How to bring the colonies out into the open again?

[Kagemusha]

what about cavein distances?  right now the default is 5, more than that and you get stuff falling.  what if regular rock had a distance of 2, wooden walls 3, stone 4, metal 5, and any stronger materials do more.  this way you can still do the dwarf but you got to be more careful and line everything with metal walls.  i do this anyways but it would slow things down if you havent much metal.

This idea is excellent. I also line my caves with metal walls, mostly for the power situation and maybe a little obsessive compulsive behaviour.
I feel that there should be a requirement for greater structural support when digging underground (well, undermountain). This way the cave systems would inherently be a little tighter and narrower unless resources were expended to bolster the structural integrity of the caves.

[RemingtonRyder]

If you check the change log, Tynan has added some end-game enemies.  Hopefully this means less swarms.

[EarthyTurtle]

Agreed the main reason people are choosing to dig into mountains, walls themselves off and build kill-boxes is because they don't have the strength or skill to deal with these 200+ raiders. It's not because people simply don't wanna build outside it's just that it basically ends the game earlier. Atm you can't sustain a colony indefinitely. Some people just can't micromanage to that extent. I know I can't, so unless I play basebuilder or casual I don't often survive beyond a 6 months to a year building in the open.

This would be truly diabolical (which is why I like it so much) to players who choose to wall themselves in. Why not have enemy raiders build a kind of mobile drilling rig?

I like the way you think >

It makes sense that, since raiders can drop from outer space with orbital pods right into your backyard, they would employ such evil devices to counter vaults.

It goes hand in hand with how we want raiders to become more adaptable and smart about your play style, instead of using just sheer force.

BUT, it can't be a regular thing,  we don't want 200 raiders popping in into your dungeon every once in a while, just as we don't want 200 raiders dropping into our garden colony and ruining the perfect grass. Perhap's they are part of a larger force waiting outside, they have some kind of mission like destroying the generators or batteries, or stealing supplies and leaving?

Exactly my thinking! It'd be awesome to have a smarter A.I. More raid types too that didn't involve 'Zerg rush' tactics. Nothing against it though, zerg rush is classic. But if we're talking about getting people into the habit of building outdoors then we really need to consider A.I tactics that 'break' the walling in system. A smarter A.I means that we can decrease the swarm sizes as well.

-Have A.I's who's tactic's change according to what they are after.
-Have A.I's who c
-Let the A.I use explosives to bust down walls/doors instead of punching.
-Let the A.I bust down walls if their only plausible form of entry is to cross over sandbags.
-Increase the amount of people an outlander or tribal colony will send you to deal with enemy raids.
*Fix the opinions system, so we can start feasibly using Allies to help with raids. xD
-Plug in more diplomacy options.
-Pay tribute as a means to maintain the peace with some raiders.

If you want a means of enticing players into the open, have structures that require you to be in the open:
Watch towers - buildings that can house up to 2 colonists that gives them additional range and cover.
Trenches - Dig trenches in soft soil/sand so your colonists can take cover.
Windows - To shoot out off.
Roofs - To shoot off of.
Livestock - Tame some wild animals, they can't go underground because they need grass to survive. Build paddocks with fences to contain them.
Horses - have a rare, ridable wild animal that you can ride around to move faster and carry more (even ridden in combat if you liked). But these animals could not be taken underground at all.
Lightning rods - Gives an enormous power boost to recharge your batteries, any remaining power is rooted into the ground to prevent overcharging.

Or make some dangers of living underground:
Gas leaks - It's a common problem, why do you think they take the canary into the mines?
Earthquakes - infrequent and can cause cave-ins.
Necessity for water - Have rivers your colonists can drink and wash in or collect water from rain. (bit iffy on this one but eh)
Get dirtier - Doesn't matter if you plate the entire area with metal, make it so your colonists can pick up dirt from the rock roofs they are living under. They get dirty just being in a cave. Alternatively ties into water and hygiene, if colonists get dirty or are around dirty people for too long they get happiness debuffs. Being underground all the time can make you dirtier. (bit iffy on this one as well)

Events that happen:
-Rare animal migrations, could be useful animals that you can tame or get resources from that otherwise don't exist in the area.
-Decrease the likelihood of a faulty conduit, this is one of the main reasons people don't like solar power.
-Happiness events, Like seeing a kind of Aurora during some eclipses. Just some events that happen outside that make colonists happy for a week or something.

Went on a tangent but I hope this is a good contribution to the topic.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Agreed the main reason people are choosing to dig into mountains, walls themselves off and build kill-boxes is because they don't have the strength or skill to deal with these 200+ raiders. It's not because people simply don't wanna build outside it's just that it basically ends the game earlier. Atm you can't sustain a colony indefinitely. Some people just can't micromanage to that extent. I know I can't, so unless I play basebuilder or casual I don't often survive beyond a 6 months to a year building in the open.

Insane micro is not very fun at all for most people, no. That's part of the problem - another is that a real-time strategy game does not lend itself well to X-COM style battles against forces which are vastly superior in number. (Not to mention vastly superior in skill, which is what happens when you're forced to draft every tom, dick and harry in the settlement.)

It makes sense that, since raiders can drop from outer space with orbital pods right into your backyard, they would employ such evil devices to counter vaults.

No, it really doesn't. If they had magic drills that can go through rock like that, they'd be much better off drilling into the mountain themselves to get a metric assload of metal to sell off for money for which they had to fire off precisely zero shots.

Raiders raid because they have relatively few resources and they want to claim those which others have. Raider, for those reasons, do not like to attack well-fortified positions. The Raiders in RimWorld, as it stands, aren't "Raiders" in any sense of the word, they're Borderlands Psychos who only want to kill people.

Which, you know... Is legitimate, but they're not raiders. Raiders shouldn't even look at a well-armed, well-defended settlement which is so paranoid that every tom, dick and harry goes about their daily lives with a military pulse rifle strapped around their chest, in an underground bunker, an aboveground castle, or an aboveground castle with killboxes leading to an underground bunker with more killboxes. That's not a raiding target, that's a suicide meatgrinder - which is exactly what happens. My personal strategy has always been (bear in mind it's old, I stopped playing when it became clear that Tynan was just pulling out stick after stick to nerf all the effective defensive strategies so that players inevitably die to doomraids,) to use craptons of mines on concrete roads (that they inevitably path down because it's easier) lined with graves. When the majority of the arseholes are in the suicide path, I blow the mines, which (1) killed the baddies, and (2) emptied the graves, which the now-dead baddies were shoveled into. Collect the guns, rearm the mines, rinse, lather, repeat.

You'd have to be an utter moron to fall for that trap, but you'd have to be equally moronic to think that under any circumstances attacking people who are so paranoidally xenophobic as to create such a trap was any kind of a good idea.

It goes hand in hand with how we want raiders to become more adaptable and smart about your play style, instead of using just sheer force.

You know what a smart raider does when he sees a settlement of 30+ people armed to the teeth and heavily entrenched, ready for a fight? He decides to move on and go look for a settlement of 5-10 people who are not armed to the teeth and heavily entrenched, ready for a fight.

Attacking an entrenched position is not the domain of self-interested, profit-motivated highwaymen and bandits, it's the domain of people who wield political power and seek to exert/expand their influence. So it shouldn't be raiders attacking a large settlement, it should be people who (a) feel threatened by you, or (b) want to conquer you. (a) should be reduced by not hostilely attacking/hijacking travelers and by not sending out raids of your own (if and when it becomes possible,) and (b) should be reduced by either signing up with the biggest, baddest mofo on the block and enjoying his protection but paying him regular taxes, not doing that but buying off anybody who comes 'round with an army (Raiders should also be dispatchable in this way,) or (c) repulsing enough attacks that the locals are forced to concede that you have become a local power in your own right and attacking you is Not To Be Taken Lightly.

BUT, it can't be a regular thing,  we don't want 200 raiders popping in into your dungeon every once in a while, just as we don't want 200 raiders dropping into our garden colony and ruining the perfect grass. Perhap's they are part of a larger force waiting outside, they have some kind of mission like destroying the generators or batteries, or stealing supplies and leaving?

200 raider doomstacks is just crazy, unless we can get the colony that large. I mean, of course, raiders should be glad to opportunistically attack anything they can get away with attacking, like if you left a steam generator out in the open. They could demolish it, loot the metal and run off, satisfied that they got a good haul while you all hid in your fort. On the other hand, is it a good haul if they have to fight their way past half a dozen turrets inside a baffled wall which negates their snipers' range advantages and which thus ensures they take casualties?

Raiders should be very casualty-averse. They should evaluate the reward of attacking you versus the risk of casualties against a set, reasonable number of raiders, not simply escalate until entire huge armies are zerg-rushing you. 30-40 should be the absolute high-end maximum of raider armies, and if the risk of engaging is high (IE, they estimate, using whatever metric they have, including the number of hostiles you've killed divided by the number of encounters it took to kill them, how likely it is that those among them will die before they can grab what they want and leg it,) they just won't even attack. Honestly, even estimating 25% losses and being okay with that is bordering on psychotic, but I'd call that reasonable for gameplay.

(For a good example of this, imagine get some of your friends and family together and go stick up your friendly local mafia bagman. He's armed, I guarantee, and probably with something nasty like a .44. Sure, you can kill him, but at least one of you is going to die before he does. How many people do you have to have in your mugging party before a casualty becomes an acceptable risk? 2? 4? 8? 16?)

Exactly my thinking! It'd be awesome to have a smarter A.I. More raid types too that didn't involve 'Zerg rush' tactics. Nothing against it though, zerg rush is classic. But if we're talking about getting people into the habit of building outdoors then we really need to consider A.I tactics that 'break' the walling in system. A smarter A.I means that we can decrease the swarm sizes as well.

Zergrush should be restricted to animals, zealots and armies, but it shouldn't go away completely. On the other hand, it should be really, really easy to defeat zergrushes with prepared defensive positions.

-Have A.I's who's tactic's change according to what they are after.

They really shouldn't just be aiming to kill everybody, unless for some reason they want to claim the fortress for themselves or they're psychotic BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD types. Everybody hostile should have an objective, whether it's using the threat of violence to extract concessions of money or resources from you (and they should be willing to try this if you have a history of paying, even if there's no way in hell they're actually going to attack and will just back down and skulk off tail-'twixt-legs if you call their bluff), grabbing food from your stockpiles (because they're desperately hungry, and you could just buy them off by sharing food with them,) grabbing metal from your stockpiles (share it to buy them off,) tapping your power lines to charge portable batteries (which you could buy them off by charging them out of your own batteries/generation power,) etc.

-Let the A.I use explosives to bust down walls/doors instead of punching.

Agreed, but the AI should not be able to bust down walls/powered doors by punching, unless the AI in question is (a) a muffalo, or (b) a battering ram/siege engine. Raider type enemies would need sappers/grenadiers to blow down walls, and if you kill those, they bugger off. The player also needs embrasures to build up a good pillbox.

-Let the A.I bust down walls if their only plausible form of entry is to cross over sandbags.

Line walls with sandbags/rubble = AI broken? (And it's not a bad idea to do so anyway. I line my walls with concrete to prevent the spread of fires from outside, and I line the concrete with rubble so raiders don't path over it, and instead use my roads. Which are lined with hot explosive DEATH. And graveyards.)

After a certain point of defensive preparations, raiders should just say "not worth it" and move on. If they have to blast down more than one wall and climb over a field of jagged rocks, crashed spaceship junk and sandbags to get to those walls, they should just pack it in and call it a day.

-Increase the amount of people an outlander or tribal colony will send you to deal with enemy raids.
*Fix the opinions system, so we can start feasibly using Allies to help with raids. xD
-Plug in more diplomacy options.
-Pay tribute as a means to maintain the peace with some raiders.

Good, good. I've been arguing for "just buy them off" as an option for a while. Or hell, pay raiders to go harass someone else.

If you want a means of enticing players into the open, have structures that require you to be in the open:

See? Carrot! This is what I'm talking about.

Watch towers - buildings that can house up to 2 colonists that gives them additional range and cover.

Tynan is opposed to this, for some reason, which is a shame. Watch towers allowing my snipers to drastically outrange enemy snipers, or my machine-gunners to equal their range, and thus rain a fusilade of fire down on raiders before they ever get the chance to return fire (especially if I can surround the watchtower with walls and sandbags and they can still fire over it,) would get me out in the open a lot more.

Trenches - Dig trenches in soft soil/sand so your colonists can take cover.

No reason you can't carve a trench out of stone, it'd just take longer. I'd say it should be added, mind you, but not artificially locked off from stone floors for no reason.

Windows - To shoot out off.

Windows yes - having windows looking out of your bedroom onto nice scenery should be a big morale boost, and you could take cover by them and fire out from them.

You should also have embrasures, which are not fantastically fun to look out of (though a minor bit moreso than bare wall,) and which offer incredible cover whilst still letting you fire out of them. Line the outside with sandbags/barbed wire and you can have yourself a WWII style pillbox.

Roofs - To shoot off of.

I agree again, but Tynan doesn't want to go full 3d, Dwarf Fortress style. Sadly.

Livestock - Tame some wild animals, they can't go underground because they need grass to survive. Build paddocks with fences to contain them.

If you can build hydroponic farms, you can build hydroponic grass farms to feed your animals. But it ought to be more of a PitA than just paddocking them outside, of course, and raiding for these tamed animals should be something a lot of folks might be interested in doing.

Of course, you'd have to make them very useful, what with the extra exposure - raids for your animals which simply would not happen if you didn't have any, a paddock full of your valuable animals and the Rimworld's legendarily inflammable grass is a great recipe to watch a lot of your valuable tame animals go up in literal smoke, etc. Basically, they'd have to crap out money, fart rainbows (of happiness,) and piss heroin before it'd be remotely worth it for a RimWorld player to go to the trouble and expense.

Horses - have a rare, ridable wild animal that you can ride around to move faster and carry more (even ridden in combat if you liked). But these animals could not be taken underground at all.

This would be nice, I'll admit, but I'd rather build dune buggies and PMVs in underground machine shops than deal with the hassle that comes with paddocking animals (see above,) except maybe in the very early game, if a horse wandered by. Also, you can totally ride a horse underground if the ceilings are high enough, and it ought to be able to make them high enough.

(You want to know what might be nice? Mounting muffalo - they're huge and powerful, and aggressive, which would make them good mounts if they can be tamed. Sure, they aren't terribly fast, but they should soak up damage from the rider and maul anyone who gets close.)

Lightning rods - Gives an enormous power boost to recharge your batteries, any remaining power is rooted into the ground to prevent overcharging.

This... Eh, I'm not sure. You'd need some kind of real supertech to do that, and given that we all know how well the power conduit construction in RimWorld handles sudden power surges (hint: about as well as water balloon would handle the surge of black water of the New York Sewer System discharging everything into it at once,) that seems like a bad idea.

Or make some dangers of living underground:

RimWorld really, really has too many sticks already, including the huge sticks which drive players who are not looking for a micromanagey real-time-pause combat sim, into underground bunkers. Outside castles used to be good enough, then the mortars came out. Do you just want RimWorld to be a painful exercise in kicking the player in the teeth because no matter what they do, the RNG is going to screw them?

Gas leaks - It's a common problem, why do you think they take the canary into the mines?

Proper ventilation can sort that out, making sure that gas pockets don't happen anywhere that's ventilated. It could be a risk, but one that could be mitigated by proper construction.

Earthquakes - infrequent and can cause cave-ins.

Yes, because what RimWorld really needs is more ways for the RNG to say "Have you got the time? To get stuffed!"
(That was sarcasm.)

Honestly, this would just be a massive pain in the ass.

Necessity for water - Have rivers your colonists can drink and wash in or collect water from rain. (bit iffy on this one but eh)

Plumbing isn't a thing, I guess? Nor are underground springs, or condensing the water that's coming out of our many and copious steam generators?

Get dirtier - Doesn't matter if you plate the entire area with metal, make it so your colonists can pick up dirt from the rock roofs they are living under. They get dirty just being in a cave.

How about not, because caves which have been prepared for living aren't any dirtier than your average dwelling. Sure, going out into the uncut stone areas might get you grimy, but that's what sending all of your laborers to smooth it all out is for. Or just putting down metal walls and flooring, which ought to include metal roofs to boot.

Alternatively ties into water and hygiene, if colonists get dirty or are around dirty people for too long they get happiness debuffs. Being underground all the time can make you dirtier. (bit iffy on this one as well)

How about no, because you know what frontier life tends to involve? A lot of getting dirty. Sure, maybe some delicate glitterworlder might be this way, but someone who's been trained as a miner or is from a medieval world is unlikely to be overly bothered by getting a little dirty.

Events that happen:
-Rare animal migrations, could be useful animals that you can tame or get resources from that otherwise don't exist in the area.

Food. Leather. Bone. These are the resources one tends to get from animals. Manure and milk if you don't kill them right away. And I suppose you could maybe render some explosives out of boomrat corpses, heh.

-Decrease the likelihood of a faulty conduit, this is one of the main reasons people don't like solar power.

Decrease it to the tune of removing it from the entire game. This event mages me ragequit when it happens. It's RimWorld saying "Hey. You know you've done the smart thing and banked up battery power for those long solar eclipses so you don't have to shut off the lights and the turrets? FUCK YOU!"

-Happiness events, Like seeing a kind of Aurora during some eclipses. Just some events that happen outside that make colonists happy for a week or something.

THIS! This is what I'm talking about. Pure carrot, a reason to want your mooks to go outside, possibly up to and including drafting them all and sending them scurrying out into the moonlight if it lasts a reasonable amount of time.

[Johnny Masters]

No, it really doesn't. If they had magic drills that can go through rock like that, they'd be much better off drilling into the mountain themselves to get a metric assload of metal to sell off for money for which they had to fire off precisely zero shots.

Except it really does it. The game already has magical drills, the ones you start with. Seeing as how raiders, or whatever you wanna call them, have the same diverse background and technology as your own, you could say that: since they have access to orbital drops, they would have access to some sort of mobile driller, its even like a driller is lower tech than dropping from space (or however you wanna imagine it).

It's not magical, they pop unannounced but they didn't teletransported there, the movement part is just omitted from the player (as is the orbital drop).

But sure, just as some research path could prevent/help against orbital drops (AA guns, shields, radars to give you a head start ), you would get the same treats against drills (sensors, armored floors and walls, better doors...).

But i do agree on the purpose of raiders, I've been trying to think of some sort of goal or object of valor that a raider faction would want from you,. Probably would need a bunch, for reply-ability. Stuff like dropping near the crashsite of a ship (or your own ship), the only thing with a unobtanium reactor, capable of taking you off the planet. Else yes, they would be just psychos.

200 raider doomstacks is just crazy, unless we can get the colony that large. I mean, of course, raiders should be glad to opportunistically attack anything they can get away with attacking, like if you left a steam generator out in the open. (...)

I don't know if you are agreeing with me or not, either way, toning down numbers and making things beliavable is half my discourse.

-Let the A.I use explosives to bust down walls/doors instead of punching.

Agreed, but the AI should not be able to bust down walls/powered doors by punching, unless the AI in question is (a) a muffalo, or (b) a battering ram/siege engine. Raider type enemies would need sappers/grenadiers to blow down walls, and if you kill those, they bugger off. The player also needs embrasures to build up a good pillbox.

That's about the other half of my discourse. But i'd want a better armor system implemented (see my previous comments, if you feel like).


TinnedEpic:

Gas leaks - It's a common problem, why do you think they take the canary into the mines?

Was about to post that. Even without gas leaks, living into a mountain has a very stale air, so you'd probably need some ventilation shafts or air purifiers objects (think of a one block thingy with a radius that would negate a mood modifier :stale air/ bad air. I like that because its a drawback that can easily be surpasses by some techonology, unlike other events.

Also, the lack of sun would reduce vitamin D, immunity and serotonin levels. Serotonin is already covered by cabin fever, but perhaps once diseases are implemented, living inside would allow for some very specific diseases? Increasing your chance to contract some? Certainly it's not the most hygienical solution to stay in confined spaces with several people. Perhaps diseases can infect others if they are touching all the time (cramped corridors).

-Happiness events, Like seeing a kind of Aurora during some eclipses. Just some events that happen outside that make colonists happy for a week or something.

This is golden. We should totally make a post about it and have fun listing happy events

[Wex]

The main problem, for me, of the "zerg rush" of pirates, is the total unrealism. You are a pirate, you want to steal from someone weak, to gain a profit; if you have to kill someone in the process, so be it. You are not a professional soldier (well, some character are but that's not the point). Charging toward a MG nest is unnerving even for the most seasoned war veteran, but yet they come, bullets in all limbs, and destroy the automated turret. How come? They should be pis*ing themselves to approach it, and run for their life. And I won't even talk about mortar fire. 

[stefanstr]

With diseases being introduced, the lack of sun and protein (meat or survival meals) should increase the probability of going sick. Or to make it a carrot: meat and sun should decrease the probability of going sick. This is a great idea, guys!

Also, I think the key thing we are all agreeing on is that raiders/visitors need to have some purpose to their visits. Two followup thoughts to that:
- why not give the raiders the ability to do some of the same jobs as the colonists? If raiders were able to mine through the mountain, we couldn't seal the entrance shut and wait for them to go away... Because they would mine their way into our base.
- I think it would be really cool if the diplomacy screen included things that the specific faction needs. E.g., "these raiders are short on metal". You could buy them off with some of your metal (and have them bugger off for a while) or if you don't, they would show up, trying to steal some of your metal, or maybe they would establish an outpost and try to mine on your territory (playing off of my idea above) unless you scare them off... The game would then revolve more around resource management and less around tower defense.

Another thought I have: Tynan keeps talking about "endgame". I think he *wants* the game to be over in a year or two. You either die or flee. I am not sure I like that. Currently, I feel we have the choice between difficulty levels that are boring/don't provide enough challenge or levels that will ultimately screw you over. I think that Phoebe should be reengineered to stack up the challenges more until she detects that your wealth has gone down significantly. Then she should let you rebuild for a while. I.e., she should be more like Cassandra, but without the ultimate downfall that Cassandra always seems to end in. I would love to play the same colony for even 10 years having a progression like that. What do you guys think?

[Wex]

Another thought I have: Tynan keeps talking about "endgame". I think he *wants* the game to be over in a year or two. You either die or flee. I am not sure I like that. Currently, I feel we have the choice between difficulty levels that are boring/don't provide enough challenge or levels that will ultimately screw you over. I think that Phoebe should be reengineered to stack up the challenges more until she detects that your wealth has gone down significantly. Then she should let you rebuild for a while. I.e., she should be more like Cassandra, but without the ultimate downfall that Cassandra always seems to end in. I would love to play the same colony for even 10 years having a progression like that. What do you guys think?

That's the spirit! That's the game I want! I love it!

[RemingtonRyder]

Don't read too much into "endgame" - it might just be that point at which there's nothing new left to throw at the player.

[stefanstr]

Don't read too much into "endgame" - it might just be that point at which there's nothing new left to throw at the player.

Even if I didn't see a single post by Tynan, I would have come to the same conclusion based on how things play out in-game.

[JimmyAgnt007]

I think the raider AI will get improved.  hes already stated how difficult it is to work with AI and get it working right.  The zerg rush mentality is just the basic framework.  He added sieges.  He will add more, but the rest of the game needs love too and thats where his focus has been, as it should be.  he mentioned before that hes taking notes with this thread so even if the next few updates dont do much with raiders they will be on his list.  we can have a whole thread dedicated to raider AI, maybe those of you who had lots to say on them should make one.  lets focus this thread on other means, and assume for the moment that raiders remain the same, or will be improved in time.  yes i know they are related but they are both big topics.

[stefanstr]

I think the raider AI will get improved.  hes already stated how difficult it is to work with AI and get it working right.  The zerg rush mentality is just the basic framework.  He added sieges.  He will add more, but the rest of the game needs love too and thats where his focus has been, as it should be.  he mentioned before that hes taking notes with this thread so even if the next few updates dont do much with raiders they will be on his list.  we can have a whole thread dedicated to raider AI, maybe those of you who had lots to say on them should make one.  lets focus this thread on other means, and assume for the moment that raiders remain the same, or will be improved in time.  yes i know they are related but they are both big topics.

I have to disagree with you here.

Firstly, if one of the main problems leading to people hiding under the mountain is the simplistic AI, it fully belongs in this thread.

Secondly, the AI tends to be the orphan child of game development. It is complicated to implement, so it is easy for designers to put it away for some undetermined future moment. It is less visible than moar content, so players are easily persuaded that they can live without it if they get a cool new gizmo instead.

I cannot stand by that. Cool new toys are very easy for mods to add and implement (examples in RimWorld are aplenty.) Programming better AI can only be done by the actual game designer and is of paramount importance to the game experience.

If anything, this thread proves that the AI needs some love. I think that sweeping this topic under the carpet will do the game no good. In fact, I would be more than happy if Alpha 8 introduced nothing new but AI improvements.

[Matthiasagreen]

I disagree on two parts of that.

First, AI will never be completely up to the standards of most players because it is simply that: AI. AI will never match the way you think the characters should react, especially if it is trying to reach the standards of a thousand different people.

Secondly, the game is not the game that Tynan imagines and he has many things he wants to do to it. But if he has a choice of adding 100 new features or one AI improvement, I would choose 100 new features every time. The AI is a placeholder, like lots of other things, but the AI is not as noticeable to the general audience as, say, a new trading interface or the ability to make things out of Gold. As much as he would love to spend tons of time on the AI, he also has to worry about increasing and keeping interest in the game and considering the AI is still playable, it is not a priority. You are probably the minority that wants nothing but AI improvements and he has to cater to the majority for now.

[JimmyAgnt007]

at what point does dedicating a thread just for raider AI constitute sweeping it under the rug?  I just mean that we have one thread for the AI and one for any other features we can try to get people in the open.  thats all.

[Geokinesis]

Why not require that to mine further into/under a mountain you require x wood per tile. Like mineshaft supports. You'd have to spend time outside gathering the wood, and without it you'd get cave ins.

Also any fire in your base could destroy supports leading to everyone being trapped inside/outside trying to tunnel back through