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Messages - PoisonPen

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1
Solved'n'fixed bug reports / Re: NPCs opening doors, farm animals fleeing
« on: December 17, 2017, 07:58:36 AM »
The whole point of a barn is to protect the animals from wildlife inside solid walls, so a paddock area just creates a headache every time you need to try to get the animals back inside to close the barn door.  And I don't think you can tie animals to walls, just trees.  The easiest thing to do is to fence off the doors so you have to climb the fence every time you want to open the door.  It works, but it's totally unimmersive.

2
Gameplay questions / Re: Psychic enemies
« on: December 04, 2017, 01:21:00 PM »
Using your advice, I've now run the same combat ten times.  I die every time.  The fact is, I'm not faster than the civilians, so I only get at most 2 or 3 shots before they're at melee range.  The civilians have such high dodge scores, avoiding my blows "like a swan," that the warriors always have time to catch up.  After that, it's game over.  One of them eventually gets a critical somewhere and I die.  As near as I can tell, the only way to take more than one or two enemies at a time is to have the largest and heaviest possible character with the highest possible strength and speed.  If you're slower than the fastest enemy, there's simply no way to win.  And that is terrible game design.  I see from comments Sami has left to other people with the same complaint that combat is "working as intended," and that's a shame, because it ruins an otherwise enjoyable game.  I've been working on some mods, but this experience has completely soured me on URW because it tells me there are serious flaws which are never going to be fixed.

3
Gameplay questions / Re: Psychic enemies
« on: December 03, 2017, 10:57:52 PM »
Okay, I died.  I'll have to abandon this game after this, but I've decided to save-scum until I've figured out how to do this.  Here's the problem.  As you say, there's no difficulty killing warriors, but women and children make it impossible.  They move at super-speed, faster than I can run.  That means it's impossible to flee, ever, once the first child or woman appears.  They're hard to hit.  There were two warriors at the back, three woman, and a child.  When I realized the women and child moved faster than I could, I stopped backing away and tried to shoot their legs.  I got one woman, but then got swarmed by two women and a child.  I put away my bow and pulled my axe.  I have 70 dodge, but their constant attacks kept wearing me down.  I tried to keep moving backwards to stay away from the warriors, but the woman and child kept knocking me down.  The child crippled one eye with a rock.  By this point I was down -70% from injuries and the warriors curbstomped me.

My throat is sore from cursing and screaming at my monitor.  I decided to go through the old forum and the Steam threads, and I see a lot of other people have been complaining that combat is just too random.  Even with top of the line equipment and maxed-out skills, it comes down to luck.  There's really no way to predict the outcome of combat.  And as others have observed, that's a pretty critical flaw for a roguelike.  I don't mind tough or even unfair, but random dice-rolling determining the outcome of battle isn't something I want in a roguelike where I'm sinking a couple of hundred hours into a game.  The problem here is that women and children are super-fast and have a high dodge.  They don't hit hard, but they hit often.  This cripples archery and makes melee a losing proposition because, while their attacks can't penetrate my armour, they keep getting criticals which knock me down or cause my weapon to fall or cripple a body part.  I don't think it was the dev's intention to make children the most fearsome enemies in the game.  Seriously, I'd rather face a bear than a child, since I can at least reliably hit a bear.

Advice?  I'm thinking of maybe putting URW away at this point.

Edit: In one posting, Sami says that combat in URW is based on the Harn combat system.  I remember trying Harn and hating it for exactly the same reason I've having problems with URW: it came down to whomever happened to roll the first crippling injury.  The first time I had a character cut off his own nose with a bow, I refused to keep playing.  I remember sitting down and working out the statistics and realizing that if you had a wall full of 500 archers, you'd have archers stumbling and falling off the wall with every volley.  All you'd need to defeat a defending army is wait for their archers to fall off and die or cut off their own noses and fingers.

4
Gameplay questions / Psychic enemies
« on: December 03, 2017, 06:50:58 PM »
So I've been trying to take out a Njerp village and getting really frustrated.  I have 99% stealth, 99% bow skill, and a whack of broad arrows.  I managed to kill four or five with the help of a companion for distraction, but after he was killed I had to run away and managed to get back to the overmap.  The problem is, no matter where I pop back in to the local map, EVERY villager instantly knows exactly where I am and begins making a bee-line for me, even in complete darkness.  Stealth is useless.  Every villager has become a heat-seeking missile which begins moving in my direction the second I drop down to the local map, even in deep woods completely out of sight.

I had planned to slowly whittle them down, but I can't deal with a huge zombie horde of enraged Njerps who all magically know my position at all times.  Is there any way to make them go back to their regular jobs and such, or will they just sit there for the rest of the game in a big pile waiting for my radar track to reappear on their Terminator AIs?

5
Gameplay questions / Re: Trapping,am i doing it right?
« on: December 03, 2017, 06:42:06 PM »
You're better off finding a large isthmus on a coast and building a trap fence to completely isolate it.  Then poke holes in it every 10 or so spaces and set your traps at those spaces.  What I usually do is put a pit trap along the fence line, and either a light lever trap or a fox board on the *outside* of the fence line, right behind the pit trap, with fencing on either side of it.

  xFx
xxPxx

That way anything which spawns in the area you've cut off will eventually run into one of your traps.

6
Solved'n'fixed bug reports / NPCs opening doors, farm animals fleeing
« on: December 03, 2017, 01:05:56 PM »
Recruited a companion and went to milk the cows in the barn.  I have two doors, one of which has an "airlock" to keep the animals from escaping, while the other doesn't.  While milking a cow, my companion decided to open the other barn door and all my animals escaped, immediately dispersing in all directions.  Two separate problems here: NPCs opening doors on their own and just leaving them ajar, and supposedly tame, domesticated animals fleeing at top speed for the hills the instant they get free.

7
Suggestions / Primitive survival gear & strategies
« on: November 17, 2017, 10:38:42 PM »
Right now most people settle down and build a cabin or a series of cabins and hunting/fishing shacks, but I think it's possible to rebalance the game to make a more nomadic lifestyle more interesting to play by adding some traditional neolithic survival tools and techniques to the game.

Fire pouch
Primitive peoples found it much easier to keep an ember from their old fire and use it to kindle the next one than have to make a new one every time. There were a number of different strategies, such as enclosing a hot coal from a fire between two tightly-bound shells, but I think you could probably make this work fairly simply in URW by adding a [M]ake menu option to "extract embers" from either a hot fireplace or a burning fire into a container of some sort.  It would work the same way food does, where it has a limited lifespan.  Instead of "stale" you'd get a "dying" status: (dying) rough wooden bowl of embers, and then it just disappears when it goes completely cold.  [A]pplying the embers would use them up, but give a very high chance (say, 95%) of starting a fire on the first try.

Travois
Carts, dogsleds, and other vehicles are probably very difficult to implement, but I think a travois would be somewhat easier, since you could just make it an animal that doesn't move on its own and just follows you around.  Unlike pack animals, a travois can be easily crafted on the spot from a couple of slender trunks and some cord or rope to let you drag that elk carcass or Njerp raiding party loot back to your shelter for processing.

Snowshoes
I know this has been suggested many times before, but I wanted to put my weight behind it too.  Walking in snow should be slow and tiring without snowshoes (which should have the opposite effect of making walking anywhere but snow slow and tiring so you can't just wear them 24/7 and forget about them).  They should also have the benefit of making you less likely to fall through ice.

Atlatl
An atlatl is essentially just a stick with a cord or rope on it, and is used to sling javelins harder, faster, and more accurately (by causing them to spin) than being thrown by hand.  When wielding an atlatl, you could use them to shoot javelins the way bows shoot arrows as implemented in the game right now.

Throwing stick
One step below a javelin, throwing sticks are super-easy to make from a simple branch, and while they have a pretty short range, they're reasonably accurate and can take down small game like birds and squirrels.  They should fit somewhere between a rock and a javelin in terms of their accuracy and killing power.

Funnel trap/fish weir
This would be super-easy to implement, essentially just traps which can be placed at the edges of any large body of water the same way traps are currently placed on land.  Funnel traps would be made from sticks and catch smaller fish, while fish weirs would be made from slender trunks and catch larger fish.

Boiled grass
If you're desperate, it's possible to boil fistfuls of ordinary grass for a few carbs and some critical micronutrients.  I'd like to see it possible to harvest grass from any grassy land square.  Without boiling the grass is indigestible, but if you have a pot and access to water, you can boil it for better-than-nothing nutrition.  It should definitely not be capable of keeping you alive in the long term, but could be useful for grabbing a few urgently-needed calories while waiting for a fishing net to pay off rather than just waiting.

Eating dirt
Dirt contains a lot of spores, tiny animals (like springtails), bacteria, seeds, molds, and other biological detritus which can be extracted by your digestive system at the cost of, well, eating and pooping dirt.  Some survival experts recommend eating dirt in an emergency situation when there's absolutely nothing else, and there's argument about whether primitive peoples used to do the same.  Regardless, it would be a very last-ditch attempt to stave off starvation when there's absolutely nothing else to eat -- but it's there in limitless quantities and requires no tools whatsoever.

Pine nuts
The nuts from pine trees were a traditional staple of paleolithic Europe.  They should be harvestable in the late fall as pine cones, then require some threshing to separate the nuts.  The thing about pine nuts is they're mostly fat (they have more than twice the fat than the protein and carbohydrate content combined) and so are a good way of avoiding starvation without needing to eat meat, provided you can process enough of them.  The reason pine nuts weren't generally sold commercially is because they're so small, and require so much effort to obtain, that they're not generally worth the labour.  But if you have no other source of fat in your diet, they should be able to prevent starvation, which would make a huge difference to the game balance currently in place; it suddenly becomes possible to survive without hunting.

Shrooms
There are already psychedelic mushrooms in the game, but they have no practical use.  There's a theory that what made Norse berserkers so fierce is that prior to battle they would drink a brew made from shrooms until they were stoned out of their brains, and then set loose on the battlefield literally feeling no pain and utterly psychotic with rage.  I'd love to be able to brew some shroom tea before charging into a Njerp encampment wearing nothing but crazy, feeling no effects from exhaustion, pain, or fear.  The game effect would be to remove all tiredness and exhaustion for the duration of the effects, but translate that into physical damage instead.  So you'd be inexhaustible until the shrooms wore off, but cause physical strain to your body which might take days or weeks to heal.

8
Suggestions / Plankwood wall
« on: November 14, 2017, 07:03:16 AM »
When you have a lot of animals, milking is a nightmare as they all run every which way and you're lefting figuring which you have and haven't milked yet.  You can fence them into individual enclosures outside, but if you have a barn you have no way of separating them into stalls.  It would be nice to be able to create internal plank walls which don't remove floor and ceiling.  It would also be helpful just for the sake of aesthetics to be able to create rooms in cabins without having to make internal walls huge, load-bearing log walls.

(And just incidentally, why the hell do animals in barns make a bee-line straight for any door you open and head for the hills?  Having to create an "airlock" at every door isn't very realistic.)

9
Suggestions / Re: Endgame economics - Money sink ideas
« on: November 08, 2017, 05:06:31 PM »
It would be interesting to be able to create a new village in a specific location by piling enough of certain supplies in one spot.  It would give you a reason to stockpile large amounts of certain things.  For instance, to establish a village which specializes in fishing, you might need to pile up:

10 fishing rods
20 nets
1000 days worth of food
10 bags of salt
500 stones
1000 logs
2 of each type of axe
10 assorted knives
500 pounds of fur
250 pounds of leather
100 cords
100 pounds of any combination of seeds

Put that all in one space, use the [M]ake menu to to make a fishing village, and poof!  To make it more interesting and useful, you could also add certain cultural items to give you the ability to make it a certain desired ethnicity.  So if you want a Kaumo village to trade with near your Owl-region homestead, you could build one and create a Kaumo cultural area around it.  With enough time and tenacity, you could transform an area by creating multiple villages of the same ethnicity in the same general area.

10
Suggestions / Human sacrifice
« on: November 08, 2017, 03:15:44 PM »
I read an article about bog corpses, with many of them suspected of being the result of human sacrifice or murder, and then did the bog weapon sacrifice as part of the advanced course.  It got me thinking.  Would it be possible in URW to tie up an unconscious enemy with rope instead of killing them?  I know human sacrifice was a major part of the Celtic culture, and I'm sure the Finnic peoples had similar rites.  It would be interesting to be able to please the spirits by, say, performing the blood eagle on a bound prisoner, or cutting their throat and throwing them into a bog for future paleontologists to find.  It would also make the ruthless warrior path more viable by spiritually balancing out the murder of innocent people with blood sacrifices to the spirits.

11
Suggestions / Re: Disease, pests, and the joy of cats
« on: November 08, 2017, 03:02:12 PM »
You wrap yourself in furs and go to sleep.
Zzzzzz. [Hold on]
You wake.  You think you can hear a horny yowling nearby.
You wrap yourself in furs and go to sleep.
Zzzzzz. [Hold on]
You wake.  You think you can hear angry hissing and shrieking nearby.
You wrap yourself in furs and go to sleep.
Zzzzzz. [Hold on]
You wake.  There is a feline butthole pressed to your face.

12
Suggestions / Re: Paddles as weapons
« on: November 06, 2017, 04:14:41 AM »
When I'm finished with the mod I'm currently working on, I've been considering adding some new tools which perform multiple roles (but not as well as specialized single-purpose tools) if I can figure out how to do it.  For instance, an adze which would be both broad axe and shovel, but doesn't count as a sharp tool for harvesting and makes a poor weapon.  Or a shoulder saw which acts as a woodsman's axe and carving axe.  Or a mattock which can be used as a good two-handed weapon, but also acts as a splitting axe.  And so on.  I like the idea of being able to mix-and-match tools according to need, preference, skill, and weight.

13
Suggestions / Re: Paddles as weapons
« on: November 05, 2017, 09:30:20 PM »
In Cataclysm:DDA any object in the game can be used as a weapon to greater or lesser effect.  One of the more entertaining things to do is to beat a zombie to death with a cheese sandwich, a pair of socks, or a dildo.  I think it makes a lot of sense to be able to wield any object as a weapon, though of course you should get rather large penalties trying to bludgeon a Njerp with a dead grouse or a pail of milk.

14
Development News / Re: "Spirit of the forest, I presume"
« on: November 05, 2017, 05:00:42 PM »
I'd really like to be able to turn supernatural elements on and off in the options.  As much as encountering pirus, paasselkas, leshyies, rusalkas, polevois, and the rest would be fun, I'd like to be able to have a more grounded, historical experience too.  If I'm shooting lightning bolts at a level-25 domovoi, I might as well be playing ADOM.

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Suggestions / Re: Improvement for cutting branches
« on: November 05, 2017, 04:47:17 PM »
The same sort of quality-of-life fixes should be done to other activities in the game too, to make them more consistent.  For instance, harvesting is pick-a-direction, but then moving to pick up the harvest is move-in-the-direction-you're-pointing.  I've lost track of the number of times I've forgotten to switch modes in my brain before moving, resulting in move-get-return resulting in popping up onto the overland map instead of collecting the harvest.

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