a couple suggestons from a new player [updated 04.09.2014]

Started by Xerberus86, September 03, 2014, 11:10:37 PM

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Xerberus86

hey, i bought rimworld a couple days ago and have already played over a dozen hours with it, it is a good great (great with mods) but there are some essentials missing.

- better UI thankfully we have the edb interface mod and these changes should be made vanilla. i read the thread were the dev said duo to resoultion limitation xyz ... idc...selecting a deer and a button with "hunt" should appear. rimworld doesn't over 100-200 (or even more) colonists like dwarf fortress does and focuses more on the indivudal one, which is fine cause the fights are all tactial and having over 100 soldiers would make tactical gameplay impossible. the latest edb interface versions deliver some colonist picture including their outfit (in their symbol picture) and a color coded hp-bar next to them. now these things could still be improved with icons singaling that x colonist misses armor / weapon / head / x equipment but the mod adds so much already which should really be considered vanilla-worthy.

- squads / fighting groups (UI +): let me group certain colonists and make them more easily selectable for me (like fleets in sins of a solar empire for example). shift+1 as hotkeying does sadly jack. now i am sure that currently and in general with the intended amount of colonists it isn't that big of a deal but honestly i want to hotkey 2-3 frontgunner, 1-2 sniper and maybe 2-3 artillery guys / gals and with the current setup it takes half an hour (slight overstatement) to find the person i need.

- resource panel (UI tweak):let me decide which resources i want to see at the left panel, i play with tech tree minami mod and my left screen side is completely cluttered with icons and it takes ages to find the resource amount i am looking for. thankfully edb interface mod gives me an inventory screen where all items are listed by groups. 

- power / energy management: (UI +) now energy is kinda an important resource and batteries have effectiveness rating, different items / buildings have power requirements and solar panels aren't always delivering (which is kinda expected). now what i am asking for is an energy / power management screen. let my see the items which supply me with power, which store power and which consumer power and let me see their statuses. let me activate / deactivate certain items in this screen and let me set some priorities like if i have not enough power then the game should automatically shut down the garden lamps instead of the nutrition dispenser. of course lamps would've needed to be grouped (manually) by the player or / and by rooms.

- burrows / activity zones (UI +): we have friendly fire in the game and the colonist AI in general is quite suicidal. please let me have some zones where i can assign colonists to and give ma a big red button which i can switch and then all colonists will stay in the "DANGER"-area.

- jobs screen (UI tweak) needs some improvements, why not add the option to sort by certain skills, this shouldn't be too hard to implement. let me sort the overview by doctoring / research skill for example.

- health & equipment overview (UI+): we also need a colony overview screen with all the colonists and their current health-status. put every colonist in a row and the columns are the rows from the colonist "health" screen. like an excel spreadsheet and even better if i click on a colonist then there will be a screen-extension where i can enable / disable jobs for this colonist.....or "relieve" him (read execute)...i do hate those vegetables taking up work-orders and food. they also die too slowly when i stop doctoring them and the micromanagement is killing me....sadly we have no atom-smasher or pit in rimworld ;). having an overview screen with all the colonists and their equipment would also be nice, rows are the colonists and the columns are the equipment slots, also let me assign them equipment from my stockpiles directly from that screen. there is really nothing more frustrating than searching for that sniper rifle which he had dropped somewhere on the map or which lies in a certain stockpile (scratch stockpile, let me also view if i want the weapons on the map to assign to them).

--> sub-note, add some general rules like "claim dropped weapons" or things like "new stockpiles have everything disabled" <-- this is added by the edb interface mod i believe and is a must-have (sorry if i'm wrong and this is part of vanilla).

- AI tweak:the colonist AI needs some fixes / tweaks ASAP. in my current fort...eh..colony i almost had my entire population (6 people...hey shut up :P) whiped out by this mind-thingy which made all 5 out of 6 colonists rampaging chimpansies. at the end they beat each other to ribbons and i had to carry them all to med beds....that wasn't the problem. problem was that the AI doesn't care when it has work to do (or it sleeps) and its starting to starve. this is unacceptable, really, in DF if you dwarvese have nothing to eat (either by fault of the player doing jack or being trapped on an small are on the other side of the river, curse those ice fishing dwarves which stay there till spring) they will automatically harvest nearby / reachable plants, drink water and hunt for food....even vermin if the need is too big. in rimworld they just do their things and starve. the top reason my colonists are dying lately is because they starve while doing their job. it is actually funny, i had some colonists starve to death while they were feeding patients and hauling food....i mean wtf.

- melee combat: melee weapons? please give me some melee weapons, we have "shooting" and "melee" as a stat but not a single melee weapon. an idea would be that every colonist has 3 weapon points, he / she can either equip a medium-sized weapon (costs 2 points) and a small melee weapon (knife, 1 point), a small weapon (handgun, 1 point) and a medium-sized melee weapon (katana, ..yeah..2 points) or a big weapon from one of the two categories (bazooka or a greatsword / halberd / lance / dual-wielding katana...yeah :D). especially against critters and tribesmen with bumerangs / rocks its kinda silly. i wanna fight mechanoids with a katana....last samurai 3k style :D.

game creation options:
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- add more options regarding the difficulty and add more storyteller (this isn't an urgent one), the current scaling is from noobish to challenging (30% to 160%), why not give us 200%? also having an ironman-mode would be fun :D. yeah sure, just don't reload...i am scum :p.

- character creation: PLEASE give me the option to create my first three characters with a point-system, having to press random for a clear amount of predefined characters is a) not random and b) too much time-consuming and the end-result is almost always unsatisfying for me.

- custom game: pls add an option to create a colony with custom game settings, now this is an idea for the long run i think / i am sure of. what if i wanna have a scenario where i crashlanded on this planet where only tribes-people are. let me set that the only things attacking me and visiting me are tribes-people. then either let me have the standard weapons / gear / items or let me decide which era-type / developement-grade equipment i wanna be able to reach. maybe i want to have tribeswar ^^....i think some checkboxes won't be too hard to implement. or give me the option that i will get attacked from mechanoids from the start and the world is a lost / ancient civ planet where i am certain to fail or at least struggle till the very end.


- progression (and some rambling): now the game is still in alpha and the dev made the right call and concentrates on adding game mechanics instead of pure content. mods like project armory and apparell mod are doing an AWESEOME job in adding a huge amount of new content....big KUDOS to all the mod makers of rimworld...GENIUSES! now my favorite mod / mod-pack is tech tree minami...why? rimworld vanilla has no real progression, yes there are some small improvements but i dare the dev to play a round of rimworld with the TTM mod, it is a different of day & night, i think this kind of progression is what keeps the player addicted to the game. honestly i have tried rimworld once in vanilla format (after seeing a bunch of lets plays beforehand) and vanilla rimworld is good, don't get me wrong, but i have reached everything i can buld and the "lategame tech" pretty fast. vanilla rimworld doesn't have a long gameprogression like you get with tech tree minami. now this depends of course to some degree on the personal taste and you can decide for yourself how far this should go but i think that adding more progression to the game (again, more for the later stages of gamedevelopement) tied in with the research and a bunch of new workshops is really more engaging to "reach that next tech level" ("just one more turn"-syndrom) instead of the current drive of "i wanna build this area with that layout". vanilla rimworld reminds me more of a topdown minecraft which is focused on the actual building / designing of the colony and with the TTM mod for example it reminds me more of dwarf fortress, it is more focused on the developement / progression of the colony from the early stages to the lategame and focuses more on the colonists. in vanilla rimworld colonists are more or less your main workers for building your dream colony, shaped in a specific form. in my modded TTM version every colonist is important and starting with a colonist who has construction high, one cooking high, crafting high, etc. is important because certain jobs (bills) have certain skill requirements and so the focus shifts from generic workforce, mainly customized with weapon and amor as an individual soldier, towards individual colonists which are almost irreplacable duo to their skills. as i played with the modded rimworld version i got more intimate with these guys, in my current gameplay i have 2-3 colonists which are so essential, if they would die (or become a vegetable) then my colony would be truly crippled. THIS is a huge survival sim aspect of the game which builds a huge synergy with the whole "crashlanded on a foreign planet (rimworld)" and has the focus the game (i think) intends to go towards.


colonist / enemy AI tweak:
i also think that the tactical AI should get some tweaks regarding their positioning and their direction of attack. building an entrance hallway of doom is the easiest way to kill them off. if you have too many long-range weapons then the AI should attack (spawn with them first of course) with long-range weapons too like rocket launchers, in-hand mortars etc. and prioritise your turrets from a distance (and of course you if you are closer to them than the turrets).

if the AI tries to go through your main entrance and it gets suppressed  by heaver fire then it shouldn't stay in the corner and hope for the  best but retreat and try another direction of attack, breaking through some of your walls instead (better melee-attack the wall and break through than die in the main entrance).

some raid parties should also get the option to carry dynamite (to open up walls or eliminate turrets) and to carry picks...yes....we have enemies trying to poke you out of your base with mortars...why not give them some tools to dig a way towards your colony slowly on their own? of course they would take a while and not every raider would have one. in a party of 12 raiders why not give one or two a pick and let them start digging towards you.
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!!!!!NEW SUGGESTIONS!!!!!!



fog of war:

-would it be viable / interesting to add fog of war to the game? so that you get for example the message that raiders / tribesman have come but you only see your near surrounding. lategame you could also build some camera mast that show the immediate surrounding but require some power (give us smaller solar panels + batteries, this could be used for this kind of things). this would not only add more tension to the game, could potentially increase performance because not everything is rendered at all times (idk, not a programmer, just a guess) and it would add more strategy to the game.


TITANS / MEGABEASTS:
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in contrary to the bolded letters i don't mean actual fantasy titans and fantasy monsters but a rimworld equivalent. let us have bigger enmies which are much stronger with way more HP and more importantly MORE THAN ONE WEAPON!

in dwarf fortress there are wild animals, night creatures (werecreatures, undead, vampires), invading factions like goblins, megabeasts (both full and semi-megabeasts) and titans.

in rimworld we only have the equivalent to invading factions which is nice on itself but these game mechanic offers us the challenge to fight a horde of easy to medium difficulty groups, the challenge is basically in numbers and that we have to spread our firepower. the equivalent to titans / megabeasts would be the opposite, a HUGE and strong enemy where we have to focus our attacks against. also making him able to destroy walls (not instantly but at a reasonable fast pace) would mean that we also have to go on the offensive (mortar attacks from raiders are fine but they are more like attrition damage which is a thread over time than an immediate threat). of course this would be lategame encounters! i know mechanoids are supposed to be that lategame enemy but they still fall in the category of many enemies, dividing our forces and / or firepower. having a huge killer-robot fore example attack with laser beams and rockets would be neat (or the rimworld equivalent).


raider gunboats:
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now having a medium to big-sized army of raiders walk towards your colony is good and fine but it would also be a nice idea to have them come with gunboats which are give them some cover from incoming bullets and have some (smaller) canons and machine gun nests (both explosive when damaged too much).

now i don't want to have vehicles now in the game, of course after fighting this what remains is more of a building than a vehicle. this idea adds more challenge to the game and after the battle you have kind of a building near your colony which will remain and remind you of your battle :).

here is what i mean (more or less):




BetaSpectre

Most of these I support, In the options you can access Dev mode its basically hax0rs.
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                           TO WAR WE GO

Xerberus86

#2
Quote from: BetaSpectre on September 03, 2014, 11:13:40 PM
Most of these I support, In the options you can access Dev mode its basically hax0rs.

wow if you actually read the whole post then kudos to you^^.

well if you mean the dev-mode in terms of custom game then i know of that but using the dev-console aka the cheat console is kinda not really fun. having some options to limit and tailor the game would be nice though, this isn't a must have but would be a nice additonal feature.

Edit: fyi, i also edited my main post and added some more ideas at the bottom. most / some of these things should / could be alreayd planned by the dev but how should i know :).

Edit2: damn i'm tired, thinking is starting to get hard (5:24 am here...damn rimworld). which suggestions aren't in your favor and why? just interested to know your opinion, no critique.