REVISION 35 UP: ENOLA BRIMBLE'S FINE DAY IN WHICH EVERYTHING ISN'T GOING TO EXPLODE

Steady. I like 35! Few thoughts and bugs;


Thoughts:

1) Cults are indeed non-existant (almost).

2) Goes very smooth, until I hit about 30 colonists, where it hangs a little.. Still hangs a bit when placing modules in a new building. Work crew tab is much more responsive.

3) Combat also a lot better.



Bugs:

1) No drinking whatsoever

2) Kitchen is dumping cooked food at a stockpile where food is not allowed...Other colonists promptly move it over to the food stockpile after. Early in the game I decided to make my food stock pile the "other stuff" stockpile and vice versa, so maybe that has something to do with that. Uncooked foods are delivered correctly.

3) The work crew scroll slider is divided into 2 parts. But the slider just goes over both until you have scrolled down to the second part, then you cannot scroll up in the first part again (as it should be, as the first part is for unassigned workers).

4) I have mentioned before, but at the borders of the "sub biomes" there is some white stuff in my game (see attached pic). I do NOT have it in the temperate biome (unless 35 changed that).

 

Ah ok about 4. It looks really weird because it's so obviously along the lines of the sub biomes, so I can live with it, but certainly not a fan of it.

About the others; I will try to explain with this paint that I attached representing the whole scroll bar in the work crews tab. The slider is supposed to start at blue, but it starts at red. (there was only 1 unassigned worker, so there should be none up there). After you have scrolled down into area 2, then you can no longer scroll back up into area 1 (aka working as intended). Hope this makes sense!

 

Oh, this was a FUN one.

I got a pretty decent colony up and running with a decent-sized army - two regiments of four men (including the NCOs). I was very grateful for this (see below)


Note that this was the first fish raid after 9 days, so not entirely unexpected. I managed to fend them off without sustaining any causalities thanks to the careful placement of a few landmines (and the fact that a single footsoldier can beat three fishpeople).

But then I lost all my soldiers. Not to enemies, but to a bug.

See the soldier on the left running through walls? He'd been stuck there for a while and was close to starving to death. Even moving a nearby module (a window) didn't free him. I decided to do the merciful thing and finish him off, but the moment I marked him for frontier justice EVERY other soldier (both regiments) became frozen in place, some running without moving, all focused on but unable to strike the poor fellow down.

Then there came another fishperson raid. This one five in number.

Quite irritating...

 

Yes (CER80), and I actually managed to fix it by retiring and drafting the units a couple of times; they finally managed to kill off the soldier and returned to their duties...and then I was hit by a 5 and 6 man bandit group on the same day.

I got through another week before it crashed (CER81)

 

I have been having a problem in this build where some of the crews will not do their workshop jobs, particularly the refinery/forge/ceramics workshops. I can not get them to make bricks when there are supplies even when I turn all jobs other than workshop jobs off. has anyone else encountered this issue?

 

Kind of. It seems like work crews occassionally get 'stuck' on a job they never complete and refuse to do anything. One time (well, more like two or three times) I've noticed my kitchen was no longer producing cooked food. When I checked on the crew they were assigned to a 'construct building' task yet every member was doing something else (idle, sleeping, eating, admiring machinery). Shutting off any and all tasks apart from workshop ones didn't get them back to cooking. Canceling the construct building job from the jobs menu didn't do anything. In the end I had to reassign the kitchen to another foreman along with all his workers and ultimately ended up killing the former overseer because he was stuck assigned to a task he couldn't or wouldn't complete.

No, I don't have any of the replay files.

 

More observations:

Soldiers seem really attached to spine guns. As in, even when there are plenty of other weapons and combat supplies, they will preferentially use this weird weapon and stick with it. Not only is this kind of strange (unless they have Certain Traits you'd think soldiers would only use the vile things as a last resort), as a weapon they kind of suck. Case in point: I once had a group of three spine gun-armed soldiers chase a single fishperson who was pursuing a hapless colonist half-way across the map. Owing to some property of the weapon, likely its short range, they were unable to actually hit the enemy unless he/she/it actually stopped (i.e. when the fishperson finally killed the fleeing colonist). Thus my colony was left without a military force and was hit by a group of six bandits (seriously devs, fix the bandit raids!). It also seems odd that soldiers are constantly dropping their weapons off at storage zones; you'd think they'd carry their sidearm with them at all times.

On the subject of fishman raids, they now tend to scatter a bit, some hanging back, before running towards your colony as opposed to coming in a single concentrated wave like bandits. Not sure if this is intentional or a product of the new pathfinding protocol, but it makes dealing with them far more difficult; they're far more likely to pick off lone colonists and/or sneak into your base to do real damage. Also, fishmen who spawn from a raid event do not trigger a 'colonist is being harassed by fishman' alarm. This sometimes makes it hard to figure out where they are attacking and seems kind of arbitrary.

The kitchen task list (and more than likely workshop jobs in general) is a bit borked; more than once I had to clear all jobs and re-enter them because the work crew wasn't cooking. Case in point: I had the top task set to make maize chowder (20 minimum). I had a dozen bushels of the stuff (and no chowder), but the crew was idle. I deleted the standing order and re-entered the task and they immediately got to work. This may be related to unfinished tasks; when you cancel a task currently being carried out they can't seem to latch on to a new one some times. Task priority isn't respected, either; they'll make whatever they please.

This has been mentioned before, but storage zone restrictions aren't being obeyed. It seems to come up more late in the game after you start establishing new zones. Colonists will preferentially store all objects in newer zones over older ones regardless of restrictions.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but I don't think the 'send building material' favor works; I don't think anything happens when I select it. Let me repeat my suggestion for redesigning favors.

"...[favors] feel like glorified, redundant supply drops/immigration events. I think that, with increasing prestige, you should be able to ask for more specific favors, not just larger ones. For example, at a certain level of prestige you should be able to ask for an artisan with a specific trait (e.g. seminary training, military training), a supply drop consisting of nothing but one resource (bricks, food, booze), evict an annoying aristocrat, a bombing run on a pesky bandit camp, etc. Furthermore, instead of being available once a day for a brief period like supply drops/immigration, calling in a favor should be available at any time, but once a favor is called there should be a 'cool down' period before you can ask for another. The length of the cool down period should vary depending on a) how big a favor it is and b) how high your prestige is (it shouldn't be shorter than, say, half a day, no matter how high your prestige is). This would change the mechanics of favors, making them more of a reactive tool available to the player to deal with a imminent threat/need, distinguishing them from supply drops/immigration. Thus they would be more valuable thereby raising the impetus to acquire prestige."

 

Congratulations on squashing a majority of the save/load bugs, I saved and loaded and actually played a game over multiple sessions successfully, the first time ever.

As stated before here are some of the major lingering/new issues:

-Stockpile filters don't work again (and colonists will walk across town to drop stuff in far away stockpiles and ignore close ones.)
-Colonists get lazy again (noticed this in food production). However...now they don't die like flies since they can survive on raw cabbage, flour, etc. AND THEY AUTO-FORAGE! Very nice touch!
-Soldiers keep dropping their guns to go do stuff, and will ignore invasions and things, so the "call to alarm" function doesn't seem to be working anymore.
-Thank the dark gods, you reduced cult activity to suitably subtle levels.

Thanks for a great revision