Reaction Line of Sight

[Zombull]

Reactions to events should take into account whether or not each colonist could actually see the event occur, not just their distance from it when it occurred.

I tried a cannibal colony and encountered nothing but frustration.

I built a cooking and butchering station inside a separate room and storage area and designed my priorities such that only my cannibal chef would ever go in there. She would grab the bodies, drag them into her kitchen, carve them up and store the meat there safely out of sight of her fellow colonists (some of whom do not have the cannibal perk). She would then prepare meals and deliver them to the primary cooler area where other colonists would grab them and eat. They'd never see her take the corpses, nor what she did with them. All they saw were prepared meals.

Brilliant, right? Nope. No go. Every time she cooked a cannibal meal, all the colonists knew immediately and had strong negative reactions.

Line of sight could make this strategy possible.

[rbos]

Could be a "gossip" mechanic where memes spread through the population. If anyone talks to the chef, the "cannabilism" meme has a chance of spreading to the conversation partner, unless you choose a particularly taciturn chef. It opens up a whole new class of events, too, rumours. The cannibalism rumour would be hard to quash, especially if it were true; true rumours would last longer and have a higher chance of spreading. The duration and chance of spreading would go down with each person told. But if multiple people tell you the same gossip, it would increase it (less with each telling).

[Zombull]

I'd want the colonists with the associated perk to not consider it worth talking about. But colonists that object to what they see would tell other colonists. So one moralistic colonist seeing cannibalism would cause a negative hit to all other moralistic colonists but cannibal colonists neither care nor talk about what they see.

[TheClassiness]

I already feel a Soylent Green colony coming on.

[Professor Cupcake]

+1 to the idea of a "gossip" system.

It might be worth making a separate thread for that.