How to bring the colonies out into the open again?

[Aethelric]

First, let me just say that I agree with just about everyone (including Tynan) in saying that raiders should change to something other than a massive zerg. This would undo some of the problem, but, without completely nerfing all threats, mountain fortresses will still be the optimal playstyle.

Perhaps one way to solve the issue of dwarf-ing is to make colonies simply take up more open (roofed or otherwise) space than most mountains can provide. You could so this in a few ways: make "spacious" rooms actually require a room that would be spacious in real life, for instance. Perhaps make something like "noisy room" if colonists are near something that would be very loud (even through walls) like generators, smelters, hydroponic facilities, and the like, and mitigate it across open space like those between buildings.

Currently, the game gives you way too much incentive to live within as small a space as possible. Travel time is less, organizing for defense is much easier, your pawns have more conversations, it's much easier to concentrate beauty-enhancing objects, and obviously build costs scale with the size of the building. Giving more substantial bonuses for letting your colonists live in something that actually resembles, you know, a colony (instead of the interior of a submarine) could include some carrots, such as: give outdoor spaces a higher base beauty factor, give a "nice day" bonus in favorable biomes during clear weather (and perhaps a corresponding malus for not being outside on a nice day), and maybe even give random and semi-occasional buffs like "singing in the rain" that give colonists a bonus for interacting with nature.

Last ideas: alongside cabin fever, you could have something like a "different day, same s***" malus when colonists live and work in the same small spaces day after day after day (might be hard to implement). You could also have a rare chance for colonists moving outside to come across buried objects like caches or crashed escape pods.

[Kagemusha]

Some really nice ideas Aethelric. Especially the nice little incentives for moving around outside. These can be gained by town builders and mountain dwarfs.

I think we all agree that we want to make moving outside viable again. I like being able to choose based on my start location. If there is ever the thought process of, "If I don't have a large mountain to build into then I'm dead", there in lies the problem.

Variety is always great. The only things that should be requirements are food and sleeping spots. Everything else is an optional choice that can be aesthetic or make your colony run better.

When I get back from work today I'm starting a outdoor colony again with the express goal of seeing what works and what doesn't work and what would make my experience better. I think we all have some good ideas and I want to see how things are feeling in Alpha 7.

[Matthiasagreen]

just played my first out-in-the-open turret/mortar-free base now that A7 is out and did pretty well. The final siege following the crashed ship did me in, but thats probably because i was hording metal and plasteel to build my ship.

[thestalkinghead]

you could add resources that only can be made on the surface, like maybe moon crystals (or whatever) that could be grown only in moonlight, or weird and rare plants that only grow naturally on the surface and only bloom for a short while, or maybe there could be ground resources like some kind of special sand or tar that would only appear on the surface of maps, so it would be advantageous to choose a landing site with very few mountains, because at the moment mountains are just more valuable than the surface

[Johnny Masters]

These kind of resources have been brought up in this thread a couple of times, and yeah I agree they'd help to even things a little. If not, at least they would bring more diversity to the game, which is mostly nice.

I actually think the game would profit more from a more randomized approach and better/diverse game goals, if not for a core experience, at least a solid alternative one.

Random pawns, maps/biomes, equipment, fauna and flora, weather, enemies, events, etc. Basically each "drop" would have it's own theme, it's own challenges, not unlike a mission or a scenario in other RTS games.

So, one drop you might get heavy thunderstorms or heatwaves, thus you'd move into the ground. Another drop you'd have regular earthquakes, so building into mountains would require more investment (metal supports, anti-tremor walls or earthquake sensors), or perhaps you have one of those special resources laying around, making building outside more worthwhile than inside. Basically every game you'd have to adapt to your newly found situation, actually giving some rapport with your own pawns, because they too have no idea what to expect from their environment.

I've already suggested this a couple of times, but as a thread grow in size people stop reading the middle comments, so here it is again

[Simulacrum]

The biggest problem is that the end-game enemy waves are just too punishing, to the point where you *have* to funnel all of them into a killbox to even stand a chance in hell of surviving (be that through building a giant fortress with only one entrance, or by digging deep into the mountainside).

I think this could be fixed by first severely lowering the strength of the enemy attacks, and then making the ones that do attack do things like refuse to march single-file into the killbox. Spread the attackers out, make them attack from several different angles, and add units like sappers that blast through your walls and cause cave-ins if you've buried deep or left only one (or very few) entrance(s). If you've dug too greedily and too deep, make them spawn inside the mountain with you, and start blasting their way in your direction. Stuff like that. Anything to punish ultra-defensive strategies that rely on walls and single death-rooms to keep safe.

We should have to use our colonists as mobile defense to protect our colony too. Doing this was overly punishing (if you ask me) pre-7, but now that we can fix up their legs and organs, this would give us lots of really cool battles where our guys and gals fall in battle, only to get patched-up and maybe turned into battle-hardened cyborgs over time. Or maybe they'd steal the organs of their attackers, who knows! That's way cooler than locking them up behind walls of turrets all the time.

Just giving players incentives to move outside isn't enough, we gotta be punished for staying inside and using only fixed defences.

All this in my opinion, of course.

[Zulgaines]

From what I've played so far it seems that the reason we build fortress castles is because most dangers, as they progress, eventually become armies and there is no answer for this beyond physical force.

As long as mobs of enemies and physical force are the only two variables in hostile events we will ALWAYS have heavily condensed fortress style colonies. What we need in the game is more styles of "red" events, more ways to deal with hostile events, and far fewer zerg rush events happening in general.


Just my two cents.

[Varnhagen]

After reconsidering some older posts in this thread I still think that no one should be forced out of mountain building by some kind of RNG Balrog. The best way would be -  solely a PoV among many - to incur the costs of living in a mountain on mountain colonies as open colonies already suffer from quite a range of afflictions.
To summarize and expand on some great ideas in this thread:

• Mining should require the use of resources, preferably wood (or any kind of resource the player is willing to use¹). Drilling a mountain is an expensive task and you should spend some money to earn money. Basically it would be a resource conversion game-play that converts renewable resources like trees and woods into deplete-able resources like room² and all kinds of metal. Right now, the only cost of mining a mountain is the work required to mine. But even with only a marginal number of skilled miners, that's pretty much neglect-able, thence the support for longer mining times.³
• Personally, I am no fan of enchanted unicorn milk that lets your colonists age backwards when consumed (or any other kind of special resource that's considered valuable to hamstring players' stiles). But we could keep it realistic when we consider the "resources" living in the open provides to you for free. Air quality. As pointed out before living in a poorly vented mountain is indeed fatally dangerous. A second infrastructure akin to energy that recycles and refreshes the air would raise the cost of living but allow the player to overcome a predefined obstacle by game-play and not being blighted by RNG madness (aka "Events").
• In the same vein: Sure you can live underground and grow our crops with hydroponics. But hydroponics requires an insane amount of energy and water(!). A third infrastructural layer of water and sewage pipes⁴ could be utilized by in- and outside colonies, with mountain fortresses requiring large cisterns and water-pumping stations, that their outside brethren could do without.⁵Heck, twice a day their potatoes are watered for free!

Each player could decide for themselves whether a more expensive colony development is justified by being shielded from most harms. It would be transparent and problems could be anticipated and mitigated in time and not just on demand when Randy thinks it's time for a quake to (literally) shake things up a bit.

TL;DR: Raise the cost of living in a mountain by requiring the players to invest in some kind of infrastructure, that open colonies can do without.

¹Would metal struts be somewhat stronger than wooden ones and their use be a good investment considering the amount of metal that's exploited by the mine shaft?
² Room is a deplete-able resource because map sizes are finite. Shielded room under a mountain is a part of the entire map space and thus an even scarcer variant.
³ Longer mining times could mitigate the advantage that mountain strongholds have over open terrain settlements. Development would be seriously hindered if the time to mine room could equally be used to build an entire colony. Fortresses could start out as open settlements hugging a big rock and over the course of years slowly move indoors. Improved gameplay. Fortresses are viable but only as a reward for serious development/investment. Another point in favor of longer ming times: Willing suspension of disbelief. Is it credible that raiders zerg the killbox, if they could just slice through the mountain in double the time it takes to traverse the map?
⁴ To remove clutter and offer a goal for development, a future techtree could offer integrated utility walls, thus enabling the player to reinvest in your current base and infrastructure. A redecoration would offer room for better accommodations perhaps.
³ Sure, there are sub-subterranean water sources (springs, rivers, even lakes) but they'd need to be integrated into an infrastructure like geysers are right now.

[Varnhagen]

The biggest problem is that the end-game enemy waves are just too punishing, to the point where you *have* to funnel all of them into a killbox to even stand a chance in hell of surviving (be that through building a giant fortress with only one entrance, or by digging deep into the mountainside).

This behavior is (or better was) caused by massive hoarding and defense spamming. A wealthier colony surely attracts more raiders (more to gain and split). An average player's measly 10 colonists were sitting atop giant heap of valuables, thousands of rations, building materials and hundreds of weapons that were all necessary.
I hope that with alpha seven and the change from wealth to colony head count to determine the raiders' strength, this is a thing of the distant past. On the downside, players won't stop to design kill-boxes for 300 enemy combatants, because it has worked up until now - and it will continue to work for the now smaller raiding parties. The only way of progressing (in vanilla, at least) is building things. Like kill-boxes, e.g. I fear for a much more challenging early game and a pretty relaxed (boring?) endgame. The new endgame enemy types mentioned in the change-log might shake things up, though.
But I've yet to reach that far. My two colonies were both ravaged by diseases.

I think this could be fixed by first severely lowering the strength of the enemy attacks, and then making the ones that do attack do things like refuse to march single-file into the kill-box. Spread the attackers out, make them attack from several different angles, and add units like sappers that blast through your walls and cause cave-ins if you've buried deep or left only one (or very few) entrance(s). If you've dug too greedily and too deep, make them spawn inside the mountain with you, and start blasting their way in your direction. Stuff like that. Anything to punish ultra-defensive strategies that rely on walls and single death-rooms to keep safe.

A better AI is always welcome and I'm pretty sure, that it waits for us somewhere down the line. But it is one of those 20% things that hog the ominous 80% of resources to be done right and according to Ty's blog and his work method that might still be a long way to go.

Concerning the rest of your post: Hilarity ensues and Shenanigans galore!

[Geokinesis]

Regarding turrets/killboxes;

What gets me is somehow after crash-landing my colonists can just manufacture an automatic turret out of scrap metal but can't make carpet or other thing w/o research.

Automatic turrets should be the last in a line of research and/or have greater cost. So you could start with a manned machine gun (more powerful than a handheld one) > Pillbox (gives defense to colonist too) > Remote control Turret (require manning but colonist is safe) > Maybe Automatic turret.

You could have it (like a mod I've heard) that you build a turret base and then need to mount the weapon, if it cost say 3x a weapon for a basic gun turret (pistol/enfield/etc) and more for advanced one (grenades/m24/etc). You'd have to choose whether colonist would be a better use of your weaponry than a turret.

[Simulacrum]

A better AI is always welcome and I'm pretty sure, that it waits for us somewhere down the line. But it is one of those 20% things that hog the ominous 80% of resources to be done right and according to Ty's blog and his work method that might still be a long way to go.

Yea, I didn't need to (though I did) read his thoughts on the matter to understand why such AI improvements are probably a far away off. My post didn't articulate that, though I suppose I should have. I also probably overestimate the importance of these changes as I tend to play with mods that add a greater end-game, adding way more value to my colonies than would be possible in vanilla. So far all my colonies have literally ended because they were hit by raids with so many attackers in them that I dropped to sub-1FPS and had to eventually just abandon the game. Though I suppose that's more a problem with mods than with the base game.

On another note, I have no non-trivial diagreements with the points made in your post. Mining probably is too easy; it's very fast, very easy, and very cheap. Making it more difficult would do a lot to mitigate the problem, but it doesn't solve the killbox problem. Though I suppose not everyone agree that killboxes are a problem.

Personally, I find them very boring, and I worry that they're so easy and powerful that the game's military challenges have to be balanced around it, which means that players *have* to use killboxes to survive (otherwise, the military aspect would be so easily overcome it may as well not even be there), which I really don't like.

[stefanstr]

I have managed to play Alpha 7 a little bit yesterday, and I couldn't stop thinking about this thread and our discussion about turrets. I had the same thought as you guys: how can it be that colonists cannot make carpets but can make a high-tech piece of intelligent weaponry.

Plus, from the gameplay perspective, turrets are really anticlimactic. I plop a bunch of them, lock my colonists inside during an assault, and only let them out to finish off whoever survived the turrets.

My idea on how to change it: I agree with the suggestion that turrets should require a manned console to be operated (and I think one colonist should not be able to man more than 2 or 3 turrets, max). But (and this is new) I think there should also be a second tier of research allowing you to build an automated console to operate turrets. Such a console would require an AI persona core. With Alpha 7, these can be bought from traders and are less rare than before.

I would make a mod to test these ideas out but I have no idea how to. Might try it though.

[EarthyTurtle]

Here's a 10c idea for the thread, Wind turbines. Wind turbines provide a relatively low output (half the output of solar?), that increases during stormy weather. Cannot be placed under roofs so it must be placed outside. It is however another consistent power source besides geothermal.

[Johnny Masters]

More energy types are always welcome.

Some or most energy production could exhaust waste or pollution, so you'd want to place them in the open (pollution debbuf, more debuffs yay!)

So you either deal with pollution; use very specific power sources or research something like nuclear (and deal with its potential dangers); build outside where you can sprawl around and have more energy options and pollution/waste dissipation available

[Darth Fool]

I don't think that there is anything that will really stop Dwarving.  Let's face it, anything that is remotely realistic with combat situations will ultimately lead towards increased fortifications.  There is a reason people built castles in the middle ages.  To prevent going underground as the only viable option I see a few possibilities...

1) Increased world map/diplomacy interactions.   If you can either pay tribute to pirates to keep them off your back or send your own raids to destroy their colony, you could create a "peaceful" world to live in...minus, of course, the mechanoids.
2) Make outside colonies less prone to attack ("Those new guys have built a fortress in the mountain...I hear they are hiding a pure gold 16 foot tall maltese falcon inside...what do you say we go see?")
3) Having more outside resources that should be protected...have raiders do more to steal food/set fields on fire, destroy walls, hunt game, mine/steal metal, and less trying to blindly charge at the nearest citizen.  Having more different reasons for raids will make it harder to game the system with a single strategy.
4)Malnutrition...With the new diseases, it could be implemented so that over time eating only one or a small number of types of food leads to malnutrition...not a fatal disease, but something that weakens the individual pawns.  Eating a variety of foods cures this, so if only a few types of plants can be grown hydroponically, it would encourage actually having farmland and hunting grounds which must be protected, not to mention a reason to grow all the different options out there.