Currently, when a hearthling enters the K.O. state, he/she drops every single equipment, and then we, the players have to manually loot them.
There are problems with this however…
A) Auto-loot ignores this, and so players have to manually “loot” the items. It can be quite frustrating, considering we enable auto-loot because this is exactly what we don’t want to do.
B) Makes little sense. Like, imagine the situation… Bob the footman, equipped with the heaviest iron mail one can imagine, and then comes a goblin and knocks him silly… then Bob still has the time to unequip all that iron from his body, and carefully lay it beside his unconscious body. What?
So what I suggest:
Let equipment stay with unconscious bodies (and only drop them once they are dead for sure)
Introduce a new gameplay mechanic which involves monsters that can steal equipment from downed hearthlings and make use of them.
– A goblin would steal the unconscious footman’s sword and would deal increased damage for the remainder of the battle.
– Certain monsters could “consume” equipment. A rock golem would eat items made of metal, which would give it a buff/heal it. A treant would do the same with stuff made of wood.
.
If the current mechanics are here to stay, then at least make auto-loot claim those items.
Once again you gave me a smirk smile on my face If only logic could actually determin how problems are solved in games and the real world we would have alot of energy to evolve stuff and concepts…
There is a stated reason why the dropped items from an unconscious hearthling are NOT auto-loot. If it is set for auto-loot then more non-fighter hearthlings will head out to pick them up and it could be right away if there are no other, more important tasks in the queue. Which means that more hearthlings could be heading right into the fight while the enemies are still there and they could become new targets.
Once a player knows that this is the way it works, it isn’t hard to just loot those necessary items through the menu once the fighting has ended.
@Relyss Perhaps this could become one of the tips that we all see on the loading screens - that items dropped by unconscious hearthings are not set to auto-loot and must be manually chosen to loot.
Spot on, @Golden! Great way to break it down for us
However, I do agree with this suggestion:
Personally, I’d still say auto-loot should be off for this loot due to the very reason Golden explain. But I agree that the gear should remain with the Hearthling until death.
This will of course make it harder for other Hearthlings to use (“borrow”) this gear in a deffensive situation; yet, imo, the gear should remain with a soldier (or whatever) until told otherwise.
If the enemy is slayed, most likely the soldiers defeated it and more fighting-units is most likely close to the dropped loot - if the loot is from a soldier, well, chances are high the enemy is still standing strong and any non-fighting Hearthling going for this loot makes an easy prey.
Town Defense Mode is an action initiated (turned on or off) by the player; Soldier going for an enemy is more automated and thus the 2 scenarios are not bound to always occur at the same time.
Yes there is something wrong with the argument that the hearthlings rush into the enemy… who will rescue the downed soldier i wonder? unless you have two fighting teams, it will be one of the non combatant hearthlings?
And the rescue system is bad aswell? if the hearthling that come to pick up the injured, gets to close to an enemy, they drop the injured and runs away… but no one tells you that? i cant count how many times i have lost a good soldier on that behalf!
Hopefully this will be a part of the overhaul of the combat system in the future?
Though, I still believe there needs to be some automation to it. Manually hunting for stuff that got lost in shrubbery just isn’t fun. Something like a delay timer, or that the command should only apply when no enemies are nearby.
And @Fornjotr brough up an important issue with downed hearthlings, and that being we are absolutely not getting warned when our people are abandoned and dying. I feel this should have some automation to it too, like the out-of-combat auto-loot I mentioned above, people should automatically collect unconscious hearthlings when there’s no combat going on.
Now these are some neat ideas, indeed!
As mentioned by Fornjotr, hopefully these ideas will be included in discussions/food-for-thought during future overhaul(s) of the combat system.
I don’t know who to ping on this in order to make sure they notice it; but I’m sure they go through the forums and will notice this anyways
Definitely needs some kind of explanation to the player, since it’s not intuitive.
I believe one of the reasons why we made them drop their equipment is to allow other hearthlings to use it while your incapacitated one is recuperating (you might have other soldiers that have better health and can use that gear). They also drop whatever’s in their backpack (and we fixed that they didn’t drop the contents of their backpack after being promoted - because they went straight to patrol). They don’t drop their talismans because it doesn’t make sense (and was a bug when I tested it before the release).
Half of the times there are still monsters there, but it can also be the case that you managed to kill them all but had one or two casualties.
Yep, rescuing has bad UX and will be reviewed.
I’ll ask @Brackhar for thoughts. Even though I’m fine with the current system that prevents your hearthlings from going into suicide missions, that’s a valid point. Auto-loot was meant for loot from your enemies. The gear your soldiers drop is not really loot, although your enemies might consider it loot I guess (from a storytelling perspective). But if you expect auto-loot to work like that, it kinds of make sense, since you can loot it manually. Now that I think, there was also a request/suggestion to make stolen items auto-lootable too. That sounds a little difficult to implement, but I might be wrong.
I think what we need is a sort of “forbid” state with a really clear representation on the item, like a big red X or something. As a player you could use this for things like making sure your hearthlings don’t use certain objects in your stockpile in case you wanted to save them for a trader, and in this specific case we could use the same iconography for items that are dropped when a hearthling is incapacitated.
I’m also not opposed to adding a “strip” style order that can be used when a hearthling is incapacitated, but at first blush that seems more fiddly than I would hope to pursue. Let’s see if this forbid idea make sense
Perhaps a better way would’ve been to make the equipment drop when the Hearthling is at the bed, if you want to tend wounds you don’t wan to have a lump of metel on the one you’re tending
So basically have the equipment while they’re getting carried and then drop them near the bed when they’re starting to get treated (and make them not be manual or auto looted, treat them as normal town items
I totally just checked this in, as my first commit on the Stonehearth team
Hearthlings still drop the stuff they were carrying/in their backpack when they’re knocked out, but they’ll keep their armor and weapons until they’re carried to a bed/hearthside
If only logic could actually determin how problems are solved in games and the real world 
we would have alot of energy to evolve stuff and concepts…
