AI improvements and micro-management

[PsychoticLime]

Just a little list of suggestions regarding the micro-management of your colony and the AI of both allies and enemies:

-Possibility to set preferences to haulers (example: "Haul only metal / Haul metal first", "Haul only items inside/outside home regions")

-New order in the Orders tab, "Prioritize": the selected elements will be marked and the colonist will take care of them first (for example to have your builders concentrate on the defense systems before working on the other stuff)

-Possibility to schedule the sleep of your colonists: selecting a colonist and right clicking on a bed will display the option "go to bed". The colonist will sleep until woke up by the player or by an urgent threat (enemies attacking him/her), until his/hers "Rest" bar is full or until his/hers "Food" bar is low

-Sieging mortars will try to shoot most valuable enemies and not the closest ones: they will concentrate on enemy mortars first, then on large groups of colonists or on valuable structures (power generators, nutrient paste dispensers, auto-turrets, communication consoles).

Let me know what you guys think, I know litterally nothing about programming but I think these are classified as "small" suggestions: they're little changes that I would personally find useful when playing

[bullwinkle]

I love the idea of prioritizing hauling certain things. Would help huge with making an assembly line process.

I like the idea of scheduling sleep times. Maybe be able to wake them up at a certain time each day and go to bed at a certain time. Like most of us do in real life. Alarm clock wakes us up to go to work. If where tired or not we get up. On the flip side if the colonists keep getting woken up early it would impact their mood. So you'd have to be careful.
This way you could make "shift work" in certain tasks. When one colonist goes to sleep another takes their place.

[StorymasterQ]

Just a little list of suggestions regarding the micro-management of your colony and the AI of both allies and enemies:

-Possibility to set preferences to haulers (example: "Haul only metal / Haul metal first", "Haul only items inside/outside home regions")

Sounds good. I'd also like something like Haul only Food. This is looking like every colonist should have a Hauling button on their Info that looks like the Storage button on a Storage Zone. We can then choose which colonist can/may haul which items.

-New order in the Orders tab, "Prioritize": the selected elements will be marked and the colonist will take care of them first (for example to have your builders concentrate on the defense systems before working on the other stuff)

Want! That Hauling button I mention above could be, instead of tick marks like Storage, boxes like the manual priorities in the Overview.

-Possibility to schedule the sleep of your colonists: selecting a colonist and right clicking on a bed will display the option "go to bed". The colonist will sleep until woke up by the player or by an urgent threat (enemies attacking him/her), until his/hers "Rest" bar is full or until his/hers "Food" bar is low

I'm pretty sure a mod made this happen a while ago. Could be part of Vanilla+, but either way, I think it was outdated and was never made for A5.

-Sieging mortars will try to shoot most valuable enemies and not the closest ones: they will concentrate on enemy mortars first, then on large groups of colonists or on valuable structures (power generators, nutrient paste dispensers, auto-turrets, communication consoles).

Sounds okay. I'd move 'colonists' to below 'valuable structures' on the priority list, though. Really, siege weapons are made for buildings. Targeting moving objects only made it vulnerable to kiting techniques.

[PsychoticLime]

Sounds okay. I'd move 'colonists' to below 'valuable structures' on the priority list, though. Really, siege weapons are made for buildings.

That is what I thought, too: that's why I find silly that mortars target the closest enemy (usually people). But, as in real life too, sometimes artillery IS actually used to target infantry, in the case of large groups of people, that's why I included them in the list of "valuable targets": a mortar shot well placed on a group of colonist would certainly do quite a lot of damage. But because there would be quite a lot of programming to do (the AI would have to define what a "group" of people is, decide whether it is "big enough" or not, order it in the priority list...) I think it would be ok to have colonists at the very bottom of the list like you suggest.

[Shinzy]

I'm all for micromanaging as many aspects of the game as possible (within reason ofc =P "Only fill paste dispensers with dead squirrels and move in zigzag pattern whenever possibly")

the mortars need worked over for sure. it's too easy to bait them to try get your colonist on the hunt for more stuffing for paste dispensers while you're mauling their siege site with your mortars

and forcing sleep would be welcome addition =P keeping someone drafted or fiddling with their priorities in toomuch a hazzle when you're just trying to get them stay home and recover instead of going on a hunt for animals
which they can be fixated on for quite the while without canceling their task

yes my colonists really hate squirrels but they do keep eating my potatoes

but I support all these!

[Captain Sho]

Since the mortars were just added last update i'm sure they will get some more tweaking but I do think they should focus on structures rather than your colonists assaulting their encampment but on the other hand, it does make sense that they would being that they are seeing you as the biggest threat, plus they have better accuracy at a shorter range.

And i'm not sure about being able to pick their sleep schedule but I would like to see a "night owl" trait that would basically do the same thing just more luck of the draw

[PsychoticLime]

Since the mortars were just added last update i'm sure they will get some more tweaking but I do think they should focus on structures rather than your colonists assaulting their encampment but on the other hand, it does make sense that they would being that they are seeing you as the biggest threat, plus they have better accuracy at a shorter range.

That's true but artillery isn't made for targeting people, I mean raiders are like 15 people with guns, it's their PURPOSE to defend the position while the mortars do their job to the Colony. And, you know the proverb "Offense is the best defense": if mortars keep targeting the base even when colonists try to attack, the player has to worry about both: if the offensive fails and the colonists need to retreat, they will find a wrecked base and they wouldn't be able to recover from the fight.

[sirdave79]

I totally agree about being able to prioritise the items being hauled. Separate checkboxes for food, stone, metal, wood etc (like a certain other game has).

Some of the videos ive watched would suggest to me that hauling is a poor third cousin of other jobs and seems to only happen when most people have stopped doing anything else.

I prefer the sleeping as it is now, they sleep when they are tired. Maybe its just me but the sight of a scientist beavering away at the research station through the night appeals to me.

[Shinzy]

I totally agree about being able to prioritise the items being hauled. Separate checkboxes for food, stone, metal, wood etc (like a certain other game has).

Some of the videos ive watched would suggest to me that hauling is a poor third cousin of other jobs and seems to only happen when most people have stopped doing anything else.

I prefer the sleeping as it is now, they sleep when they are tired. Maybe its just me but the sight of a scientist beavering away at the research station through the night appeals to me.

the sleeping works fine normally but on some occasions you really need to have some really tired near mental breakdown guys to just go to bed instead of beating down fires when there's others better capable of doing that at the moment

and hauling is one of the worst jobs right after cleaning =P
you always need to have coupla citizens wholly dedicated for those two jobs
and untick all the other jobs from them
or manually prioritize them to highest priority

[PsychoticLime]

That is the annoying part about hauling, at the moment haulers pick up the closest thing, that means that if you have a farm at your base the haulers will be stuck in that limbo pretty much 70% of the time because every time a grower drops a potato they will try to haul it and by the time they have dropped it in the stockpile there is the same problem again. It's fun to whatch, but not very efficient

[sirdave79]

Yeah thats nailed what ive seen (the food around farms). Hauling takes too long.

I do like the people running around picking stuff up and dropping it off, but seeing food all over the ground around the growing zone/hydroponics constantly and the far out stuff sitting around for ages Im tempted to say maybe hauling/some hauling could be  abstracted (at least for rimworld, i wouldnt want this in df which handles things slightly differently). Possibly short distance (x tiles) hauling could be automatically done after sitting for a day. Ive seen cooks picking up food for a meal and running through a food stockpile to make a meal (dam you little things.... store some of the bloody food while youre at it). So that would be the rationale for automatically stockpiled stuff.

I think that would free up dedicated haulers for longer distance stuff and more hauling would take place in the same time.

More realistically and less drastically haul by item types would at least let us control what gets done too slowly.

I think its interesting how DF handles time as opposed to rimworld. Dwarves only eat every few days in df so a month passes quickly. Meaning that performing a job that should be quick (cooking a meal) can take a few days. Same goes for sleeping. So whilst handing the "real hauling" in as realistic a fashion as possible (not compromising with abstracted hauling or some such), against a clearly abstracted time flow and individual needs require satisfying framework (sleeping and eating only every few days). So df is less realistic in this (wow didnt think id ever say that - 1/2 day to make a meal in rimworld vs 3 days for df.... ish) whilst simultaneously "playing better" (forgive me, they do also have haul by item type as im sure everyone here knows).

Against all that it seems like more food needs to be grown in rimworld than df. Leaving even less free time for colonists to fight or generate wealth (or more importantly haul stuff!). I always try in df for me to have my poulation organised with half civillian half military. Then ill try to use half of the military to defeat a raid. the idea being that the civillian (but armoured) half keep the essential cogs turning while a raid is beaten down by the military half (quarter). The reserve quarter is used for emergencies, for a potential 2nd objective, like guarding a caravan or training replacements from previous engagements (df only i realise). That feels right. Also military casualties are replenished from the most promising civillians (who are procreating ASAP which in rimworld is even slower and not fast enough but still.....).

That just feels right to me. An inability to actually do that, perhaps requiring 90 percent of the colony to beat down a raid or the only people not fighting are farmers who REALLY have 0 time for anything other than making sure theres enough food for the returning heroes or theyll all come back to an empty or rotted larder, and that maybe (speaking hypothetically and for myself) the "challenge" currently present in cassandra classic is chaotic at best. I micromanage and edit labours in DF almost constantly, I realise this can be inefficent and counter-productive and I strive for touching them as little as possible but it just doesnt happen. Theres nearly always something that could be done better now by editing a labour or 7. Everything ive seen makes me think my play in rimworld would be either much worse in this regard or id be losing (badly).

The df timeframe also lends itself better to procreation but excuse me, im finding it hard not to bleed into other topics on these forums.