First impressions

[s4bre]

Ive played extensively for about 30 hours and started several colonies on normal here are my thoughts on the current state of the game.

First : I really like it

Now for the things that i feel need to be fixed/improved quickly

Available space at starting location way too limited and way to close to the enemy,
the space requirements to give a colonist everything he wants including at the high end a own house with all the accomodations in it, and the space that agriculture takes away on top of that are not in line with the playing field offered. If youd increase the map by 50% and the distance to the closest enemy village by 100% i think we would be in a lot more enjoyable spot. Also it would require to play more strategicly to bridge the distances.

Micromanagement of needs to maintain mood and gain reward points becomes a massive chore at population of 8 or more, colonist should manage needs such as relaxation, sitting and talking to people they want to talk to on their own as soon as they have aquired a 3 star level in one trait and maybe some extra requirement or research.

Micromanagement of gear: Frankly…Terrible im sorry. You should have a job roster for your population and storage facilities for them to drop off and equip gear automatically (possible researchable option here opens up further enjoyment for those who love to research things and feel rewarding progression)

Add Alarm Bell research to auto equip weapons and armor change role to soldier and man towers.

Colonists requesting stuff in their rooms/houses that is either already present , gets dragged into their room or built new wont register these additions. Needs fix asap.

Ability to turn on name tag&job on settlers and above owned beds would be welcome.

Ability to click on a “wants to chat with” icon have the game target the person he wants to talk to.

Behaviour of manned Towers is inconsistent, colonists sometimes just stop engaging the enemy for no obvious reason.

Dead bodies and graves. There is a dire need of pyres in the game to remove dead bodies. I have about 50 graves of enemies clogging up the map and they get more and more since the 2nd settlement is damn hard to take out even with fully equipped armored level 3 soldiers.

For an alpha and also a free one i think you have done a fricking good job and id encourage you to go Early Access because frankly ive seen way worse things in EA than this which already has a lot to offer for its ridicolously small file size on which i also congratulate you.

I just hope you dont run into the typcial unity related horror stories when you increase the scale and complexity of the game or unity decides to do one of their horrible engine updates ^^

[Daniel]

Alright glad you like the game. 30 hours is a lot of experience!
Here we go:

• Space: Won’t be an issue after the next update
• Wishes are not necessary to keep mood up, you can just use it to boost your mood temporarily. Why do you think you need to micromanage?
• Haha, yeah the gear thing. Doesn’t influence gameplay directly, so was deprioritized in the past. It’s high on our list, but still not a gameplay thing. We’ll see if it makes it into the next major update.
• Combat in general needs to be improved, yeah. The only question is in which update.
• There was a room logic bug. Fixed and will be in the next minor update
• You wanna see their names in the 3d world, is that what you’re saying?
• Towers: Maybe they just lost their line of sight? Archers won’t leave towers in order to shoot around a tree.
• About Unity: Rimworld was actually made in Unity, so I hope as long as we’re smart about the software architecture, we’ll be fine

Thanks for the kind words! We’ll probably choose Kickstarter over early access for our first step. I hope this “demo” can earn some trust of the backers

[s4bre]

Dear Daniel,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Space : Glad to hear that I am eager to play on that bigger size.

Micro / mood management:

My experience on NORMAL was that if i dont take care of that and especially if i dont hoard reward points to get rid of allergies and stuff it can get very nasty quickly if you have not yet buffered enough ressources, especially foodstuffs.

Those temporary mood boosts are very necessary all through out the game play, because the worst thing besides one of your dudes with high skill dying is when they go into a frenzy and destroy stuff, which can start a spiral of havoc in your colony especially if youre low on ressources. The debuffs gained by various events such as nightmares, bad conversations, room envy, pessimist trait, health damage, etc, can stack up quite brutally. So it is vital and cant be ignored to scan through your colonists often and keep em satisfied, you dont really want to wait until you get a warning message and find out whats bugging him that can be too late in some cases to prevent a rage tantrum.

Also the wishes are of course needed to get rid of negative traits or gain positive ones, or to forfil the desire to spend these points as that can be a wish too. Also when u have to deny a wish because it simply is not possible to do what they ask (eg because of said room logic bug,or because u lack the research etc etc) u need to compensate for the debuff. Things they like to ask in late game often require you to basically give them a much larger room to build things like Sofas and all the larger stuff, that can be challenging as well since often your base layout, the available ressources, and the lack of space to build safely in wont allow for easy changes. Also the work performance is quite essential when it comes to farming. You need a lot of farmers later on.

Now when u have a lot of dudes and run the game at max speed most of the time and you want to level the reward points it becomes quite a click fest so a bit added automation (which i suggested to be implemented as something you could gain by satisfying X requirement or research would be great)
I cant imagine handling this with 12 or more guys. Mood decay is super quick in this game.

It is pretty essential to keep the mood at 50% most or higher and you dont want a guy to throw a tantrum when u get attacked.

Combat: I find the pathfinding works very good which is always a problem in such games to get right
Melee combat is so far no problem pretty much no fixes needed.
Archers require extra attention though
Concerning the Line of Sight . No it was clearly not a line of sight problem its must be
something else. A) They dont open fire at their maximum range by themselves , you have to
manually attack the target. B) they sometimes stop firing at targets even when those targets a
right infront of them, and resume fighting when u manually tell them to (so they clearly can
see the target). C) also they randomly leave their towers to attack targets they could easily
shoot from the tower

Gear Management: I played fully teched out with 10 guys who have multiple roles, farming outfits, armor, various tools, bows and swords. Switching outfits takes 2 manual commands, they will otherwise only discard their current outfit and not pick up the new one, switching equipment works with 1 command. Now you have the problem that your stuff is of course lying around in the base and sometimes its really hard to see unless you always maintain a strict regiment where you drop things off and so on. It would be so much easier if you could add a feature for them to equip available tools depending on their jobs if such are available as an option or make a colony wide weapon rack and useable dresser. Microing 8 dudes when a attack wave comes who are all currently in farming mode, wear watering cans and farmer outfits to change to battle gear is quite tedious and of course when you have to change back to farming you have to do the same procedure again. Alterntaive at least the equipment switching could be negated by giving the colonists an extra gear slot for weapons when they reach level 3 soldier that would be a nice incentive and i think the dev time for that wouldnt be too demanding, just in my humble non programmer ways of thinking.

Yes with name tags i mean visible name+job over the character models and names over their beds as a toggle option.

[Daniel]

Alright @s4bre, thanks for the wall of text again
I can hardly keep up with everyone, so just a quick reply:

• Alright mood thing noted
• For the love of god, there is nothing forcing you to run at max speed! Unless you wanna speedrun it, that is The game is designed to throw enough things at you that max speed is not advisable 100% of the time.
• Appreciate your comment about the navigation, I spent a lot of time on it
• Archers: A) is true, not sure I’ve seen B) and C) before. Maybe I need to test it again.
• The answer to the gear thing is still the same: It’s obviously needed, but not sure if we’re going to do it for the next update. Thanks for your idea.

[s4bre]

Sorry about Wall of Text its just how i am Not always. But if i do invest that much of time and effort writing these things because i found this nice little game is worth it.

I know that i can pause or slow down i may have been misleading with that speed statement , still reducing speed or pausing does not reduce the amount of time and extra actions necessary to manage simple things such as swapping out gear or microing other things such as the really vital mood stuff that at some point become more of a chore if you scale it up and think ahead of what it might be with 3x as many people in your colony. Some way for your colonists to compensate for bad moods by themselves if you give them the necesarry infrastructure to do so (you mentioned rimworld as an perfect example) at some point in the game will be really mandatory to maintain a nice flow of gameplay imho.
Also forgive me if i sound a bit blunt as you i am not writing this in my native language and im just that kind of a rational person when it comes to these things that people sometimes think im arrogant or something (also i am suffering from ADHS,Major Depression Anxiety and i am on heavy meds , which influences my way of speaking to people). Sorry it became a damn wall of text again. Ill shut up now.

[Daniel]

Oh, don’t you worry, I just wanted to excuse myself that I didn’t have time to write an answer that’s as detailed as your questions

I understand the comment about moods. We’ll think about it when we’re planning the development.

Sorry to hear about these issues, to me you come across as a great guy (or girl) that cares about what they’re playing

[SPmac]

Hi Daniel,i know ive only played 4 to 6 hours,on your game,but i must admit the time has flown bye,i find myself really enjoying my time playing the game,the games learning curve is very good,i find playing the game relaxing and fun to play,the game flows very well no problems ive found,other than once when i had three of my peps round the table and with three seats,one guy decides to sit on the lap of another,which to me was amusing.I agree the area they live on needs to be bigger,but the ideas and concept of the game,for me, is spot on,even my wife who is;nt a games player,was watching me playing the game and said,that she too would enjoy playing it,which leads me on to female peps,is there any,because of now i have;nt seen any.If not, it might be a good move to have some females in the game,so the female games players can enjoy.I find that i really care about my peps while playing,i do try to make sure their mood swings are addressed as soon as possible. I do think this game has a great future,i am so glad i saw it on youtube,if im allowed to say that word,lol.

[s4bre]

yes that is true this game has the formula to be a great settlers/dwarf fortress game and i hope it will be expanded, gets more complex over time , adds the ability to go subsurface and build multi level structures, wildlife, pets, etc

I especially love the furniture stuff and the art style of the building assets.

[s4bre]

Thank you very much for the kind words. Guy here .) 50th birthday coming up in June Been playing video games since i was 6 years

[Daniel]

Welcome to the forum @SPmac!
Female colonists is definitely somehting we’re thinking about, but it takes time to make them.

[shyrelle]

good evening a little tip that would help in the game to add especially when we start to have several characters it would be nice to put the name of the nomads on their heads because when we have 10 characters and the wishes of one of the characters is d 'going to want to chat with someone else it’s complicated to find the character who the other person wants to talk to! maybe it would be nice if the name appears on their head!
otherwise nothing to say the game runs very well and when I present it in stream tonight on my channel twitch and youtube many of my followers were interested in your game! bravo anyway with some small improvements very basic it is promised to a nice future

[s4bre]

btw thank you for implementing so quickly the improvement of having the blue symbol over the bed indicating the owner you currently have selected. That is a great help.