(another)Occupations feedback

[Dirmagnos]

Whole idea behind this feature seems nice, but rather poorly implemented. 

Dupes were already rather stupid as far as doing stuff to begin with, but whole occupations part added another layer to already bad system. Complicating it with no positive returns.

Dupes should continue to able do to everything as before this feature. Assigning dupes certain occupations should be beneficial, rather detrimental, meant to overcome artificial obstacles that are added purely to justify existence of this new system. Which is extremely lame.

Instead having an occupation should provide certain bonuses(not artificial ability to overcome artificial penalties).

First, modifier to speed of tasks. Not cumulative with skill bonuses. Formula instead of being "base*(skill bonus+occupation bonus)" be "(base*skill bonus)*occupation bonus". Making professions giving persistent bonus on every skill level. Like 10/20/30% faster - right now there doesnt seem to be any difference between miner and seasoned miner, aside of greater expectations of the latter. Why in heavens would i appoint dupe to be seasoned miner if it only provides me with additional penalties.

Second, Make occupations actually having direct impact on production output. Like farmhand/farmer/seasoned farmer having 10/20/30% chance to grow extra food on plot. Or chef having a chance to make food with more calories. Or miner having chance of finding extra materials during mining. Or researcher having a chance to make a breakthrough(chance if based on type of scientist and is proportional to time already spent on research - assistant could have bonus of 0.3, researcher of 0.5 and tenured scientist could have bonus of 0.7; so assistant would have chance of 24% to make a breakthrough when research is 80% done, while tenured researcher would have chance of 56% under same conditions), instantly finishing his part of research(could be checked every 10% of research progress).

Third. Occupational activities should have higher priorities for dupes. Why to *censored* do i appoint dupe to be miner, if he does everything and anything but mining that granite that i need to get out of the way. I have farmhands cooking, miners carrying water and scientists building - all while i need tiles mined, farms attended(this has been an issue for a while now, when there is barely any food to go around, yet dupes pay little to no attention to farms in general, unless assigned higher priority, but then they rush there for every little things, carrying water by milliliters to keep farms stocked, from one extreme into another) and stuff researched. Just make occupation-specific activities having priority of 5.5(slightly above average) and it would go a long way making this feature having any point. If i appoint dupe to be a farmer, then i expect that he will prioritize needs of plants, like carrying water or fertilizer, rather than ignoring them and cooking for example. What gives !

Im ok with members of certain profession doing other tasks, but only AFTER they are done with their respective fields or if there is an emergency.

Also, drop those +2 bonuses, they are pointless. Feel like a filler, that actual feature. Same with 50% exp gain bonus.

Bonuses of some professions seem to be redundant. Farmers getting extra seeds is pointless, as considering chance and time it takes to grow stuff, those extra seeds will be 2-little-2-late. You wont get any/much early on when they are really needed and later in game this bonus is completely irrelevant.

Would be nice if dupes with excluding traits would not be interested in activities they cant perform, eg Uncultured having interest in Art. Building custom dupes would be best, but il take what i can.

 

On side note. Would be nice it constructions located in the fog would not appear in my notifications when they inevitably break/flood. Annoying and misleading, as they are not part of my base and there is nothing i can, nor are interested, in doing about it. At least allow excluding them from notification bar - something is broken, somewhere out there, dont care, go away and never come back.

[Dirmagnos]

Alternatively make occupation traits learnable. Literally, assign dupe to train skill. Like 2 full cycles for tier 1 traits, 4 cycles for tier 2 traits, etc. It would make it less likely for dupes to learn them early on, as there are more critical things to do, but at the same time would remove current, extremely tedious and annoying micromanagement on professions.

At the same time, similar to medical help, instead of simply studying, another dupe, who already possess skill, can take on teaching, reducing time that would require to learn skill by half. Both studying and teaching would increase Learning skill - this way research of technologies would not be the only way to increase it.

[Kasuha]

30 minutes ago, Dirmagnos said:

Alternatively make occupation traits learnable. Literally, assign dupe to train skill. 

That's how it works now. You assign a dupe certain occupation and he learns the associated traits as soon as he gains the mastery. He'll not forget them and can apply them even after you assign him a different occupation. Mastered Miner can dig abyssalite even if you move him over to Groundskeeper.

[Dirmagnos]

6 hours ago, Kasuha said:

That's how it works now. You assign a dupe certain occupation and he learns the associated traits as soon as he gains the mastery. He'll not forget them and can apply them even after you assign him a different occupation. Mastered Miner can dig abyssalite even if you move him over to Groundskeeper.

Poor wording on my part.

Currently, if i want to train all dupes in particular skill, then i have to go thru the motions of switching them from one specialization to another. Not to mention that they are not particularly interested in pursuing those professions without additional step of restricting either those specific dupes to specific activity, or preventing all others of doing same. Basically i can set dupe as cook, yet despite of availability of food to cook, he will do pretty much everything else but cooking.

Basically new system adds whole additional level to training skills without any particular need. Shuffling dupes around from profession to profession and then restricting or allowing them to perform particular activities fells like a whole game on its own now. Extremely tedious game.

On top of that i have to either train them in succession(from mining to architecture, etc), or try to remember who already knows what(and there is no separate menu where i can look up what dupes already know) and spend significant amount of time shuffling them around and waiting for them to learn new needed skill(considering that they do not have any particular preferences for that skill by default, it may take awhile...or again, restricting and allowing activities).

As ive seen it mentioned many times, new system is overly complicated for no particular reason, need or positive result.

[Kasuha]

2 minutes ago, Dirmagnos said:

Currently, if i want to train all dupes in particular skill, then i have to go thru the motions of switching them from one specialization to another. Not to mention that they are not particularly interested in pursuing those professions without additional step of restricting either those specific dupes to specific activity, or preventing all others of doing same.

That's not how the game works at the moment. Jobs are more like trainings. Neither do they need to have interest in the occupation, nor they have to do tasks of that particular job. Both of these increase their experience gain but in general not enough to be worth it to restrict them to those tasks - I would even say that under most circumstances they will level up slower when restricted because they'll have less to do. A Gofer will gain his gofer mastery exp just fine by digging and harvesting.

[Dirmagnos]

42 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

That's not how the game works at the moment. Jobs are more like trainings. Neither do they need to have interest in the occupation, nor they have to do tasks of that particular job. Both of these increase their experience gain but in general not enough to be worth it to restrict them to those tasks - I would even say that under most circumstances they will level up slower when restricted because they'll have less to do. A Gofer will gain his gofer mastery exp just fine by digging and harvesting.

Interesting. Havent paid that much attention to rates. I knew that dupes gained exp even without doing specific professional tasks, as half the time they seem to "level up" when sleeping. But i didnt know what was rate difference.

But then it kinda raises another question - whats the point of this system in this case ? Again, for level of additional complexity that it adds to game, it seem to have rather little practical value.

I presume, that at this points its more of a placeholder, rather than something even remotely finished.

[Kasuha]

3 minutes ago, Dirmagnos said:

But then it kinda raises another question - whats the point of this system in this case ?

As far as I know, the original intent was to put duplicant leveling under control. Up to the update they were leveling up whatever stat was considered useful for doing the task they were doing. In practice it meant the duplicant gained maximum stats over time without the player even knowing about it. It acts a bit like a nerf, you need to care about stats of your duplicants and they level just a few at a time.

The other part, to turn duplicants into specialists that will cooperate on building the colony so far failed and was rolled back. But the game is under development and I think devs will come up with something better than there is at the moment, it will just take another release or two. There definitely are things that can be built on the current occupation base.

[Dirmagnos]

1 hour ago, Kasuha said:

As far as I know, the original intent was to put duplicant leveling under control. Up to the update they were leveling up whatever stat was considered useful for doing the task they were doing. In practice it meant the duplicant gained maximum stats over time without the player even knowing about it. It acts a bit like a nerf, you need to care about stats of your duplicants and they level just a few at a time.

Dont really see why it could be a bad thing. Dupes do things, they level up(why should i "care" about it, i do see them becoming more efficient and faster over time; what else do i need, give them a medal every time they gain a level ?). Simple. Considering that their AI is not the greatest(altho seem to improve...or maybe its just me getting used to it), simplicity of leveling compensated for poor ai at least to some extent.

With the way that professions are implemented now they never solve problem with poor ai, nor they add anything of particualr value, yet they complicate exiting system for no good reason. Thats why i came up with actual training idea - you need particular skill, you educate dupe in it. Instead of just giving him a hat and letting him gain exp in that skill simply because he is assigned that skill, not even practicing it.

And as far as hats go, it could be done in reverse actually. Reminds me of UO - any dupe that is qualified enough can wear specific hat, so dupe can only put on golden helmet only when her is highly trained as miner. And if it is also followed by him preferring mining tasks when its his current profession it would actually mean something. This way if i see a dupe running, even without selecting him, i could make an educated guess where he is running and how efficient he will be in his work.

Im sure it will be improved and refined eventually, but right now.... meh.

1 hour ago, Kasuha said:

The other part, to turn duplicants into specialists that will cooperate on building the colony so far failed and was rolled back. But the game is under development and I think devs will come up with something better than there is at the moment, it will just take another release or two. There definitely are things that can be built on the current occupation base.

Couldnt agree more. Kley is among only handful of dev studios i consider to produce quality content and seemingly actually care about both their games and gamers that play them.

[IvanX]

Agreed, if anyone is able to produce quality content, it would be Klei. I'm a bit worried about the platform choice tho. A decision to write a colony management simulator like this on a language not supporting modding is a weird one. As for the struggles we are in atm - it is quite a complicated task - to write a perfect algorithms for colonist AI, as well as a best concept for it. I've seen a lot of games, less burdened with features and physics, literally devastated by developers not able to solve this task. It only seems simple.

As for what we currently have priority-wise, I'm confident klei would give us a new priorities next update, until then - I just can't play Oni anymore. Not with what we have now)

[Dirmagnos]

Why do i always think its "Kley"... no idea.

Addition to previous ideas.

Keep dual Jobs screen. Except that upper part lists all dupes with all learnable traits they have learned(basically dupe name and list of icons representing skills with info available on mouseover). Allowing full centralized overview on all dupes and their specific strengths.

At the same time research screen gets additional tab. In new tab player can select specific dupes from dropdown menu and then sending/queuing them to study certain perks(with already known perks grayed out for convenience). Perk study is done via computer(so process would use already existing presets).

Using supercomputer instead of regular one cuts time required for obtaining perk by 25%. Studying is done is same fashion as research - dupe uses computer and "researches" skill. Dupe can pause his studies and resume them again later. Only one dupe can study per computer.

Priorities are as follows. If there is no tech research queued, then dupes will prioritize supercomputer over regular one if available. If there is tech research queued, then first regular and first supercomputer always prioritize tech research. If there are additional computers, then they prioritize perk learning over tech research, if any are queued.

Perks could be divided into ones giving access to particular abilities(like mining harder ores), and ones that give bonuses, both specific(like +25% speed of Abyssalite mining) and general(like +5% mining speed). Perk bonuses are not cumulative with skill bonuses and are applied on top.

[LTLking]

15 hours ago, Kasuha said:

That's how it works now. You assign a dupe certain occupation and he learns the associated traits as soon as he gains the mastery. He'll not forget them and can apply them even after you assign him a different occupation. Mastered Miner can dig abyssalite even if you move him over to Groundskeeper.

If you remove someone from research job even after they've leveled up.
It will give you a notification.
No researcher allocated.
If you remove your minors. It gives you the red X.

My base. All new dupes after the 1st 3 become gophers. Get their speed and strength up to at least 2 or 3 It varies on how long I keep them their but I don't want any -2's trying to do things. Then they move on to a field of interest.