Let's talk about Revision 31

Gut reaction after a 31b playthrough in temperate: cults need a subtlety upgrade. This is just thinking "aloud"...

1. Colonists seem to flee murderers before the first swing, as far as I could see. Just holding an axe shouldn't automatically give them away...
2. Suggest dividing murders up based on traits and memories, between Psychotic and Cult.
3. Psychotic murderers should run at their targets and be heedless of other goings on, and trigger frontier justice immediately (as now).
4. Psychotic soldiers on a murder spree should use their firearms...
5. Cult murders should be biased to take place at night, away from witnesses (until line of sight is a thing, this will mean ambushing other colonists while away on tasks alone, like foraging), and not announced unless the body is found, the act observed, or the victim has been dead a while ("%s has failed to attend to their duties"). No frontier justice for a cult murder that goes undetected.
6. Allow murderers to change targets if their efforts to reach one are frustrated?
7. No burial detail trigger for undiscovered cult murders. (Send an explorer to them, wait for them to get found naturally, or find the body yourself and designate them as a job).
8. Add a cultist "burial" job -- "Blasphemous Ritual". Requires a cult murdered body and a creepy shrine. Corpses so used can still get a proper burial, can't be ritual'd twice, and seriously upset non-cult discoverers who lack the traits to be staunch.
9. Allow destruction of creepy shrines by non-cultists, just as they can clear vile crops.
10. Restrict Pray To Dark Forces job to proximity to a creepy shrine, or a group of at least three cultists near each other, perhaps?
11. Adjust memory values for murder-triggered frontier justice based on traits, so some colonists will feel happier/safer at watching the blasphemers given what-for.
12. Check facing on cult-murder victims; hitting them from behind could provide a clean, quiet, instant kill.
13. Tag tools as murder-suitable (eg hammers) for when tools are no longer spawn-on-demand.

...that got longer and more detailed than anticipated...

 

I disagree with Wolg's item 4. Unless the soldier then takes the corpses back to a shrine I think he would use an axe as that causes more blood and the blood god likes blood. Also the blood god may not like the firelocks.

strongly agree with his 5. and 10. as praying to dark forces while tending cabbages makes them easy pickings. and I kind of like to see my REDACTED coming to the town from the dark forest rather than pooping up next to the kitchen.

 

[r31b], temperate, no AZDO

So I played an extremely long session in one sitting (over 30 days, with a population stabilized around 30 colonists). Things are looking very stable. There were no stalls, and no script errors. All observed behaviours operated as intended. The only bugs I observed were old ones (e.g. an explore beacon placed halfway in the fog of war could not be cancelled because I could not select it). Balance issues aside, cult mechanics worked, the job queue worked, combat worked. Clearing terrain worked, farming worked, supply drops and immigration worked. Nothing was obviously broken or malfunctioning. I haven't had to submit a bug or crash report in quite a while now.

 

Hey guys, I'm new to this game. LOVE it because it is SO DAMN HARD

 

Just had the time again to have a quick play of the latest changes. Not played since like REV31 And i must say the changes are brilliant!

Loving the new tools and such like terrain flattening and the interface at least I feel is nice and tidy......to an extent of course, (Cannot forget that )

Looking forward to the soldiers however being fixed so to speak with their constant running to respond to alarms and bugs in that sense but apart from that very nice update(s). Hopefully I get more time to actually play the damned game for a while but certainly is developing and coming on. Keep it up and as always keep the bug smashing going!

 

So I've had a bit more time to test out [r31C] now, including a couple of longer sessions. Here are my impressions:

Like everyone else has noticed, soldiers don't seem to be working properly. Once they've all retreated into a ball in the middle of town, they may then, reluctantly, shoot at invading Fishmen. I'm sure that's going to get ironed out.

I know the UI for modules is still a work in progress, but I'm finding it a wee bit confusing that every module for every building appears in the same menu, particularly since you can build any module in any workshop. To compound that problem, only modules that happen to be inside appropriate workshops can be used. That definitely needs some refinement. A related problem is that it seems to be possible to move completed doors, which leaves a non-functional hole in the wall, and the door's new location does not function as a door, either.

I noticed something is broken about graveyards. Corpses still get buried, but there are no headstones, and they throw some kind of script error at present.

Herbivore AI seems to be better - it's actually possible to hunt and butcher animals for meat again.

On the technical side of things, gameplay has generally been smooth without any drops in framerate or graphical issues, the only script errors have been occasional ones relating to graveyards, and I have not experienced any crashes during gameplay (although my last game crashed when I tried to save it - I've submitted that crash report in the Save/Load thread).

 

Lots of changes to dig into, but the biggest issue to be addressed is the lack of an automatic counterattack in melee.

The old system was simple and effective. It also helped stop runaway effects (like a Fishperson slaughtering an entire colony).

I see there are some jobs now to trigger a melee counterattack, but that seems like a lot of balancing for something that was already working. is there any way this can be brought back? I gather there were some animation issues with long sequences of attacks, but are they unsolvable?