Feedback - Auto-disinfect can destroy the entire colony for very few "germed" tiles

[S0ulstr34m]

Hi,

Just want to start off by saying I love this game and pretty much everything about it .

 

I've played a good amount of it but I've always had issues with reaching the 100th cycle dying somewhere after the 50th cycle (ie: when my base starts expanding in all directions, eventually hitting germs) for up-to-now an unknown reason but I just put the finger on it and wanted to share it here in the feedback section as it's been a "colony killer" for me so far and I think many new players will get caught up with that.

My colonies are dying from starvation ("can't reach food") although there is food available, higher priority set, path to get there free, un-trapped dupes, food enabled in consumption, dupe can farm, etc etc etc

Turns out in my last game, my entire colony was taken out (I can't say for sure :D, I got lucky and a new dupe arrived as I had only 1 left.. I might be able to save this.. maybe) by a single "germed" tile. Dupes would try to get to that tile which was very far out in my base, in an area with no oxygen, manual doors, hard to reach tile and I was losing basically 1 man's worth of work power on that tile that kept 'poping up' (ie: getting 'germed'). This was slowing down my entire distribution of coal and algae which was affecting my oxygen level which ended up killing my farms...  if you don't "manually" deactivate the auto-disinfect on these tiles, you end up losing your entire colony this way as priority 9 on farm is not enough... your dupes will go for the 'auto-disinfect' before farming which would prevent their death.

 

My suggestion would be to have dupes prioritize eating when they get to a critical starvation level (ie: <500 cal or so), just like they do with oxygen. When they run out of air, they drop everything they do and run for closest oxygen location. Only they would do this for food as well IF a source of food is available to them (ie: on the ground, in a fridge or can be harvested by them), they would go straight for it then resume their queue. An alert would be fired off to let the player know what's going on (eg: Emergency: Ignoring all tasks, seeking food immediately).

Maybe this situation could be 'easily fixed' by having the dupes to ignore 'auto-disinfect' tasks altogether when they are below a critical starvation threshold.

 

Looking forward to play this game many, many, many more hours

Regards,

[Zarquan]

If it is only 1 tile, you can disable auto-disinfect on it, but it is a little ridiculous.  I feel that autodisinfect should be triggered only if a dupe passes the tile or building on the course of their duties.  And getting food while starving should override everything except maybe breathing.

[Kasuha]

I think the auto-disinfect should apply only on buildings that can get duplicants contaminated. That means ladders, poles, and machines, not tiles. I tried walking a duplicant back and forth over a tile holding 1 million germs and he did not pick a single one. There's no point auto-disinfecting tiles if they're safe.

[ImpalerWrG]

Some kind of area selection to turn on and off disinfecting (maybe even set the threshold) would be useful, I'm feeling that default behavior should be to only disinfect areas designated 'home' or something to that effect.  Picking up germs from walking on them sounds like it could actually be a good feature if added, if we expect germs to ever be a serious threat, otherwise Kasuha is right they should stop disinfecting that which can't infect them.

[Jigsawn]

This caught me out too in my first few games. The main culprits were tiles close to slime outside of my base, and objects in germ-filled water tanks which gave no risk as normally dupes wouldn't ever go there. The problem is that this constant disinfect task allocation pulls your dupes off critical, survival tasks. When you are starting out you have so much else to contend with that it's incredibly easy to miss this kind of behaviour, and also you might not even be aware of how to change it. I agree with the OP that the best solution is probably to just re-order the default priority of auto-disinfect and put it below life-threatening other tasks. 

Although it's not an ideal solution, you could add a checkbox on the disinfect drag and drop interface pop up window, for disable auto-infect. In the disinfect overlay have it that when you have an object auto-disinfect disabled, an icon indicating that appears above the object, similar to the current disinfect icons.