Guilty Visitors

Started by Kyna Tiona, June 04, 2019, 09:51:03 PM

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Kyna Tiona

So from what I can tell, raiders, escaped prisoners, and colonists who have committed murder get a "guilty" status on them that largely absolves consequences for doing bad things to them. Would it be possible to reuse the guilty effect to absolve the player of guilt when a visitor (guest, trader, etc.) acts out of line in the colony, such as with violent mental breaks? Like, I just had a guest go on a mental break and set fire to my rec room. If one of my colonists did that in someone else's colony*, getting arrested would be the least I could expect. But if I arrest the arsonist, his entire faction tries to kill me.

It seems really absurd and not entirely believable that I have to choose between either indulging the guy's wanton property destruction, or bloody war. I understand ingroup/outgroup bias is a thing, and I guess I could expect this rapid escalation out of a faction who's barely not at my throat in the first place. For other factions, though, I feel like a gentle tribe or civil outlander union would probably accept that their guy acted out of line and warranted punishment.

*: Everyone's stretch goal no doubt

togfox

What did you do to your guest to make him flip out?

I've don't think I've had that happen before. Some raiders have arrived high up to the eyeballs and don't random stuff but never a peaceful guest.

Kyna Tiona

Quote from: togfox on June 05, 2019, 01:26:24 AM
What did you do to your guest to make him flip out?

I've don't think I've had that happen before. Some raiders have arrived high up to the eyeballs and don't random stuff but never a peaceful guest.

Nothing in particular. Actually, I've got Hospitality going, so I have an idea of how well I'm accommodating visitors, and most guests really like hanging out around my colony. I'm assuming the character had preexisting issues, although I was mostly concerned with making him stop burning things and forgot to check. I noticed guests don't deliver a notification when they have mental breaks, so I'm suspecting that there's a lot more stranger mental breaks than I'm aware of. They're often aimlessly wandering anyway, so it'd be hard to tell at a glance whether they were wandering normally or any of half a dozen of the minor mental breaks.

Kirby23590

I remember having some visitor going in a fire starting spree, since she had the pyromaniac trait... And i can't do anything but tell one of my guys to be drafted and put out every fire that she made in the guest room...

And i was also using the Hospitality mod. And i also had Snap out mod as well. But i think i had it disabled for guests and forgot about it...

At least trying to put them in time out in jail could mean their guys being upset and then attacking your pawns.
I had this happened once with the goodwill from being +80 dropped to -20 from throwing a recently revived pawn via Mech Resurrector that was someone's sister from a outlander faction. Different story but almost a similar thing since i was using the hospitality mod as my guests suddenly turned hostile and started attacking my people.

Maybe a very small goodwill loss arresting them when they did something bad like going berserk and attacking your pawns and animals or throwing a tantrum destroying something important in your storage. They will at least say
"Hey, not cool! But yeah i know she started that fire and that stuff, but can you at least free her from prison from her time out, and not harvest her organs or the prime councilor will get really angry if you do so, thanks!"
Freeing them after cooling down in prison would at least give you back that goodwill that you lost from arresting them...

One "happy family" in the rims...
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Limdood

I wouldn't mind this, but it's certainly open to quite a bit of abuse. 

The requirements would have to be pretty simple to see in order to make it intuitive when you can arrest them.  Now for most games, that would be it....no worries, you provide hospitality and the guests are expected to behave appropriately.  But this is rimworld, and you can bet there will be situations where players would engineer mental breaks on good-stat guests in order to arrest and then recruit them if this were implemented.  It's easy enough to make someone sit in a horrible room that's filthy, cramped, and has rotting dead bodies hauled in.

As far as keeping track of what you do once they're a prisoner, the game doesn't seem to have a way to check that....like meals that are made of different ingredients and then stacked up, it just isn't something the game keeps track of (and currently, that is SOLELY for figuring out which faction they rejoin if released).  Once they're a prisoner, the game only tracks which faction they were from...so it could be a long time prisoner from when you were still enemies with that faction, or a fresh visitor put into "time out."  Currently the only people that care what you do to your prisoners, no matter WHAT faction the prisoner was from, are your own colonists.  They'd have to delve a good ways into the prisoner code in order to change this (which may not be currently moddable), and extensively test to make sure the changes don't break a bunch of other things, since it'd be storing a bunch of extra information about every prisoner (extenuating circumstances regarding the arrest, how long they've been a prisoner, what treatment they've recieved) which would probably break every mod that deals with guests or prisoners.  There are also really weird circumstances that could come up....if you down an escaping visitor prisoner, and have to re-capture them, would you get another rep loss? would they go hostile right away?  would it reset the release timer?  What if they OD'd on a drug and you changed the beds around after capture, requiring another capture?  what if you were incapable of releasing them due to being unable to to end the "incapacitated" condition (blood loss, pain shock, legs gone, brain damage, etc.)?

Considering the rarity at which incidents like this occur, as well as the tone of the game, and the fact that vanilla interaction would be EXTREMELY limited with implementing a change like this (it would mostly affect hospitality or prisoner modded games), it seems unlikely that such a potentially deep change would be implemented, and the work required vs. the actual effect/improvement in gameplay would be pretty steep.

Kyna Tiona

@Limdood I think it's simpler than you're making it out to be. The game can just track what condition they were in when they entered your custody, then punish you if you release them in worse condition. It's basically the same mechanic as how you gain faction rep for rescuing a downed visitor and ensuring they make it off the map in good condition, except in reverse. Recruiting the imprisoned visitor would of course inflict a penalty, as would anything other than releasing them in more or less the same condition you arrested them in.

As for purposefully inflicting a mental break on a group of visitors in the first place...well, honestly, that does seem a bit exploitable, but it's a thing the game already allows you to do. The system I suggested above would make the exploit harder to pull off if anything. That said, it's a limited opportunity exploit that would probably require save scumming or luck to pull off correctly, so I don't think it's that big of an issue.

Limdood

Quote from: Kyna Tiona on June 06, 2019, 08:17:32 PM
@Limdood I think it's simpler than you're making it out to be. The game can just track what condition they were in when they entered your custody
but RIGHT THERE, the game isn't currently equipped to handle that.  First of all, the framework isn't in place to track individual hediffs and store them for later...while that alone might be easy to implement, tracking those bits of information is only necessary for prisoners arrested while visiting...which the game ALSO can't currently differentiate.
Quotethen punish you if you release them in worse condition.
and what is worse condition?  if their wounds are 3/4 healed but they catch the plague, are they better?  worse?  if their torso heals 19 points but they get their nose shattered by another prisoner...are they better?
they have more total body part hp, but their smell is now 0%...it also won't ever heal, so if it's NOT better, then you're in a situation where they can NEVER be better now...

QuoteIt's basically the same mechanic as how you gain faction rep for rescuing a downed visitor and ensuring they make it off the map in good condition, except in reverse.
again, that framework has loads of restrictions as guests that have to be carefully managed...doing surgery on a downed visitor can make the faction hostile...even if it's to remove an infected limb.  You also have a lot less direct control over a downed visitor than you do over a prisoner, so there are only a few restrictions for things you can't do to keep the factions happy

QuoteRecruiting the imprisoned visitor would of course inflict a penalty,
the tracking of these things for prisoners doesn't exist, and doesn't need to exist except for this one specific edge case of event
Quoteas would anything other than releasing them in more or less the same condition you arrested them in.
which brings back how you'd measure "more or less" as well as "the same condition"

QuoteAs for purposefully inflicting a mental break on a group of visitors in the first place...well, honestly, that does seem a bit exploitable, but it's a thing the game already allows you to do. The system I suggested above would make the exploit harder to pull off if anything. That said, it's a limited opportunity exploit that would probably require save scumming or luck to pull off correctly, so I don't think it's that big of an issue.
I'll grant you that, but it's still worthy of consideration.

Lastly, what happens if you try to arrest the visitor, but they go hostile?  if they die, does that change anything?  Note that currently killing a berserk visitor imposes no penalty, but that visitor wouldn't have gone berserk without an arrest attempt.  What if you arrest them in a room with their friends and the friends go hostile?  if the friends shooting the berserk visitor that you caused start a fire with an inferno launcher, are they guilty now? 

You say it's simpler than i'm making it out to be, but you're advocating adding loads of different tracked info, new functions, a significantly more complex set of rules than downed visitors have, and a HUGE variety of "what if" situations that currently don't exist in the game, because you can't currently punish visitors.  I'm not saying it's a bad idea, i'm saying it's a very complex and involved idea that impacts a large variety of systems in the game, and that the potential benefit would be limited, and a large portion of the playerbase would be unlikely to ever even run into the situation, unless they're using hospitality, and even then, unlikely.