Alarms, lockable doors, assignable beds and more

[Colonist51]

Hi everyone. I have been playing this game for just a week and I must say it's quite addicting. In other words, this is an awesome game and it has a lot of potential.

I have thought of a number of features that would in my opinion significantly improve the gameplay. I haven't read many previous suggestions or upcoming features, so please forgive me if some of these ideas have already been mentioned.

1. Alarm - a device that is automatically triggered when enemies appear on the map. It would have a radius. The colonists who are located within the radius are automatically drafted and sent to a rally point.
Note: in order to avoid possible issues with manually drafting/undrafting and moving colonists in the area of effect of the alarm while enemies are present, the alarm would be triggered for a short period of time (e.g. 10 seconds) or it could be manually set to work for as long as you want.

2. Rally point - a manually designated point or zone where colonists automatically go to whenever they are located in the radius of a triggered alarm. This should reduce micromanagement and give the player a bit more time to prepare for the attack, and of course make the emergency feel more realistic.

3. Lockable doors - quite self-explanatory, an ability to lock doors.

4. Assignable beds - the possibility to assign beds for colonists of your choice.

5. Set forced target for a group  - as of right now, you can only set forced target by selecting individual colonists, turrets or mortars. It should be possible to do the same thing for a group.

6. Option to disable automatic mortar fire - the ability to stop a colonist from firing the mortar as soon as he/she mans it.

7. Stronger mountains - sometimes it can be really annoying when these pesky mortar shells explode right in the middle of a mountain, creating holes in shape of a cross, and even more so when you have carefully planned the layout of a base in that mountain. Even from a realistic point of view, a mortar shell would never penetrate a mountain. Of course the base inside of a mountain should not be immune to mortar shells, because that would be just as bad as a cheat. Therefore the solution would be to make only the mountain blocks invulnerable to mortar shells.

8. Ability to place armor in the equipment racks - self-explanatory.

9. Rock crusher - there should be a more efficient way to dispose of rock chunks than by throwing a bunch of grenades at them. A rock crusher would work in a similar fashion to the crematorium.

10. Slower research speed - even a colonist with a low level in the research skill can research new technologies at ridiculous speed, and considering that there are not that many technologies to research at the moment, I think that the research speed should be greatly slowed down.

Please feel free to share your opinion.

[Shinzy]

Assignable beds are going to be in the next alpha

and there's a mod for locked doors I believe

as for the alarm I don't really want my guys to ge automatically drafted and sent somewhere =P as I prefer to have my cooks keep doing their jobs
I'd like it more if the game to pause of slow down though
and maybe possibly let me know of colonists who are outside my home zone doing something naughty like attempting to go on a hauling trip right next to where the new threat spawned from

and I totally agree on forced target for group of mortars
or just smarter automatic target selection instead of the closest one

the rest I don't really have opinions about =P /indifferent

[Colonist51]

Thanks for the input Shinzy.

I'm glad to hear that assignable beds are coming soon.

If there's a mod for locked doors, that's nice. However I believe this should be a part of the game, not just a mod.

As for the alarm, you wouldn't have to build it if you don't want to, it should be completely optional. As for the cooks, you could make their bedrooms close to a kitchen in an area without alarm, this would probably solve the issue. Another solution I have just thought of would be the ability to create a "no-alarm" zone where the alarm would have no effect, or the option to make some colonists ignore the alarm altogether. But again, it would probably be just easiest not to use that feature if you don't want to.

[Bog]

Hi everyone. I have been playing this game for just a week and I must say it's quite addicting. In other words, this is an awesome game and it has a lot of potential.

I have thought of a number of features that would in my opinion significantly improve the gameplay. I haven't read many previous suggestions or upcoming features, so please forgive me if some of these ideas have already been mentioned.

1. Alarm - a device that is automatically triggered when enemies appear on the map. It would have a radius. The colonists who are located within the radius are automatically drafted and sent to a rally point.
Note: in order to avoid possible issues with manually drafting/undrafting and moving colonists in the area of effect of the alarm while enemies are present, the alarm would be triggered for a short period of time (e.g. 10 seconds) or it could be manually set to work for as long as you want.

I agree with Shinzy about your alarm design. Auto-drafting people would sometimes be a pain, and anyways you can draft all your people really quickly if you want to. Just zoom out, double click on somebody, press draft, tell them to move somewhere. You almost instantly have everybody in a big drafted group.

I wouldn't mind having an alarm though, but one that you manually click and press a "High alert" button. If you could then give colonists pre-designated "high alert" tasks that'd be cool. The pre-designated things would be colonist specific. You could make your cooks and non-combat colonists not get drafted, and you could tell your other colonists to equip specific weapons and more importantly, armour, then proceed to a specific spot for defense (like a rally point, but you'd just assign a spot for each colonist, you wouldn't have to build anything)

Hitting the "high alert" button again (now called "low alert") would reverse the tasks. Colonists would return their weapons and armour to where they found them and go back to normal day life.

That way you could set up little equipment racks in convenient places and put a weapon and piece of armour in each. Your colonists wouldn't need to run around doing all their regular tasks in power-armour (which slows them down) and could equip, say, Uzis instead of sniper rifles during "peace time" when you primarily fight crazed animals. (snipers are not as useful against squirrels as Uzis, in my experience)

2. Rally point - a manually designated point or zone where colonists automatically go to whenever they are located in the radius of a triggered alarm. This should reduce micromanagement and give the player a bit more time to prepare for the attack, and of course make the emergency feel more realistic.

See the above comment.

3. Lockable doors - quite self-explanatory, an ability to lock doors.

Yup. That'd be nice, and pretty easy, I think.

4. Assignable beds - the possibility to assign beds for colonists of your choice.

Great idea, and already coming.

5. Set forced target for a group  - as of right now, you can only set forced target by selecting individual colonists, turrets or mortars. It should be possible to do the same thing for a group.

I'd be fine with that, but probably would never use it.

6. Option to disable automatic mortar fire - the ability to stop a colonist from firing the mortar as soon as he/she mans it.

You can basically do this already, just tell your colonist to stand on the mortar firing spot without "manning the mortar" and keep them drafted. Then he/she will just stand there. When you want it to fire tell them to man the mortar.

Of course that means they won't reload then wait for your order to attack... you have to watch them closely and manually stop them when they're ready. So your point is very valid. I'd be convenient sometimes.

7. Stronger mountains - sometimes it can be really annoying when these pesky mortar shells explode right in the middle of a mountain, creating holes in shape of a cross, and even more so when you have carefully planned the layout of a base in that mountain. Even from a realistic point of view, a mortar shell would never penetrate a mountain. Of course the base inside of a mountain should not be immune to mortar shells, because that would be just as bad as a cheat. Therefore the solution would be to make only the mountain blocks invulnerable to mortar shells.

Really all the explosives should have a building damage stat. Right now they'll destroy anything solid in a single hit. I think that frag grenades and turrets exploding should specifically deal a small amount of damage over a large area, because their explosions would primarily be from fragmentation.

Because a modern frag grenade often doesn't knock big holes in even drywall, instead it peppers it with little holes. A frag grenade knocking a hole 3 wide in a solid stone wall is just silly.

So as I said, I think they should get specific damage amounts. Frag grenades could do, say 150 building damage. (when used against solar panels or geothermal generators they could hit it multiple times per shot, because of the area of effect. That way they could still deal up to 450)

Improvised turrets exploding could do 100. Mortars could do more, like maybe 650. That'd let them tear apart even stone walls, but they wouldn't take out mountains in a single hit. (so far as I remember mountain walls have 1000 hp... but I might be wrong.)

It'd also remove the exploit of using frag grenade to mine out mountains quickly, even with people like criminal kingpins who can't mine normally.

8. Ability to place armor in the equipment racks - self-explanatory.

Definitely.

9. Rock crusher - there should be a more efficient way to dispose of rock chunks than by throwing a bunch of grenades at them. A rock crusher would work in a similar fashion to the crematorium.

I personally would never, ever use this.

Rock is one of the most valuable resources in the game, because you make stone blocks with them, and there's a finite number of them on the map.

To me it's like wanting to be able to throw berries and potatoes into the crematorium. I'm like: 

10. Slower research speed - even a colonist with a low level in the research skill can research new technologies at ridiculous speed, and considering that there are not that many technologies to research at the moment, I think that the research speed should be greatly slowed down.

I'd be fine with them being slowed down a little. But I'd prefer to just get more research items.

I'd like to see, for example, stone-cutting get 3 levels. Stone-cutting 1 would be just like stonecutting now, but it'd be a little cheaper to research and you'd work at 50% of the current speed. The next 2 levels would cost more and speed it up to 75% and then 100% of the current speed. That way you'd be able to unlock the new buildings style faster, but work would go really slow until you put more research into it. Getting stone-cutting up to where it is now would probably take 2-3 times as long.

Just my 2 cents. Unless you live in Canada or New Zealand or somewhere else with currency rounding. Then it's my 0 cents. 

Please feel free to share your opinion.

Done. 

[Somz]

1) Don't know what to think about alarm, in case of raids I usually draft all combatants (yes, a 200+ raid requires my cooks too ^^),

2) rally point -same, for me it's pretty pointless,

3) lockable doors -there's a mod that lets you lock doors, it's either 'miscellaneous with Mai (or something like that) or...Maybe Betterpower+? Don't exactly know, sorry,

4) assignable beds are coming,

5) group targeting would be nice, yeah,

6) disable mortal auto-fire? Just...why? x)

7) About mountains and mortars... My suggestion would be (if manageable) that the ceiling should collapse, raining rock chunks on your stuff, crushing them ( in case it is mined out below, in case it isn't it shouldn't do anything in my opinion)

good point,

9) well, sure, why not but I for example use pretty much all the rock chunks. If not for creating a s**t ton of stone blocks to place floors or to reinforce the metal walls with an outer layer of stone wall(s),
then to place lines of stockpiles and use the chunks as sandbags (like hell I'm gonna waste metal! ^^)

10) Umm, yeah, about that... I'd say no. And the reason? Mods. Lots of mods. I'd suggest you using mods, they can change and improve upon the vanilla game drastically. There are awesome, wast amounts of content out there, I mentioned 2 already,
there's also Clutter mod (couldn't live without it), Project Armory, Jaxxa Shield(s?), Gun Emplacements, The Clay mod, Mechanical Defense, Meteorite mod...
Most (if not all) of them comes with so much research you'd s**t yourself of joy. :3
Seriously, for me Rimworld would feel empty without them.
So with all due respect, start modding right now!