no interest in playing it when it has been developed a lot further. I think for the moment I'll probably allow myself a few games every alpha release and delete it afterwards until the following release.

My feedback most likely rehashes stuff others have already said and stuff Tynan knows about, but here goes anyway. These are just *my* experiences of the game and aren't necessarily more or less valid than other possibly contradictory opinions.

Tynan,

• The game is an awesome preview of what's to come. Even with the current lack of content, I keep wanting to go back and try and do better than the previous game. Whatever flaws it may have, I think this is a great testament to how successful your idea and implementation is and likely will be (even moreso) in the future. Very good work, well done!
• I love the combat; I think the tactical aspect is quite good. I hope you have plans to expand on this in the future with additional options and possibilities. It can make a real difference to a supposedly-unwinnable situation when superior tactics can allow your small band of ragtag colonists to win against overwhelming numbers of attackers.
• I find the forced slowdown during combat frustrating during prolonged encounters. The change of pace when combat begins is fine and I think works well, but there are often cases when I'd like to be able to speed it up again until something triggers another slowdown, but the options to speed the game up are disabled while a combat scenario is in play. That should be my choice to make.
• Crafting bills are a great idea, and I've been using them with reduced search radii and infinite lengths to create nice little production lines. I'd like to see an option to obtain ingredients from a specific stockpile zone, rather than within a search radius. The fact that the search area is circular and zones are rectangular feels mismatched, as does the fact that I try to situate my source stockpile inside the search radius, but the search radius is centred over the crafting table, meaning it's harder to plan a production line as you have to reduce the search radius to the smallest size possible and very carefully configure your zones to not appear in the wrong search radius. I've been using the storage options to overcome this.
• My colonists are irritatingly stupid at times. I know they're supposed to be semi-autonomous and operate based on priorities but also on their own personal needs and desires, but there are some clear omissions or bugs that frustrate me in certain situations. For example:
  
  
  
  • Colonists should know that if they try to haul stuff from inside a combat zone they'll probably get shot. In fact their desire to do anything that's going to get them shot should be heavily dampened.
  • When a colonist is enroute to do something that will solve their mental problems, they should get a pause on mentally breaking given that they know their need is about to be fulfilled. Yesterday I had a colonist who was urgently hungry pick up his food, take it to a table and a fraction of a second before he started eating, he dropped his food and mentally broke due to starvation. If I were starving and finally had some food to eat, I'd more likely be excited about knowing that I'm going to eat than being pissed off that I hadn't eaten in ages.
  • My colonists are such whiney babies when they're in combat! Waaaah I'm hungry, waaah I'm tired. It seems to me that if your colony that you'd spent so much time and effort building and making a home of was under siege, your resolve to repel the enemy would be significantly increased and you'd be a lot more tolerant to a lack of sleep and an empty stomach.
• To prioritise what's important there's currently a lot of micromanagement, especially when you're preparing for a dangerous situation or responding to something that's time critical, such as preparing an enclosure for a dying prisoner. I don't know what form they'd take, but it'd be nice to see some kind of option to prioritise a task or group of tasks as a colony-wide effort without having to mess with all your carefully-balanced work priorities. Perhaps some way to create a new colony priority, then right click on a given unfinished order and associated with that priority group, sort of like when you have a colonist selected and you ask them to prioritise completing a specific task.
• The standard AI story teller is often overly punishing. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs for some elaboration on what I'm talking about. I will have just survived overwhelming odds being attacked by an enemy and my base is in pieces. I'm just getting underway rebuilding and am maybe 20-50% through recovering and rebuilding and I'm attacked by another enemy. Maybe I manage to survive this one as well, though likely with at least half my colonists incapacitated, killed, mentally-broken/captured and once again my base in a shambles, and then the AI story teller will drop a psychic drone on me (or some other unfair scenario), destroying most of the remaining mental capacity my colonists have. It seems to me that there should be some sort of internal heuristic judging what you're capable of dealing with and not screwing you over with too-frequent negative scenarios that cross the line from challenging into punishingly unfun. At the very least, any scenario should have *some* way of being dealt with. Psychic drones seem to have no recourse as best I can tell. I know there are "easier" AIs you can choose from, but I want the game to be as challenging as possible, just not unreasonably-so, and the current default AI seems to err in the direction of "(A)sshole (I)ntelligence". When the game knows my colony has been beaten to within an inch of its structural, defensive and mental life and I'm down to barely a skeleton crew keeping things going, throwing yet another nasty thing at me without any breathing room crosses the line from "hey it's all part of the meta story" to "I'm done with your game; i've decided your colony needs to die now".

Anyway, I'm very much aware we're only in early alpha stages, so I look forward to what's yet to come. I'm hoping that it's planned that there will be a huge number of "story" scenarios so that most games don't just feel like different combinations of the same few things. Each game should really feel different. Also looking forward to seeing additional depth of character and intelligence in my colonists.

Keep up the good work.

[sirdave79]

Agree with most of whats said here. Drafted colonists should/could maybe carry a meal or two in their backpacks. Kind of makes me think about food decay and preservation though.

Ive seen videos where the default storyteller looks like its hammering the crap out of players. Seems like its tuned to send more hostiles against you than you have colonists. Whilst I like the look of the tactical element it seems like youll almost constantly be attacked by challenging groups of enemies. And the story above about attacks coming on top of previously highly damaging attacks sounds bad. I worry one has to be absolutely and utterly tip top to defend your base from successive attacks without suffering critical cumulative damage to your base and population. I suspect also that luck will be the deciding factor in encounters where a lower number of defenders are constantly attacked by overwhelming odds, at least when it comes to not succumbing to critical cumulative damage. Possibly further tactical elements might be added to change this.

I suppose that it is possibly intended that a few colonists die with a 2nd or 3rd damaging wave, its just the way I play DF is that I can almost arrange that no one dies (and thats the way I like it and the way I think a successful dwarf overseer should see it. And thats before we get into actual world populations and limits). And the logistics for these games make it difficult for routine stuffz to get done alongside the normal stuffz that need to happen continuously. Im thinking of the games timeframe, the actual game process that needs to happen for say a meal to be made (and the associated time) ie the colonist "grabbing the job", traveling to the beginning, then picking up needed items before finally making the output. I would guess that depending on start conditions making a meal could take a significant fraction of a day. I suspect repairing of base defenses would suffer the same problems.

[HalfBrother]

In regards to the hauling things and getting shot by raiders, I think there should be a "keep out" zone you can set to keep the colonists from being suicidal.

[_alphaBeta_]

All good points really. Nice constructive criticism.

The temporary prioritization of certain tasks within the main categories was recently discussed here. No need reiterating the ideas here, but I think the issue can be solved multiple ways. My feelings are a few posts in.

Colonists going outside or in dangerous areas has also been discussed in numerous places. I've seen one and two recently.

[Jet Jaguar]

I've been thinking about this article a bit since I saw it earlier today:

Debunking "Losing is Fun" Game Design

Right now the game eventually devolves into repelling massive raids and cleaning up piles of dead bodies due to said raids, to the point where new furniture exists to dispose of all the bodies. It's all a bit macabre, really.

[TKS]

Agree with pretty much every point 

[Tynan]

Hello and thank you for the well-thought-through suggestions! I basically agree with a lot of what you're saying and we're moving to address some of it. Already for A6 I've separated out the storyteller choice from the challenge scale, so you can choose the flavor of events (random/ramp-up/etc) separately from how tough they are. This kind of invalidated Phoebe, so I was wondering what to do with her until I read sirdave's post and had the idea of just using her as a storyteller similar to Cassandra, but with long inter-threat intervals. I'm calling her Billie Basebuilder. She'll still kick your ass at high challenge scales - but she doesn't try to do it so often.

Regarding colonists not walking into dangerous areas - I've had this on my list for a while, but it is actually a rather difficult problem to solve properly. I'm hoping to build a solution on top of the region system, but it may have to wait for A7. Doing this in the AI is a bit of a dangerous change to make because you risk creating circumstances where the players want the colonists to do something in a dangerous area, but the colonists won't do it, which would be frustrating. So you need some kind of override control, which adds interface weight, or some really intelligent AI to fully understand the best thing to do in all circumstances. It's also a general-case problem, not just for colonists, but for enemies. The solution should also prevent raiders from walking through crowds of your armed colonists with kidnap victims, for example (they should run out the other direction and go around if necessary).

I'm reluctant to make the storytellers more adaptive. Doing this too hard seriously risks deflating the whole experience. When you know the storyteller won't hurt you if you're down, not only does it make risky/difficult situations less emotionally engaging, but it makes the rest of the game less engaging because now you know that even if you're down the game will go all Playskool on you and help you back up. I'm choosing instead to focus on ways to make the failure conditions more elastic - that is, to make it so that even if you lose a battle, you're not dead. Kidnapping was one step in this direction (e.g. they don't kill everyone, they just kidnap one or two people and leave). So was raiders being satisfied with the damage. I'm thinking of other mechanisms for this too. (See my book for more on elastic failure conditions)

Insanity will become temporary, so rampaging or depressed people may calm down (elastic failure again).

Crafting from a specific stockpile is an interesting idea, I'll say.

Colonists will get traits that modify their mood responses and set points. This will make them not all get sad at once in various circumstances, including post-combat. I've also already balanced some of the dead body mood impacts, and we have actual rotting bodies now, so most of the "saw dead body" effects only come from seeing rotted bodies now. And if they're surrounded by rotting bodies, well, that's avoidable.

[_alphaBeta_]

Regarding colonists not walking into dangerous areas - I've had this on my list for a while, but it is actually a rather difficult problem to solve properly. I'm hoping to build a solution on top of the region system, but it may have to wait for A7. Doing this in the AI is a bit of a dangerous change to make because you risk creating circumstances where the players want the colonists to do something in a dangerous area, but the colonists won't do it, which would be frustrating. So you need some kind of override control, which adds interface weight, or some really intelligent AI to fully understand the best thing to do in all circumstances. It's also a general-case problem, not just for colonists, but for enemies. The solution should also prevent raiders from walking through crowds of your armed colonists with kidnap victims, for example (they should run out the other direction and go around if necessary).

I linked a few threads a few posts back that have some suggestions. An initial implementation could be to just temporarily suspend your colonist jobs outside of either the home area, or a new area designated for this purpose. (I'd recommend a new zone for reasons I discuss here.) This condition would only take place when the player activates an emergency mode. This latter part, especially if the activation of the emergency mode is depicted by a blinking GUI button or reminder, should help players realize that their colonists are being restricted. This would help reduce frustration on why their colonists are behaving strangely after a battle.

I'm reluctant to make the storytellers more adaptive. Doing this too hard seriously risks deflating the whole experience. When you know the storyteller won't hurt you if you're down, not only does it make risky/difficult situations less emotionally engaging, but it makes the rest of the game less engaging because now you know that even if you're down the game will go all Playskool on you and help you back up. I'm choosing instead to focus on ways to make the failure conditions more elastic - that is, to make it so that even if you lose a battle, you're not dead. Kidnapping was one step in this direction (e.g. they don't kill everyone, they just kidnap one or two people and leave). So was raiders being satisfied with the damage. I'm thinking of other mechanisms for this too. (See my book for more on elastic failure conditions)

Elastic failure sounds great, and agree that a safety net every time you're down could get old for some players. Along those lines, expecting the inevitable huge game-ending battle when you're up on life wouldn't be great either. I don't envy you in trying to find a good balance, but I think your storyteller adjustment will be interesting to try out.

How about extortion and negotiations (for silver or resources) either before or during the battle to end hostilities as elastic failures? We were discussing around this post on how raiders would be more interesting if they had a goal in mind when attacking your colony in the first place. This goal doesn't necessarily need to be known to the player, but may become known based on the actions of the raiders. Wiping out your entire colony for sheer evil (or for the land and existing infrastructure) can still be a reason, but others in between may add some flavor.

[axefrog]

Tynan I'm not sure if it will help you debug, but here's a save game with highly unfair conditions caught at just the right time so you can see them before they're triggered. There's a crashed ship and all my colonists are in position to begin fighting whatever comes out of it. Every single time, the battle will get a minute or two in, I'll be doing not so well and then the game will dump a tonne of pirates or tribespeople on me. A perfect example of Cassandra Classic deciding it's time to end a colony. https://www.dropbox.com/s/qbsxpvow67rf7ie/Rimville3b.rim

Oh, also, for the life of me I can't get F11 to take screenshots. I don't know what the problem is. I was trying to take a screenshot to show my plight, but F11... it does nothing!

[Omg_Ken1]

Oh, also, for the life of me I can't get F11 to take screenshots. I don't know what the problem is. I was trying to take a screenshot to show my plight, but F11... it does nothing!

PrtScn and Ctrl+V in MsPaint works too until this have been solved!

[Tynan]

The screenshot key is now F10. Where does it say it's F11?

[Celthric Aysen]

The screenshot key is now F10. Where does it say it's F11?

Before it was F11 now its F10?
wouldn't have known if you haven't told us.

[milon]

I've actually had the same screenshot problem (see the most recent post in the Share Your Best Screenshots thread).  I'll try F10 next time I'm playing.

And Print Screen doesn't work since it only captures the desktop (on Windows anyway).

The screenshot key is now F10. Where does it say it's F11?

It's a bad rumor that's been floating around the forum for a while now.