I wonder if there is a bit of a problem with the whole concept. Why are they building a colony that is likely to kill them? Why not just build a comms desk and signal a ship and spend the $1000 getting the hell out? :)
Maybe contacting ships should only happen a lot later in the game when the colonists have something worth staying for like children & homes and a lot of research is needed before ships can be contacted?
BTW this is shaping up to be a classic. I have been near addicted to it since I bought a few days ago. It's knocked my Gnomoria addiction into a cocked hat. I loved looking at the prototypes as well. The tactical game reminded me of the old SSI game Roadwar2000. Pity no one has yet made a new version of that.
Use search function. You'll find identical topic where someone asks OP to use search function :P
In short: space travel is VERY slow, traders are not equipped to house passengers, traders are unlikely to pick up unknown folk in fear of riders, colonists have nothing and no-one to come back to (time needed for space travel makes sure of that).
I did use the search and nowt came up that had anything to do with the question. ;D Using the terms 'why, build, colony' only comes up with my question unless I am doing the search wrong ???
If travel is so slow there seems to be a huge amount of ships and travellers flitting about in the bit of space the moon resides. In such a universe is it not likely that enterprising souls would start up rescue services for the large amount of folk who seem to get themselves stranded? They have no problem in picking up slaves. I could understand it if there was a universal law stating that all rescued travellers become the property of the rescuer or suchlike.
It has come up before, in diferent forms. I think many people miss another point entirely, and that is we are not really building a colony in this game. In the sense that a colony will grow into a new city, at any rate. This is a group of people trying to survive a hostile world in a hostile galaxy. All they are building is a base to survive, that is all.
Quote from: CharlieC on December 05, 2013, 08:35:59 AM
I wonder if there is a bit of a problem with the whole concept. Why are they building a colony that is likely to kill them? Why not just build a comms desk and signal a ship and spend the $1000 getting the hell out? :)
Maybe they want to stay, because it's their new home planet :P
I think leaving the planet will be a feature in the endgame, or some typ of quest to win a szenario. Building a colony fits the space between this :)
Heya, I have just bought the game, not even played it yet, but from the text on the website it seems that this is a hard sci-fi universe.
That means there are realistic limits on space craft, and as you may or may not know taking off from a planet takes an immense amount of energy, especially if there is an atmosphere, which is why space shuttles take off with a massive rocket after just a few minutes they discard that. The energy that it would take to land the ship on the ground would just about cripple their fuel supplies, if not ground them.
But you may ask the question, 'Well in that case, how do they get the supplies you sell them to their ship?'
I imagine they use some kind of small drone with a high Thrust to weight ratio to pick up the small amount of supplies you give them.
Anyhow, I have no idea what this game is actually like to play, so I may be completely wrong on this :) .
I am sure it will all get worked out in the end after all the game is in early stages of development. Really having a great time playing with what we have at the moment. Did I really just see a group of those boomrats thingys get zapped by a lightning strike?? Ha ha.
Great stuff Ty, lots of great ideas and I'm still just finding out what does what.
What I'm saying about why you can't just hitch a ride with traders:
It would be like saying, hey, you're stuck in Bangkok, why can't you just hitch a ride home with a passing bead-seller on a tuk-tuk?
The people you're trading with are in-system traders, not interstellar. You could ride with them, but they'd probably just take you as slaves. Even if they didn't, they're not going anywhere you really want to be.
Real space isn't like in Star Wars or Star Trek. The difference between a planetary voyage and a voyage to another star is a factor of a trillion.
You could technically arrest everybody and sell as slaves ;) BOOM, here's your escape plan :D
Ahh interplanetary travel and not intersteller. I have a clearer picture of the setting now. Ta. BTW your prototypes are fascinating thank you for sharing them, I spent the first couple of nights playing with them without even getting to the game. ;D
You can have interstellar/interplanetary trade without a ship that can land and take off from a planet's surface.
No matter what level of technology you are imaginining the action of deorbiting, landing on a planet, and taking off again is a big deal in any realistic, probable, or practical sci-fi. The idea of in-system traders would requires that there are populations nearby living and working on ships or space stations or living on neighboring planets.
A trader shooting down boxes is actually not a bad way to imaging how it could work. Getting things back up without some kind of shuttle seems like it needs some explaining, how about a cargo drone? Slave transport down can be in some kind of suspended animation pod, but going back up would need a launch vehicle or shuttle, unless we have teleporters.
Why escape? The likelyhood of a random ship failure ending up with you landing on a habitable planet is very unlikely. I would have to think that this planet was the intended destination, just not with the intended circumstances.
Though your arrival may have sucked, you would have no choice but to continue with what you came there to do. I could also see where all the raiders and wanderers were actually fellow survivors of your colony ship. Tynan stated the inspiration of Firefly, and their wild west vision of space colonization. Included in their backstory is that Earth had became a polluted wasteland that mankind fled, which is not difficult to imagine from where we stand today. The concept of escape requires a 'somewhere else' to go. If humans were to find a planet that we could live on without spacesuits and domes, that planet would have so many people on it that it would resemble ants on a candy bar.
FYI, there is another kickstarter game called 'Planet Explorers' which has an interesting first person MMO/Minecraft composite play style. Their backstory is eerily similar.
http://planetexplorers.pathea.net (http://planetexplorers.pathea.net)
Yet another is Starbound. Read their backstory: www.playstarbound.com/about (http://playstarbound.com/about/)
Quote from: Tynan on December 05, 2013, 12:35:39 PMIt would be like saying, hey, you're stuck in Bangkok, why can't you just hitch a ride home with a passing bead-seller on a tuk-tuk?
The problem with this analogy is, you're not stuck in Bangkok. You're stuck upland in rural Thailand. It's not a completely appropriate analogy, since in RimWorld you're in completely unsettled wilderness and even in rural Thailand there's people around, but it works. In this analogy, paying a bead-merchant on a tuk-tuk to take you to Bangkok would be a step up, because Bangkok is a big city and you would
probably rather be in a big city than in the middle of nowhere, digging at a mountainside and shoveling huge quantities of human remains into graves.
QuoteThe people you're trading with are in-system traders, not interstellar. You could ride with them, but they'd probably just take you as slaves. Even if they didn't, they're not going anywhere you really want to be.
If they're intrasystem traders, that's
worse. Intrasystem trade means that those ships have to have somewhere to fuel, somewhere to offload their wares, somewhere (other than you) where they
acquire their wares, somewhere they repair and get maintenance and the like.
It means that there is
definitely either some sort of major metropolitan pressurized habitat or ground city either with affilitated space station or ground-launch system, (or that these ships are capable of landing and taking off as they see fit) somewhere in system, which would be a
huge step up from "digging into the rocks in the remotest wilderness."
It also means that if they
are in-system traders, then their companies are housed in-system. Companies like making money, so even if the carriage situation is a problem the first few times they come around, and even if they're heartless bastards who won't front their own money to mount a rescue mission once their company HQ knows where you are, you could
hire one of them (probably one of the ones who does not deal in slaves, IE most of them,) to refit one of their ships for passenger transport and collect all of your colonists for resettlement somewhere else more conductive to continued survival and less conductive to constant, incessant raids by Borderlands psycho-raiders.
Agreed on the fact, that traders being in-system create more problems than it fixes. If they were in fact interstellar, but limited to two, maybe three neighbouring systems (in a natural, small cluster), that would make much more sense to me. If we're even considering existence of long-range interstellar travel, in-system travel is always kind of trivial. In present, in-system travel is possible in theory.
A trade ship would have only space for the skeletal crew to run the ship, no more. Which means they would not be so readily able to pick up travelers. Besides, they see all the corpses and guns, they would probably not trust you. Let me paint a picture: You stumble upon a group of people packing heat, surrounded by bodies, on a planet known to be frequented by raiders. Would you believe their "We were stranded here, please let me on board" story? Also, with people capturing random travelers and selling them as slaves, would you really be comfortable getting on board the ship and leaving your weapons behind? We're not talking saints here, we're talking simple traders in a hostile world who want to offload their wares and gtfo. They probably are only selling/buying from you out of the goodness of their hearts.
That's all dandy and was said before - but that works with inter-system traders. If they have hub in the system and at least one other colony (to drop that goods at), they have some police forces (because raiders) and they have resources to mount up a SAR party. It's obvious no one would care if we're talking about some system X lightyears away, that just happens to be on the way of a populated trade route. If we're talking about crashing liner and stranded people few light minutes away... that is a whole different perspective.
I'm still not so sure. We're still dealing with a society on the rim, people out for themselves. And I pictured the colonists being from an interstellar liner, so they are outsiders and would be just as lost in a metropolis as they would be where they're at. Though another game in the RimWorld universe where the goal is to make it home by hitching rides/doing jobs for people would be pretty cool. But that is completely beyond the scope of this game.
Other plot hole people never mention that is more problematic: At a certain point, the original three colonists always end up dead. Why the hell are a bunch of former raiders and drifters and travelers still trying to keep the colony going? Travelers came from somewhere, they could just go back to being on their marry way. Raiders could sign on with next raider party.
Edit: But in all honesty, it doesn't matter. The story is there for gameplay, and if I am willing to suspend disbelief for the ridiculous stuff Vin Diesel does, I can do it for a video game.
Quote from: Tynan on December 05, 2013, 12:35:39 PM
Real space isn't like in Star Wars or Star Trek. The difference between a planetary voyage and a voyage to another star is a factor of a trillion.
You guys can download the demo of Kerbal Space Program and fly to the closest celestial body, the Mun, with time warp x100. Now do the same thing for the closest planet.
One thing I do wonder about is how my grain gets into orbit though. Lifting a payload into orbit is often more expensive than the interplanetary trip itself. Dropping cargo pods from orbit is cheap, the other way around though... :P
Quote from: Col_Jessep on December 09, 2013, 11:08:57 PMOne thing I do wonder about is how my grain gets into orbit though. Lifting a payload into orbit is often more expensive than the interplanetary trip itself. Dropping cargo pods from orbit is cheap, the other way around though... :P
If you can get something into orbit, it's half-way to anywhere.
I just assume the ship lashes down with tractor beams or something. I mean, you
could make it so you'd have to build a mass driver to lift payloads into orbit, but that would just make setting up trade more of a pain in the arse.
You start a colony to enslave people :D.
Quote from: TinnedEpic on December 10, 2013, 02:58:22 PM
You start a colony to enslave people :D.
And force them to harvest potatoes so you are best potato-seller in the sector.
Wonder if they know you are supposed to wait for them to grow a potato on the bottom before you eat them or are they eating the leaves? As they seem to be growing them pretty fast.
The ships may only be equiped to hold a skeleton crew but everyone has their price, no matter how many graves there are. Also it would only take one or two traders to be in orbit during a raid to see why there were so many bodies. Your colonists would be offered employment and rescued by the merchant companies to use as guards because of the way they handle themselves. Seeing as there are hoards of bandits.
Quote from: killerx243 on December 14, 2013, 03:40:45 PMeveryone has their price, no matter how many graves there are
In rimworlds that price is usually "whatever doesn't take me to one of these graves" ;)
Quote from: killerx243 on December 14, 2013, 03:40:45 PMYour colonists would be offered employment and rescued by the merchant companies to use as guards because of the way they handle themselves. Seeing as there are hoards of bandits
Erm... they would need to be REAAAALLY desperate for new hands to risk something that sketchy ^^' A simple "nope" and you just wasted a mountain of cash helping some freeloaders that ain't good for nuthin'.
Have you seen all the raiders? Clearly they must outnumber more civilized folk seeing as they hurl themselves at you with no regard for their own lives. There would always be the demand for people who can fight; after all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Quote from: killerx243 on December 14, 2013, 06:22:05 PM
Have you seen all the raiders? Clearly they must outnumber more civilized folk seeing as they hurl themselves at you with no regard for their own lives. There would always be the demand for people who can fight; after all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Game logic vs. real world logic. If you take things literally in videogames suddenly best titles of all times come apart in seams. Sorry, no.
And there is absolutely no indication there is not enough capable hands on homeworlds of these trade companies. Darn, was I to guess? I would guess they have more than enough, seeing how freely they travel through raiders-infested territories. Also - mercenary companies try to win their employers and provide solid service for your buck since day one. Some unknown folk on some deserted planet do not provide nothing solid for your loads of bucks till day rescue. Risk vs. reward is preeeeetty clear on that one! ;)
We don't know how much interstellar fair costs in this universe. Also, none of the merchants we've come across seem suited to having passengers on-board, except of course the slave traders. So besides sending out word for rescue from their government/company or maybe trying to charter a passenger ship to pick them up (very expensive in what is a clearly a dangerous part of space), its seems the best course of action is to hunker down and try to survive.
The planet itself likely has a whole load of debris orbiting it what with all the junk falling everywhere. The travelers and escape pods are probably survivors of previous crashes. The raiders too, except that they've been twisted by years of living on the edge. They likely hide their makeshift ships in the debris field above, ambushing ships that pass by. In turn, their victims ships expand the debris field and some of the survivors go on to become new raiders. It's a vicious cycle. :'(