ALPHA 42 NOW RELEASED ON STEAM

Pumpkins indeed they were!

 

Good. I love all these hotfixes, so fast and very prompt. Jolly good. onwards and upwards!

(So i take it I can actually continue playing REV42:3 (is it? ) )

 

Can't say that I do - a single 6x6 plot of maize is so far feeding 23 colonists fairly well.1 overseer + 1 worker in a kitchen is giving a steady overflow of 25-ish bits of food.

Do you accidentally get stuck because workshops auto-disable every other job, so very little gets done? This is a Very Bad Thing because it slows down everything else and should be Consigned To The Fires of Damnation until there's a better balancing need to specialize in workshops. As is, you have too few overseers (ie: job capability) to allow any kind of specialization until you're at 70ish colonists. If you set out to painstakingly make everything organized and effecient then everyone will starve to death because colonist job output / overseer ratio / productivity per colonist per job is quite low.

In other news, it doesn't seem as if anyone is actually being trained in this rousing game of Frontier Barack Simulation. Two seperate instances of games results in workcrews assigned to Baracks either idling, wandering around or wandering around while idle. Could be a statistical fluke on my end, but t'is a bit odd.

General Labourer / UI question:

I understand the need to downsize the "Mental group" you have to pay attention to, and thus reducing labourers to an undifferentiated mass represented by a "pool" and a non-descriptive icon in the work-crew menu. Social commentary! hurrah!

But it seems counter-intuitive that they then still retain full descriptions, traits and variations in the game itself. Right now the implementation means that you have no fine control over who goes where, despite the fact that individual under-class colonists still have traits that assign them some value in different groups. When they were represented by a full portrait and finer control ability, those attributes made sense. Now, less so.

Assuming for the sake of the argument that there's not even any actual in game effect of "brutish" or "brave" underclass colonists there's a mental effect upon reading their descriptions and assuming that their traits apply. But since assigning brave or brutish people to the military squads, or rustic to farm crews is currently difficult/impossible (requiring a bit of a work around with pooling in and out) with the UI the current UI system seems at odds with itself. Essentially, I get access to information that I can't act upon.

Wouldn't it make more sense to blank out most of the information about lower class colonists? Retain the memory track and their generated portfolio description and let it speak as to their "Personality". The only thing you really need to know about them is what work-crew they're assigned to, and their memories for kicks. It fits with the slightly derisive thematic anyhow; the beaucracy only have full information on Overseers since mere lower class workers don't merit that much attention.

They can still have traits and afflictions and desires and property, but there's no point in allowing the player to witness those attributes if the player can't correspondingly use them to make informed decisions about where to employ the worker or what to do with them.

 

As far as I can tell, cabbage isn't very good.

In my last 100 population colony game in 41E, this is what was my setup for fully automated food production:

1 maize farm: 6 squares wide x max length
1 pumpkin farm: 6 squares wide x max length
1 wheat farm: 6 squares wide x max length

3 maxed out work crews that only have farming enabled. All other work crews have farming disabled. This allows them to skill up more effectively. (You could probably get away with only 2 farming crews, but 3 is safer).

3 kitchens with 4 steam ovens each, with each kitchen work crew having 3 laborers assigned to it. (I used to have maxed work crews but that was overkill). 2 maxed kitchens wasn't enough, but 3 four-person kitchens was enough.

Kitchen one:
minimum 25 pumpkin stew
minimum 25 maize chowder
minimum 50 bread


Kitchen two:
minimum 25 maize chowder
minimum 25 pumpkin stew
minimum 50 bread


Kitchen three:
minimum 50 bread
minimum 25 pumpkin stew
minimum 25 maize chowder

This setup gave me an equilibrium. I didn't over farm food and have too much raw goods, and I also didn't overcook food and have too much cooked food sitting around. The wheat production was also enough to sustain a brewery as well.


My setup means I needed 5-6 almost fully maxed work crews just to sustain food production. About 25% of my entire population. Is this too much? That's depends on how much resources the designers want food production to require.

 

Total agreement. If it sometimes matters which laborer is in which workcrew (and sometimes it does), and you're going to give the player the ability to reassign people, then the UI shouldn't actively fight us when trying to determine who goes where.

 

There's been some slip-back in Item Ownage.

In the Jungle Biome, if Bandits are brutally devoured by... something unseen, then their equipment drops to the ground. The game promptly decides that the colony is the proud owner of a pair of, err, lightly blood-stained Jezails and blunderbusses. Helpful colonists will wander across half the map to bring back these new items.

Same thing applies to invading Foreigners. It's not every item? It only seems specifically to be items that are wielded by human characters who get killed by whatever it is out there that utterly devours bandits.

Also Stalmarhkian's have Carbines now. This is preposterously dangerous and means a single Stalkmarkian shot two of my colonist-militia dead. aa+, would use colonist bodies to test advanced Stalkmark wargear again.

Edit: Also Conscripts have (again) gotten into the curious habit of dual and triple-wielding weapons. I appreciate how keen they are, but given that they don't get "Military Training" from doing Push-Ups at the moment, it's a little disconcerting to seem them lug around 2-3 weapons.

 

What defines what's "in" my town and what's "outside"? Proximity to the nearest building? To the airship mast? I assume it's related to how the citizens decide what dead bodies are too close to town and which ones aren't? My towns tend to get really big, so sometimes it feels like all the bandits and Mecharebuplicans I kill are close enough to my town and should be buried in the graveyard, but apparently my citizens don't think they're too close at all.

 

Either that, consider going down the route of "Rimworld". The Zone part i mean So you decide what your "Colony Zone" is classed as and where.
So you designate an area, in future could be built upon so that over a period of time, your zone can be expanded or expand?
Just a thought. Although I feel that having some system like this would perhaps sort out whatever issues or annoyances people have with people running back to civilization or attempting to bring things outside of civilization etc etc

 

At that point you can call them Oath Keepers.

 

Good stuff! It's mostly a problem because your poor colonists get killed by the dethwurms too, which prompts burial which prompts further death.

Needing the claim command validates the exploration and closes a game-play loop. I forget to mention it but you lot at Gaslamp work hard and it is pretty darn enjoyable to see the game take shape as you code away. At this rate there might actually come a day where I prefer Clockwork to Dredmore.

 

Lol haven't tried 42 yet but last game I had, before first week was out, I had foreign invaders kill 3 of my first squad with the nco dying, swapped another workcrew out and assigned to barracks, lost most of them til finally invaders fled.5 minutes later I get a bandit invasion and just about used up every laborer I had chasing them away. I remember thinking, I am doing so good this game, started out strong with farms, too many overseers but will build some more buildings. After those events I was almost back to original starter of 7 workcrews... I guess the good news was had food covered....

 

Since there's some kind of civilization rating assigned based on buildings, it would be nice if there was an overlay we could turn on (like in Tropico) so we could see what the computer thinks our colony's borders look like.

 

Just started a new game with the skilled overseers starting loadout and should it really be giving so many pistols with the starting supplies?

 

I recall reading a post somewhere that they put it in because of an earlier bug where soldiers wouldn't function properly without guns, so having you start with enough guns for everyone was a stopgap solution.

 

Found it:

 

Ah thanks.

Edit: Nevermind, just reread the tooltip on worker immigration and noticed it says "Around" the stated number.