Random feedback

[Roccandil]

First, I bought this game on GoG, my first pre-release/in-dev purchase ever, and I don't regret it. Looking forward to the whole map!

The following are just some odd things I've encountered, using the latest experimental GoG releases.

1) Prolonged player presence tends to result in Hiver towns being destroyed by wildlife spawns (Gorillos/Beak Things). In my current game, the first Hiver town I frequented is down to one shop; everyone else is dead. Looks like this doesn't happen if the player doesn't visit (and thus trigger spawns), which feels "wrong".

2) In one game, I bought a house in Mongrel, hoping to take advantage of the good local buying price for robotics and cheap price on robotic components to turn a tidy profit. I happily constructed batteries and small wind generators on the roof, only to discover that the power goes into the Mongrel grid, not my house. I had to reload and build a house outside town to pull off my scheme. Not a huge deal, but again, it felt "wrong".

3) Once my main character gets to level 50/60 on relevant combat skills plus good armor, he can easily take on hordes of enemies like cannibals. The odd thing, however, is that while he clobbers them while they still exist en masse, he tends to starts taking a lot more damage as they thin out near the end. (I noticed the inverse of this, too, when I was running around with a couple full squads.) Seems like enemies are too respectful of an enemy swordsman's space, but not of each others' (I figure that hordes of friendlies block each other from doing full swings).

4) This didn't happen in the GoG stable build, but once I installed the latest experimental build, I noticed that when characters "bump" another character, they slow down, and the slow down seems to be cumulative up until not being able to move at all. This is very bad when being chased, especially since "bumping" distance seems to extend significantly past the characters' visually touching. I don't know if this is a bug or a mechanic, but it's very frustrating now to see the survival move be to run as fast as possible, only to have your character freeze in place and be unable to move no matter how much you click. If this is a mechanic, it would be nice to have a visual indicator telling me it's not a bug.

5) I understand why infinite storage had to go, but the current scheme has messed up characters hauling to locations. I can set a character to haul to a single storage, but I can't set them to haul to multiple storages of the same type, else they go bonkers (looks like they're either shifting goods between storages of the same type, or getting into a pathing loop). This unfortunately means I have I have to do a lot of manual work that should be automated.

6) Heavy weapons sound good on paper, but it seems like speed is far more important. I've never had success trying heavy weapons; a highly-skilled saber/katana specialist seems to outmatch a highly-skilled heavy weapon specialist.

7) Seems odd that plate armor is so good against harpoon attacks, when historically crossbows tended to trump plate. As another historical example, blunt weapons with points (like maces) were very good at armor piercing (since so much energy is packed into so small a point; plate can't hold up). I bring this up because the general feel of the combat is very realistic, and so this is somewhat jarring.

8) Outpost gates that get damaged and then repaired seem to stop functioning as gates until a reload (I can't click on them at all).

9) Rain in the Vain area is blocky, making for a visual nightmare. Rain in other locations (such as the Shrieking Forest) looks right. Also, even if I'm zoomed onto a character inside a house, I can still see rain falling inside the house. It's possible to rotate the camera such that the rain vanishes, both inside and outside.

10) Occasionally the game will pause to load textures, and never unpause. I have to reload.

11) I also experienced one of the Ancient Labs being empty (the one in the Floodplains). This was in an entirely new game, started with the experimental releases (not an imported game).

12) If you build right outside a Hiver town and leave the door open, Hiver worker drones (if any still live) may come and do odd jobs for you (like research or campfire). Also, if you mine copper in a Hiver village, drones may join you and even take over, while allowing you to take the copper. Free stuff!

13) Why doesn't the Armor King carry chainmail? I'd like to tease him about that.

14) Joining the Flotsam Ninjas seemed to do nothing more than increase relations (I was already at -100 with Holy Nation, due to my legendary sword). Looking forward to that meaning more.

15) Speaking of legendary swords, I noticed that a competent Kenshi seems to gain more experience using a bad sword, since he's in the fight longer. I haven't tried to actively exploit this yet, I just saw this comparing my startups with the naked dude versus the guy who found the Edgewalker.

16) When I first started playing as the naked dude, some hungry bandits found me and said, "Strip him!". That was worth a laugh. (I guess they were blind hungry bandits...)

Some random wishes:

1) I wish if an weapon/armorsmith leveled to a certain point, he could make high grade, specialist, or masterwork armor, or make sharper swords (a level 100 weaponsmith would basically be making Edgewalkers).
2) I wish you could get the recipes for Blood Rum and Ration Packs.
3) I wish you could use a high-level character to train other characters.
4) I wish you could build T-intersections with walls.
5) And yes, I wish there was storage for robot parts. I also wish you could make your own robots. I was sorta hoping the research artifact about Timmy? meeting his first Skeleton had something to do with that, but I never found a use for it. (I found that artifact in the GoG release; maybe it's obsolete now.)
6) I wish I could get to the Bugmaster.
7) I wish you could reverse engineer gear for research. I also wish research were more innovative in general, not static. I bring this up because the learn-by-doing thing is so prevalant in the game (and fun) that an old/common-style static research system now feels a bit out of place. I don't know, however, how this might be implemented. In game terms, maybe allow a leveled science character to create research artifacts? (After all, presumably the first people constructing large building shells didn't have pre-existing engineering blueprints; they had to innovate.)

[Hatsune_Neko]

#6 heavy weapons is a player's choice. and when you're very skilled with them you are not faster than say a katana user but you can do massive damage to your enemies. so they do have a place in combat as they go well with your tank characters. not to mention they are great for strength training because of their weight.

#7 in the world of Kenshi it might not be plate steel. it could be a different aloy all together giving it different characteristics versus harpoons. even today we now have liquid metals that can stop bullets and in the world of Kenshi it is far beyond earth's technology level before the fall.

#8 if this still carries over after you reload your game, please zip up your game folder with the issue and upload it for the Devs to look at. please post that report in the bug report forum.

#11 some areas are not always stocked and can be randomly restocked over time.

#15, that's normal.

[Roccandil]

Thanks for going over that wall of text!

On #11, the entire lab is empty of everything, no furniture at all, as if the player had just built it.

On #7, I'm having a hard time accepting the explanation of exotic plate steel, for a few reasons:

1) In the world of Kenshi, we make plate steel by beating raw iron ore. Nothing exotic seems to be happening.
2) Even if plate steel were actually an exotic alloy, then it follows that the crossbow and harpoon bolts could also be an exotic alloy, thus canceling out the "exoticness" of the plate steel, and reducing the question again to simple physics (plate steel is attempting to protect a large surface area, whereas the bolt is trying to focus as much energy as possible into a small point, to defeat the armor).
3) Finally, though, I can certainly accept gameplay reasons for plate steel being abnormally strong against bolts (whatever lore justification is used), but in this case, I don't see any gameplay reasons, at least with what's been released. I think I've been shot at by a ranged weapon maybe once, for no damage, as my legendary swordsman assaulted a Holy Nation military base by himself (and wiped it out), prior to wiping out the Holy Nation capital by himself. I'm quite sure that if harpoons were effective against plate, I would have had a much harder time of it. The best I can guess, then, is that city assaults need to be possible?

While we're on the subject of crossbows, I've noticed a few other oddities. I was able to get my legendary swordsman up to 75+ turrets because somehow a Beak Thing got stuck in firing range, locked to the map geometry, and my swordsman found it impossible to ever hit the Beak Thing, no matter how good he got. That made it an indefinite training exercise, and he leveled up turrets like mad,

In another game, I also accidentally discovered you can design walls in such a way as to replicate that "bug". I built turrets in what I thought were a position to cover a gate entrance, but as it turns out they couldn't quite hit it. Gorillos would show up and wave their arms around at the gate, but not damage it, allowing my turret guards to shoot indefinitely (and level up).

Finally, my legendary swordsman decided to bag a Leviathan by himself, and hauled enough iron plates to the Coast to build a crossbow. Felling a Leviathan was straightforward, simply due to blood loss. I don't think I had actually damaged the Leviathan that much, but the blood loss from the bolt hits was incredible. I've noticed that in a lesser way against normal enemies; they sustain massive blood loss, stop in front of my turrets to use a first aid kit, and in so doing of course get hammered.

[Roccandil]

More oddities:

17) When crafting robotic parts at a Robotics Bench, no skill seems to be used or increased. The logical skill would seem to be Robotics. Is it simply not implemented yet? (I've never had a skeleton to heal, so I wouldn't know if that increases Robotics.)

18) Not all Hive building entrances seem to work; often I'll click right inside an entrance, only to have my character run all the way around the building to go in another entrance. This can be Very Bad if Beak Things are involved.

[Roccandil]

19) When Gorillos or Beak Things are attacking a Hiver village, they are considered to be "Committing Crime!", and bounties are placed on them. I found no way to get the bounties, though. I tried hauling a dead body to a merchant (since they seem to be the only Hivers I can talk to), but that didn't do anything.

20) When looting an enemy, I accidentally put some of my stuff into his inventory, and when I got it back, it was considered stolen. I didn't mind too much, since there seem to be various bugs allowing you to "launder" stolen gear into non-stolen status. The only one I know how to repeat is to put trade goods into storage bins for those goods, but I've had it happen other ways, generally when transferring stuff, and sometimes by accidentally dropping things on the ground. I did that somehow when looting the Post-Ancient Workshop: I managed to drop two Engineering Blueprints, purging them of Stolen status, but when I tried to repeat it (to allow inventory stacking), I couldn't.

[Max Dredd]

2) Even if plate steel were actually an exotic alloy, then it follows that the crossbow and harpoon bolts could also be an exotic alloy, thus canceling out the "exoticness" of the plate steel, and reducing the question again to simple physics (plate steel is attempting to protect a large surface area, whereas the bolt is trying to focus as much energy as possible into a small point, to defeat the armor).

My understanding is this is generally not how material science works. A scientific break through allowing for the manufacture of material with a particuliar property does not allow for the opposite property also.

Heavily over simplied example : kevlar vest will stop a conventional bullet, but making a bullet out of Kevlar doesnt help you penetrate that vest, you need to do somethine else to defeat the Kevlar a technology yoy make not have.

Some times a technology just dead ends. ie as far as I am aware there is nothing you can do to conventional knife to allow it to penetrate an heavy duty anti stab vest.

[Roccandil]

Well, it's a plausibility thing: if we can invoke unknown exotic material for plate steel, it's equally plausible to invoke unknown exotic material for bolts.

I'm not hung up on that, though; the real deal is the game balance reason for plate trumping bolts/harpoons. Would be interesting to know what that is.