Hi guys. The new update makes a bunch of really good improvements. Excellent stuff. There are a few things still remaining. While the list is long, I'm trying to give some feedback to help you out. Don't mistake my list for me being disappointed - I reckon this is on of the slickest and best games I've seen in a long time (and I'm pretty cynical, so please take this as a compliment!):
1. When a room is full of rubbish to be cleaned, it is really painful watching the toons reposition themselves around the room just to get at 'that' piece of trash, rather than cleaning what they can already reach. For a room with multiple production animals, I can watch them spend more than 90% of their time wasted just walking from place to place, stepping over trash and just being totally ineffective. My option is to put up with it, or micro manage it so they are doing the job they should be doing automatically. Its not fun, and its a real pain in the butt.
2. When there is lava on the floor in a combat, it needs to be much more obvious before you go in. It is a total hoser, and the number of times it just gets missed in the pre-battle interface totally belies the damage it does. Make it much more obvious, or have a warning "Are you sure you want to stand on that?". Or, you could change the removal rules to allow any water spell cast to remove it. At present it only is removed with water damage, but it should be removed if I have my own water mage cast a buff on the lava-stander. Remember, every kid learns that the floor is in fact not made of lava... :)
3. There is an option prior to battle to 'refill mana before combat'. Can you please change this setting to a 'ignore for this battle only' setting. I cannot imagine any situation where you would want to turn it off long-term, so a toggle function for this control isn't the best option.
4. There is too little control over students not having teachers. I've got a few apprentices, and it takes an awfully long time (way too long in my opinion) to get them up the skill levels from four to seven. So the number of times they stand around without a teacher, especially that you have a limited number of teachers, means that in the end the best way is to manipulate the hell out of the student timetables. If that's the case, then just change the schedule function to be per-person, rather than the groups that it currently is. Or redesign the visual interface so that it has less waste space in between the different schedule lines. Put bluntly, use the rimworld interface, it is far better and has immediate control in a compact form. Another alternative is to allow teachers to stick to only certain disciplines - for example allow me to enable teacher X to only teach skills Y and Z. That way it makes use of the training accelerators, and removes my need to micromanage.
4a. Add in the "Finished Students" group automatically to the grouping system. Any students or apprentices already finished learning all their skills should no longer attend class as a default. I only just discovered by accident how to do this, so either teach me how to do it within the game, or just set it up as a default starting group.
5. Sporeshrooms and Unstable Anemonies and greenhouses. No, just no. You need to come up with a better mechanism than what is on offer. Having sporeshrooms just guarantees that I'll have a permanent debuff for no real reason. And the anemonies will explore far more often than I ever get the chance to harvest. Outcome is a pathetically low harvest success rate, which you could just replace with a low rate and avoid the whole rubbish of debuffs and missed harvests.
6. Fractal mold - a woodcutter tree or a greenhouse thing? Give us a clue which one it 'should' go in to get the growth buff please.
7. House designer and Room Goals. Why cannot I have one room goal assigned to each room? I'm getting a little tired of having to switch to this goal, then that goal, then back again, as I check out my house. I would like to say "This room is becomming a kitchen, just show the tooltip in this room for the kitchen sequence please". As I upgrade to the next step, it shows me the next one again. Or just shows me all the kitchen options all the time. But the whole list in parts and having just one 'preferred' goal regardless of which room I am looking at is less than helpful.
8. Deconstructing spiral staircases. If you have a room seven open spaces high (so eight including the roof) and you deconstruct a spiral staircase, it will always skip deconstructing the sixth segment up. Always. No idea why. Tried on multiple staircases in different locations. Always the sixth one doesn't get deconstructed and I have to manually tell them to go back and do it.
9. FloorPlate and Minimum Room Size on the list of room goals is totally incorrect. Most rooms show 3x3x4 and when they have a four-size item in them, or a huge window needed. I don't think so Tim. (And what the hell is the third dimension for rooms anyway, they are just width and height, there is no depth option that we can use). Text on size of in-room items in the research tree is also often wrong. It would also be helpful to say 3w x 4d x 5h to make depth, width, height more clear. For contructables, it would be helpful in the tip to show the floorplate with any standing workspace included (so some items shown as 2x2 actually need 2x4 to be worked at.
10. Its about time you allow Foundation to be built underneath a planter. This is the most common situation, where you plant near your base, and then expand the base and have to pull up the planters. Just allow the foundation to go underneath, or it is a huge waste of resources for no real reason.
11. Do Your Job. Can we please have people do the 'next job' which is incredibly obvious after the first job. Example : Win Fight. Pick up Loot. Nobody wants to walk all the way home empty handed whilst someone else from home has to walk all the way out here to pick up my loot. Example : Replant garden. Congratulations, you've just harvested. Now take the one second to plant the next crop. Example : You've just shrunk the kids, and moved them into the target room. So now you can expand them. It will take just one second, rather than forcing someone else to do your job for you.
12. Jade Dragon Egg and Wasting. Please stop allowing the Wasting event to hose the dragon egg completely. The number of times I've had the egg totally ruined is now 100% of playthroughs, and you would think I would learn by now. The alternative is just to avoid the combination (at least for a while or at least when you first reveal the egg).
13. Earth spell Earth Armour 1 asks for a target. It doesn't need to ask, since this is a self-only spell. I'm betting Earth Armour 2 has the same issue too, while we are at it.
14. Silent Rooms. It shows a list of what rooms aren't silent. But maybe it would just be easier to class the few non-silent rooms as "Quiet Rooms" and then say that the room needs to be next to other "Quiet Rooms". This allows a library joke to be told much funnier.
15. Cleaning. Again. I've got so many problems with my production animals throwing off trash that I set a guy to Emergency priority for cleaning. And then I set a mana lantern nearby. The problem is that these two settings are abusive of each other. When the toon reaches zero mana, he will refill for one mana. Then clean for one mana. Then refill for one. Then clean for one. As if there weren't enough inefficiencies in the trash removal process already.
16. Cleaning. Again. Again. Hey, am I getting this wrong? The trash requires say 12 points to clean. But it takes my water mage with skill 6 four throws to clean it. Is there some bug with how much effort is involved in trash removal? Tried it in the kitchen. Trash with durability 4. Takes three casts at skill 6. What gives?