Protip: Put some cots in your chapel.

Sleeping colonists, if they happen to be sleeping in the chapel at the same time someone is giving a sermon, will also receive the happiness benefits of the sermon.

I say cots, because they are unclaimed, so there is a greater likelihood that someone will sleep in it. On the other hand, no one really cares what the mood of lower class workers are anyway.

 

Vicars Hate This One Weird Tip!

 

I like everything about this thread, and will no doubt continue to like it until 45A.

 

Please, please let the cultists whisper sweet, sweet madness-inducing Quag'garaothian Pentameter to other colonists while they sleep.

 

You know, on a more serious note: One of Lovecraft's little motifs was a tendency for terrible events to cause nightmares in the more 'sensitive' people—artists, poets, etc.. This was usually local, though in The Call of Cthulhu the POV character describes it as a global phenomenon.

While I don't really want CE to start copying Lovecraft wholesale, colonists afflicted with a certain type (or types) of madness might be able to cause nightmares in their immediate vicinity when they and their neighbors sleep. This could simply be reducing the benefit of sleep—a quality difference similar to sleeping on the floor vs. a bed—and could also increase levels in appropriate negative emotions. It'd be a subtle thing, difficult for a Colonial Administrator to root out but not absolutely awful; and it'd be a small encouragement to build individual living quarters instead of massive bunkhouses. If there are fewer people sleeping within a few squares of the afflicted colonist, you naturally wouldn't get as many nightmares.

 

It's a feature, not a bug! I say leave it. It's cool. It gives me a reason to add bedrooms to my churches. I put bedrooms in my churches! Nothing can go wrong with bedrooms in churches...right?

 

Look at that, it's so cool!



You gotta love that church design! It's so beautiful!

 

Sleeping through church IS a long-standing tradition, and the Empire IS all about tradition!

 

Definitely needs to be fixed I'd say, unless colonists memories also cover subconscious or otherwise indirect influences they have no real awareness of yet still record as part of their experiences that shape them.

It's not really any different to a colonist fast asleep the whole time getting a memory of being a conscious eyewitness to another colonist committing a murder... it just makes no sense. If it wasn't for the fact that this example was a player-positive exploit, there would probably be no dilemma.

Personally I'd say tighter restrictions or more significant side effects to what modules can be placed in inappropriate buildings is something somewhat overdue, it wouldn't need to be a outright ban on placing non-roled modules in a building, but at least limit support to ranges of modules that make some kind of functional sense, with perhaps 'non-core' modules providing a harsher quality hit... or if it's a decorative item, providing less/no quality gain.

 

Nuuuuuu leave it

It's weird, but it's also cool as emergent gameplay and diversifying the utility of things.

 

I'm all for emergent behaviour, but this isn't a example of that. It's an example of a hole in behaviour logic leading to incorrect results.

Emergent behaviour is something like a colonist starving to death, finding no food in the colony, searching for forageable food and detecting none and being designed to just keep broadening their scope of their definition of acceptable food more and more until they detect their own limbs as a source of food and begin to eat their arm.... the outcome is unexpected and not planned but the logic and behaviour behind it is entirely solid.

This however, this is like Chewbacca. It just don't make sense.

 

That's why you must acquit!

 

Sleeping colonists maybe still receive minor benefits from sermons (and maybe some madness) but far less than ones that are awake.

Inept preachers put colonists to sleep in their terribly uncomfortable pews, delivering some of the benefits of sleep. Practiced ones might wake ones that are sleeping.

Preachers feel unhappy when people are sleeping through their sermons.

EDIT: Clearly things being the way they are now is a bug. Better though to be able to have a "the dev team thinks of everything" answer to the player putting cots in their church than to just kludge something.

EDIT: Except insane, cultist ones. Who will preach in dormitories or around cultists who are sleeping in general, not waking them but instilling dreadful nightmares (and perhaps adding traits like Doomed or Fishy)

 

"She was dismayed at having to sleep [on the floor of/in a <bed-module-type> in] a <non-house-structure-type>. Really, the colony's facilities should be better planned than this!"

For Organised, etc colonists, augment the base sadness with a decent dose of anger at Bureaucracy not matching their standards.

 

On the one hand, I agree that this is clearly not intended behavior. Sleeping people probably shouldn't be able to witness anything at all, really.

On the other hand, if this were DF, it would become a crucial part of the player lore immediately, and that's kind of awesome too.

 

In situations like these, I default to the "Is it cool" test.

Does it make sense? Not really.
Does it break the game or is it OP? No.
Is it cool? Yes.

OK, just leave it.

 

On that 2nd I'd actually have to answer with a 'Yes', it does break the game or is otherwise OP.

Witnessing things (especially positive thing like having attended a sermon) simply by sleeping in the general area inside the building suggests a fundamental problem that likely applies elsewhere, and gives a not insignificant benefit to breaking the general role of buildings to instead stack up sleeping modules in your churches to exploit this hole.

There's no reason with this in place not to spam out your churches with sleeping modules and no reason to have your colonists sleep anywhere else until someone discovers the next exploit that gives unintended benefits by sleeping somewhere and getting a positive gain that makes no sense as a result, and then sleeping becomes "Either have everyone sleeping in churches or sleeping in xxxx. Anywhere else simply doesn't make sense with these exploits in place".

When it comes to balancing things like this that significantly impact how a player approaches the game in key areas, you sadly can't just hope most people will go "Ok, so this giant glaring exploit is a thing, but you know what I won't use it instead I'll make things less efficient for myself".... because they won't.

You just need to look at things like:

* How spread the behaviour of building all your sleeping modules in one or two workshops until later game so as to avoid bothering with building actually homes was up until building quality came in and people were told "Now your giant exploited slum shack carpentries are pissing your colonists off".

* How "Go-to" the jungle biome used to be for a significant number of players when various unbalanced/exploitable things to do with food and such used to be much more present with that specific region.

* How across the various farm changes at multiple points almost every player who knew about such things, would all have their farms in one exact way, using one exact configuration & crop because anything else offered less 'efficiency'.

* How feedback on things like immigration rates and populations during periods of things being changed didn't see lots of active posters reporting the thoughts on immigration, but rather had posts stating "Here's my colony No problems here. Oh what embark option did I pick? 20 odd colonist one of course." or "Sure it could potentially be a problem but just use the large colonist number embark package. Solves possible pacing problems".


And so on.

Keeping something like this around and the larger exploitable implications the fact it's even possible points to, and you'll have a large number of players doing nothing but exploiting this in every colony they ever make from this point forward. And having something that throws off how people approach the game in such a significant way and sets up a single "Way to do it", really shouldn't be kept around.

That this thread exists not as a bug to the developers to report back on broken behaviour but as a 'protip' to recommend players exploit it in their colonies upon making the the discovery, actually serves as an example of the latest instance of said behaviour in fact.