Revision 37 is Up! Discuss

Huzzah! Onwards!
Cracking good show and all that, and I was just checking steam to see if anything new was in.

Bit of a hiccup with Fish People Corpses and Butchering Them. Sometimes odd freezes occur because a colonist moves a corpse before the workcrew assigned the butchering it gets to it, and the "moved corpse" becomes non-interactable, creating this weird loop of people being stuck with Butcher Fishperson jobs, but the fishperson they're supposed to be butchering being unbutcherable.

When I told to stop that silliness by deleting all the "Butcher Fishpeople" jobs in the jobs menu, the game froze. No crash report or anything, sorry, because the freeze was everyone playing their animations in the spot, but nothing happening for a good solid 4 minutes. When I tried to use the menu to exit, the game crashed.

Other than that's its great. The zone markers are a special delight, and the tiny resource indicators on some modules to show what they help produce is a great touch.

 

played for 10 min, sooooo glad to see the farms working better (so far so good at least).

I noticed a bunch of the food items being produced from the kitchen were invisible. cooks carried invisible pots to the stockpile and then there was nothing there. I have no idea why.

Also, none of my materials are going to my main stockpile any more, but rather are being scattered about after they get produced.
Thoughts?

 

Noticed a couple of odd things that may just be part of new colonist behavior:

-Thought bubbles are extremely rare now. You can go days without seeing a thought pop up.

-Gossip doesn't happen very often at all. You can have idle colonists hanging around in groups all night or day just keeping to themselves. I noticed this in 36c as well, but wasn't sure if it was a bug, design, or test.

 

Wish I could say I like this version, but honestly, it rates a 4/10 in my book.

Biggest complaint is that the game stutters. A lot. The animations are fine but it feels like something under the hood is rattling. Now, my computer isn't a gaming beast but it ain't no slouch either - 64 bit Win 7, AMD 3.82 GHz quadcore, 16 GB RAM, R9 270 Radeon graphics card. I don't run a lot of programs in the background and I'm pretty sure I'm virus/adware free. So I think my rig should be able to run the game smoothly (and has with previous versions) but colonists continually freeze mid-step walking in place, pause while working, etc. It really slows things down.

Despite the much-hyped cult and social interactions rework colonists are, if anything, more boring. When they have nothing to do they just stand around staring into space. They don't even gossip (well, very rarely). Maybe things will get more lively when I get cults but so far it's pretty dull.

It seems as though favors now cost prestige instead of higher prestige unlocking better favors. That and/or prestige events such receiving gold bars and getting a favorable article on the colony in the newpapers reset prestige to 0 or 1. Not sure if this is a bug or an intended change. In any case this, along with the reduced rate of supply drops (~1 per 5 days), makes early resource management critical to your colony's success. Use up that last iron plate on the extra brick oven and all of a sudden you can't build your metalsmith module until the next drop (and you may not even get an iron plate). Not necessarily a bad thing, mind. It just demands a change in strategy.

I definitely noticed an increase in food consumption. After the first couple of weeks it was a struggle just to keep everyone fed, let alone make cooked food. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. I may just need to get a continuous supply of food going earlier on and start dedicating a couple of a work crews to farming again. We'll see how it pans out.

One major problem I encounter in around half my games is a lack of nearby clay nodes. Bricks are a critical resource for building more advanced structures such as breweries, textile mills, etc. yet it's very much possible to wind up several screens removed from any source of clay. In New Sogwood, this is almost a game killer since you can't send colonists out into the wilderness. Your only viable option is to build a couple mines and wait for the clay to accumulate. Not nearly as bad in New Antipodia, but it's still quite irritating. Although you can wind up with a similar situation with metal nodes the difference is you don't need nearly the same volume of iron, copper, etc. as you do bricks so a mine or two will provide what you need.

(note that instead of searching for nodes by sending a colonist out to explore, I just select huge portions of unexplored terrain until I get a "Mine Surface Nodes with Shovel" command. Might want to fix that exploit eventually).

There are also a ton of minor graphical glitches and other small bugs - invisible commodities, commodities suspended in midair, lopsided commodities, multiple commodities stuck to colonists' hands, colonists still place finished bricks in the wrong stockpile, colonists mining surface nodes often stand frozen over the nodes, pickaxes/shovels in hands, colonists occasionally stand still while fishpeople beat them to death, no control over repair priority, soldiers don't appear to use/need combat supplies, and much more.

That said, I am very happy that a) stockpiles do seem to be working for the most part b) you can FINALLY delete zones c) footsoldiers respond quickly, promptly and (usually) intelligently to threats, and, most importantly d) the game crashes a lot less now. Still, this build needs a LOT of work.

 

36C had the same problem. I haven't rebuilt (or built) gabions in build 37 or 36C. If it helps, I usually play in windowed mode, not full screen.

 

The character and event animations are very fluid, so I'm not sure it's the video driver. A better way to describe it is that the game regularly seems to pause for a second, like it's loading a lot of stuff in the background. Again, it could be my computer, but I don't know what could have changed.

 

Yeah, more or less like that.

Running a new game now and it's as smooth as clarified butter, animation and movement. Will watch to see when and if that changes.

 

Hello Nicholas,

I had a stuttering problem also. Didn't start happening til day 7 or so. Only would happen when I had one of the jobs/work crews/commodities overlays open. And would stop stuttering when they were closed again. I will keep an eye out for when it starts popping up, and try to give you guys an upload to see if you can detect it.

edit - Stuttering/Hanging started to notice it on day 4. Here is an upload of it.

 

Having played another game, this time focused more on sustaining a food supply, I think you may have overdone hunger again. After your colony hits 30+ even with the increased crop yield it's a constant battle to keep the nosh coming, any lapse resulting in empty food stockpiles, colonists eating food as soon as it's harvested, scattering out into the wilderness to forage due to hunger. I'll keep pecking at it to see if I can get a viable agriculture system going.

Didn't see a colonist drink alcohol once, though maybe none were stressed enough to need to.

Also, I had six bandit camps form in as many days during the first week. Is that normal/expected?

EDIT: Just confirmed that favors now cost prestige like in the original system. This wasn't indicated in the patch notes!

 

Just started a new game....



I don't think resources will be a problem here...

 

Ask and ye shall receive. I finally managed to get a laboratory working and even researched a pair of fish idols (both of which yielded prestigious discoveries...all we want is for some random colonist to transform into a fishperson. Is that too much to ask?)



Anyhoo, I received the crate, one of my researchers...researched it, and, well...

 

What the - there was a turtle and a reindeer in the crate?