Guaranlen Trees

[Zen]

There's a lot of things that seem to be very poorly thought out with the new expansion. And these trees take take about five hours of the day to maintain every single day. For one. For a skilled plant cutter. They're so inefficient that essentially whoever is doing the job can only prune the tree and eat and sleep.

These are extremely disappointing given that this whole expansion was partly marketed on their inclusion and interaction with the tree-worshipping meme. But really growing multiple of these trees just isn't very viable since to keep them at any level of useful dryads you need to dedicate someone to pruning them.

It takes like a day or twos work to sow a field and maybe a pen with hay for a large amount of animals by comparison. Why ever even interact with these things with how the math currently works?

[Kasa]

Ayup.
The Dryads in there current incarnation are a bust, and 1.3 patch made animals even worse then they were before.

[RCMidas]

High impact meme, high impact gameplay. It's not necessarily there to make things EASIER for you. That's the wrong way to think of it. It's there to CHANGE how the game plays for you.

Whether you LIKE that change or not is irrelevant. If you don't like it, don't use it. It is not necessary.

[Kasa]

@RCMidas

You do know you can use those trees without the meme right?
We are talking about the trees sucking regardless of the meme you're using.

[RCMidas]

Without the meme, they aren't brilliant. With it, they can be pretty good. You can get dozens of combat dryads with just a few hours of pruning per day per tree. They need a few balance patches, of course, the occasional tweak here and there, but again...

They are not necessary. They are there for some difference to the standard style. I don't exactly know what you were hoping out of them to be this disappointed.

[Kasa]

I personally was hoping for work effort put in to at least equal value out.
If I wanted to make the game harder with inefficient strategies then I can do that easily by cutting off all my pawns left leg and right hands.

New styles of play should be AT LEAST as good as old styles of play, as it stands now the tree is strictly inferior to all other methods.

And no you cannot get "dozens of combat dryads" with a "few hours" of pruning a day.

2 Dryads takes about 3 hours a day of pruning so it stands to reason 4 dryads takes about 6 hours.
You cannot train these dryads so the combat ones will only gather around the tree, the tree has a build radius mauls so the range you can play near your base is restricted.
If you want a dozen dryads you need 3 trees and 3 pawns that can dedicate 6 hours a day to prune these 3 trees.

Out of the combat dryads that you can't control 1 is has the defence of a wet paper bag and the attack power weaker then a steel club, and the other has 60% sharp and 30% blunt defence, fine enough for early game but mid game is a joke when combined with it's pathetic attack and lack of range weapon.

All the tree meme gives you is the ability to get Gaumaker dryads so that you can plant more trees.

Btw the 3 hours for 2 drayds? That was WITH the tree worshipper meme which is suppose to reduce the time it takes to prune a tree.
So if it's 3 hours for 2 dryads with tree worshippers god knows how long it takes without.

[RCMidas]

You said nothing that countered my assertion. Plant up some core pods to produce the caste that generates more pods. Start planting those and you've got yourself a bunch of extra trees for dryads. When you draft their bonded colonist for combat, they will rush to help him. Including if you are merely hunting animals.

Sure, they die relatively quickly - but this means less enemies focused on your actual pawns, and how exactly is this different from say, zoning your animals in front of the enemy again to serve as a distraction? At least the dryads respawn endlessly AND don't need to eat.

Naturally it's time and labour-intensive. So is crafting a bunch of power armour for your fighters, building a spaceship, or breeding thrumbos with their 5-year cycle (1 year pregnancy, 4 years to mature).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you sound like you want a nice quick and efficiency boost from start to finish that is viable across any playstyle.

[Kasa]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

You said nothing that countered my assertion. Plant up some core pods to produce the caste that generates more pods. Start planting those and you've got yourself a bunch of extra trees for dryads. When you draft their bonded colonist for combat, they will rush to help him. Including if you are merely hunting animals.

Naturally it's time and labour-intensive. So is crafting a bunch of power armour for your fighters, building a spaceship, or breeding thrumbos with their 5-year cycle (1 year pregnancy, 4 years to mature).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you sound like you want a nice quick and efficiency boost from start to finish that is viable across any playstyle.

I did, I said that you were factually wrong, you talked as if it took nothing to get and I quote:

Originally posted by RCMidas:

dozens of combat dryads

DOZENS of them you said, when in reality you would be struggling to handle more then 4 since each tree can only support 4 dyrads with 6 hours of work A DAY and only 1 pawn can be connected to a tree at a time and that WITH the tree worshippers.

You could use them for combat, but then your exposing your pawn to danger just to get them close enough to do anything, and why bother?

Animals may suck but they still perform better with their balanced offence and defence to the dryads crummy stats.

A warg has better damage, better speed, better defence, breeds and grows at similar speeds to the dryads.
Ya you still need to feed and train Wargs but it still takes less time a day then pruning a dryad tree and you can have more then 4 of them on a person and as I mentioned animals suck so that's not actually a gotcha there.

Or better yet just use a rifle?

And you missed my point about how you are effectively loosing a pawn for a tree because 6 hours out of the day for 1 pawn means that pawn is doing just about nothing else.

And the difference between labor of a tree and crafting armour and weapons is that armor and weapons are a 1 time deal.

You make them and anyone can use them and once they are made the pawn can go do something else, you can also use tool benches, bionics, and drugs to speed up the crafting process where the pruning process is not effected by those.
Not to mention again the tree needs to be pruned regularly to keep those 4 dryads alive.

The spaceship is not a play style it's an end goal to "beat" the game.
Also who the hell breeds thrumbo's other then as a joke? Maybe if you have a super end game colony and you just want to goof around you would start breeding and raising them for fun but like hell you are doing that normally at any point in the game.

And lastly whats wrong with wanting to be able to use the tree across various play styles?
Or at least make the 1 play style there suppose to support viable.

[RCMidas]

Ah, so our disagreement stems from different expectations. I don't expect everything to be viable or easy, even on the one thing it is primarily linked to. But if you put the time and effort in, it is eminently possible to do really well out of it. Having anywhere from 20-40 colonists on average in my colonies makes me particularly unworried about having a bunch of them spend a few hours a day taking care of 4 animals.

Now, you are absolutely correct that animals are not the most efficient use of your time, but that is itself a playstyle is it not? Especially since you can use them and a rifle at the same time, which I find peculiar to consider the possibility that you could not. They are more easily replaced than pawns after all.

Besides, how is the time investment on pruning significantly different to tribal meditation at anima trees for heavy psycasting? Especially if you want the majority of your colony to be psycasters. And the structure proximity issue of the anima tree is VASTLY more severe than the same thing for a guanralen tree. Yes, I realise that psycasting is intrinsically the stronger of this pair, but it also requires a lot of financial and RNG investment as well to pick up the desired psytrainers for your colonists.

I don't doubt whatsoever that there will be several balance patches that will tweak most of the variables here over the next couple of months. I do doubt that the initial complaint, that the DLC was poorly thought out, has validity.

[Mimoslav]

Originally posted by Kasa:

2 Dryads takes about 3 hours a day of pruning so it stands to reason 4 dryads takes about 6 hours.
You cannot train these dryads so the combat ones will only gather around the tree, the tree has a build radius mauls so the range you can play near your base is restricted.
If you want a dozen dryads you need 3 trees and 3 pawns that can dedicate 6 hours a day to prune these 3 trees.

You'll need more because connection decays faster at higher levels.

[Kasa]

Originally posted by Dekk:

Originally posted by Kasa:

2 Dryads takes about 3 hours a day of pruning so it stands to reason 4 dryads takes about 6 hours.
You cannot train these dryads so the combat ones will only gather around the tree, the tree has a build radius mauls so the range you can play near your base is restricted.
If you want a dozen dryads you need 3 trees and 3 pawns that can dedicate 6 hours a day to prune these 3 trees.

You'll need more because connection decays faster at higher levels.

oof, forgot about that, so ya complete garbage atm.

[RCMidas]

Just over 5 hours a day for 100%. You can test this out in like five minutes, including game boot-up time.

[Kasa]

Cool, so you loose 5 hours a day from a pawn for inferior animals that you yourself admitted was not viable even for the soul style it was meant for.

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Ah, so our disagreement stems from different expectations. I don't expect everything to be viable or easy, even on the one thing it is primarily linked to.

[RCMidas]

Wait, correction:

Up to 7.5 hours if you have Plants 0, down to 5 hours if you have Plants 20.

So, not horrible either way considering the baseline. Besides, if you're running Tree Lover, your biggest concern is not going to be what to do with the dryad trees, it's going to be the "try to avoid cutting any trees and keep tons of them alive" issue. So that's basically impossible in more extreme environments or if Randy feels like dropping a bunch of weather disasters in harsher ones (simultaneous Cold Snap and Volcanic Winter in a boreal forest anyone? And happened on a test Phoebe run, so even she don't give a damn sometimes).

But yeah, I think it all boils down to whether or not you want efficiency and optimisation (even discounting any degree of outright min-maxing) and if that is more important to you than a tricksome and optional part of the game...

*That is ALSO your choice*.

If you're choosing to make use of this mechanic, for the moment at least, you should really acknowledge that it is intended to shake up the playstyle enormously (even with Tree Lover meme disregarded), rather than purely add onto it.

We'll see how it changes in the future though.

EDIT: And in case you may feel it's an insult like some people I've seen, I wasn't the one to give you that award. You've been making respectable arguments all the way through and that's the wrong award in my opinion to reflect that.

[Kasa]

@RCMidas
Don't swet it, the clown rewards just means free points for me that I spend to give people awards int the artwork section of these games.

[Mimoslav]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Just over 5 hours a day for 100%. You can test this out in like five minutes, including game boot-up time.

5 hours for a pawn with 20 skill in plant cutting. That's a totally unrealistic scenario for a colony that could benefit from a dozen of unarmored melee animals.