[1.0] EdB Prepare Carefully - v1.0.13 (28 Jul 2019)

Started by EdB, September 21, 2014, 12:30:45 PM

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Kellern

I just downloaded this Mod with the latest version 9.  When I added the Mod, the screen went to the opening planet screen but had no buttons or text available, just the picture.  When I cancelled out of the game and restarted it, the screen was just black.  All were the lastest versions and I double checked for the folder inside the folder.  Any thoughts?

Thanks.  Love the Mods.

EdB

Quote from: Kellern on March 05, 2015, 06:51:20 PM
I just downloaded this Mod with the latest version 9.  When I added the Mod, the screen went to the opening planet screen but had no buttons or text available, just the picture.  When I cancelled out of the game and restarted it, the screen was just black.  All were the lastest versions and I double checked for the folder inside the folder.  Any thoughts?

Thanks.  Love the Mods.

Sorry that you're having trouble with it.  A similar issue was reported not long ago.  Read through those responses to see if there any hints on how to fix.  I don't really have a clear understanding of what might be causing this.  I've only ever seen this happen when you have a version mismatch between mod and game, i.e. alpha 8 mod with alpha 9 game.

EdB

Quote from: Tryndalis on March 06, 2015, 09:55:28 PM
In the folder for this mod where are the preset save files located if I wanted to share them with a friend?

The preset files are not saved in the mod folder but instead are saved in the same directory as world files and saved games, in a directory called "PrepareCarefully".  In Windows, this should be in the "Users\[Your User]\AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld" folder.

Sacarathe

Hi, I am new to mods, I like the simplicity of addition to the vanilla game of your mods, however I am very for maintaining balance. I have noticed that the points system (a good idea) is an amalgam of the characters,  and gear. I have searched this thread for 'points' and found surprisingly little. I wonder, at what point is it to be considered cheating by going over the set point level you have chosen? (I realise you have tailored the points system).

I find the random characters buttons can generate three characters with the points at -1400 without even altering anything, and as such I wonder why it was not tuned to a number 10% higher than you have actually done it.

I normally play on rough or below (for experience reasons, not difficulty - I didnt back this for an RTS :)).

Simply put, what is a hard OP number to consider the starting colony beyond intended for the vanilla game, 16500? For the purposes of this question I am only tweaking the colonists themselves, excluding their starting gear/health and the group starting gear.

And for custom game creation (where starting balance would be irrelevant) I simply love the add colonist button.

Cant wait to do a game with 10 identical (same backstory) characters with minimal identical skills. I've already noted your points system allows for several new characters within your limits as long as the existing doods are weakened.

EdB

Quote from: Sacarathe on March 08, 2015, 07:12:34 AM
Hi, I am new to mods, I like the simplicity of addition to the vanilla game of your mods, however I am very for maintaining balance. I have noticed that the points system (a good idea) is an amalgam of the characters,  and gear. I have searched this thread for 'points' and found surprisingly little. I wonder, at what point is it to be considered cheating by going over the set point level you have chosen? (I realise you have tailored the points system).

I find the random characters buttons can generate three characters with the points at -1400 without even altering anything, and as such I wonder why it was not tuned to a number 10% higher than you have actually done it.

I normally play on rough or below (for experience reasons, not difficulty - I didnt back this for an RTS :)).

Simply put, what is a hard OP number to consider the starting colony beyond intended for the vanilla game, 16500? For the purposes of this question I am only tweaking the colonists themselves, excluding their starting gear/health and the group starting gear.

And for custom game creation (where starting balance would be irrelevant) I simply love the add colonist button.

Cant wait to do a game with 10 identical (same backstory) characters with minimal identical skills. I've already noted your points system allows for several new characters within your limits as long as the existing doods are weakened.

This is probably more information than you're looking for, but I might as well go into a little detail around the current state of the point system--mostly because I'm not entirely happy with it in the alpha 9 version of the mod.

Balancing is really difficult, and it takes a lot of time.  The point system is built off of the built-in "market value" system that attaches a cost to everything for trading in the game.  My hope was that using this would take advantage of all of the balancing that the vanilla game is doing when assigning this market value.

Unfortunately, not everything is factored into the market value of individual characters.  For example, passions are not factored in at all, so a character with every skill set to the maximum passion level has the same market value as a character with no passions at all.  This seems like an oversight to me because passion levels really are quite valuable.

Also, the market values for some items in the game seem unbalanced to me.  I've mentioned this example before, but the market value of the plasteel knife that you start off with is equivalent to the market value of twenty pistols.  Who wouldn't trade in their starting plasteel knife for 20 pistols?

In the vanilla game, it doesn't matter as much, but in the context of this mod, it causes problems, so I need to make my own custom adjustments to those market values.  I've tried balance out some of the inconsistencies (for example by reducing the value of melee weapons vs. ranged weapons), but it's difficult to get it to come out the way that I want it to.

Ideally, every time that you press the "Prepare Carefully" button, you'd get dropped into a situation where you roughly have the same number of remaining points, with somewhere between zero and a few hundred points to spend depending on the three random characters that were generated for you.  Unfortunately, this usually does not happen because the three random characters that are generated for you are wildly inconsistent.  Some of them have 12 passion levels to go with well-balanced skill levels while some of them have 2 passion levels to go with three or four "incapable of" skills.  Sometimes all three of your colonists are wearing synthread jackets and sometimes two of the three are naked (synthread has a fairly high market value).  This makes it really difficult to get a consistent point value to start with.

Hopefully that explains why you see those inconsistencies.  I'm trying to make it better, but I'm still not quite happy with where it is right now.

As far as the question of how many points starts to be OP--it's a difficult one to answer.  Focusing on the character generation, the random characters that get generated really fall into three buckets:

  • A decent average character will have a point value somewhere in 2800-3000 range.  Those are the characters that at first glance look like they have a good distribution of passions and not too many incapable skills.  You'll see these most frequently.
  • Less frequently, you'll see characters generated in the 3200-3600 range.  These characters usually are incapable of nothing and have one or two high skill levels and an above-average number of passions.
  • You'll also see characters in the 1800-2400 range.  These characters typically will be incapable in a number of skills and have a below average number of passions.
Characters in that 2800-3000 range feel the most fair to me.  Or having one average character, one above average and one below average.  Something like that, but that's just my opinion.  Remember that you can always hover your mouse over the "Remaining Points" value to see how the points break down between characters.
 

Sacarathe

This is most excellent information, and not more than I was after.

QuoteRemember that you can always hover your mouse over the "Remaining Points" value to see how the points break down between characters.

This was not clear to me. I was about to suggest it (then I checked in game before posting :D).

Perhaps you could put in the OP a note about that (or perhaps update a screenshot to include it visible.)

And perhaps include a list of ranges (in the op) of colonist point values relative to ability though it seems to me fairly clear with knowledge of that tool tip that and ideal character will be worth 3k, though I just took the 3 starting chars and got 2.8k, 2.1k, & 2.8k .


Kaballah

This is a really well-done mod and it adds quite a lot of replay!  I hope you get around to pricing traits, if that's possible, because they aren't balanced against each other at all.  Great mod never the less!

Darkhymn

This is one of several mods, along with the interface mod, that I am starting to consider essential to this game. As a player looking to keep the "vanilla" feel of the game while still looking for ways to improve gameplay, I love how much time and effort EdB puts into balance and quality of life for the player.
The complexity of making the points system work without overly constraining the player or allowing hugely unbalanced starts is almost incomprehensible, and while I see a lot of room for improvement, I'm very impressed by how balanced it feels overall.

Thanks for this mod and all of the hard work that must go into it!

Sentenza

Hey, thanks a ton for this mod! :)

Edit: I had an idea yesterday, but I thought it over, and for future-proofness I'd like to propose a new feature instead:

A way to list and filter backgrounds, so that you could filter them by the skill they add, and see the skills they modify (and jobs they prevent) at a glance.

It wouldn't necessarily have to replace the current way of selecting backgrounds, the only issue is finding one you want, once you know its name it's easy to select it.

Thanks :)

Old post:
I have a request, I'd like all backstories and traits in an excel sheet, and luckily I'm willing to do work to get there, however I'm having trouble finding the backstories in the xml files, so I assume it's directly in the code?

I hope you have access to the backstory files, and I've prepared a google spreadsheet into which you could paste them for me, and I'd work it out into nicely human readable form for everyone.

Lonery

(sry bad english :p)
I have the same problem as Kellern. No buttons whatsoever. Can you pls fix this? This is my favorite mod, I just can't play without it. :'C

EdB

Quote from: Lonery on March 21, 2015, 01:57:04 PM
(sry bad english :p)
I have the same problem as Kellern. No buttons whatsoever. Can you pls fix this? This is my favorite mod, I just can't play without it. :'C

I have not been able to duplicate this problem, so it's difficult for me to fix it.  Be sure that you have the latest version of the game, the latest version of the mod and be sure to try it with no other mods enabled.

If there's anyone out there for whom this is happening, if you want to help me figure out what's causing it, send me the contents of game's error log, RimWorld727Win\RimWorld727Win_Data\output_log.txt.  Usually, the error that's causing the issue will be repeated many times in this file--you don't need to send me everything; just copy-and-paste up to the first few occurrences.  Also, keep in mind that this file does include some information about your computer, i.e. details about your graphics card, the directory where the game is installed, etc.  If you don't want to share this with the whole forum, just send me the contents of the file in a private message.

Lonery

Nevermind, I've figured it out. ^^ The game was in the directory with russian letters in it. (This phrase probably has thousands of mistakes ._.)

SSS

So... many... backstories... can't... choose... x-x

This is really cool though. After a small forever I managed to decide on one colonist setup. I like the point system too. It helps in keeping you from going too crazy with the editing and seems pretty fair.

poisin224

Maybe I'm just blind, but is there no way to access the information screen about colonists while Preparing Carefully? Or to change their health?

Dragoon

Quote from: poisin224 on March 25, 2015, 11:22:27 PM
Maybe I'm just blind, but is there no way to access the information screen about colonists while Preparing Carefully? Or to change their health?

What do you mean? you don't change their health you can turn off scars if you want to.
(I'ts in the body parts tab) Unless that is what you ment.
Quote from: faltonico
I truly can't understand that sense of balancing a LOT of modders have, pouring more resources on something doesn't make it more difficult, but more annoying. It is not engaging, even if i'm swimming in silver at late game ¿why to bother?, why all the effort to get there?.