ALPHA 43A NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Close your eyes.... and breathe slowly.

 

And here I come, poor Daniel, Just let someone else read my post.
Had a crash, when accepting a bandit defecting to me. And a script error.


Script error seemed to happen same second as crash. Ill try to play further on last save.

*edit. on load, I tried to accept bandit again. and it crashed again. so save can probably be used to help find issue.

 

Had a crash wile working on the pub. here are the files.. Maybe I had a little less common crash now?

 

It feels like colonists don't drink laudanum as much as they used to. Usually my gameplan is to have a maxed out chemistry workshop fed by a maxed out opium farm, but in my 43A game, they hardly drank anything. I only noticed it when I realized I had a crap ton of raw opium lying around which never used to happen before.

 

Jungle Biome, Windows 10, 45 days, 64 colonists

Here are the files from a several-hours long session. Generally quite successful, although jobs began to be neglected toward the end of the session (in particular the gabion jobs were not being completed).

Specific points:

• Barbershop appears to be working as intended - I observed several folks getting their wounds healed
• Public House seems .. sort of functional? I observed booze being delivered to vats (and as a consequence, no booze in the stockpiles), and I saw many colonists waiting for service inside, but I never saw anyone serving booze, and I'm not sure if anyone ever drank any
• overall stability was good, got around a couple of crashed by just loading up the previous save
• fishperson gifts, as noted elsewhere on the forums, are ignored by your colonists (and do not appear in your stockpile) until you Forbid, and then Claim them
• setting certain offices to operate in the evening / overnight makes them much more effective - in particular, the Pub, Barbershop, and Chapel
• the Chapel is still the site of 'starvation due to immobility', an issue that does not appear to affect the Barbershop or Pub
• moderate insanity was rife, but there were no cults at all - my kitchen got renamed, and then quickly reverted to a sensible name

Gaze Upon My Mighty Works and Despair!

 

Anyone else having problems getting bread baked? My kitchens are only making the mixed stew - nothing else. Even if I delete all food and restart the queue. Odd.

 

There's a bug in 43a that's causing wheat to be ignored as food (using it to make beer still works). I believe the Devs are aware of the problem, and I imagine will be fixed soon. In the meantime, you'll have to survive off cabbage.

 

Ok, quite liking this build. Probably one of my longest running games yet. First time ever getting carbines made I think.
The temporary 3 day overseers are actually really useful if you have a bunch of mines that only need to operate now and then.

Buuuut it crashed.
Attached the save closest to the crash, but not sure how reliably it will reproduce.
There was a script error right before the crash, it's in the console.

- fishpeople gifts aren't being added to the players list of usable stuff correctly. I need to forbid and reclaim them all.
- beer in the tavern vats counts towards the max amount that the brewery has made. Not sure if that's a bug, but if you have maintain 20 beers set and they all get put into vats then the brewery ceases to make whisky. NO WHISKY IS NOT OK!
- STOCKPILES! my colonists are stuck in a an infinite loop of stacking things! (see the save)

 

Noticing in a current 43A session that quite a few of the Fishpeople interaction policy events aren't being triggered.

I got the initial event when fishpeople were first encountered to decide generally policy, and opted for diplomacy.

But for a week or so now my NCO and other colonists have been harassing fishpeople on whims for no reason, and the "Our military are harassing fishpeople, what stance do you want to take?" event isn't triggering... which has the knock on consequence that whenever fishpeople visit, my military end up chasing them to the ends of the earth in a constant harassment loop cycle until pure chance sees the target fishperson manage to get far enough away to not be targeting by further harassment.



These two militia have followed fishpeople so far out in a harassment loop that even at max distance the colony is no longer in sight, and there's no indication they'll stop any time soon.

Also fishpeople have begun attacking my crops and the "Fishpeople are destroying our property, how should we respond?" event isn't triggering.

 

Just had a fishperson's head fall off when they died. Was pretty cool to watch but I doubt it was how the animation was meant to play out.



Oh and if you have multiple events occur that have a prestige cost, providing you initially met the requirement when the event window opened you can click as many of the cost options as you want and the game will gladly let you go into negative prestige values.

I suspect this is already well documented, but when it allows you to get 6 more colonists and 36 odd units of food at the same time, it may be something to address with some additional checks sooner rather than later for balance feedback reasons.

Speaking of balance, after about 50 or so colonists, it be just broken, since about that point I've been doing nothing in this colony except trying to keep food from tipping into the "Everyone just dies" territory after a few events saw my food production get disrupted and ever since my colonists eat food before it can be prepared more regularly than I can prepare it to solve the problem, even with 2 fully staffed kitchens with trained up overseers.

I've used the prestige food drop favour twice, and even that hasn't covered enough colonists for the system to get back on track because it causes a mass flood to the new food, including all my farmers which means no new food gets produced whilst everyone eats the airdrop, then by the time the farmers get back to work and produce harvest people are getting hungry and when the "Evening has arrived so you are prompted to eat" routine happens those that couldn't get the airdrop food (plus those that are just plain greedy) chows down on what little headway I gained.

I wouldn't even say the problem is kitchens as such. It's how it all kind of interfaces with each other. If Kitchen figures are sorted to work for the current situation, I can't help but see all this occurring yet again a month or two down the line. Making me think something like Kitchen offices may very much be a overall better approach rather than rejuggling all these delicate factors every time some behaviour changes or colonist routine shuffles a little.

 

3 fully staffed farms of at least 10x14 (of which at least one is wheat/sugar cane) should be enough to feed your entire colony.

 

Not once the production is disrupted for a period and you're trying to get back on track. Hungry colonists will stuff 2 or 3 raw food down their greedy faces to sate the built up hunger and that will only tide them over for a short period.

Getting something going initially that will function fine providing nothing really disrupts long enough for colonists to get into the mass raw food seeking state isn't the problem, something that can bounce back after events kick off and you have 50+ colonists all immediately hungry and looking for the nearest raw food to eat the moment it's made... that's the bitch of a problem with the entire way everything interacts with itself at the moment.

 

I agree that once food production is disrupted it is very difficult to catch up. Cooked food should make more servings or satisfy longer. I am also struggling with labor on the farming plots. Five colonists may work on a 2x3 field of flax, ignoring food production even when they are hungry. I would like to be able to assign my farmers, and perhaps have them serve under overseers with the formal profession of Agricultural Engineer.

 

• Putting chairs in a public house and assigning a work crew will create a serve drink job when a colonist sits down. However, with no booze vats completed, such jobs are unfulfillable but don't seem to get cleared from the job list when the colonist gets up and leaves (without noticeably getting angry about the lack of service/booze, either -- how odd...). I wasn't able to check what happens when the vats are subsequently constructed, but neither a crash nor a zombie job sounds good to me...
• Colonists who visit the barber get messages stating they have been cured, but the info panel still displays them as having the Affliction. (This seems to fix itself after save+load.)

 

It's not that bad, especially if you supplement farming with foraging. I don't even make my first farm until I have 20+ colonists. Until then, eating raw berries and fungus serves them just fine.

There's not that much that can disrupt a colony as long as you scale up food production appropriately. One 10x14 plot with full work crew at 20ish pop, and then another one at 50ish pop, and so on. I never run into food problems, even after 3 foreign invasion with 30 mecharepublic troops at once events in a row.

All you need to do is have your farmers set to farming only, and then disable farming on everyone else.

 

Up until 50 or so colonist, yeah the whole food system is kind of a snooze. After that, if it does get disrupted to some degree the whole thing can get into a pit of almost no-return without that much of a nudge, you'll be able to survive but you'll be surviving on colonists eating daft amounts of raw food in a continuous cycle that even artificially injecting 35 or more prepared meals from the sky won't solve.

And foraging is great.... for about 2-3 weeks. After that the nearest forage sources are a quarter or half a map away and colonists foraging then leaving the raw food sat there in the wild whilst they wander back to the colony doesn't really do anything to help food production.

The same with hunting eventually the only source of real hunting food you'll come across are beetles, as all the dodo, Aurochs and deer mysteriously seem to just vanish from any kind of proximity to your colony... which is great from a "Oh you've hunted the poor animals to the extent that they now avoid your colony" perspective but utterly shite from a "Yeah, we're totally taking another source of food away from you alongside foraging after your colony gets xxxx old".

But again, the problem isn't making or finding raw food, it isn't even my kitchens not having the capacity to produce enough food given enough raw food. My colony of 82 colonists my farms constantly churn food in excess of what I would need to sate my colonists needs at regular intervals, I have 5 farms covering at least 35 tiles each with significantly skilled farmers, and when the fields pay out I can see over 30 per crop injected into my colony, and alongside having jobs foraging 26 items half a map away (the nearest source of forageable food).

The problem is having 82 hungry colonists all chomping at the bit to eat the first raw food that they see, and both kitchens being lucky to even see 8 units a day of all that food being produced. An especially hungry colonist will stand there and consume 2-3 units of raw food straight away before doing anything else, fortunately a somewhat hungry one will make do with 1 unit of raw food, but that intake will hardly see them through the day before they're back into a state where they're hungry enough to eat more raw food. And so anything you produce is immediate eaten, and by the time it takes any field to be able to produce more yield those colonists are again looking for raw food ready and waiting for the next crop harvest, the forageables are STILL sat in the wild half the map away with a slow trickle being hauled into your colony and then.... yep that's right... immediately eaten raw by the person who just hauled it to the colony before the kitchen can even use it.

And it's really not that difficult to disrupt the food cycle once you reach that kind of colony scale, especially at the moment where:

* Colonists have selective awareness of Beetles at seemingly random intervals, especially at night where they will on occasion just outright ignore beetles eating crops.

* Hostile enemy troop can magic up over a half dozen of military units to attack you at the same time as part of a big military invasion event.

* Bandits have developed the ability to shoot colonists from within the fog of war just slightly beyond the reaction radius of the colonists, so your colonists don't even react to being shot a half dozen times whilst they sleep, or farm your fields in broad daylight.

* Bandits that raid your colony treat entire containers as 'one item', and thanks to your colonists now compulsively throwing as much into a single container as they possibly can, it means if a bandit makes off with a container of raw food that generally equates to them taking EVERY unit of that raw food you had in reserve.

* Military units having erratic self-preservation behaviour, to the point where if a troops morale breaks rather than flee they will then adopt a job to do, even if that means charging at the people shooting at them to stamp on a beetle, or walking into a bandit camp to pick up a unit of iron ore to haul back to the colony.

Any combination of such events in close proximity to each other can really screw over a colony of 50+ colonists as far as food maintenance is concerned, unless ones idea of a stable colony is "Well they're not dead, so what if they're living on the edge of the abyss clinging on through raw food alone." and requiring enough player focusing on trying to fix a almost unfixable situation that they end up doing little else in the colony other than trying to sort out the endless raw food consumption loop for 2 more weeks of in-game time progression, whilst the game goes "Congrats on surviving! HAVE MORE COLONISTS!".



But I don't see how it's really something that 'Kitchen Balance' or 'Farm Balance' would inherently fix.
It may hide it away and throw a blanket over it until the next changes to the game alter colonist behaviour patterns again, after which a new round of feedback collecting and crossing of fingers does the round, hoping that various combination of events under new changes don't lead the player stuck in that abyss again because they didn't make their colony follow "The one true path of the Ori" that forms after weeks of players working out how to play around the problem.... but it won't really fix the problem, it'll always be there as something that influences what is and isn't viable both for the games design and for players because it's sourced from how multiple elements interact with each other, rather than being because one building has wonky balance figures.

In which case, given that new options are available from a design perspective that weren't remotely viable when Kitchens were first designed and implemented, perhaps there's a better way to do kitchens now that actually cuts out the problem completely and offers something that delivers what was intended without restraining everything around it?

Edit:

Oh and:

Units that hunt will never butcher what they kill, unless they have hauling enabled.

No idea why the heck that's the case but if they're hunting and have hauling disabled they will never butcher what they kill. They'll just leave the body sat in the arse middle of nowhere.

And having your hunters of additional food having to have hauling enabled means they sure do a lot of hauling and little else... like say... defending your colony. As apparently carrying a plank of wood is more important than reacting to the rampant slaughter of your fellow colonists going on 2 feet in front of you... nope. Gotta make sure that plank of wood gets where it needs to be, even if it means 3 overseers die whilst running to you for help and then you get shot in the face 10 times... can't drop the plank of wood!
It's of vital importance to the empire that this plank of wood gets to where it needs to go!

 

The way I set up my colony, my 2 kitchens can make food for nearly 100 colonists all the time. You need to have the kitchens stocked with 6 or more steam ovens. Have two doors. One leading to a food only stockpile. The other leading to the farms. Have your food farms right outside the kitchen door. That way you don't need to haul raw food to the stockpile. Your cooks will just walk out the door and get it right from the field themselves.

For maximum farm protection and productivity, have one or two extra farmcrews than you need, and stagger everyone's break time so that there's always somone farming a farm and that there's no downtime. This will protect against tiny beetles too.

For defense I have 3 or 4 dedicated militias who do nothing but train and haul goods/hunt. That way there's always someone around to kill bandits or giant beetles or foreign invasions.

For happiness, a brewery and adequate beds, and a church full of 10+ seats do just fine.

I've been doing it this way since build 41(or whenever those major farming and cooking changes came) and it never fails.

 

Another noticed oddity that I'll admit I've been somewhat exploiting since discovering it.

If you initially choose to interact with fishpeople diplomatically, that stance is frozen in place no matter what future actions you take. So whilst later on you may give a "Attack fishperson" order which then flags all future fishpeople are hostile, fishpeople envoys will still keep arriving with gifts which your colonists will then promptly kill on sight whilst they've got their hands full and can't fight back.

So not only do you get a constant stream of free stuff from fishpeople, but you also get a home food delivery service when you chop them up into fish steaks. And fish people attacks never happen because you're still regarded as being "diplomatic toward fishpeople".