Desensitization

[Neurotoxin]

So here's my thought, I was actually planning on modding it in but I can't figure out exactly how I might hook it in. Basically, a instance variable on each Pawn, that counts how many times a specific thought has been had (eg. Saw a dead body, Saw a stranger die) and after a certain number (maybe x % 10 = 0) it lowers the mood penalty/benefit by a small percentage.

If I see a body, yeah it would probably cause some freak-outishness but after I've seen bodies 100 times, it likely wouldn't faze me as much, if at all. Certain thoughts shouldn't be affected, you'll always be sad when a fellow colonist dies for example, but maybe the time the thought lasts could be reduced. Once things like entertainment and other available mood boosts come around, they should be affected as well. Watching TV for 48 hours won't make you linearly happier than watching it for 3 hours and then doing something else entertaining (such as playing a game).

Overall I suppose I'm asking for diminishing returns on mood affecting thoughts, of course for balance issues they'd have to have a minimum they can drop to.

On that note, if anyone has a suggestion for how to hook into the pawn + thought system I'll gladly make the mod.



Finally, sorry if this has been posted before, I DID check the common requests thread and the other stickies and also google and didn't see anything here.

[bobucles]

One thing I noticed with the food mods is that while a citizen won't stack their displeasure from eating a single type of raw food, having a balanced diet of raw food will drive them insane. This is because each individual food is its own bad thought, and they don't share the same type. Of course this can be made useful in the other direction as well. For example of each food type had its own +1 bonus, you can get a pretty large stacking bonus by offering a wide variety of foods.

I think the best option right now is to work character traits into the morale system. For example a "disciplined" trait may only suffer half the penalty from watching people die, while a "neurotic" suffers twice the penalty from dirt&grime. Stuff like that.

[Neurotoxin]

Agreed on working traits into the system. The fact that multiple different foods stack effects it sounds like it's using a peritem effect rather than adding the thought via the typedef. Not to derail my own thread but a few ideas for traits:

Insane - Occasionally lose control of Pawn for short periods of time (Set them into wander mode or something)
Murderous - Gains mood bonuses rather than negatives from seeing people die/corpses
Lazy - n% chance the pawn will refuse to work for x amount of time and/or gains negative mood from doing work.

I'm a bit new to programming in C# and in general though I'm more proficient with Java. I could do this if I could just figure out how to hook the method that adds thoughts. I'll keep working on it for now though.

[ZanathKariashi]

Murderous - Mood bonus for killing people, butchering people, eating people, or seeing dead bodies, but gets a stacking mood penalty if they haven't seen a human corpse or killed something in a few days. Is always capable of violence regardless of other traits/class. (I.E. better put them as hunters so they can fulfill their urges without turning them onto other colonists).

As for desensitization, over-time people should naturally become more resistant to psychological traumas. Physical traumas and the like, no, but psychological, sure. Though with some traits being more or less resistant to certain changes.