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[Arseface]

The log says an excavation team is being sent. I've waited 3000 turns and nothing has shown up. I've fired my medium laser to overheat 3 times and have been unable to remove a single tile.

What do I do?

[jimmijamjams]

This happened to me once and I posted it as a potential bug:

http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=37.0

tl:dr

This is working as intended. There are mining lasers around the exit of the previous level. Make sure to pick one up if you're ever going into the mines. While this info won't help you with your current run, hopefully it will save you in subsequent runs.  I did find it confusing at the time...

[Arseface]

I really don't like that the excavation squad can all die/not show up. I ended up waiting 10,000 rounds before I quit.

I'm fine with being punished with a fight for not being prepared/following clues. Forced suicides are kinda BS.

[jimmijamjams]

Yeah, I waited about 10000 turns too in the hope that something would happen

I'm fine with being punished with a fight for not being prepared/following clues. Forced suicides are kinda BS.

This irked me too at the time and I'm yet to have it happen again.  Even so, every time I go into the mines I now pick up something that will dig.

[Kyzrati]

I really don't like that the excavation squad can all die/not show up. I ended up waiting 10,000 rounds before I quit.

I'm fine with being punished with a fight for not being prepared/following clues. Forced suicides are kinda BS.

The mines are supposed to be risky, since going there is completely optional, and for other strategic reasons I can't reveal. Everything is designed with a purpose.

That's also why there are always Mining Lasers at the entrance, and you may even find someone in the mines who will remind you not to be wandering around down there without one.

In short, the way the world is designed, the main complex always follows standard rules with no shenanigans, while you have no such guarantees in branches. The latter might throw some really weird stuff at you, and those areas have much wilder variations in the risk vs. reward spectrum. Just wait until later when all the superparts are only found in branches, but you might have to brave some very crazy stuff to get to them... And then once you get them you will be oh so happy...

But if you want a roguelike without curve balls, stay out of branches and go straight to the surface.

(That said, I should look into making the excavation squad a little more reliable, and I will. They really do sometimes get their butt kicked when they come to do their job.)

[Arseface]

The mines are supposed to be risky, since going there is completely optional, and for other strategic reasons I can't reveal. Everything is designed with a purpose.

That's also why there are always Mining Lasers at the entrance, and you may even find someone in the mines who will remind you not to be wandering around down there without one.

In short, the way the world is designed, the main complex always follows standard rules with no shenanigans, while you have no such guarantees in branches. The latter might throw some really weird stuff at you, and those areas have much wilder variations in the risk vs. reward spectrum. Just wait until later when all the superparts are only found in branches, but you might have to brave some very crazy stuff to get to them... And then once you get them you will be oh so happy...

But if you want a roguelike without curve balls, stay out of branches and go straight to the surface.

(That said, I should look into making the excavation squad a little more reliable, and I will. They really do sometimes get their butt kicked when they come to do their job.)

It's not the risk that bugs me, it's being forced into quitting. Being killed I expect. Quitting is terrible.

[Reiver]

Perhaps a couple hundred turns after the cave-in that cut you off, with no excavation team in sight, the whole thing collapses as a mercy-kill? 'Normal' Roguelikes would simply have you starve, but such mechanics are a touch different in cogmind-land.

Don't ask me to program how the game would know that the region's been cut off and needs to murder you for your own good, but it would certainly save the 'sit there waiting forever, not realising the game is lost and you're supposed to just hit quit now' issue.

[Kyzrati]

This was already fixed in the Alpha 1b release. I probably should've added a note here in case someone found the discussion like yourself =p

Shortly before releasing Alpha 1, I apparently made a change to the Engineer AI that prevented it from excavating to your position in the Mines. They would spawn an excavation squad, arrive at the outer edge of the cave-in, then leave...

See the 1b changelog--it's now guaranteed (through two different methods) that you will be freed, which was the original intention behind that event.

[Reiver]

Oops. Serves me right for digging through old threads, I suppose.

[Kyzrati]

No, it's good that you reminded me. This was one of the fixes I thought would be important to post back in the original discussion thread--I did with a few others--but I apparently forgot this one!

[Draco18s]

Related:

How do you activate mining lasers to mine the walls?  I picked one up one run and could not find a control listing or manage to activate targeting without a robot around.

[Adraius]

Despite the name, they're activated like any other weapon, by pressing the F key (what way do you usually fire weapons?).  They don't have any special property that allows them to destroy walls, just a high damage and low damage variance that allows them to destroy walls with a 100% success rate.  Mid-late game cannons can also blow through walls, but few with so much consistency, and the Mining Laser is available even on the lowest levels of the facility.

This info was given by Kyzrati somewhere either here or on the game's subreddit, but I can't immediately locate the source for you, sorry.

[Draco18s]

Despite the name, they're activated like any other weapon, by pressing the F key (what way do you usually fire weapons?).

Ah, I've been doing all of my targeting with the mouse.  The mouse input is much more usable than the typical Roguelike command system (and when I played those I almost never used ranged weapons, because it was such a hassle).

[Adraius]

Ahhhh, duh.  I play mostly with the mouse but use keyboard commands for some things, like initiating targeting.  Cogmind is fully operable with a mouse or keyboard, I should have remembered.

[Kyzrati]

Yeah, using a Mining Laser is one of the rarer operations that happens to be impossible purely via mouse since without the 'f' key, it's not possible to initiate a ranged attack without another robot around.

There are a couple other examples, though they require mod keys which mouse users would be more used to needing in some situations, e.g. force attacking (via Ctrl-Left Click).

(So it's technically 99% "fully operable" with the mouse. Hard to get to 100% in a game with so many commands without introducing strange one-off solutions that break the established UX paradigms...)

[Draco18s]

Sure, sure.  I just couldn't find the command in the manual (but I also wasn't really sure what I was looking for).

[Adraius]

I don't deal with this issue because I use 'f' to target everything, but it occurs to me another point where this might be an issue for mouse users is destroying traps.  I doubt they can target a trap normally, left-clicking would just move to Cogmind into trap's cell, as they are passable terrain.

In fact, a quick couple questions about traps.  So far every group of traps I've tried to kill have been close to a wall, and I've killed them by targeting the wall itself to guarantee a explosion about where I want it.  But what if I want to kill a minefield array in an open area?  Traps are built into the ground and have no 'hitbox' for projectiles, correct?  Will explosive projectiles even explode/know to collide with the ground if you target an open area of floor with them?

[Draco18s]

I've seen projectiles that miss (grenades) impact the floor, but not anywhere near where I was aiming.

So I suspect that they can hit the floor, but most likely won't.

[Kyzrati]

It's true--targeting the floor is not possible. I was thinking about this as a dilemma with traps, since you might think you can shoot them directly.

Launcher projectiles can still detonate over open ground, though that occurs when/because they've reached their maximum range.

As for traps there's almost always some obstacle nearby to hit with an explosive. It would be nice if you could, realistically, aim a cannon at the floor and just blow it away, but from a gameplay standpoint I somewhat like the idea of traps being more difficult to remove (while still generally possible if you have a launcher).

All projectiles travel perfectly parallel to the ground, an early decision I made when converting the world from its 3D origins (a la X@COM), so there's currently no simple way to hit the ground without adding a new mechanic that could likely be abused to more easily hit robots (unless even more fiddly mechanics were added to stop that). In the end, this is a situation where design needs trump reality, frustrating as it may be in some situations.

[Adraius]

I guess I can see how allowing aiming at the ground could be problematic; I think the problems are surmountable, but it's probably simpler to come up with another solution.  And I like how traps aren't trivial to deal with even when identified as well.

Spitballing a solution:

What about a toggle-able fire mode for launchers, 'Precision'?  When toggled on, only the launcher with this mode active - and only a single weapon - will fire, similar to Guided launchers.  The launcher's fire will fire at three (four? five?) times the time-energy cost, but not suffer from deviation and will explode exactly in the spot targeted.  Cannot be fired without LOS.

Thoughts? (Also, are we expecting a new release today?)

[Kyzrati]

I don't see a significant issue with leaving it as is, other than having to answer the occasional "why can't I do this?" query

The new release is already built and packaged. I just need to actually upload it and write the release notes and various announcements. Sitting down to prepare all that stuff now.

[zxc]

How about shift-F to attack ground? And subject that to similar accuracy penalties (maybe slightly more severe since it's harder to shoot something on the ground than it is to hit a wall) for projectile weapons.

[Adraius]

I don't think it's a pressing issue, but I think it's worth addressing.  Right now, if you detect a single mine in the middle of a large chamber you need to cross, what are your options?  It's true you have several: you can a) find an alternate route, b) wait for your passive sensors to detect most/all of them, c) risk a passive, or d) fire at a wall of the chamber, and traverse the area cleared by the explosion radius (not ideal, considering what could be on the other side of those walls).  All of the options take time or entail risk that could be avoided if the common-sense solution was available.

Like I said, this isn't a major issue right now, but I think it will become one when, eventually, someone tries to revive/adapt the army-building strategy in the post-trap environment.  Large numbers of robots will be many times harder to shepherd across a large open space seeded with traps than a single Cogmind you have total control over.

I thought over my solution a bit more, and you could give rid of even the edge-case combat applications by making the launcher fire using the normal time-energy, but 3-5 turns after you targeted the spot.  Call it 'Minesweeper'.  But it would be a unique mechanic to solve a rare use case. =/

Thanks for Alpha 3c!

[Kyzrati]

How about shift-F to attack ground?

All Shift-(alpha) commands are for retrieving attached part info. The closest I could come is Alt-f. (Alt is for rare commands, anyway.)

Like I said, this isn't a major issue right now, but I think it will become one when, eventually, someone tries to revive/adapt the army-building strategy in the post-trap environment.  Large numbers of robots will be many times harder to shepherd across a large open space seeded with traps than a single Cogmind you have total control over.

Very good point about the allies. That is the only situation I now feel might need to be addressed regarding this. Will have to think about it some more... What I'd like to avoid is mechanics specifically to address rare issues.

I had a similar experience last night while fooling around with 3c, with a trusty allied Hunter I picked up stepping on a couple traps while wandering around. I didn't think much of it at the time, though, and can see it becoming a bigger problem when you have an army.

However, traps might not be so incredibly common that they become a huge problem when you have allies, especially considering that your allies will avoid known traps, so if you want to protect them all you have to do is equip a Structural Scanner and you'll find them fairly quickly (not to mention the other even more effective methods of detection).

Individual allies are, in general, going to be fairly expendable in Cogmind, so maybe it's not all that bad if you occasionally lose a few to traps you otherwise could've discovered if you really wanted to.

We'll wait on this and see how it turns out in the future.

Thanks for Alpha 3c!

Thanks for being so helpful . Now to work on event preparations...