ALPHA 44B NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Yay! Do you think this will fix the Mac issues?

 

Something to think about going forward—it's really helpful early on (first couple of days) to have the military hauling things. Would you consider having the military doing "regular" jobs as an option, but one which incurs anger penalties (since they certainly shouldn't be dirtying their hands like common laborers?) It's an enticing trade-off.

Otherwise, all of this looks great, and I can't wait to try 44B!

 

Yeah, this whole 'hauling things is beneath the military' thing sounds odd.

Is the logic for the new decision tree readable and/or hackable, or does it reside in the forbidden realm of Compiled Code?

 

Also, this seems to mean that soldiers can't hunt anymore, which is a MAJOR bummer.

 

If that's the case then I really hope reinventing how some creatures exist in the world is planned before 45 ships. As the only way to deal with some things like burrowing mid-sized beetles just outside your colony is through hunting.

And until food gets the overdue balancing sorted out, I can't see there really being excess free workgroups to throw into hunting.

Will give 44b a poke in a short while.

 

I am so, so very happy about this!

Also the generally pro-cult, murder, and Eldritch nature of this update. Cheers!

 

QUOTE="Nicholas, post: 108092, member: 4"]Her Majesty's 40th Civil Engineering Brigade)[/QUOTE]

Mein Sehr Guter Herr.
As it is evident you are doing most of the main work ,one would not have the luxury of time to indulge in pedantry as you are also having to to repair the inordinate amount of minor presumably unchecked error somehow occurring .

Here is a bit of the time consuming drudgery .
If you should be so kind as to take a moment.

Poetic license possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license

A civilian (Civil) perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_engineering#History

Easily occurring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron

A little reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_engineer

Toodle loo

 

Welp... mac problems not solved. Seems to be a fatal crash when crops mature.

Also some weird graphic glitches (see screenshot).

 

Indeed, that's the thing I'm most looking forward to poking. Though not sure if there really needs to be any more sources or prolonging of madness as that's already flooding the entire game at this point.

But changes to help trigger something meaningful from the abundance of madness is very much looked forward to.

 

I can confirm that soldiers not hunting anymore is indeed a major bummer when giant beetles come stampeding through. I'll have to wait til it happens again to double check, but it seemed like they weren't targeting them at all unless they hit a colonist. They could destroy the crops to their hearts' content and the soldiers just stood there looking bored.

 

The soldier update will require some major strategic adjustments. My colonies heavily relied on their hunting and hauling abilities.

One thing I noticed in 44A is that reassigning work crews with adjusted sleeping scheduled from/to workshops sometimes resets the sleeping schedule to the default value. I personally think that once its been customized by the player, that choice should override any changes that the game would want to make (when assigning crews to service buildings such as chapels and barbers for example) and therefor stop resetting them when the crews are reassigned. Right now, it's quite a mess to manage these for all work crews.

 

I'm glad hunting is getting shaken up a bit--it's always seemed a little too easy to hunt. I mean, you see some wild game, you box-select, and boom, instant food compliments of the queen's finest. It shouldn't be as easy as foraging. Seems like citizens should be the ones doing that anyway, and those with certain traits doing it particularly well.

I get that the giant beetle event will be... tricky. But even then I'm sure there's a better gameplay solution out there than "select and fire". That's too RTS.

 

You will change your mind the first time being attacked by the worm in New Sogwood...

 

My main concern with hunting, military roles and other things getting shaken up right now is that it's happening off of an already extremely unstable and unbalanced foundation that has been so for a couple of months now.

Two contributing factors to this (albeit not the only 2 factors):


Food Production

Food production to put it politely just falls apart after a certain population threshold. If you manage it very well you can maybe get to 50 colonists fed by produced meals. Soon after that milestone you rapidly need to redirect more than 3 quarters of your colonies overseer manpower into food production including a minimum of 3 kitchens staffed out... or you just fail to be able to feed your colonists on much else other than raw food.

It's possible to scrape by up to 60 colonists before it descends into most colonists just living on raw food forever but really only if:

a) You make sure you lose somewhat less than a half dozen overseers throughout your colonies existence... that's including military NCO losses, as they need to be replaced and a minimum of 2 troops maintained just to help avoid losing more overseers.

b) Don't mind ignoring labs, naturalists, chapels and other 'fluff' roles because you need all the overseers you can get in food production and the rest of the left overs making sure there's enough to pick up a fraction of the load for raw/building materials and hauling so your kitchens don't drop behind.

c) You have your kitchens central to your colony and have all your farms 1-2 tiles away circling your kitchens.

d) Pretty much just exploit the living crap out of Pumpkins.



Hauling

Hauling at the moment is half one system, half another.

Colonist picks items off the floor to haul, they use one system.

Colonists make a item in a workshop, office or everything else of that nature, they use a different system.

This gives all sorts of erratic and inconsistent behaviour which contributes quite significantly toward a very flimsy backbone for 'shaking things up', especially when part of one system involves "Consolidate everything in sight and keep doing it until there's nothing to consolidate" and the other system involves "Don't consolidate anything, just throw it down anywhere there's a empty stockpile tile".... the two behaviours directly combat each other in that regard and causes all sorts of anomaly situations that wouldn't happen if it was all one system whichever way... but whilst it's part one, part another it's really in no state to be used as a foundation for any significant role or design changes for anything else.

Throw in some work jobs like mines that can have colonists able to produce 2-3 raw resources at a time, but the behaviour to drop items produced seemingly only supporting the ability to drop 1 item with the rest getting forever stuck in the colonists hands, and you got a 'fun' erratic setup.





So before there's really much more:

* Shaking up existing roles.
* Bolting on partial implementations of totally new ideas.
* Changing the design concept behind one specific existing system only, discarding the knock on implications it has.

Perhaps a good idea may be to take the current state of things, consolidate it into something that isn't such a hodge-podge "Duct tape" feeling affair currently in place and get what is there working in its own right.

As increasingly it's feeling more and more like some branches of development that were critical to getting that consolidation done as part of the regular development schedule have hit brick walls or have otherwise been delayed and not happened when they should have, whilst another branch of development just carried on steam rolling forward regardless to the fact that what it needed to have happened first never happened, yet it still tried to pretend it had happened by throwing in placeholder behaviour never really intended to stay around and built off of that.

And now we've got new things being bolted on top of things that were already bolted on in the first place to temporarily fill in for the gaps that crept in... but rather than dial it back to allow time for the areas lagging behind to fill the gaps properly with behaviour that is consistent or at least stable, instead the branch that originally steam rolled on continues to steam roll forward because that was the original plan.



Edit: Should go without saying, this is entirely just how it appears from the outside. Perhaps it's all part of some masterful design and all the existing gaps and dangling loose ends these last 2-3 months were all intended as part of the next steps forward.... if so, then great. Perhaps that could make an interesting topic for the next dev blog.

But if this impression is at all accurate, rather than continue layering on flimsy partial solutions on top of other partial solutions that all never held together for what they should have been doing in the first place and facing a major "Oh shit" realisation sometime next year when the majority of the games code needs to be rewritten to solve those holes. Putting on the brakes and getting what's there at least filling the roles they're meant to be filling reliably might save a lot of headaches later on.

 

Thanks for clarifying. I look forward to trying out the new build when time permits.

 

The point has already been raised but hunting is now basically impossible for anything that fights back and doesn't die in 1 hit

you order the stag beetles to be hunted they take one shot and then get an attack in which breaks the moral of the colonist and you have to wait until your military guy comes running to help

As the game stands there seems to be little point to hunting after the first few day's and at the moment no way of effectively doing it during the first few day's