I'm at the start of winter in a new game on rough with cassandra. The first mission I get is to storm a bandit hideout for a legendary gun. I say ok..send 3 of 5 pawns with starting pistols and all of my food out on the 4 day trek. Pawns will starve on the last day back. When I get to the bandit hideout its defended by 12 well armed badits and I have no chance of completing the mission.
I have found that the missions are never worth doing because the easiest goals are never worth the time spent away/labor lost going on the mission. And the harder goals are never worth the risk.time not working to the important pawns you need to send to accomplish them.
Yes, they are worth it, if the travelling time is not too long. But not because of the reward of the map mission, instead, because of the sheer value of the bandits' equipment/buildings protecting it. Three pawns with pistols will get hammered hard, though. Those missions need at least seven good fighting pawns with some tamed animals as meatwalls/additional combat value.
Bring one person, a few stone blocks and a psychic animal pulser. seal that person in a tiny room, activate pulser, watch and laugh.
Real answer: Not really. Only if the reward is something like a legendary grand sculpture or something along the line. The trouble setting caravan up is usually not worth the reward.
You need to differ between the missions.
The bandit kill mission don't got a timer, you can do it (much) later.
It is special a bad idea to start these at a winter when you got high movement costs.
The other missions with timer, you need to look what you can pickup (mosttimes crap) or what you need to deliver (mosttimes stuff you don't got anyways) and need to decide to spend your time on the mission or to improve your base.
They are worthwhile mid to late game and onwards. You will need, as suggested previously a solid strike team. I would recommend a balance of weapons my team has 3 snipers 3 assault rifles 3 charge rifles and two melee guys with plasteel long swords and shield belts. they can take care of anything I have come across to date. All have powered armour with devilstrand Tshirts and pants.
All male muffalo's for transport (pregnant muffalos will slow down your movement) and away you go. It has certainly improved the ongoing playability for me its always a challenge to take out a full pirate base but very satisfying when you do.
I usually guage if I need or want the reward. I sent a three man squad to get a trove of neurotrainers that I used on my backups. It had a few combat and crafting ones. Turns out it was only guarded by manhunter elk.
On the other hand, I lost a colony striking a pirate hideout that had the faction leader and started me in a small valley with no cover. I lost too many valuable pawns. At least I iced the leader with a head shot.
Item stashes in the early game (4-5 ppl) are really good, the most memorable games are those where I managed to take one of those stashes early. The fights can be tough, if you dont know whats guarding it bring at least one survival rifle/great bow in case you get turrets.
Quote from: Razzoriel on September 08, 2017, 03:29:11 PM
Yes, they are worth it, if the travelling time is not too long. But not because of the reward of the map mission, instead, because of the sheer value of the bandits' equipment/buildings protecting it. Three pawns with pistols will get hammered hard, though. Those missions need at least seven good fighting pawns with some tamed animals as meatwalls/additional combat value.
Seven is overkill. Just 3 is fine
.... with doomsday rocket launcher.
:P
In my opinion, under A17 i generally don't think missions are worth it at the moment (only late game perhaps when you have too many pawns and can afford to lose some):
- The food consumption to make even small trips is mad. To make a 15 day round trip journey, with a moderate force, would mean all my food supply (300 meals). And that is travel during the summer.
- Your pawns often have a mental breakdown during the journey because joy is not satisfied. Worse, pawns often break during the mission or even afterwards when you are trying to collect or mine your hard earned reward, which is just frustrating after traveling so long.
- Limbs blow off at alarming regularity when assaulting a raider outpost/base, and if a pawn loses a leg then you are screwed for the trip back.
- Disease quickly sets in even for minor scratches and scrapes. My fully competent assault force turned up to mine resources, faced 20 manhunter foxes, managed to kill all the foxes with only minor scratches and all my assault force got infections before I had a chance to start mining.
- Then to top it off you often haven't got the weight capability to haul the goods back. For resource missions i often mine it all, but even with a convoy system of going back and forth with the mined resources I have to leave most behind because of the time limits of staying at the location. Why is there even a time limit for resource missions?
- Attacking a enemy base (not an outpost) yields no reward in money, resource or gameplay terms. Destroying a base seems to have no tactical or strategic advantage, but for a small outpost you get about 2000 silver?
So in summary I feel there is little incentive to risk pawns on traveling, and it is safer (but more boring) to buy the resources you need when it comes to late game. Travelling should be fun, but more often than not it is punishing because of some questionable gameplay mechanics.
If version A18 at least reduced the amount of food needed to travel, stopped (or even just reduced) the need for joy on missions, increased the time you could stay at locations, and provided some meaningful benefit to destroying pirate bases (as is the case with outposts), then that at least would make journeys worth the risk - mid-to-late game anyway. There is no benefit in early game as there is no way to gauge the threat of what awaits you.
In the absence of the devs sorting out travel (if they do) then i'd recommend the MRE mod. That way you can travel longer distances without using up your entire colony's normal food supplies to attempt it. The camping mod is a good idea for at least being able to stop to refresh pawns with joy, but i dont think it works for A17 (well that mod doesnt for me anyway!).
If you are planning a 15 day round trip that's covering a lot of ground. You must be passing by a lot of friendly townships. For that length of journey I usually pack around 150 packaged survival meals and then lots of Smokeleaf joints and Yayo. Then at each town I pickup pemmican, simple meals and sometime fine meals to top the food side of things up. at least 100 medicine to stop those infections fast.
Yes rainforests and other biomes will slow you down and you will need to plan accordingly.
6 to 8 pack animals (Muffalo or Dromedaries) will be required for an 8-10 person strike team.
Even then this is Rimworld and things do generally go bad at the worst time. Keep trying though and you will find it can be fun and opens a new layer to the game.
i saw a guy stream use 6 full bionic men ( arms legs eyes spine ) and he ran round the outpost with assault rifle killing everything with little resistance.
un-modded ofc, he was using pemmican ( lasts longer ), and he raided 5 outposts before returning to hes base with components mined from every outpost
hes rewards for 5 outposts was 10k silver, 100 components, + drugs + guns... and he could do it all again after a manhunter raid
I don't think bionic spine is in vanilla.
No, map missions arent worth. Right now I feel like a lot in the game is broken, like loading cargo pods which takes forever and your pawn wont eat, sleep and joy meanwhile. Also they have some weird habbit of hauling 35 and then 5 or 6 units of cargo repeatedly.
Well also prizes with outposts are way too smal for what you have to deal with.
AND THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: I WOULD APPRICHIATE IF OTHER FRACTION BASES AND OUTPOSTS WOULD AT LEAST LOOOOK LIKE THEY CAN SUSTAIN THEMSELVES. God Im too sick of this bullshit. Somehow 20 enemy pirates (or tribalists or any fraction) live with only 200 pemicam stored and 3 by 3 growing zone, whit no joy objects, NO FUCKING KITCHEN TO COOK THEIR MEALS and they all live in the same room?
How about I attack the fraction base like that:
I attack during winter and wall off myself and wait for every enemy to freeze or I get a shitton of food and wall myself off and wait till they starve to death. Is this possible?
No need to shout. I am not sure why you have an issue loading your pods. Maybe let us know what your trying to load or how many people you have set to haul. Also how far are your pawns travelling to get what you want to launch?
Yes the Bases that we get to attack are not setup for realistic functionality but I am sure that this is something that will be improved over time. However the resources that you get, components is the major one for me, certainly make it worth your while. Every now and then you get uranium too.
No you can not just wait them out you will be attacked within around 48 hours if you don't start the fight yourself. Better to prepare defences and then attack when you are ready.
Do map missions scale with the difficulty level?
Quote from: freemapa on October 03, 2017, 09:18:45 PM
Do map missions scale with the difficulty level?
Not to my knowledge but I only attack Pirate bases have never felt the need to harm other factions. The biggest things that add difficulty is biome rainforest is hard work and if the base has a mortar or not.
I never go for them. Mostly because messing with caravans is a pain and brings me more frustration than benefits.
Enemy colonies are not map missions but I'll say you may attack them if you have a psychic animal pulser and a place to hunker down but then you'd have 2.5 days to leave, which is too little time until all the manhunter animals go to sleep. You'd have to use a trick by claiming the place as a part of your colony then leave once you loot.
Outposts similar to colonies - a psychic animal pulser and easy win. It's even worth launching one of your pawns and earn ~2000 silvers for the cost of a psychic animal pulser which has no other purpose to be used. Also, the timer won't start until all turrets are captured and all manhunter animals calm down, in contrast to the case of raided colonies.
Item stashes are the easiest missions, especially in the beginning. The difficulty depends on wealth of one of your colonies (depending around which colony the item stash decides to appear, it's hard to determine if you have multiple colonies near each other) at the moment an event message about item stash pops up. The threat may be shown.
- If the threat are turrets, the enemy is an outlander (confirm?) or a pirate faction. There are plenty of turrets (and a mortar if your wealth is greater) and one (or two with decent wealth or a bit more, but relatively a small amount) armored pawn. You may build up a cover and wait until the enemy pawn attacks or try shooting turrets, bateries or solar panels, though these building contain metal and components you may want to loot and send with cargo pods back to your colony.
- If the threat is a bastion, the enemy is a tribal faction. It's similar to outposts there, but an amount of tribals guarding item stash is a bit more than raiders attacking colony after rescuing a refugee, it may be not worth a toss.
- If the threat is munhunter, it's a bit animal assaults than during a manhunter pack event. You may consider building a shelter and wait.
- If the threat isn't determined, it might be one of these above or it may be no danger. You can flee from the map if the threat appears to be too big.
If a non-hostile faction offers a trade - use your common sense. You may not want to trade thousands of food or plants for a masterwork stone sculpture, but trading 8 longswords (whatever material/quality/durability) for ~5000 silver is a great deal.
I'm another Lost Tribe player, also in Cassandra rough.
I'm not doing any of them either and by the time I get an efficient team like mentioned by others, I would probably be almost launching my ship and had already declined like 50+ of those incidents before. Which means bad game development.
For tribal games, we need a grade scale down so that it becomes more viable. The same could be said for Ancient structures. Opening early with two short bows, a wooden spear, club and jade knife versus 4 mechanoids is ridiculous too. It looks like Tynan designs only for Crash-landed and then just passes new features equally to lost tribe without any adjustments.
I would really love to see those World quest incidents allowing players to claim "captured" outposts so that we can turn them into peripheral colonies for ourselves, instead of banishing into air in 24hs...
Quote from: Yoshida Keiji on October 04, 2017, 03:38:39 PM
I'm not doing any of them either and by the time I get an efficient team like mentioned by others, I would probably be almost launching my ship and had already declined like 50+ of those incidents before. Which means bad game development.
That is the end game at this point "Launching the ship". Just because you put self imposed limits on how you wish to play the game does not equal "bad game development". As you stated you do not have to do these missions in order to complete the game.
I am also surprised that playing tribal you don't find yourself in a position to take advantage or explore this aspect of the game. Maybe its Cassandra I usually play Randy Rough but I don't see how that would make a huge difference. You still should be able to get colonists with an assortment of weaponry from sniper rifles to chain shotguns (if you like) with armour vests and helmets prior to building the ship. you can have a go with 6 colonists with this setup if you wanted to have a go at the missions, that is enough to get the job done.
No, I didn't self-impose not doing. I was attacking everywhere in A16. But since A17 and all the limbs loss, is when I decided to stop caravanning.
My current game for example, I'm at day 170 and so far only seen 1 Bionic Leg and 1 Bionic Eye from traders, and I didn't had the money for the BL by the time they came. I lost one guy recently out of 4 who had a peg leg. I have a Prosthetic Leg still boxed. And 10 pawns. My latest raids count is 7 straight mechanoid attacks in a row, so I'm farming Scyther Blades (4). I can't improve my economy with 2 chemical fascination guys. Playing in Boreal Forest, and it doesn't look worthwhile to build greenhouse to produce devilstrand at this point. Already researching ship technologies.
In A16, it was easier to go caravanning with pawns who had no movement injuries or just scratches that wouldn't slow them below 90% (that requirement is my own).
I never went much for caravaning for several reasons:
1. The loot ain't trustworthy
I dunno but I never was interested in the loot that was offered. Most ressources aren't very valuable or not transportable. Only things that would trill my mind would be plasteel, and even then I mostly don't need it then, but in a far future or so. Problem here isn't the fact that the reward ain't good, it's that there is no ressource of interest, as you don't need things very importantly quick and can be replaced. The only thing I ever care, would be components.
About neurotrainers, there ain't many skills that cannot be trained by itself in more ore less time, so I rarely think them necessary to be used. Many skills aren't even worth to raise up to higher levels.
Guns and Armor could be a thing, but most time I have no usage for 3xplasteel shiv, 1xpistol and a bad quality LMG.
2. The difficulty
Especially early, when you ain't got the colonists affordable, the advanced equipment or animal support, it is probably not worth the risk. Probably because You have no clue on the actual difficulty of the encounter, so I cannot calculate as long as I doesn't have my win-'em-all Team. I'd wish there to be a small clue about what you can expect( e.g. "There are about one dozen of bandits armed to teeth", " Five madmen with rocket launchers", "Two jerks and a coma" or "It's a horde of furry tortoises!)
3. The hunger
Food on caravans doesn't feel balanced. When there's an AI caravan visiting you see 10 people with 3 pack animals and 99% of their goods aren't food.
When I send caravans myself about 50% have to be food, and it would be best to put a pool table beside them to prevent joy crisis.
AI caravan never had a pool table with them, but multiple bad quality granite sculptures (who the hell would carry these??)
I think there is no way on how to reduce food consumption in traveling, but I think it needs a way to resplenish it. Here I think about pawns hunting offscreen, animals producing milk or eggs or something.
This could be toggled in caravans, similar to colonists timemanagement, preplanning a caravan's relax, travel, hunt and sleeping time. By this a well prepared caravan could make very big journeys, presupposed, they have a good hunter, medical supply and weapons.
4. Defense
The game design, or better said "Tynan's wish", is to make us go out and travel around the world. Meanwhile the pressure on our colony is getting is getting higher and higher, by a permanent shedule of raiding types that require most attention of the colony management. Both alone are cool things, but in the end "the risk" you take in a caravan, ain't the caravan, it's the weakening of the colony, think.
5. Hard work all day
A minor, or maybe a major, issue is that most of the time there is quite enogh work to be done in your colony. Especially when the lategame infrastructure isn't fully completed yet, my colonists are 24/7.. I mean 24/15 busy doing things.
When everything is done in my colony, I already built the equipment I need, don't need to skillup my colonists, and have the industry to buy everything that I want. going out for a treasure would be only for the fun, not for the need.
I might be doin it wrong, but caravaneering doesn't make me happy.
What makes map missions worthwhile is : Droppods
( and free loot and prisoners. )
Embrace Maxim 1.
1.) Fly in.
2.) Crush your enemy.
=== PILLAGE ! ===
3.) Exploit the map as much as you can, while ressuplying your guys from home. Leave everything on the ground.
Only roof stuff that deteriorates.
=== THEN BURN. ===
4.) Leave when the time is up.
Exploit the fact that you can overload your caravan at this moment and take everything with you.
Your caravan will not make a single step.
Instead.
5.) Create a new outpost.
6.) Drop only what you need from your pawns, they will move just fine with tons of stuff in their backpack.
=== GET PAID TWICE. ===
7.) Exploit the shit out of this map.
8.) Build Droppod Launchers and send everything home.
Finally I have to admit, especially in early game it would be nice if World Events would be closer than a half-year long round trip by foot.
And I only think about this when there are at least one or two pieces of good quality endgame equipment on the line.
The cheapest mission of them all is the peace talks ( is this even vanilla ? ) Get there, talk to some guy, hang around to exploit and collect the stuff lying around, gain additional points by caring for starving friendlies.
Gain additional loot by stripping them.
...and of course on top of all the already mentioned difficulties...we also have Infections.
This spring - summer time I had a nice window to go caravanning as all the harvest was done and abundant with pemmican already made from early seasons...but...
* Fibrous mechanites.
* Flu.
* Muscle parasites.
All three waves one after the other stacking on my pawns...
... but Tynan wants us to go out... yeah, right.
Do pawns self-tend now in A17 while traveling?
Quote from: Bolgfred on October 05, 2017, 08:21:33 AM
2. The difficulty
Especially early, when you ain't got the colonists affordable, the advanced equipment or animal support, it is probably not worth the risk. Probably because You have no clue on the actual difficulty of the encounter, so I cannot calculate as long as I doesn't have my win-'em-all Team. I'd wish there to be a small clue about what you can expect( e.g. "There are about one dozen of bandits armed to teeth", " Five madmen with rocket launchers", "Two jerks and a coma" or "It's a horde of furry tortoises!)
Agreed. It would be nice to have a better idea of what you might face otherwise there's not much point sending people in early game because you might be up against a well armed horde and get slaughtered, but it also means you might pass up on raiding that settlement that had only two jerks guarding it. Not asking for an exact number of enemies and exact weapon types, but something like those examples you just gave would be great. Maybe we could even get a new type of tech as an exploratory/scout drone. We have bionic body parts and mechanoids that attack us, why can't we build a drone of some sort to scout out an area and give us more detail of what we might find. Number of enemies, equipment, number of buildings and infrastructure, and even how much natural resources/ore there is in the area. Or you could have it as some sort of researchable/trainable skill to teach a pawn (so tribal's can also scout) so they can move alone without needing a caravan, can move faster, and have whatever skills needed to scout and survive alone while doing so. Maybe it could just require a pawn to have a certain value in certain skills, like melee and/or ranged, animals and/or plants (to hunt and eat on the move), good eyesight, no/minimal movement penalties, etc.
Quote from: Bolgfred on October 05, 2017, 08:21:33 AM
3. The hunger
Food on caravans doesn't feel balanced. When there's an AI caravan visiting you see 10 people with 3 pack animals and 99% of their goods aren't food.
When I send caravans myself about 50% have to be food, and it would be best to put a pool table beside them to prevent joy crisis.
AI caravan never had a pool table with them, but multiple bad quality granite sculptures (who the hell would carry these??)
I think there is no way on how to reduce food consumption in traveling, but I think it needs a way to resplenish it. Here I think about pawns hunting offscreen, animals producing milk or eggs or something.
This could be toggled in caravans, similar to colonists timemanagement, preplanning a caravan's relax, travel, hunt and sleeping time. By this a well prepared caravan could make very big journeys, presupposed, they have a good hunter, medical supply and weapons.
The food thing for caravans doesn't make much sense to me either. AI caravans don't carry that much food and it seems rather sucky for us to have to take so much food which means we can't carry as much other stuff which is the main point of caravaning. Like you mentioned it'd be great to see some on-the-move foraging. Unless it's a desert or ice biome there should be plants and berries on the map you could harvest or animals you could hunt as you move through. Automatically of course. That would suck to micromanage.
Let's be basic: by year 2 on a 30 days growth period tile you can easily have 100k+ worth of items. Reward of an outpost: 2k.
Rougly 2% of your item wealth for maybe 50% worth of manpower + travel costs + potential loss. Most of the time, these are just for fun.
I mainly do the outposts for two reasons:
1. components (if the map is at least hills)
2. prisoners (because with my usual 2 bases there usually is a need for more people).
This is for mid-late game of course:
1. Prepare a number of drop pods.
2. Load your ranged fighters into pods, load melee fighters (with plasteel swords, and power armor + shield belts) into a different group of pods. Have a couple more empty pods.
3. Launch the ranged group, set to drop at edge.
4. Once they are there and you have the sight of the place, launch the melee group so that they drop on the enemy. Meanwhile start attacking with the ranged group. This tactic gets the enemy killed fast. (ranged group can be small, their main job is scouting the area before droppod assault).
5. Now use the empty pods to send some components + chemfuel, with which you build a pod launcher on site (enough steel can usually be found on site). And start mining every component/gold/jade you can find on the map. It's very much possible to collect up to 100 components in those 2 days you have, and send them back via pod launcher.
6. Before leaving, don't forget to uninstall any turrets/furniture there might be, and take them with you if you have capacity. Turrets can instead be disassembled for components.
Now the optional parts, if you have some mods (misc robots and dropships):
5.1. Send a couple Hauler bot bases in pods. Since the outpost will have a solar panel, you can connect them to it, this makes fast mining even faster (bots haul the components to the launcher). Don't forget to deactivate and uninstall them before leaving.
5.2. Send in your dropship to pick everyone and everything up, instead of going back by foot.
Missions are rarely worthwhile, and sometimes impossible (hey bring us 1000 agaves soon trololol).
Occasionally you get stuff like "bring ~1k or less potatoes", which is great if you're growing potatoes in gravel, you get way more silver than normally selling them and only need 1-3 pawns to carry the stuff.
Outposts for stuff like megascreen TV can be decent too, if you figure out a way to beat the outpost without sending most of the colony. An added bonus is deconstructing their stuff for components, and mining stuff on the map for additional resources you might not have at home.
Player base conclusion:
* We have eradicated "Caravanning" for safe travel via drop pod. So "Misc" like Caravan Spot are literally useless.
* World incidents have been pushed to late game only, meaning that all other proposals before that are just annoying pop-up notifications that serve no purpose.
I guess this only makes happy the sedentary players who stay longer than 5 years but to those who launch the ship A17 only meant rivers and roads, just an aesthetic update.