Hostile zone (like home zone but the opposite)

[UsF]

I would like to propose the addition of a hostile zone, similar to home zone. It would be a zone that people would try to avoid if possible (as in if there is another route to the target through non hostile zone areas.

The reason for this is the following:
1. Imagine you build a base outside and have a layered defense like in the screenshot attached
2. The outside of the perimerter, right next to the wall would then be marked as hostile zone

This would have the effect (I hope) that people would then repair damaged walls from the inside as they are under fire by the enemy or a fire is happening outside. People wouldn't walk straight through burning flames to get to the place they want to extinguish and they'd be safe from any outside hazard by being in the home zone. It would allow sieges to happen naturally as people inside your walls try to contain a breach, while people from the outside might be trying to smash through. Your own people would never walk outside to try and repair the wall from the wrong side getting them killed and you could therefor have better siege situations. It would also mean that Raiders could be more violent towards walls with their fists (and occasionally grenades) and the siege would happen somewhat different, because Raiders could be spawned to be highly likely making their own path.

An alternative to this would be to prefer reaching a zone through the home zone, but I'd like to tell my people to (almost) never walk into an area more, as this would remove all the dangers of people messing up.

[attachment deleted by admin: too old]

[samtarling]

I take it that drafted settlers would be able to go into this zone or are you thinking more "completely forbidden"?

[Nabobalis]

Couple this with an "alert mode" and we could resist movement of people who are undrafted during a raid.

[British]

The "red zones" have been touched on this thread, which is about traps, and those "danger zones" would prevent the colonists for going there and possibily blowing themselves up, for instance (even though the actual "mines" are triggered by the player).

I do like the idea of having the colonists repair walls from inside, though.

[Ford_Prefect]

This is a neat idea. 

Though, to be honest, the path-finding for non-drafted colonists should avoid the blast radius of mines when there are enemies around, rather than have the player mark a no-go (unless necessary) zone.

Might want to instead make the zones be:  If there is enemies on screen, don't go here unless ordered to.

[UsF]

I take it that drafted settlers would be able to go into this zone or are you thinking more "completely forbidden"?

Suggested movement (only walk through there if there is no other way) and not enforced. In case of fire or other stuff blocking alternate routes, forbidden places will be used to escape. Drafted people go wherever you order them.

[Tynan]

The way I'd really like to do this in the end is by having a system that tracks danger regions and has workers avoid those areas by skipping non-critical tasks in them. So they won't run to collect metal when a raider is standing right next to it. This is quite a chunk of AI work, but I can imagine how to do it.

Another option is forbidden regions. There are areas where no work targets will be acquired.

A third possible contributor would be traffic zones. Here we just bias the AIs' perception of path distances to make them prefer to take paths through certain areas or avoid others. I think something like this might be usable to do what you want to do.

In all, a lot of these options are really complicated and I'm wary of complexifying the AI. AI is really hard to design and execute in a sustainable way; as soon as you start putting in too many different decision-making influences they start acting weird and it becomes impossible to debug or understand why they're doing what they're doing. Expect me to be conservative on this front, I'm afraid.

[Produno]

Cant you make colonists on the 'player team' prefer the safe zone? May not have the full desired effect but i guess it would help and save ellaborate and more complex AI for now.