Some rough edges that I'd really like to see fixed

[entelin]

I have about 1100hrs in Rimworld, there are some rough edges in the game that cause me to alt-f4 in a commitment game because I feel that it's basically just not my fault. Here are the most common ones:

1. Color coded mood bar, seriously just make that mod official. Someone with a mood so low that they are about to set fire to your antigrain warhead should not be represented by a slightly different shade of grey. Mood management is what everything else in the game revolves around, it should be crystal clear to the player at all times where they stand on this.

2. Luciferium need does not alert you until the pawn is going to go berserk, and at that point it's generally too late. Additionally I've seen pawns not take the drug when on a 5 day schedule. When the drug policy is instead set to take for addictions, I've seen pawns take it when their need bar is full.

3. Raids should (imo) alert you briefly *before* the raiders show up on the map. If you have a pawn or especially animals that happen to be far away they could just be screwed and there was effectively nothing you could do about it. This has a greater impact the smaller the map is. You can mitigate this by keeping everything close, but I'm not sure that's an interesting choice gameplay wise. It makes sense that raiders would be seen coming from a greater distance than what the map represents. It doesn't need to be long, just a few hours would do, and the alert could be more vauge than the final card. "Hostile Drop pods sighted!"  "Hostile ground force spotted!" etc.

4. When a pawn is being followed by a hostile animal or pawn, time should slow to the slowest rate when that entity has gotten within a certain distance that will still allow handling the situation. Currently it only triggers on aggro, and so a melee entity can time accel right into your pawn and then it's too late. This is really awkward and can happen by mistake very easily.

5. Moving lots of stuff: Set home area or stockpile, create caravan packing spot, create caravan, watch pawns pick up everything, cancel caravan, if using animals create an animal spot, manually click twice on every single animal to have them drop their stuff. <---- This should not be in the game as is, it's awful and you are incentivized to do it. There are mods that soften this up, allowing pawns to haul their weight capacity and such, but that's not the only problem with caravan packing. If packing is canceled it cannot be resumed before unloading everything first, and so on, if the whole process doesn't happen fast enough mental breaks are incoming, pawns don't use their beds even when available, pawns who do have a mental break cannot be taken off the map. Caravan packing needs some serious adjustments.

[Canute]

3. Yeah i think too that burglar and murder should give out a warning before they strike ! :-)
But like you allready notice, there are mod for such things, look for Spotted.

[entelin]

3. Yeah i think too that burglar and murder should give out a warning before they strike ! :-)

We already have that with the "drop on top of you" raids, which are balanced accordingly. I would have no problem with a stealth thief and other such events in addition to what we have. Dwarf fortress had a thief that would try and carry off children for example. I've always thought there should be a thief event that would target undefended items as a counter to large stacks of things left outside in particular. However having normal raids which are not trying to be stealthy come unannounced has gameplay problems as I stated, particularly on small maps.

Mods are great I use a fair number of them, but some things should be standard, like the mood color mod.

[khun_poo]

Totally agree on 5.

I can share my story. Got a quest to ship 31 tuques to Nearby settlement. The hauler took half a day to haul all the tuques, some medicine, some food, some flake to sell along the way, some statue , blah blah blah on the list. Suddenly got a raid to take care, so caravan need to cancel.

After raid event is cleaning up. They need to unload every pack animal first before create new caravan again because the item on pack animal and on the hauler pawn doesn't count on caravan screen.

Can't imagine something like migrate the colony. The hauling process it's so bad.



Btw, I came up with a faster way to form caravan. Only work with colony that have more than 1 colonist though.

First, make a caravan "only" 1 colonist and all the pack animal or prisoner you like to bring with. Don't bring any item with it (but a day of food is fine)

Second, Form another caravan with only colonist you have left.
it's fine if you can't carry all stuff at once. Just haul as much stuff as they can.

Finally, merging both caravan. Then separate those hauler you don't want on caravan back to the colony. If your stuff are not fully load, repeat second step again.

This method is faster because instead of colonist hauling only 1 item at a time to a wandering pack animal. They hoard all stuff into their inventory at once and moving out.


Tl;dr load "pick up and haul" mod. It's time savers and much easier lol

[Ukas]

3. & 4. No. If you worry about being too close to edges of the map then just zone those areas restricted. Also why would the player be alerted in the exact moment when animals ambush your pawns? It's an ambush, not just another hunting opportunity! Bad stuff can happen, I don't want the game to be all gentle and nice.

5. Cancelling a caravan is always a huge bummer, that is true. To what it used to be packing the caravan works well enough now, but unpacking, that takes a long time if you don't micromanage. And what cancelling means is packing, unpacking and packing again, indeed not a cool gaming moment.

[RicRider]

I'll never forget the stupid caravan where I had to deliver 31 peg legs to the neighbors across the desert and when everything was selected on the caravan loading screen all 31 peg legs fit onto the runner and the donkey I was sending. But packing the 31 peg legs took so long the runner decided to go to the kitchen and eat some pemmican, but left some in his inventory when he was done so by the time I noticed he only had 30 peg legs because of weight issues he was already 2 tiles away from the people who wanted the peg legs.

I'm sure this was how caravans were intended to be played.

[Canute]

Caravan is just Tynan's translation for moving trouble around the world ! :-)

[Feyda]

Caravans are pretty easy if you just use a couple of tricks. 

1.) Always have enough pack animals to carry the full weight of all items you are taking (that way pawns dont pack inventory on them self)
2.) Only select the humans and animals you are going to send on the caravan, then turn off auto supply and add the ENTIRE rest of your humans to the caravan (this keeps auto supply from adding a ton of unneeded food).
3.)  Your colony will now pack your caravan like a swarm of piranha attacking a sick cow in the river.
4.) When all of your caravaners suddenly pause for a second and then beeline for the edge of the map, select all colonists, then shift click the colonists who are actually going to remove them from the list.  Now for the remaining humans, simply click remove from caravan.
5.) Profit

[RicRider]

Caravans are pretty easy if you just use a couple of tricks. 

1.) Always have enough pack animals to carry the full weight of all items you are taking (that way pawns dont pack inventory on them self)
2.) Only select the humans and animals you are going to send on the caravan, then turn off auto supply and add the ENTIRE rest of your humans to the caravan (this keeps auto supply from adding a ton of unneeded food).
3.)  Your colony will now pack your caravan like a swarm of piranha attacking a sick cow in the river.
4.) When all of your caravaners suddenly pause for a second and then beeline for the edge of the map, select all colonists, then shift click the colonists who are actually going to remove them from the list.  Now for the remaining humans, simply click remove from caravan.
5.) Profit

I'm sure all of this was intended as well, as it's so clearly explained exactly the way you've explained it in the learning helper!

[mlzovozlm]

6. relative raiders. can't we at least have some kind of marker on the relatives? tracking them so you don't kill them off with your pawns is tedious