Recommended Changes to Ideology Structure Requirements (Transhumanist)

Started by Swyftie, August 16, 2021, 04:22:36 AM

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Swyftie

Hey all, so I've really been enjoying the new ideology expansion and I greatly appreciate all effort the Dev team put in to add yet another awesome chunk of content into my favorite game. I've spent the last couple of weeks messing around with different colonies with drastically different ideologies/religions. I am currently on my second attempt at building a stable settlement with the Transhumanist ideology (the first one kinda crashed and burned), and I would like to draw attention to a steep spike in difficulty that occurred in both playthroughs as a result of mood debuffs stemming from the transhumanist meme. Once you reach a certain point in the game, which I believe is triggered by hitting a colony wealth threshold, your colonists demand a lot of specific things all at once. Every transhumanist colonists will require access to neural-supercharging, the construction of an altar or other place of worship, and the artistic sculpture that aligns with your ideology (if you have one). Assuming you have none of these when you reach the colony wealth trigger, each colonist will receive a whooping -14 to their mood, which in my case had the result of everyone going from being relatively satisfied with colony life to being constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown. The crux of the problem is essentially that these demands all come at once, and with no warning that this is something the player might need to be aware of in advance. Therefore, when your colony starts going to shit, it doesn't feel like a fun challenge that you now must tackle because you failed to adequately prepare (like a drop-pod raid, or a toxic fallout event), rather it feels cheap because it would not have been a problem if you had some prior notice that this was coming up (kinda like how the game tells you that you have to prepare for winter when temperatures will reach -X degrees, or how the game alerts you when you have less than 3 days worth of food in storage)

{mid-post anecdotal rambling}
{In my case, I hit this wealth threshold rather quickly due to hoarding crafting resources to make formal shirts for trading. So my wealth-to-capable-colonist ratio was way off and as a result, I had only one colonist with building skills of any sort who struggled to hastily put together a decent room to house my altar and sculpture. He had a mental break, which meant the construction took longer, which resulted in the other colonists having mental breaks. In addition, there is little point in rushing to construct the altar and then building the room around it, because the mood-debuff for disrespecting the altar/sculpture (i.e. having it housed in a room that is not impressive enough) is basically the same as not having the desired object at all. And that is not to mention the Neural-supercharger problem, which is a big deal because of the -6 mood debuff that comes along with it. In my case, I had not yet researched the Neural-supercharger and my researcher had two mental breaks before it was completed. This was obviously not quite ideal, but the situation was compounded by the fact that I had like 3 components at the time (being component poor is a rather common problem in the early game of most playthroughs). During this entire time I was just thinking to myself how much-easier it would have been if had known about these problems before hand.}

So here is my list of supercustom-patented-limited-edition "MINIMALLY INTRUSIVE MODIFICATIONS"(tm) that could be made to make this spike in difficulty come as less of a surprise. The first option is to just put a little popup in the notifications bar by the bottom right of the screen letting players know they are getting close to reaching a point when colonists will desire these structures, and that they should start building the appropriate facilities and making sure they are prepped. Option number two: stagger these demands so that they do not all come at once, by making the demand for the alter and statue come earlier than the neural-supercharger; this way the mood-debuffs can be more spread out and far easier to handle without constant mental breaks. The Third Option, and the one I believe to be the best, is to simply make the mood-debuffs start at a -0 or -1 and slowly go up over time as they do for colonists with the raider ideology meme/precept. This would give players adequate time to make the modifications needed without as many mental breaks, and it would also be the most realistic option because instead of your colonists simply waking up in the morning and being furious, their dissatisfaction would slowly grow over time due to the lack of prayer objects and significant technology. Also this would alleviate the problem of receiving the full mood-debuff for lacking the sculpture while you are simply moving it to another room (which is also kind of silly)

Obviously, my suggested MINIMALLY INTRUSIVE MODIFICATIONS don't only apply to colonies with the transhumanist meme, as altar requirements and the like apply to other ideologies as well, I just found this issue to be particularly pronounced with transhumanist colonies due to the extra neural-supercharger requirements. My understanding of coding and programming is pretty rudimentary, so I honestly have no clue how difficult it would actually be to implement my proposed solution but I would greatly appreciate it if it could be implemented either into the base game or into a lightweight mod that I could add into my saves.

Would love to hear other people's opinions on the matter.

P.S. I forgot to mention my colonist desire for artificial body-parts which gives a -3 mood debuff. It's still the early game, and they all want them. I could install wooden dentures into all of them but that just seems silly. I currently don't have a single artificial limb on hand. I have 6 colonist. Tynan plz help  :(