How to bring the colonies out into the open again?

[SpaceDorf]

We need more SURVIVAL in this survival game. The funnest part of my last game was trying to survive a nuclear winter as a tribal with no electricity (chopping down trees for firewood, trying to get enough fur to make warmer clothes, almost starving to death because a cold snap wiped out most of my crops earlier). We need more challenges like that not "lol the insects spawned all around bobs bed so he's DEAD!" Because those types of challenges may be fun for some people, but I'd say for most (people who don't have a lot of free time) they're not.

I Like this. All Points in this thread will be adressed some time in development, I am sure about it, since balancing is a very long and slow process. But playing to the strengths of rimworld. Challenges for the Pawns to overcome that have nothing to do with combat experience and the player ability to engineer every AI into helpless cannonfodder.
And before you argue DF. Sappers are on the wishlist for a long time there now, and Drawbridges are the most powerful item in the whole game.

Also every post of me about what you can and can't do under a mountain are heavily biased by my Urist-Notch Syndrome*, which I allready had long before I knew about DF.

I can't even start a map in Rimworld without Marble or Limestone and at least large hills for fear of running out of rocks as building material.



* Urist-Notch Syndrome : Supremacy in gaming through min-maxing, ridiculous overengineering and exploiting every weakness.

[SaintD]

If you want people to live more 'open', you need to overhaul the utterly terrible injury system. Every 'complaint' Tynan has about how people play this game stems from people doing everything they can to mitigate a frustrating, badly conceived, screw you RNG injury system.

He doesn't want people to create killboxes, but doesn't want to address why we're doing it.
He doesn't want to add embrasures, but doesn't want to address why we want them.
He doesn't want us to all build underground fortresses, but doesn't want to address why we're doing it.

In every single case the 'bad behaviour' of players in this regard stems directly and incredibly obviously from his design choice which people are working overtime to mitigate as much as possible. What's the most popular mod available? The one that lets you fix any injury.

There's a simple deadlock between the developer and the players here, and if Tynan wants to be stubborn and make 'his' game instead of tuning it closer to the game players want, then anyone who doesn't use a mod to tear out the guts of his 'vision' will just get annoyed/bored and leave. And in that case....why bother making the game?

[Pax_Empyrean]

In every single case the 'bad behaviour' of players in this regard stems directly and incredibly obviously from his design choice which people are working overtime to mitigate as much as possible. What's the most popular mod available? The one that lets you fix any injury.

Agreed. Continually exposing the player to risks that cannot be recovered from leads to huge efforts toward mitigating those risks.

There's a simple deadlock between the developer and the players here, and if Tynan wants to be stubborn and make 'his' game instead of tuning it closer to the game players want, then anyone who doesn't use a mod to tear out the guts of his 'vision' will just get annoyed/bored and leave. And in that case....why bother making the game?

I don't think there's anything like this going on. And to be honest, even if the game were horribly balanced and the injury system stays the way it is and combat isn't improved or anything like that, I've got a set of mods installed that overwrite basically all of it, with the most prominent being EPOE and Combat Realism. Now I can play more aggressively in combat without permanently crippling my guys, assuming I have the tech and resources to fix the injuries.

It's not pointless for him to make the game even if mods overwrite huge chunks of it, because he's making the framework that the modders are building onto. The base game is interesting enough to attract a solid modding community, and with such good support for mods I don't see that changing. I'd rather Tynan spend his time implementing new systems for the players to mess with (drugs are a good example of this) rather than overhauling the base game to match what an existing mod has already handled.

The game is still in alpha. That means that the development focus is on putting in all the systems that make up the game. Balancing is for the beta stage. While it's not wrong to talk about balance at this point, saying that the game is pointless if balance isn't addressed at this stage isn't justified.

[Kegereneku]

I don't consider the fact that manhunter packs give up after a while of attacking a door to be an exploit or cheesy. They're animals that happen to want to do violence to humans. They're not going to keep bashing at an inanimate object indefinitely when it fails to yield a human for them to vent their rage upon.

Honestly, if the animals couldn't be stopped by doors and walls, your first non-trivial manhunter pack would be game over every time, barring tactics like killboxes.

Cheese is when you exploit unrealistic or illogical behaviors, like wandering into an obvious trap simply because the pathing score is lower than other paths to get to your target (which is exactly what killboxes do). Cheese is not relying on walls and doors to do what they're designed to do, and expecting animals to display animalistic behavior.

Door stopping/resisting (small) animals isn't the problem, but repairing doors indefinitely as if it had infinite resilience/material is a stupid exploit. (to the point that maybe we need a micro-countdown after a structure is hit that forbid repair)
Then again, what make it a bigger problem is Manhunter behaving like TERMINATOR. If they didn't cared much for human and stayed away from turret (after being it) we couldn't get free-meat out of a silly exploit.

Speaking of cheese, that's exactly what the current rules are.
Unrealistic : "Man"hunter not caring for any other source of food
Unrealistic : Repairing door forever with no risk of ever loosing it even if, well, there's a frigging Rhino or multiple WARG tearing it apart (taking WARG as much stronger than wolves).
Unrealistic : being forced to build a perimeter wall, that's neither supported by history or good for the gameplay.
Illogical behaviors : Animals not staying away waiting for a chance after getting damage from a target they can't reach.
Illogical behaviors : What would be an animal recognizing and avoiding deadfall traps it never saw before.

Of course, realism isn't the goal. But speaking of GAMEPLAY, being forced to build a perimeter wall by anti-player features made silly is part of what's keeping players from getting in the open.
So you can't solve the problem unless perimeter wall (and indoor fortress) stop being the only way to prosper.

[re1wind]

The highly scripted behaviour of certain events and enemies is what drives me to build a perimeter wall and build in mountains, mountains being particularly effective against siege mortar.

Enemy factions will send limitless meat/hardware to fight you throughout the game for no apparent gain other than an irrational hatred of you that can only be calmed by throwing silver at them.
1) Factions on a planet should send out scouts to your location, from their perspective they don't know that a player-led faction has magically started. The stance of the factions should be unknown until you encounter them and learn more about them.

2) Raids and hostile events need tweaking to make them more plausible and less "throw infinite people at the player colony in the hope of almost destroying it".
examples: Pirate raiders should attempt to intercept visitors and trade caravans. They should loiter around and kill animals in an attempt to screw you over, maybe set fires to burn you out, or just "siege" you by attacking any neutral factions that enter your area.
What about Tribute events where a sizeable force appears on the map and demands a tribute of value X, made up of anything you want to give. Diplomatic gift factor, social skills, your own military strength, and the quality of what you give should affect any future demands.

Manhunter packs: IMO they shouldn't pathfind to the nearest colonist as if they were a raid re-coloured as animals. Much like the alphabeaver event, when a manhunter pack enters the map, the animals will simply try to kill any humans on-sight, giving the option of staying out of range.

Psychic waves and animal insanity should also occur on trained animals, perhaps less often and with "dazed" or "confused" effects instead of directly trying to slaughter their masters.

Animals' behaviour should try to be more natural, more nuanced, less "permanent man-hunter mode when training failed" or "ignoring the humans shooting you for the past 10 minutes".

The high RNG during combat is less fun and balanced that it should be (because logically the same rng happens to enemies) but because the attackers frequently have more attackers than you have colonists, the RNG favours them. They also have the extremely unfair advantage of having limitless pawns and guns.

[night777]

Of course, realism isn't the goal. But speaking of GAMEPLAY, being forced to build a perimeter wall by anti-player features made is part of what's keeping players from getting in the open.
So you can't solve the problem unless perimeter wall (and indoor fortress) stop being the only way to prosper.

Dude, practically every historical city of significance built a wall to control borders and defend territory.

[Boston]

Unrealistic : being forced to build a perimeter wall, that's neither supported by history or good for the gameplay.

Uh, what?

Almost every culture in existence built some form of palisade around their homes, for defense and for keeping predators away.  Building a perimeter fence and wall was an extraordinarily common thing, especially in the US.

[SpaceDorf]

Unrealistic : being forced to build a perimeter wall, that's neither supported by history or good for the gameplay.

Uh, what?

Almost every culture in existence built some form of palisade around their homes, for defense and for keeping predators away.  Building a perimeter fence and wall was an extraordinarily common thing, especially in the US.

Yup, take that back to the Roman Legions who built forts where ever they camped longer than a few days.
They also build this smaller versions of the Chinese wall in Germania and Brittania.

[Boston]

My "main" problem with open colonies is that your defensive ability, when compared to a "Dwarven Mountainhome"-type affair, isn't that it just lacking, you might as well not even have any defenses at all.

What do open colonies get, in terms of defense? Sandbags, wall-peeking, turrets? Whoop-de-fucking do.

Part of the issue with Tynan being so against things like embrasures is that, really, embrasures, arrowslits and firing ports are realistic. They, rather obviously, existed, especially during the time period Rimworld attempts to emulate and reference itself to ( American Colonization).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockhouse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrasure

Colonial settlers in the US would cut embrasures into the sides of their log cabins, in order to fire guns out on enemies surrounding them.

As for how to balance them, the Embrasures mod on the Workshop is pretty balanced. Enemies will shoot back at your pawns, and they will break down the wall eventually. Grenades will blow it up almost instantly, and mortars are killer.

[keylocke]

-make recruitment easier
-make desired min pop = 10, max pop = 30, crit pop = 50
-make bionic craftable

as others have said, the main problem in a long game is the accumulation of injuries for the pawns.
which means, players need the ability to cycle pawns from varying states of injuries as well as being able to efficiently replace or "repair" your pawns back to a combat ready state.

i think there already mods that addresses these. (like modifying popcaps and craftable bionics)

[Pax_Empyrean]

Short version: better defenses require larger enemy forces for there to be a challenge, and larger enemy forces balanced around strong defenses become impossible to engage outside of those defenses. Using embrasures to solve the permanent injury problem is sloppy design.

Long version: The problem with embrasures is strictly a gameplay one tied to strong defenses in general. The stronger the defensive options are, the stronger the attacking waves need to be for there to be an appropriate challenge. When the attackers' numbers are scaled up to deal with strong defensive options, fighting them without the aid of those defenses becomes suicidal. That's the Tower Defense problem, and embrasures feed directly into that. So do turrets, for that matter.

Consider different extremes in the effectiveness of defensive options: if there were a structure that allowed a single pawn to fight off 100 enemies, attacking waves would need to be huge, and trying to do anything outside of that structure would be an instant loss. If there were no turrets or sandbags and wall-peeking were only as effective as using a tree for cover, enemy raids would need to be tiny and it wouldn't make much difference whether you engaged them close to your town or further out.

Building defenses is fun, but when the only options are to use them or lose, it cuts down the types of fighting that you can engage in. Different attack types is a good way to deal with this. Sieges get the player out of their defenses and attacking the enemy unless you just want to blast them with mortars, normal raids force the player back into their defenses. Another attack type that consists of enemies that spread out and avoid your base, but attack visitors and traders, would get the player out of their defenses without being vulnerable to mortar fire the way that sieges are. Sappers get the player out of their base as well.

[keylocke]

to prevent embrasures or killboxes from being OP, i think the AI for the raiders with rocket launchers need to be overhauled. ie : (they should function like sappers) and all pirate raids should probably have sappers in their group.

but the other stuff i previously mentioned (about pawn population and craftable bionics) ought to be implemented before hand to balance things out and make it easier to cycle combat-ready pawns, be able to replace damaged limbs, or recruit new pawns to replace the permanently damaged ones that can no longer fight or contribute to the colony.

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as for mechanoids. the minigunner and the charge blaster centipedes feel kinda redundant. i think one of them should be able to bust through walls like a sapper.

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as for tribals. i think their arrows should be able to arc their shoot through walls (with an aim penalty) at targets that are in unroofed area.

++++++++++++++++++

but even then. i don't think killboxes or under mountains will get removed. ever.

people would still use it and i don't really think there's anything wrong with it.

i'm mostly interested about making it more exciting.

[Kegereneku]

Dude, practically every historical city of significance built a wall to control borders and defend territory.

Almost every culture in existence built some form of palisade around their homes, for defense and for keeping predators away.  Building a perimeter fence and wall was an extraordinarily common thing, especially in the US.

Tss.... I just knew I would have to point the obvious again.
Key Word : CITY, not 10 persons settlement. Romans MILITARY CAMPS were built by Century (100mens), Castle took year to build and didn't house farms.
And speaking of fence, the farmer who actually need them still have problem with animals crossing them anyway. It took like 1000years, electric wire fence, and the complete extermination of wolves to have LESS problem.
As for RAIDER ? Do you see any middle-east civilian settlement today taking the time to build defensive wall ? Not even redneck would do that.

So no, there's no "logical & historical reason" the game is entirely dependent of its gameplay features, easy to build wall, easy to dig bunker, absolute lack of CAVE-IN (which would happen during both Siege & hypothetical Earthquake), easy indoor farming...

Want more reasons ? Take the Manhunter pack :
- Boomrat, being RAT would be able to climb pass through any wall & fence not completely airtight.
- WARG, being super-wolves would be able to JUMP fence at the least, if not dig below in some place.
- Rhino, Elephant, Mufallo, being what they are would trample the damn fence and destroy a wall not made of -good- metal and rock (shanty town wouldn't stop it).
- Boomalope, if there were more like antelope could be able to jump.
And if we added Bear, being bear can ALSO climb stuffs, including wall if you don't take the time to smoothen any grips.

Rimworld is not a "military camp simulator", nor a "bunker simulator", it is stupid to look at all currents and planned features and act as if the game was aiming for "100 soldiers military base" with "recruitment", "enemy base" and "war of attrition".
You are supposed to build outside, you are supposed to have trouble with manhunter & fallout (beyond mild inconvenience because your entire colony is indoor)


tl;dr
Bunker & Fortress-design have to be nerfed and open-base should be just as viable (with different pro&con obviously), not "shitty n00bs design" telling player to "git good".

[eadras]

Earthquakes that triggered random cave-ins would be a realistic feature to make mountain bases more dangerous.  It could start with the ground shaking, giving you just enough time to evacuate your pawns before collapse.  Open bases would still take some damage, but scaled down from what a mountain base would.  I'd like to see more natural disasters in general and fewer bizarre events such as toxic fallout.

[LordMunchkin]

Earthquakes that triggered random cave-ins would be a realistic feature to make mountain bases more dangerous.  It could start with the ground shaking, giving you just enough time to evacuate your pawns before collapse.  Open bases would still take some damage, but scaled down from what a mountain base would.  I'd like to see more natural disasters in general and fewer bizarre events such as toxic fallout.

Sure nerf mountain bases some more (they don't need it). I can tell you right now, the moment a heavy-handed feature like that is implemented someone will have a mod to disable or lessen it within 12hrs. Every disaster should be able to be mitigated (that is good game design). And contrary to your belief, a mine wouldn't be particularly more vulnerable to an earthquake than an overland structure. What matters far, far more is the distance from epicenter of quake and the surrounding rheology (some rock types are highly resistant, sediments generally act as an amplifier). So if an underground structure is going to be damaged badly by a quake, the immediately above structures won't be that much better off. Going back to mitigation, all an earthquake should require you to do would to put more reinforce walls and pillars in your mountain base (similarly more pillars in your buildings). As for cave-ins, I'm no mining engineer, but they're fairly rare these days and are almost always due to human error.

Even with all these quibbles, I think earthquakes would be a valuable add-on if done right (designed to slow down mountain base development, not negate it completely). The ultimate goal of this thread is to bring people out of their mountain bases/fortresses. The problem with merely making living in mountain bases worse is that it does nothing to make living the open non-suicidal. A large part of this problem stems from the fact that most of the late-game threats in this game stem from combat, and those encourage people to play defensively because 1) the enemy has infinite pawns while you don't 2) the injury system is way out of wack 3) one bad late game raid=game over. If the dev would dial back the combat threats and increase non-combat threats, you'd find more people living in the open. I think the time has come to put down the stick and pull out the carrot.

Just some ideas:
-raiders demand tribute instead of immediately attacking
-raiders primary target is your stockpiles. They're not interested in wanton destruction because they want to steal from you again.
-raiders will flee if they lose more than 20% of their party.
-you can make peace with all factions. However doing so, puts a permanent cap your relationships with all factions (you're neutral in their conflicts so they really can't trust you).
-mechanoids are only interested in your metal (to feed their hive)
-mechanoids will become hostile forever if you attack them but generally ignore colonists (players will quickly want to stop them from taking all their metal)
-insects are similar but will become hostile if you go near the hive
-manhunters packs should be replaced by hyper intelligent animals that will attack as a group only if you attack them
-nerf ranged combat and buff melee combat
--ammunition has to be crafted
--make melee skill give a parry chance
--add lowtech shields
--make glittertech medicine heal EVERYTHING.  They're nanomachines for gods-sake!
-make just staying alive a challenge
--reduce the number of animals on the map.
--reduce the crop yield of plants
--make pawns need clean water
--make crops require a steady access to water (something like a well)
--make it possible to exhaust the local environment (slow down tree growth, make animals come back slower).
--disease should be more deadly and debilitating.
---visitors could bring disease to the colony. Animals could spread it too.
-slow mining speed (digging out caves into the earth with hand tools should require a lot of time).