RimWorld Alpha 9

[Taleric]

Better than Turrets? ;D

[FlowerChild]

Better than Turrets? ;D

Already named it Better Than Sentry Guns ;)

[Taleric]

Lol nice :), days from now the devs, "Oh shit it happened, we have been Better Than'ed".

[William the tuba]

All this while I was thinking about doing the same thing.

Right now the game seems to suffer from a lack of change in technology. With Cassandra, everything scales up, but I don't find myself doing things particularly differently as the game goes on. Sentry Guns are a symptom of this: they're a mid-game solution to an early game problem, given too you too early because the formal progression of the game hasn't been explored yet. I think better drafted colonist controls (finer movement, aiming, cover, consumables, maybe a la Frozen Synapse) and vastly improved but quickly consumed medical equipment drops (single use: bring the recently killed back to life) would fill the gap long enough before we could reasonably say that colonists have the knowledge needed to build auto-aim turrets.

On the subject of formal progression, thinking about musical forms with regard video games is rather interesting with Rimworld. It feels like a (formally) boring pop song, when what I want is a sonata: an exposition introducing two contrasting themes, a development, exploring everything we can do and variations thereof, and a recapitulation of those themes, clearly ending with the second theme in the key of the first. Rimworld gives us the first theme: building a colony and managing the lives of your workers, then introduces a second: fighting off raids, but I haven't felt the development arrive in any of my colonies so far. This sort of analysis hints at a possible ending: fighting off raids by good management and base design. Whether that means giant fortified kill-boxes or being so rich you can bribe them off, I don't know--probably some of both.

[FlowerChild]

All righty then!

Took me a few hours more than I had anticipated due to the aforementioned problems I encountered plus realizing that I should really be going through the game's surgery system for this to stay consistent with harvesting scyther blades and to take into account that certain parts may be damaged during combat (which the mechanical table doesn't do), and having to figure that whole bit out, but here we go:

Download Link

and that would be version 0.00001 of Better Than Sentry Guns ;)

This release contains the following changes:

-Added Mechanoid Hacking as a new research project that is required in order to build Improvised Turrets and Autodoors. You must first research Machining in order to gain access to it.

-Added new Mechanoid Sensors and Mechanoid Brain items that can be harvested from "living" mechanoids (assuming those parts haven't been damaged in combat) in the same manner as scyther blades. These parts are required in order to build autodoors (sensors) and improvised turrets (sensors and brain), and can also be traded with exotic merchants.

-Changed (reduced) the size of the brain on mechanoids so that they're less likely to be damaged in combat, and thus more likely to be harvestable if they are incapacitated. Given there are a number of sensors on each mechanoid, the likelihood of being able to salvage those (and potentially a number of them from a single mech) is already fairly high.

-Changed the Gun Turret Cooling research project to have Mechanoid Hacking as a prerequisite, since you can't build turrets without it anymore.

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Installation instructions:

-Install BTSG by copying everything in the .zip file into your RimWorld directory.

-Once within the game, make sure to enable BTSG from the Mods menu accessible from the main menu.

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So just a few small changes for now, but hopefully it'll at least partially address my main pet peeve with the game. Given the time involved, I've yet to test it fully in a real game, but I've put it through extensive tests in a debug environment, so should be solid, even if I will likely want to tweak it more.

Please keep in mind what I said before though in that this is going to *substantially* increase the difficulty of the game and may make it impossible or night impossible on Challenging difficulty. I'll likely give that a go myself tomorrow and make additional changes as required to balance it.

Enjoy! :)

[Larmantine]

All righty then!

Wow, that was fast. :O

I'd like to give this is a shot, but seeing how I am getting my ass handed to me now on vanilla challenge mode, I wouldn't even make it to be able to build a turret. I think that I'm about to lose, since my base was bombarded pretty bad, I am isolated from traders (mechs attacked me from the heart of my base, I had to remove the beacons) and there is crashed ship that's been screwing my colonists psyche up for the last month. If and when I end up losing I'll try your mod out on rough difficulty, where I could have a chance to survive.

BTW, did you post this on their forums?

Great work as always.

[FlowerChild]

BTW, did you post this on their forums?

Nah. This isn't any kind of full mod that I want to release to a larger public, just the embryo of one. I can't even vouch for the balance of it at present with any certainty, and dealing with a larger public is a big enough pain in the ass without lack of confidence in my own creation.

Oh, and btw, in case anyone doesn't catch the reference and why I keep referring to theses as sentry guns, it's because I'm an old man making references to deleted scenes in an old movie and it just dawned on me that it's probably rather obscure these days even if it used to be a common geek reference:

Spoiler

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There you go :)

[Larmantine]

Hehe... the Alien series still remain my favorite of their genre (yes, even the crappy sequels (although Resurrection was by far the scariest for me at that time) and vs. predator films). I remember my thoughts when I saw Aliens for the first time where the bullet counters were near to zero "ermahgerd theyr screwd". The horrific feelings these films gave me as a kid back then were frigging amazing.

Back on topic: Do you have any further plans once the current version is balanced? Like adding more turret types or something?

Edit: Although, giving some thought to it, I don't really think other types would be necessary by the time you are able to make them. Since one should already have a versatile combat force that can take care of mechanoids.

I should really try this experience myself and then ask such questions. (Un)fortunately, my colony is screwed, and gonna start a new one with your mod. Gonna report how it goes for me.

[FlowerChild]

Hehe... the Alien series still remain my favorite of their genre (yes, even the crappy sequels (although Resurrection was by far the scariest for me at that time) and vs. predator films). I remember my thoughts when I saw Aliens for the first time where the bullet counters were near to zero "ermahgerd theyr screwd". The horrific feelings these films gave me as a kid back then were frigging amazing.

Actually, that scene wasn't in the original movie (was left on the cutting room floow), so I guess they must have added it back in at some point over the years if that's how you first saw it.

Back on topic: Do you have any further plans once the current version is balanced? Like adding more turret types or something?

I have a few notes I've taken down on places I might want to take it, but I want to see how this plays, as I don't think this game really needs much.

If I do add any other turrets, it would likely be on the lower-tech side. Like I was thinking it might be neat to have turrets at a lower level without the friend or foe identification, so you'd essentially have to set up power to them to only activate when you were certain only enemies were in the area.

But like I said, really not certain and want to play test this further.

[Larmantine]

In the end, I decided to go on challenge mode, and I am managing great so far. I rushed for mortars and can repel pirates with fire shells with some effort and minimal casualties. I have all the required tech for sentries as well. I even managed to buy a mech brain. I just destroyed a crashed ship, and carried the defeated mechs to base and my guy just disassembled them, forgot that they need to be incapacitated in order to get their "organs".

Oh well. Will post more when I actually build my first turret.

[Larmantine]

OK, I currently have two turrets. I basically bought them, since its very dangerous to engage groups of Mechanoids directly. The few encounters I had, I just spammed EMP's at them until I could move and kill them while they're stunned. In my last encounter, where I opened an ancient structure, there were 5 Schythers. None of them got incapacitated, and two of my colonists died. So for me at least, engaging mechs for their parts was just high risk/low(none so far) reward.

Here's my colony in about day 100. Without the mortars, I surely would have been screwed. The pirate parties are getting larger and larger, and I'm being rapidly pushed towards building some sort of a killbox.

Spoiler

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I use some aesthetic/immersion mods that add things like more food recipes and floors, none of them are impacting the progression, IMO.

So yeah, the sentries feel kinda underpowered now. Either I have to be stinkin' rich to buy the parts or have to have advanced equipment and skills, which also require a lot of money. In order to buy both parts, I needed at least ~600 silver. The sentries only pack a punch in great numbers, a few of them are almost useless, sure, they help and are better than nothing, but still. I've seen episodes in past games, where a raider with personal shield was able to take out two turrets on his own.

Maybe that's because I don't like the killboxes and playing tower defense in RimWorld. I like to setup normal looking defenses, that actually make a colony look like a colony, not a maze.

I really like the sense of progression. It felt quite rewarding when I set up my first turret, although that feeling was gone when an attack followed, seeing that it made almost no difference (which I already expected).

I don't want to suggest anything, but my main point in the feedback would be that there is a lot of work and risk involved for these turrets to be effective. They feel like and late-endgame item now, but the lack of them can be really felt in midgame. Of course, maybe that's how you planned it, which is cool.

I'll see how it goes for me, as now I have a steady art production going, and every time an exotic trader comes in, I can get about 1-3 turrets, maybe it will get better.

[FlowerChild]

I'm hearing a whole lot of good in the above man. Stuff like the use of EMP grenades to try and disable mechs (if it's not working already I may try to change things so that it leaves them incapacitated and vulnerable to organ harvesting), and getting commercial trading going to be able to afford greater defenses.

I think it may act to basically expose and/or emphasize cool existing gameplay systems, which was really my intent here.

But yes, it may definitely need some tweaking, as I haven't even really played with it yet outside of debugging and basically decided to share so that folks could give it a try soon as I was fairly confident it was working as I intended, as given the length of RimWorld games, it would be a long time before I could release everything if I wanted to test and fully balance it on my own. What's in there right now is basically my first guestimate of what will have the desired result.

Very happy to hear the overall design intent seems to be functioning as I had anticipated though, and that it's still playable on challenging difficulty, which was probably my greatest concern. It's really a small change, so if it's having such dramatic effects on gameplay, I must be doing something right ;)

[Larmantine]

I just got owned. Wasn't attacked by tribesmen since the 2 initial attacks. Now they were more than 20. Even with mortar spam I got overwhelmed pretty quick. OK, going to reload tomorrow, and finally enclose my colony. Going to set up some sort of a chokepoint (legit killbox yay) and will see how it goes.

Was quite interesting. Definitely didn't play this way before, and mortars were very fun. Especially when pirates tried to besiege me. They could not even install their artillery because they were too busy putting out flames from the incendiary shells. Thanks for this :)

edit: Its a shame though I couldn't get my hands on harvesting alien organs ;(

[hawk]

I just got owned.

Same here... hard

I really don't even have a good save to load from as I didn't do any manual ones and kept playing long after my cause was lost. I made *a lot* of mistakes and I paid for it but it was still a blast. Not having turrets early on really ups the tension level. I mean I'm exhausted... I'll take another crack at it tomorrow. I may not get the ship built but I expect I'll put on a much better showing.

By the way, FC, your in-game mod description did not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

[FlowerChild]

By the way, FC, your in-game mod description did not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

Lol! Thanks :)

[DerAlex]

Great, a new mod with a great promise right after I binged on RimWorld for over a week and am right now sick of it again :D

Given your track record, I'll try this eventually, not a doubt about that.

Here are some mods I played with this last week:

Pawn State Icons
Quality of Life Mod: Displays mood icons on Pawns without having to open the "thoughts" menu. You see when your guys are hot, cold, hungry, sleepy, drunk, naked, weaponless, sick etc. Really nice mod

Prepare Carefully
Allows you to customize your starting crews skills, appearance, age, traits, and so on. This might seem a little cheaty, but if you are a filthy min-maxer like me, you hit the randomize button until you get a pawn that fits your play style anyway, so this mod reduces your world-start-time by a lot. You can't make ubermenschs though, for every skill you give, you have to remove something else. It seems properly balanced, as far as I can tell. You can even reduce your crew to total doofuses, and in turn start with 4 pawns who are good at nothing. Additionally, you can save different crews or different crew members as presets for your next game, and you can change what items you start with (based on the silver value of the items, for example, if you choose to start with 0 silver, less food, and less medicine, you can have 3 survival rifles).

[Larmantine]

I'm using the prepare carefully mod as well. Saves a lot of time spamming the "randomize" button and adds an RPG element, but I don't really like that the starting resources can be changed. Should've just sticked with character creation.

Back on topic:

Started a new colony, repelled the first 2 pirate attacks with ease, however, the 3rd attack was with tribesmen, and they overwhelmed me again. It feels now as if my survival is depending on chance, as I can repel a few gunmen and brawlers, but once there are 15 cavemen charging at me on day 20 there is no way my 3, 5 maximum, colonists can survive without sentries or allies.

Some sort of early-game defensive structure would be nice, like you said: a turret without friend/foe recognition, or some sort of manned turret.

[jorgebonafe]

You see when your guys are hot, cold, hungry, sleepy, drunk, naked, weaponless, sick etc.

Lol, wait... You need an icon to show you when a person is naked in this game? XD

[DerAlex]

Lol, wait... You need an icon to show you when a person is naked in this game? XD

It's not really an icon for naked, it's an icon for "unhappy because of clothes", ether because of tattered clothes or, yes, because of nakedness. But not everybody who is naked will be unhappy about it, since there is a trait called "nudist" in the game. That guy won't get the icon. It doesn't display the fact, it displays the mood resulting from the fact.

[hawk]

Back on topic:

Started a new colony, repelled the first 2 pirate attacks with ease, however, the 3rd attack was with tribesmen, and they overwhelmed me again. It feels now as if my survival is depending on chance, as I can repel a few gunmen and brawlers, but once there are 15 cavemen charging at me on day 20 there is no way my 3, 5 maximum, colonists can survive without sentries or allies.

Some sort of early-game defensive structure would be nice, like you said: a turret without friend/foe recognition, or some sort of manned turret.

I'm leaning towards that same line of thought... at least on challenge difficulty. I'm only using this mod with a moderate amount of re-rolling when picking my guys but I had a pretty good group and was able to turn a couple more before taking losses. It seems once you loose a couple of them you're only a raid or two away from total destruction.

Maybe I'm just not good enough at this game yet to survive with this combination. Gunna drop down to "rough" and see how it plays.

[kregoth]

Because this is relevant, but for those who want a really good example of what happens in RimWorld. Watch this!

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[Larmantine]

snip

Yeah, I was now playing now on challenge, but without FC's mod, still just got owned. Bad planning this time. Considering how extremely lucky you have to be (like I was) to survive for a couple months with the mod on challenge difficulty, I'd say it gets unplayable after a couple of ingame weeks on challenge. Unless you are really good with this game.

Even rough gets very challenging at some point.

[DaveYanakov]

FC, I never even realized they were in a deleted scene like that. I've just had the Colonial Marines Technical Manual in my desk drawer for the last couple decades to go on.

The discussion of vanilla has made me hungry to get the vet bill paid off so I can make major purchases again. Now that you're tweaking it it's almost painful to read this thread. Looking forward to getting my hands on it.

[hawk]

All of my finished games have been on challenge. It took a couple of vanilla games but with turrets I was able to get up to speed pretty quickly by avoiding putting my guys in jeopardy as much as possible. The large waves did damage sure but replacing turrets, walls, and power conduits was more of a temporary economic setback than anything else once I realized how best to set everything up. What I haven't been able to figure out is how to both keep my guys alive and kill the other guys without turrets once the waves get large. My last game, which was the second I've played with FC's mod, was really going well. I rolled a couple of my guys heavy on combat stats so I could try to bridge the gap to turrets. It worked well for a time and after 8 waves I had six colonist, 5 mortars, and plenty of shells (zoned my steel next to my machine table so I could mass produce when sieged). Then things went pear shaped. I'm assuming that, if its skill defined at all, mortar accuracy is driven by the shooting stat except my troops couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with an artillery shell despite two having a skill greater than 10 in that area. Also, I swear the baddies must have sacrificed to the rain gods before one large siege because every time I managed to land an incendiary shell close the heavens opened up with a monsoon making my fires much less of a threat. After 20 minutes of this, I waited for most of the attacking party to fall asleep and rushed them. I took a bit of damage but only lost one of my own a few days later to infection. A few waves later it was game over loosing a couple guys outright or to sickness after each Pyrrhic victory. I'm not complaining, its been great fun the whole time. I'm just hoping that by dropping down to rough I can experience the end game again :)

[kjbrona]

Started a new world for BTSG. I am currently on day 50. Not having turrets definitely adds a large amount of "butt-pucker" when you get the red flashing mail. So far, I haven't lost a single colonist and the base seems to be coming along well. I am using a couple of mods that I think enhance the game: Darkness, EdB Mod Order, EdB Interface, Pawn State Icons, and FixBone. Darkness just makes the night and unlit areas very dark. Interface and Icons both enhances the UI. Apparently you can replace body parts with bionics but you cant fix a shattered femur so ... FixBone (Haven't had a chance to use it yet so not sure if it is balanced).
I put in 4 hours straight last night until 1am and I am doing a Let's Play if you are interested in watching.
I am just starting to get into larger raids so we will see if I will be able to make it much farther without a colony wipe.