Sad tidings

Started by Pangaea, June 27, 2019, 03:08:08 PM

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Pangaea

#30
This felt like the right thing to do. I'd probably be pretty stressed out too, trying to resuscitate my dead wife with nary a limb left, with the aggressor just lying there... Not sure what to do with the bear yet. I'm thinking they should all take turns pissing down his throat or something.





She looks surprisingly whole! :)



I can't vouch for what else Red did in the freezer or the hospital, but Sparkles woke up without pants and with the "Naked" debuff....  ;D

Quote from: Shurp on July 08, 2019, 06:21:23 PM
Pangaea, is Sparkles any sort of body purist?  If not, reviving her and then attaching lots of prosthetic limbs could work.  What would be most interesting to see is if the marriage bonus returns.  She'd be a serious bonus for the colony (especially for Red!)

Thankfully no need for a wide range of prosthetic limbs (she isn't a body purist btw, but Masochist + Night Owl -- the latter is one of the reasons I liked her so much, in addition to her very good skills as constructor, crafter and artist, with minor passions for all).

A little disappointing, but all the mood buffs for marriage is gone. Both for the now happily reunited couple, and everybody else in the colony (attended wedding), and also their honeymoon phase under Social. But -3 for dead colonist (for everybody) is also gone (but the counter for deaths under History is still a 2)

But the main thing is that Sparkles is back, Red won't be flipping out every so often over the next two quadrums (dead wife lasts 30 days), and the colony is back up to our lucky number of 13  ;D

All in all this went better than feared, I just hope she won't get horrible side effects now. I read on the wiki that it's possible to get the death sentence of "Resurrection psychosis", with a base 2% chance even if she's tossed right in the freezer.


As an aside, I kinda wonder how vindictive Cassandra will treat this. Is it counted as a colony death, and she will be merciful for a time? We'll soon learn I guess. Although raids are coming pretty thick and fast now, so it's harder to tell calm periods from "die you so-and so... DIE!"

Shurp

Wow, that's weird that the resurrector serum grows all the bits back (I guess it executes a "replace torso" command).  So if you have a pawn that is mangled really badly (missing limbs / eyes / organs / etc.) it might be worthwhile to kill them and resurrect them rather than try to fix everything separately?

Or can you apply it to someone who is still alive?
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.

Canute

Good question !
I will test it out. :-)
I damaged a pawn with serveral missing parts (ear,eye,thumb,kidney,leg).
Ok, you can't use Resurrector Mech serum on a living pawn.
A Healer Mech serum just replace 1 missing part.
So i euthanize the pawn and rescurrect him.
A resurrection indeed restore all missing part at once.
But he will got the res. sickness for quite awhile (not sure how long it hold).



Limdood

Killboxes are also less cheesy than a lot of people make them out to be.  They're historic.  MANY old castle designs used what we'd refer to in Rimworld as killboxes.  The idea is that the main point of entry and/or weakest or most vulnerable point in the complex has an extra layer of defense inside.  It's a common sense tactic that people have used since the dawn of strategic combat.

Your base SHOULD have openings so that attackers tend to bunch together and funnel towards those openings - after all, whether in game or real life, would you try to tunnel through a meter of solid stone, or walk 20 meters to the side to go around it?

Your base should have defensible positions at the point(s) of most likely entry.  After all, if someone is very likely to attack a specific point(s) of your base, it'd be stupid not to provide extra defense for it.

Along with the previous point, your base SHOULD have passive static defenses.  Your pawns are a finite resource and an investment, EVERY shot that comes at them, even from the blind, frail, bad back, 0 shooting awful shortbow wielder COULD be a brain hit -> insta death.  Thinning out or deterring attacks before they reach your pawns is a crucial strategy.  Place traps along mountain lines that pawns tend to path through on their way to your base, or place them in the openings in your defenses.  Steel traps are 1 or 2 per killed raider.  Placing 5 steel traps gives about 3-4 extra no-risk kills per raid....if they're attacking you with 10 guys, you only need to kill 5 to make them run away.  Same with turrets, place turrets on the inside of your walls, near the openings...that way snipers can't kill the turrets without coming into range (through the opening) and if your turrets are closer than your colonists when shooting, then either several enemies will shoot at turrets instead of colonists, or the turrets will be able to shoot the raiders unbothered while the raiders try to kill your colonists in cover.

You SHOULD stack cover as much as possible when fighting.  Only objects directly adjacent provide any protection, so stacking 20 layers of sandbags has no additional cover from shooters.  Colonists can also lean out from behind a wall to shoot - a colonist standing next to a single wall block still has 360-degree firing lines, and has cover from the direction of the wall piece.  Standing in open doorways containing a door also provides cover, even if they're shooting straight in.  You can stack BOTH of those kinds of cover AND sandbags for best cover.  Standing in an open door, with a wall tile next to you in the direction you're firing, and a sandbag on next to the wall on the side you're leaning out (so that when you lean, you're still covered by the sandbag) will add all 3 cover protections to you.

You COULD utilize melee pawns to great effect.  If you follow the above advice, then you are providing a route into your base for enemies.  If enemies are coming into your base, then they have corners and rooms and more to start dealing with.  Using plenty of doors and corners, it's quite possible to move a small team of 2-4 melee pawns around your base in relative safety to pop in and out of doors right next to enemy pawns who are trying to use your corners for cover.  Melee pawns can also serve to block 1-3 wide hallways in the case of an enemy melee pawn raid, which keeps your ranged people firing instead of trying to punch people while wielding a charge rifle.  Along those lines, melee pawns can also serve to lock down super dangerous ranged pawns.  I use them on centipedes with heavy charge blasters, but i imagine people that haven't modded it out might use them on rocket launcher pirates, or even just the occasional assault rifle or sniper rifle wielding raider in a good cover position.  Rushing in to engage ranged is risky since you're likely to take a lot of friendly fire too, but sacrificing a melee pawn to keep several ranged alive vs. a centipede is worth it...or just loot, trade, or eventually make some shield belts.

Pangaea

Quote from: Canute on July 09, 2019, 08:51:42 AM
Good question !
I will test it out. :-)
I damaged a pawn with serveral missing parts (ear,eye,thumb,kidney,leg).
Ok, you can't use Resurrector Mech serum on a living pawn.
A Healer Mech serum just replace 1 missing part.
So i euthanize the pawn and rescurrect him.
A resurrection indeed restore all missing part at once.
But he will got the res. sickness for quite awhile (not sure how long it hold).
Cheers. Wouldn't have expected it to work on a living pawn. Not tested this myself as Sparkles had all her bits and pieces prior to getting eaten (few of those; my surgeon now has 1/10 on both eyes, which apparently makes him totally blind -- good luck with the knives!). Assuming the wiki is correct, if you jumpstart a dead pawn with prosthetics, these will still remain. So a prosthetic leg for instance won't turn into a new leg, even if it would have if he was just jumping around on one leg.

QuoteA resurrector mech serum can be used on any non-desiccated corpse, even rotting ones. To activate it, select a pawn and right-click the serum, then click a valid target. The colonist will use the serum on the corpse, returning it to life as well as restoring missing organs and eliminating all health problems except brain injury and Luciferium addiction. Replacement body parts are not affected.

Using it on an enemy corpse will not convert them towards your side. They will remain hostile. However, since they return to life incapacitated you can easily arrest and capture them.

That second paragraph is kinda interesting. Though it would be expensive if you use it on a great dead raider, they later break out of jail and wind up dead again.

Pangaea

Quote from: Limdood on July 09, 2019, 11:35:27 AM
Killboxes are also less cheesy than a lot of people make them out to be.  They're historic.  MANY old castle designs used what we'd refer to in Rimworld as killboxes.  The idea is that the main point of entry and/or weakest or most vulnerable point in the complex has an extra layer of defense inside.  It's a common sense tactic that people have used since the dawn of strategic combat.

These are fair points to be honest. It's just that it also feels a bit "gamey", considering typically other parts of the colony is much more weakly defended, so the killbox isn't exactly the weak spot that therefore needs extra protection from moats and whatnot.

Having said that, Tynan could easily make an AI that would be nigh on impossible to survive from. By having mechs and various raiders analyse and break through the actual weak spots. Let them see traps (like our guys do) and criss-cross between them, and so on. And ofc, DON'T invade into killboxes and the like, but attack walls elsewhere and attack the actual weak spots.

But that would probably make open bases a total suicide mission and further strengthen mountain bases, and also make the game less fun -- at least for those of us who embrace the base building part of the game, and not just the sheer survival aspect. It's the whole package that makes this game so much fun.

A tangent here, and the game has apparently been abandoned, but this is why I liked the earlier builds of Timber and Stone better than later ones, where it was much more brutal and made it pretty hard to actually build a base.

Shurp

Yes, the issue is more the AI than the killboxes.  We already know that sappers do a good job of avoiding killboxes.  It would help if every raid type made some effort to find a weak point in your defenses and break through there rather than just charge right into your guns.

But not every raid should be as good as the sappers are, otherwise turrets and traps would become completely useless, and what fun would that be?

Is it possible to reconfigure the pathfinding impact of various defenses?  So if you build a long windy maze, regular raids will try to just break through the walls?  (ie: reduce the pathfinding penalty for walls and increase it for turrets/traps/etc. so that regular raids are more sapper-like)
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.

Canute

QuoteBut not every raid should be as good as the sappers are, otherwise turrets and traps would become completely useless, and what fun would that be?
Then you need a 360° defence and killboxes become obsolete.
And i would build my base at the middle of the map again.
Not to forget more people would use Fertile Field mod, and build a deep water ditch around to force raiders to some entrances.

Limdood

Quote from: Shurp on July 09, 2019, 11:55:37 PMIt would help if every raid type made some effort to find a weak point in your defenses and break through there rather than just charge right into your guns....{SNIP}...Is it possible to reconfigure the pathfinding impact of various defenses?  So if you build a long windy maze, regular raids will try to just break through the walls?  (ie: reduce the pathfinding penalty for walls and increase it for turrets/traps/etc. so that regular raids are more sapper-like)
I kinda disagree.  Theoretically, the enemy shouldn't know where your defenses are...especially behind walls.  After all, you can't see INTO their buildings when you arrive to attack them.  That's one of the two points with using killing fields in real life anyways.  1) they don't necessarily know what's behind those walls...surprise is one of the most effective tools there has ever been in battle.  2) the idea was that some fortifications were literally unassailable.  In medieval warfare, the technology just didn't exist to go THROUGH a wall without weeks or months of siege and building engines.  Going over walls was absurdly costly, so attackers made a crude battering ram and stormed the gate.  The gate HAD to be weaker because people needed to be able to enter and leave the fortification, so it was the best point to attack.  Even with additional defenses inside the gate, the defenders HAD to have gates in order to enter and leave, so even an additional layer of walls...would have another gate.

The only issue with killboxes in the game is that in game terms as they exist, they make less sense, BECAUSE an aspect of the game doesn't make sense - namely the ease at which a stone or steel wall can be breached.  That being said, if they COULDN'T be breached, the gameplay would suffer.  If EVERYONE broke straight through (such as if the pathfinding cost of walls was reduced significantly), then gameplay would suffer and walls would be relegate solely to the function of "room designators" rather than actual barriers of any sort...pathfinding calculations would be almost impossible, since it makes sense for a base to only have 1, maybe 2 entrances if you have to actually defend them, and a large base would have a LOT of perimeter, meaning a raid happening to hit from a side that doesn't contain an entrance would certainly have a significant pathfinding distance to even walk to a normal, no-maze entrance....certainly a longer walk than say a 25 tile maze with 13 traps in it.  It would force people to build entrances every 10 squares or so, or they'd be able to continue to make trap mazes.  The current setup of pawns only breaking through walls as a last resort (when no other path exists) or in certain circumstances (sappers) is the most logical way to handle it from a gameplay perspective - walls ARE breachable, and in a dangerously fast amount of time, but they still have significant strategic defensive value to block or redirect enemies in MOST situations. 

As far as redoing the movement cost of traps, well...traps are SUPPOSED to be invisible to the enemy, that's the entire concept behind them, and there already is a raid type that avoids traps and turrets, the "clever tactics" raids.  It says they try to avoid turret fields of fire and see some traps.  The only change I could see making would be to either allow "clever tactics" AI to be added to any existing raid, or to add "sapper" AI to "clever tactics" raids because while the clever tactics raids work rather effectively against open bases with no perimeter wall, if a base contains a single perimeter wall with a single, dangerous entrance, the "clever tactics" just become normal tactics.


I know this is at the end of a long post, but in addition to the "clever raid" AI change, the one thing I'd really like to see is doors made more vulnerable (or walls made less so) AND targeted.  Raiders targeting doors (which already have lower hp than walls, but IMO could be made even more vulnerable) makes common sense from a historical, strategic, and real life point of view (since, as stated above, the point where the defenders have to enter and leave through is the most vulnerable point, and as a bonus, with the existence of traps, also the safest point to attack).  They could even have a "force door" action that just takes time and opens a hostile door....similar to how a prison break holds doors open, but with a progress bar that made it take a little bit of time. 

Targeting doors would still keep the point and value of killboxes, and it would also force players to more carefully consider where they place doors in their layout, give raiders a more reasonable method of entry than blow/hack a hole in the side of the base, and somewhat nerf the value of trap mazes, since those pretty much have to be built with alternate doorways in and out of the base for traders and colonists to avoid the traps.  Doors could be treated as an alternate target for raiders, the way that early raids, or raids on open bases will have raiders attack exposed fields or structures to break or set fire to, unless they can "see" your colonists...they could simply add "force foors" to that list so some raiders will come at your colonists, and some will attack exposed doors/structures/fields...and since you can hide fields and structures, but doors are ALWAYS exposed, it means that there is always the possibility that a few raiders will go somewhere OTHER than your trap mazes, unless you only have ONE entrance/exit.

Pangaea

Our surgeon angered yet another person with his loose lips, and paid the price. Please say hello to our Doctor, everybody.

"Hello, Dr Nick!"



See no evil, hear no evil -- right?  :-X

Canute

I can't see anyone.
I can't hear anyone.
But i am still able to insult anyone if i remember his name ! :-)

Limdood

uhhhh, that shouldn't be a doctor anymore.  Blind doctors don't have the best hand-EYE coordination...

Shurp

Weren't we just talking about how to fix pawns with ressurector serum?

Looks like we have our first euthanasia-ressurector candidate...
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.

Pangaea

Quote from: Shurp on July 11, 2019, 08:27:31 PM
Weren't we just talking about how to fix pawns with ressurector serum?

Looks like we have our first euthanasia-ressurector candidate...
Haha, that's a good point actually. Didn't think about that. BUT, I do have archotech eyes lying about. It's just that I wanted to save them in case somebody else got mauled. This chap is annoying everybody quite routinely, so although it's a good pawn, I'm worried he'll get himself or somebody else killed, or otherwise become even more hated. One divorce, one rejected proposal, and countless social fights. And he doesn't even have bad traits for that.

Thankfully I do have another doc. He too has a wobbly eye, but it's at 8/10, so manageable. Masahiro (in the above picture) has 1/10 on both eyes, which apparently turns him utterly blind.

Since that picture I have made two cochlear implants for him, though. Seems suitable he should hear what people yell back at him when he lashes out :D

One thing I've noticed with this pawn, and another utterly blind I had that upped and left in a total breakdown, is that they really struggle with recreation. There were times I set the entire schedule to recreation, and it was still at rock bottom. Guess they don't get all that much joy out of viewing art... :P

Shurp

Quote from: Pangaea on July 12, 2019, 04:00:39 AM
Guess they don't get all that much joy out of viewing art... :P

They're probably not that good at playing horseshoes either.

"Ow!  That hurt!  Aim at the pin, not the back of my head!"

No wonder everyone hates him!
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.