How RimWorld has lost depth/immersion and became bland and simple

Started by Yoshida Keiji, February 08, 2019, 09:15:12 AM

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TheMeInTeam

Quote from: AileTheAlien on February 13, 2019, 08:34:49 AM
I could have sworn there was a mod to stop predators hunting colonists, but I can't seem to find one...

I've only heard of the alert mod that is now part of the game, and one that blocks animal revenge from being shot.

It's self-inconsistent to decry the alert, as without it the optimal play involves routinely/constantly doing something micro intensive.  That goes against both Tynan's statements about intended design for mechanics in general and against how many other colony threat notifications work in the game.

Shurp

It might help if the alert didn't pop up until the hunting animal got reasonably close.  Instead of, "your colonist is being hunted", you see, "XXX sees a polar bear coming for her!" when the polar bear is 30 squares away.

Time enough for her to run for help... late enough that it provides excitement.  Will help arrive in time?
If you give an annoying colonist a parka before banishing him to the ice sheet you'll only get a -3 penalty instead of -5.

And don't forget that the pirates chasing a refugee are often better recruits than the refugee is.

Limdood

It's posts like this...

...that made me search in vain for a "block member" function on the forums...

ManHuntingSquirrel

I just don't understand how getting a notification about an animal hunting your pawn leads a game with depth and immersion into being a casual bland and simple game.
- The Squirrel-Llama Manhunting Association CEO

khun_poo

Quote from: ManHuntingSquirrel on February 14, 2019, 09:55:31 AM
I just don't understand how getting a notification about an animal hunting your pawn leads a game with depth and immersion into being a casual bland and simple game.

OP just have a negative thought on 1.0 update. you can check on his many topic he created.

Shurp

Quote from: Limdood on February 13, 2019, 08:48:51 PM
...that made me search in vain for a "block member" function on the forums...

You must not have looked too hard, it's really easy to find. (see attached)

[attachment deleted due to age]
If you give an annoying colonist a parka before banishing him to the ice sheet you'll only get a -3 penalty instead of -5.

And don't forget that the pirates chasing a refugee are often better recruits than the refugee is.

Limdood

Quote from: Shurp on February 15, 2019, 07:18:51 AM


You must not have looked too hard, it's really easy to find. (see attached)
[/quote]Excellent!  Thanks!  Yeah I tried searching on options on his profile for a block/ignore *shrug*

mcduff

I absolutely love the self-indulgent whining of posts like this. They're so delightfully unaware of how neckbeardy they sound.

Impyre

I kinda understand the complaint about immersion from one perspective, because how would you know if you weren't monitoring your colonists. Of course, that argument taken to the extreme suggests we play rimworld from first-person perspective as a sortof "mayor" colonist. While a theoretically awesome idea, it'd be impossible. There's no way you could even see what's going on in the next room over. And that subject also brings another to my attention, raid notifications. They also kinda hurt the game in some small way. Why should you be notified of events like this if you haven't bothered posting guards / building watchtowers? If you don't have the foresight to build those systems and/or CCTV monitoring systems, let a mortar shell be your first notification of that siege camp that's been set up.

Ultimately though, I think these notifications improve the game more than they hurt it. If I had to choose which is worse for gameplay: an odd notification magically appearing about hunted colonist *or* a notification that a colonist has been eaten, personally I choose the former.

Also, to be brutally honest, the hunting notification often doesn't come soon enough to make a huge difference... especially for weak or slow ranged-only colonists (or baby livestock). I can't tell you how many times I've jumped on a notification early-game that a bear was hunting my brand new baby muffalo before I'd had a chance to build a barn, and even though I reacted immediately I couldn't get there in time. It's like a 50-50, but once you get a barn built it's not as big a problem. Furthermore, I generally specifically and intentionally target predators with my hunter orders as soon as they appear. I periodically check for them so they don't thin out the numbers of grazing wildlife too badly... so really I don't even see this notification at all much past the first year.

Yoshida Keiji

Finally someone who actually comes with an elaborated response, thank you.

I have been supporting every suggestion in the respective section that resembles the concept of a Watch Tower for a long time already.

i think there should be guard posts in the game
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41461.0


Before version 1.0 came out, there were and still are many "Monitoring" techniques, some have been removed, like the food bar from animals which is a change that made sense to me. The other methods being:

1.- Ecosystem: Preys. Predators will have the tendency to hunt the smaller creatures first, so when a map fauna population decreases and only the large sizes remain. That is a red flag of Predator danger.

2.- Cold & extreme biomes: Predators are left with less choices as rodents start to flee the map. Tree foliage color change, tree skin change, snow. This is another red flag of Predator danger.

3.- The safest play is a City Wall: Like I commented in repeated occasions, I learnt to build a city wall within my first five games and then never again I lost a pawn to Predator attack. To me it's totally unforgivable that "experienced" players still lose colonists to such an early game / basic level threat.

4.- Proximity to base: Predators wandering around your base. Would you still let them? Another red flag of Predator danger.

5.- At night, while animals sleep. We have the ZZZzzz animation on their head which is big enough to see with a quick check by sectors.

6.- After the first year and once back on Spring, animals will enter your map through the borders, so monitoring your map becomes even easier.

7.- When a small rodent is killed, they shout a final "death cry". You should be able to hear it, a red flag that is not visual only but also has sound effect.

8.- Predators can be killed before they turn against humans or tamed pets.

9.- Food bar that has already been removed was the most obvious red flag of Predator danger.

10.- Player wiseness, if a pawn is chosen to perform activities outside the City Walls, make sure its not an Incapable of Violence, is not Unhealthy (Frail, Bad Back, diseases) and also has a pet companion with release training, nigh owls are the safest.


Here I listed for everyone how to prevent yourself from Predator Attacks that should be useful for beginner level players.


Now when I read in the forums about people complaining of Predators Attacks, I could not avoid feeling upset towards the vast majority because I personally grew up as a Rim World player during A16 & A17 and I would say that 40% of all my games were "Triple-Colony" of 400x400 map size. I learnt to cope with three simultaneous colonies on a same game on the largest map size while the average player just goes single map and default size. While commonly, everybody just does 1/3 of what I have been handling all along... Now if I don't complain about it...how come those who do 33% in comparison with me, are the ones who get upset about Predators? It's illogical.

Every time someone asks about Multiple Colony games, I have always given plenty of advises:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=47600.0

Now, people need to put things into perspective, and I will give you an analogy:

* You are walking down the street and you get the red light traffic sign at the corner of the block, and you stop walking before you cross.
* What would you tell me of people who cross the streets without even looking sideways for incoming vehicles?
* What would you tell me of people who despite having 10 Red Flags... still cross the street anyways?
* What would you tell me of people who despite having 10 Red Flags, still cross the street anyways and get hit by incoming cars...to later on complain the game is hard without ever considering their own faults and blaming the cars instead?


Asking for the Warning notification is the same as asking all drivers to honk from kilometers aways just in case a careless pedestrian is not looking around. This is beyond upsetting for me, because conceding such a request equals validating stupidity, and that is unhealthy for the mind. If despite all the 10 warning signals... a player loses a pawn...to me...its a well deserved death.

Now, when you look at the Community, what kind of population do you want to have? The careless citizens or the cautious neighbors? This is a Survival Game, people....and nature shall be unforgiving for the ill-prepared.

My Support reply for a "Watching system":
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41766.msg416318#msg416318



Now I have been waiting for almost three weeks now. Based on the people who had complained, I can already tell that such players are the careless, those who don't monitor at all, hide behind killboxes all the time and in mountainous bases more over and use tons of over-powered mods...but still lose anyways... When you try to place yourself in "their shoes" to see from their eyes and how their counter arguments are founded... People like TheMeInTeam will base their "fake" claims on theoretical extrapolation of past memories without testing unstable builds for real experiences like this case:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41766.msg413618#msg413618
He was claiming that first raiders would already come with sniper rifles, which was untrue.


I haven't been saying much on purpose so as to check if people "really know" what they are saying and if you ever play on cold or extreme biomes, you should be able to realize two "unwanted side effects":

* Now in v1.0, when you get a Predator notification and the targeted "future victim" enters a closed room, the Predator will have to change target as in "re-targeting", and if every new target also enters your base...you will literally get spammed by notifications both from letters and top screen messages alike...
* Now in v1.0, when you enter the second half of a hard winter and all Predators are the only ones left with just a few cold resistant mammals... you will also get "super spammed" by all hunting Predators which becomes a total annoyance... Because you can even get five new notification letters like the disease notifications used to trigger individually for each pawn instead of the summary late version.

But so far... no one has ever mentioned either of these two issues to what allows me to a certain degree, to assume, most of who replied are Temperate Forest exclusive players, lack game experience and therefore their comments are weak.


Finally to close, this response, to me Tynan needs to completely rollback to B18 and redo everything again from there, because the biggest problem in RimWorld has always been the last third of the game, the 2/3 that was and has always been an eternal boredom due to nothing happening but industrially awaiting the SpaceShip completion. He took the wrong turn by introducing the "Advanced Components" and making it even more longer and painful with nothing for players to do in the meantime.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=37305.0

World Quest Incidents failed completely as rewards are "Inversely proportional", as the game becomes harder, the prizes become less interesting and unworthy exchange of efforts for insignificant results, and the Caravan system has improved very little, the new User Interface already provides the same Information that you can acquire from before sending your colonists out, just a mere visual QoL...(upgrade???)

Version 1.0 should have been about filling the void in the last third of the game...but instead it just became a B18 Modded. To the point that I ask myself is there truly a Version 1.0 Vanilla build?

TheMeInTeam

1-10 effectively claim that the player should manually monitor the map and do tedious, false-choice inputs to hedge against a threat.  This is in contrast to the overwhelming majority of threat/benefit events in Rimworld and does not add anything of value, unless you consider manually panning the map constantly to have value.

Complaining about spam when suggesting that players should hunt predators isn't self-consistent.  If you actually kill the predators, they won't spam you.  Given this is exactly the argument presented against the notification, it's strange to make a complaint for the same solution.

Predators hunting colonists isn't a frequent thing in friendly biomes, not sure what you're on about there.

It's true that the end game grind for uranium and advanced components sucks.  At least you can caravan to the AI ship and call it a day, though I usually just consider an established colony a won run.

Bozobub

Exactly this.  Keeping consistency with literally all other colonist-influencing event alerts (that have a specific source location, of course; not a psychic drone ::)) doesn't somehow "ruin" the game.  Extra information from the viewpoint of a (demi)god looking down on the world stage is also not particularly out of character.

Seriously, scroll way, way out and ponder the area you can see, compared to what a pawn would be able to.  Relative to them, you are an unknown/unknowable deity, manipulating their lives as you will.  And you complain about *consistent UIX*, FFS, and having "too much" info..?

Put on your big-deity pants :P.  Too much micro is not fun, for most, and isn't really what the game is about.
Thanks, belgord!

Yoshida Keiji

Quote from: TheMeInTeam on February 26, 2019, 03:19:58 PM
1-10 effectively claim that the player should manually monitor the map and do tedious, false-choice inputs to hedge against a threat.  This is in contrast to the overwhelming majority of threat/benefit events in Rimworld and does not add anything of value, unless you consider manually panning the map constantly to have value.

Complaining about spam when suggesting that players should hunt predators isn't self-consistent.  If you actually kill the predators, they won't spam you.  Given this is exactly the argument presented against the notification, it's strange to make a complaint for the same solution.

Predators hunting colonists isn't a frequent thing in friendly biomes, not sure what you're on about there.

It's true that the end game grind for uranium and advanced components sucks.  At least you can caravan to the AI ship and call it a day, though I usually just consider an established colony a won run.



No, no, no, no and no... You got everything backwards. But honestly, at the back of my head my intuition senses are telling me to watch out. Now I need to rule out one out of two possibilities:

1.- Either, you didn't pay attention to my words (make it due to the heated flow of this topic)... OR
2.- You have reduced yourself to word-play due to lack of counter arguments and are attempting to shift my words to make everybody else  think that I said things that I did not.

For once only, I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Roll back to the Opening Post, I didn't gave 10 methods but actually 11. The true reality you intend to hide, is that "Inevitably"....whether you like it or not and even with a double shift schedule and more notorious if you don't have night owl pawns...is that while your colonists sleep... you have at least 6 in-game hours that we all Fast Forward at Speed x3, and more over for those you don't haste it. While your colonists sleep, there is nothing they can perform, and at that time "monitoring" around is totally viable and the only thing you can do to "burn time" until they wake up. And if this wasn't clear enough and I already said it before (I'm repeating myself).... I literally "pan" three colonies in that time frame of 400x400 maps.

Whether you like it or not... You can't play the game without watching your screen, unless you run the game in the background while watching Netflix or else. There is always time to "monitor around". We all have a "dead time" while they are dreaming.


This is where your reply gets nasty, and I doubt if you are doing it intentionally or by accident:

* I am complaining about the Notification Spam....because the Predators are around, I don't need to kill them myself. Get this part right.

The Opening Post picture dates 15th of Jugust which is the end of Winter.

1.- First off, I don't need to kill Predators, because I can handle myself on all three simultaneous colonies when I play Triple Colony games. I always keep them alive, because I prefer them to work for me, so that I don't need to dispatch a pawn for hunting and just wait to pick up the left overs later.

2.- What I said about hunting Predators earlier, from my own personal angle is only if they had gotten too close to my farms where my colonists work.

3.- Suggesting to kill off all Predators is a methodology to prevent attacks, yes. But is in NO WAY linked together with my complain. I fear you intend to twist my words.

Goldenpotatoes

You could condense everything you just said into "change is bad because you could just micromanage and min-max to avoid it."

I'm glad you're one of the minority capable of handling three colonies at once and keeping them running at peak efficiency but the demographic that got Rimworld to where it is today probably isn't into that level of micromanagement, me included.

Yoshida Keiji

I already condensed my one liner long ago here:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41819.msg413054#msg413054

QuoteVersion -1.0 (minus one): Lots of QoLs for mod users but nothing new to Vanilla players.

My reference is just a mere parameter, I can run triple colony games efficiently, yes. But the usage I gave to such measuring scale is to make people understand that a single colony game is just one third of what minorities like me can do. Now, if I were to run a census, doing one third is relatively easy.