Update 1.2.4: Prisoner and Survivor Management
Hi there!
As promised, here's a new update focusing on the prisoner system. With the recent introduction of a prisoner-centric faction archetype, the Arakans, it really needed some love. Of course, it's far from the only change in this update, which should make your whole population easier to manage.
As usual, the full change-log is at the bottom. I highly recommend to give it a look, as many important details will only be mentioned there. I am a bit short on time today, so the article is shorter than usual, while the change-log is more detailed to compensate.
Enjoy!
[h2]Prisoner System[/h2]
First thing first: Compliance. This value, used to determine how close is a prisoner to riot or to join you, now works pretty much as you'd guess. Treat prisoners well and give them good individual cells, and their compliance will grow steadily:
Generally speaking, and assuming good working conditions, prisoners will gain compliance much faster, turning them into potential recruits.
Speaking of housing prisoners, I added a new zone type: the jail. Yes, it's a barrack for prisoners. It does NOT provide a compliance bonus, but it provides beds for large quantities of prisoners at a minimal cost. It's especially useful if you don't intend to keep your prisoners for long (hi, cannibal factions).
Prisoners can now be treated by doctors (if you allow it), and got a refreshed individual survivor menu with nicer icons and a prominent compliance gauge.
You can also set default settings for your prisoners directly from the Faction/Settlement menu.
[h2]New Population Menu[/h2]
I fully redesigned the Population menu. Not only it scales vertically with your screen resolution, but it handles survivors, prisoners and animals simultaneously.
While the Animal tab still needs some work, the prisoner and survivor tabs are fully functional and offer new filters and features. For instance, you can assign rooms and prison cells from this menu directly. To do so, simply click on the new "Housing" filter, and right-click on any person you want to reassign.
And, of course, in the prisoner tab, you can change individual prisoner settings (work, eat, recruit, chat, doctor), and sort people by compliance.
More filters and options will be added to this menu as I continue to improve it.
[h2]Automation and Presets[/h2]
I also added a few settings to the Faction menu, while reorganizing the existing ones:
You can now set your base to automatically turn downed enemies into prisoners as long as you have free prison cells (or a jail). You can also tell your survivor what to do with dead bodies depending on their type (survivor, prisoner, animal, and non faction). Dogs can be buried now, assuming you've set a tomb to allow animals, it'll be extended to other pets in the next update.
[h2]Release Notes[/h2]
I'm aware of a few situational bugs reported recently, I couldn't investigate them before release, but if there's something to fix, I will publish a fix very soon.
You can also expect a second update where I add some more meat to the prisoner system, and add more features to the population menu in a week or two. After that, we'll move to a different topic.
Cheers!
[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]
AI and Behaviors
As promised, here's a new update focusing on the prisoner system. With the recent introduction of a prisoner-centric faction archetype, the Arakans, it really needed some love. Of course, it's far from the only change in this update, which should make your whole population easier to manage.
As usual, the full change-log is at the bottom. I highly recommend to give it a look, as many important details will only be mentioned there. I am a bit short on time today, so the article is shorter than usual, while the change-log is more detailed to compensate.
Enjoy!
[h2]Prisoner System[/h2]
First thing first: Compliance. This value, used to determine how close is a prisoner to riot or to join you, now works pretty much as you'd guess. Treat prisoners well and give them good individual cells, and their compliance will grow steadily:
- The higher quality the individual cell, the more compliance will grow. Low quality cells, or missing cells, will cause compliance to decrease quickly (and VERY quickly if a prisoner is left without a place to sleep)
- Getting food, or medical care increases compliance
- Working very slightly decreases compliance (easy to counter with good rooms)
- Prisoners chatting together decrease their respective compliance a bit
- Prison guards talking to prisoners increases compliance (usually, but if the guard is bad at his job it may backfire)
Generally speaking, and assuming good working conditions, prisoners will gain compliance much faster, turning them into potential recruits.
Speaking of housing prisoners, I added a new zone type: the jail. Yes, it's a barrack for prisoners. It does NOT provide a compliance bonus, but it provides beds for large quantities of prisoners at a minimal cost. It's especially useful if you don't intend to keep your prisoners for long (hi, cannibal factions).
Prisoners can now be treated by doctors (if you allow it), and got a refreshed individual survivor menu with nicer icons and a prominent compliance gauge.
You can also set default settings for your prisoners directly from the Faction/Settlement menu.
[h2]New Population Menu[/h2]
I fully redesigned the Population menu. Not only it scales vertically with your screen resolution, but it handles survivors, prisoners and animals simultaneously.
While the Animal tab still needs some work, the prisoner and survivor tabs are fully functional and offer new filters and features. For instance, you can assign rooms and prison cells from this menu directly. To do so, simply click on the new "Housing" filter, and right-click on any person you want to reassign.
And, of course, in the prisoner tab, you can change individual prisoner settings (work, eat, recruit, chat, doctor), and sort people by compliance.
More filters and options will be added to this menu as I continue to improve it.
[h2]Automation and Presets[/h2]
I also added a few settings to the Faction menu, while reorganizing the existing ones:
You can now set your base to automatically turn downed enemies into prisoners as long as you have free prison cells (or a jail). You can also tell your survivor what to do with dead bodies depending on their type (survivor, prisoner, animal, and non faction). Dogs can be buried now, assuming you've set a tomb to allow animals, it'll be extended to other pets in the next update.
[h2]Release Notes[/h2]
I'm aware of a few situational bugs reported recently, I couldn't investigate them before release, but if there's something to fix, I will publish a fix very soon.
You can also expect a second update where I add some more meat to the prisoner system, and add more features to the population menu in a week or two. After that, we'll move to a different topic.
Cheers!
[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]
AI and Behaviors
- Animals (pets, wild, cattle) now obey their faction's rule about attacking incapacitated targets, making dogs and giant spiders pretty good at catching new prisoners.
- Medics moving downed people will try to apply first aid before moving the patient if their health is very low.
- Survivors and prisoners are better at claiming a room to sleep in when those are made available by the player.
- Some large dead creatures need to be butchered to retrieve meat, bones, and such; corpses decay over time.
- Reviewed the prisoner compliance system, compliance is easier to gain if you treat your prisoners well.
- You need less decoration to make a "good" cell than to make a good bedroom.
- Recruiting prisoners turn them into cannibals automatically if you're a cannibal-type faction.
- Prisoners' compliance is now influenced by the quality of their cell (high quality cells improve compliance over time)
- Added switch to allow prisoners to be treated by a doctor (in individual prisoner info panel and pop menu)
- Default settings (work, eat, recruit..) can be set for new prisoners in the Colony Settings menu
- During the Besieged Settlement map events, you can now enslave the villagers if your vehicle has an enslavement item installed, like the slave collar pack.
- Added Jail zone, a barrack for prisoners. It can hold multiple prisoners, doesn't provide much compliance.
- Burials can be attributed to pets, survivors, prisoners, or others, individually.
- Ability for the game to use multiple variants for a constructed tile: for instance, road/asphalt tiles have multiple variants with small cracks/fissures.
- Massively reduced the CPU impact of large herds of animals
- Overall better performances, especially underground
- Tweaks to nature layer, chance for a plant to die on death changed from a bool to a percentage
- Replaced the sprites for a few early game objects (campfire, storage area, sleeping bags)
- A bunch of sprites and tiles used when generating the local map have been replaced by better looking ones.
- New and more varied asphalt texture(s) for the roads in the local map. It's relatively hard to notice due to ground dust effect.
- In the world map, the road tile-map was replaced by something better looking / more detailed
- In the world map, replaced buildings, trees, and rock textures + additional variations thanks to rotations
- In the world map, village tiles are easier to spot as they are represented by a big bunch of buildings
- Main menu newsfeed points to steam now, and is always up to date
- Redesigned population menu, scaling with vertical space available on your screen, better layout.
- Ability to switch the population menu to a mode displaying your prisoners with relevant info, filters, and settings
- Added a tab for the animals to the population menu (still a working in progress)
- Added "Housing" filter to population menu, you can right click people in this mode to assign private bedrooms or prison cells
- Added activity filter to population menu
- Improved individual prisoner panel + tweaks to other individual panels
- More detailed corpse retrieval, butchering, and burying tasks can be set in the colony settings
- Automatic capture of downed hostiles can be setup in colony settings (will auto capture downed enemies if you have a prison bed available)
- You can now move the camera around and use hotkeys even when the mouse cursor is over a menu
- Added specific briefing for the "go to room" combat maps (like the Robotic Lab in Act 3, and the Robotic tech tree)
- Changing a prisoner's cell wouldn't unassign them from their previous accommodation
- Prisoners were unable to combat fire
- Prisoners were unable to experience the joys of mental breakdown
- Line of sight bug causing all sorts of problems
- Traders from different factions should no longer attack each other (they also get named after their faction), they probably can't be used as an exploit to clear the map anymore either.
- Prisoners would keep their melee weapon on capture
- Pandemonium infected people would keep their melee weapon when morphing into a zombie
- Outdated tooltips in prisoner feeding checkbox implied that people with the hauling job would feed them (instead of prison guards).
- Issue between hunger and reproduction (cattle and pets)
- Prisoners could run the "prison guard" job, causing some logic issues.
- Minor button coloring issue in Misc Orders (regression bug 1.2.1)
- Chat moodlets in mood sub-menu not always pointing to the right target (people talking to themselves)
- Typo in a data file used during map generation which may have caused, on rare occasions, to cause a room to be entirely empty
- Very small minor memory leak (when loading saves or going back to main menu) tied to the way walls and tiles are reset
- If the building "fog of war" setting is disabled, it's not clear where you're supposed to go in Act 3's Robotic Lab