REVISION 36 UP

ADVENTURE!!!

 

10 days in, 37 colonists, everything's running smoothly so far. A few questions / observations:

-the pace of the early game is much slower now - considerably more time must now be devoted to gathering and processing building materials
-steel production appears to be gone from the Refinery, which in turn makes manufacturing some things at the arsenal impossible *edit* after some double-checking, nothing at the arsenal requires steel now
-raids seem much less frequent now, and generally no larger than 2 or 3 invaders each
-text implies that accepting Suspicious Goods will penalize your Prestige, but no deduction occurs

 

I love the way cults form now. It feels far more natural, and the UI feedback is helpful and entertaining.

One thing I'm curious about: Are the old cult activities still in? I've got a couple of juicy cults going on right now but nobody is building shrines, going on murder sprees, transforming into REDACTED, or even so much as renaming a workshop.

Maybe they don't have enough madness yet?

 

Day 14, 54 colonists, all is generally well.

One thing that is becoming an increasing problem with growing colony size and population is the problematic functionality of the Standing Order option.

To wit, Standing Orders still count claimed materials in their total - so if your buildings under construction have reserved 8 planks, and you have a Standing Order for 5 planks, no more planks will ever be made. This means colony expansion is actually smoother without Standing Orders. As the town expands, there are increasingly more projects and construction on the go, and it becomes increasingly more onerous to micromanage material stocks. Just altering Standing Orders so they don't count reserved materials would make a world of difference.

 

Quick note: booze is still pretty difficult to accumulate since colonists still drink it too quickly. It will make manufacturing Laudanum very difficult since it requires distilled booze (and, correct me if I'm wrong, only a specific variety of booze, making it outright impossible to make in one of the two biomes).

 

I concur with the booze note in the post above.

Day 23, 74 colonists, 17 work crews. The game crashed only once in all that time, and I was able to pick it back up from a recent save. No lag, the hang problem seems to be gone, military is working completely without my intervention. I even built some of that fancy gold furniture for the chapel, for the first time ever.

In all that time, I have seen no evidence of cult behaviour except for clawbulbs in the fields, despite allowing gossip to run rampant. Thus, no obeliskians, no shrines, no murder sprees.

I have managed to produce literally everything it is possible to produce, with the notable exception of laudanum. Even with 42 wheat plants, 3 brewing vats, and 2 stills, the colony consumes beer (and what little whiskey I can manage) too rapidly to make any laudanum.

Extremely solid. Total play time, approx. 4 hours.

 

First crash of the new build! I'll leave it to the Empires sleuths to figure out how Chaos brought my colony down!

This save seems to want to crash 2-3 min. after loading...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4bxMjEzI-oKaWFpU2dNbVJlckE/view?usp=sharing

Few things I've seen in the short time I've played...
Game Ticker seems to not show events after loading a saved game
Citizens standing in place with a "flee to civilization" job, returned to normal after the triggering fish man was killed
Rally troops job stuck after loading save game

Keep up the great work guys, every build seems to be getting better!

 

Quick notes for tonight's run (no crash, saved at day 11).

• Suspect the booze supply problem is directly tied to the slower crop growth speed (which I would retain as it reduces spoilage). Suggestion: allow workshop modules to output more than one product item per pass -- so one bag of wheat produces, say, three beer bottles (perhaps by having a countdown for the number of times a product has been retrieved from the module after production finishes, requeueing the removal task each time until zero and the module becomes available again).
• Colonists still prefer eating raw wheat (or possibly anything, even starving) over preserves.
• Evidence that the "animal meat ownership" issue has not been fixed for all cases; had a colonist wander into the black to retrieve a downed dodo.
• Military is much more effective, but (with hauling enabled for the squad) still had the amusing sight of them aborting a chase towards saving a pursued worker to lug logs to stockpile rather than tag the offending fishperson, despite it seeming to be within their zone of perception.
• Colonists forced to sleep indoors on the floor seem to always choose the building that most recently finished construction, rather than the nearest (or some other trait-influenced behaviour).
• Stockpile usage continues to make an impolite hand gesture towards both a 'nearest free square' strategy and the acceptable goods filters.
• Had a colonist go insane from genealogy, but unless I just missed the log message nothing came of it; nary a sign of cultistry.
• Obvious performance stuttering with the work crews panel open, again. (But not when showing only military or with the simulation paused.)
• UI elements in the work crews panel jump around in an unsettling manner (as though vertically resizing several times a second?)

More later when I'm not deferring sleep.

 

So far a very stable version. I'm at day 17 without any problem what so ever. The military is now so good that noone really dies unless they are sent into fow to harvest or the like. Planks and bricks suddenly became very important! Not much of a problem, just you have to actually make a lot of planks.


I love to see that many of the small bugs I reported during the last cycle are gone!

 

Very nice update, I had a lot of fun with it last night.

A few bugs with save games though:
- after loading a game, workcrews don't always remember their workshops correctly. The text that shows where they work in the workcrew menu disappears until you reassign from the workshops.
- squad rally point markers don't cancel properly if you saved with one set.
- building foundations which have had partial resources moved to them for construction when the save occurs seem to be reset to having 0/n resources. (for me a brewery with 4/4 bricks, 3/7 planks became 4/4 bricks, 0/7 planks).
- the printscreen button does not give me a screenshot of the screen. When it does pick up the game screen it does not pick up any of the mouse popups. other times it comes out black with only parts of the mouse popups. the first time it showed me the main menu. It's buggered (win 8.1).

 

You can use steam screenshot function on f12 (I think this is default). It works just fine with CE!

 

Since there's no REv 36 crash thread I'm gonna post it here:

I had a game that just crashed after I put some more ovens in my kitchen. I observed some wonky geometry and then as I clicked the kitchen to inspect what the heck, it just crashed.

 

Sure, here, dropbox link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/u2v6vhwpxw7wrks/AAANEL7qT8ZdlT5VMwZfz36Ga?dl=0

Contains save, replay, and console.txt (even that last one was too big to zip up).

 

I have some problems maintaining a steady supply of cooked food :/ At the beginnig the kitchen is fast and productive, later, I don't know why, the workcrew just go wander doing other jobs or just doesn't do anything... Another thing: I usually give them a steady order of cabbage and pumpkin stew, and then, as soon as it's available, I give them orders for cooked meat. Even though I put the meat orders on top of the list they just don't cook it...
The stockpiles don't work very well with the filters. They work really good in early game, the the colonists just shift to the newest stockpile, ignoring the other ones and stacking quite everything in them, even if it's filtered. The kitchen guys just go to the other side of the settlement to put down the food they just cooked in a stockpile filtered to not have food, while they have a stockpile filtered to have only food next to the kitchen... An old empty stockpile only for food. Totally ignored.

A little thing: my upperclass colonist group in every new building: I give the order to build a worshop, They just gruop there to chat and do their things. Is it intended?

 

The stockpile system is currently bugged. Basically, whenever a commodity is manufactured the workcrew will drop it off at the most recently established stockpile rather than the closest one that permits the commodity in question. Idle colonists may later carry the commodity to the correct stockpile but it still wastes a lot of time. What I usually do is create a minimum-sized (i.e. one square) stockpile next to the busiest workshop. Once a commodity is stored there workcrews seem more likely to transport finished goods to their proper place (though not always).

Jobs are picked up by any available, idle workcrew so long as the workcrew in question is permitted to perform the job. If you haven't done so already, forbidding your kitchen workcrew from accepting any jobs save workshop ones should help; I regularly did this prior to the hunger tweak as it was the only way to ensure a steady supply of cooked food. That said, kitchen job priority is a bit bugged as well. The workcrew seemingly picks cooking jobs at random and will occasionally refuse to cook a given meal even though there are plenty of raw food items available (note that when there are only a couple of raw food items in your stockpile the workcrew may refuse to cook them because some colonists have already claimed all of them and are walking over to consume them). Cancelling and re-issuing the cook order(s) usually helps (same goes for brewery jobs). That said, workshops will on occasion simply stop working. Crews will refuse orders. Cancelling and re-issuing work orders won't help; neither will assigning a new overseer and crew. The only workaround to this is to deconstruct the workshop and/or build a new one.