I already narrated my first game here (http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=20.msg43#msg43), and I will update this post with new stories each time I complete one.
Second story
My three colonists started building a shelter by carving inside a big rock hill, adding bedrooms here and there, with an extra for a prisoner. Everything went smoothly, the first raider was duly captured and locked down, but a Muffalo went mad and made a mess out of my three colonists when the power ran out at night and one of the colonists opened the door to pee outside.
Suggestion : make the mad animals attack target in a short range around them instead of making them go through the entire map to attack a colonist that is behind a closed door.
Third story
In a dark world where every hope seemed lost, those brave colonists let a light shine. Be ready for a fantastic space adventure with stranded colonists spilling sweat and blood to defend themselves against elements, raiders, and a mad squirrel! *record screeching*
My game went well, recruiting slowing but steadily, outnumbered and outgunned but the second raiders' raid but smart tactics left no casualties in my team, repairing fuming rumbles from weather hazards, and when the situation stabilized, my game crashed. My best story by far, but it lacks the punchline quality of my two previous stories.
I may or may not add screenshots next time, if I remember to hit the screenshot button regularly during the game.
Edit : Added a screenshot of the last autosave before crash.
[attachment deleted by admin: too old]
I laughed at each one of these. Thanks.
I'll have to think about animal attacks. They are supposed to be a bit nuts, Ghost and the Darkness type animals. The problem with making them only attack locally is that they could go crazy with nobody around, sit silently for a long time, then attack after you've forgotten about them.
Did one Muffalo really kill everyone?
Also, are you aware that you start with a gun on the ground? I should train that.
Love to see some screenshots! Even if you just load your old saves to take them.
Actually I tried to shoot the muffalo, but it was the gun bearer than went to open the door, and he got stunned and stomped fast. The other unarmed colonists weren't that much fortunate.
Maybe the mad animal wouldn't feed themselves anymore, condemnig to a sure death after a long while, at least reducing their health when stumbling upon it. "The Hunt for the Mad Muffalo" is also a great story in itself, instead of "The Mad Muffalo that stomped the poor lad opening a door".
A screenshot of the colony before the second raid.
[attachment deleted by admin: too old]
And another one after the bloody battle.
[attachment deleted by admin: too old]
I don't think the mad animals would be too big of an issue (initially), if the auto-turrets would actually fire on them :p
Is that a design choice?
So far it is. I'm considering how to approach that. The idea with the animals was to create a threat which isn't as grave as the pirates and is also different in kind. But if the turrets just murder every hostile-looking squirrel, you wouldn't even notice them.
I'm going to see how it feels once characters actually defend themselves and respond to danger automatically instead of totally ignoring it. Really, the colonist should hit the squirrel back.
Currently, my threat priority is as following :
- Fire-causing dry storms, for obvious reasons I won't repeat
- Mad animals, because they can chew through your colony members at a dreadful close range without you noticing or causing friendly fire and boomrat disasters.
- Raiders, whatever the number, because their arrival is noticed, their attack is noticed and turrets and colonists automatically fire on them. It's a clear and predictable threat, there's many ways to deal with them, and fending off raiders awards weapons and/or prisoners.
Squirrel pelts!
Yes, please :D
Fourth Story
This is the story of Watts. Coming for a long ancestry of noble military officers, he naturally took in charge the small colony leadership. His wits and social abilities quickly made forget his attitude towards menial tasks that he would never do. Inspired by its military training, he conceived the colony as a fortress, giving as little chance to any hostile to get a shot at his fellow colonists.
He also took in charge the recruiting process, quickly turning raging raiders into useful workers to compensate his own disregard for manual tasks. The colony grew as fast as the hydroponic potato plants did, exchanging the freedom of slaves offered by passing slave traders for crops.
Excerpt from his journal :
"Practically speaking, a rock-dug colony is the best for defense, but it has a high energy overhead cost for all the lighting. This requires more generators and more batteries, negating the resource gain of not having to build walls. Also, since there's no wall to pass wires in, there's electrical conduits everywhere, making it very dangerous for small children and squirrels alike."
[attachment deleted by admin: too old]
That is awesome. I wish we had a better quality screenshot!
Also, I noticed a really worryingly large number of graves down there.
Also, this is the kind of base that makes me want to make batteries really, really flammable and possibly explosive (with toxic chemical vapors).
Screenshots: I have better resolution/quality ones, but the 128kB limit on upload has me going through image-manipulation hoops to show as much as I want with the best quality possible.
Graves: It's about a third of the whole graveyard. Only foolish raiders are buried there. They may have been foolish, but they were human nonetheless. There should be a muffalo or two, also.
Batteries: Before you make anything more flammable, first add fire extinguishers. Pretty please? I couldn't help to see that current batteries efficiency is maxed at 50%, is it a scheduled future research path?
I just gotta say, that last base picture makes me pretty jealous.
Why thank you, sir :)
Damn that's a lot of solar panels.
I thought the number of batteries would have make you wonder more than solar panels, but like Watts said in his own words, an underground base is power-consuming due to all the lamps needed. There's also a significant number of automatic turrets, both outside and inside the base.
Not shown on that picture: the geothermal station and the 50-100 meters power conduit linking it to the base. I would have needed 3-4 solar panels more to achieve the same power output.
Quote from: Hypolite on September 21, 2013, 05:07:20 PM
I thought the number of batteries would have make you wonder more than solar panels, but like Watts said in his own words, an underground base is power-consuming due to all the lamps needed. There's also a significant number of automatic turrets, both outside and inside the base.
Not shown on that picture: the geothermal station and the 50-100 meters power conduit linking it to the base. I would have needed 3-4 solar panels more to achieve the same power output.
Damn, alpha is alpha I suppose, those power outputs need balancing.
I also feel that standing lights power consumption is wayyy too much but since hydroponic farming is also OP, I was able to trade for minerals and build extra solar panel/batteries easily.
Geothermal is actually supposed to be waaay more powerful than solar, just because you have to go to it and can't make it anywhere. It's intended to get you to have some asset distant across the map that can be threatened by pirates, etc. I like having some incentive (besides farming) to spread out to balance the natural incentives to make the base compact. My attempt at fixing one of DF's classic problems, which is that you can just wall yourself off into a super-compact underground base and stay that way.
Well, looking at the numbers, it looks like the geothermal is *only* 3-4 times better than solar, but I didn't take into account that it works also during the night. I should have built double the solar panel to have the same daily output including the night. So geothermal is already a good investment, and I considered fortifying it or even fortifying the whole power conduit, and built batteries to store all this extra power, but in the end nothing ever happened, except for this small power conduit fire and regular maintenance.
Yeah, there's no real threats to the power cables.
I want to have more mischievous threats who may come in and just attack a building and leave. Animals or tribal raiders, perhaps.
this makes me want to play the pre-alpha SO badly... :(((
Well, the tribal raiders and animals attacking power lines aren't in the game yet... I hope it'll be better if you wait because your first experience will be more filled-out and less buggy than what the testers have now.
Random mini-stories from today:
- Fire in the hole: Clearing encumbering slag/rubble with grenades
- Funeral pyre: Clearing animal corpses with a specialized Dump area and pouring Molotov cocktails on them (see attachments). As the animal remains are brought over when a square becomes free, they catch fire from the other burning remains, keeping the pyre running.
- A Dangerous Pet: A Boomrat stuck inside the kitchen survived very long by feeding on forgotten meal trays and leftover food from colonists' table. I guess they named it at some point.
- Desertland: After a while, there was no grazing plants anymore on the whole map. Poor muffalos are still getting spawned, and their death is long and painful. Squirrel and boomrats are dying from starvation also, and the latter explode on death, making me jump each time.
- Life miracle: I actually saw a Pincushion Cactus seed being thrown from its genitor and starting growing where it landed.
[attachment deleted by admin: too old]
Haha, awesome. People are finally figuring out how to dispose of bodies!
How did the map get cleared of grass? Did you cut it all yourself?
I cut some myself, but I don't know why it disappeard from everywhere else. I'm guessing the spawn rate of animals is greater than the plant reproduction rate, so the plants have a head start, but they get overrun in the end.
Your thoughts may be correct. The ecosystem is probably unstable. How long did you play for?
I am currently at 7 cycles and 6 days but it's been many days since I started seeing hurt muffalos and dead squirrels all around the place.
That's it then. I'll look into it.
Let us know if you need suggestions for the ecosystem :)
Quote from: Hypolite on October 08, 2013, 09:11:22 PM
- Funeral pyre: Clearing animal corpses with a specialized Dump area and pouring Molotov cocktails on them (see attachments).
I love how gleeful Rogers looks as she watches those animal corpses burn... I imagine she is also laughing quite evilly. You might want to keep an eye on that one.
She threw the Molotov cocktails herself... ;)
Quote from: Finjinimo on October 08, 2013, 10:16:32 PM
Quote from: Hypolite on October 08, 2013, 09:11:22 PM
- Funeral pyre: Clearing animal corpses with a specialized Dump area and pouring Molotov cocktails on them (see attachments).
I love how gleeful Rogers looks as she watches those animal corpses burn... I imagine she is also laughing quite evilly. You might want to keep an eye on that one.
Sorry i have to object.
Keeping a eye on her would mean she could get terminated in the future.
I would forget all about her and let her roam around the countryside and do her evil biddings
fun read hypolite
hows the latest playthrough going?
Quick update:
- 37 colonists
- 182 931$
- 156 447 Food
- 1 057 Uranium
- 775 Medikits
- 2 342 Shells
- 327 Missiles
I made the whole map the Home zone. The whole map is clean, and everytime a boomrat dies of starvation, a firefighter shows up to extinguish the fire, and two more to clean up the blood in the sand. I also cleared every single rock debris with grenades. I try to level the rock formation, but roof collapses took a high toll on my miners, so I left only pillars.
I found a geothermal geysers while ecavating to find Metal. I have now three Geothermal stations, each one under a roof and linked to the main base by a triple power conduit. This adds up to my 20 solar panels and 40 batteries to provide power to my extensive underground complex (40 bedrooms, 3 mess halls, a giant hydroponics room, a big armory).
I had to create and maintain 4 growing areas outside to allow wild life to sustain. Since I cut all vegetation after cacti won the ecosystem battle, I had plenty of animal corpses to burn because spawned wild life would quickly die of starvation. Maintaining growing areas reduce the overhaul of hauling corpses to the dump areas and setting them on fire. I have a pretty cool herd of muffalos going on, even if I can't get anything from them yet.
My current project is to allow my colonists to go full speed on every tile on the map and simultaneously not having to clean up everywhere but around the growing areas. I already applied Smooth stone everywhere I could (20% of the map), and the pavement is going well (50% of the map). I'm limited by the amount of metal I can get from trade since I used most of the obvious metal deposits on the map. I'm now prospecting inside the larger rock mass my base is built in.
I'm currently in the 220th day of ingame play.
wow,
do you still get attacked by raiders? and how many?
This game is ran on a botched build 224 that saw raiders stop attacking after a while. The last raids I had to fend off were comprised of maximum 10 raiders. With all the manpower and firepower and turrets I sold since to pave the whole map, it wasn't a big deal really. However, the blood and corpses they left was.
Here a whole view of the map:
(http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/9540/4c1y.png) (http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/1839/eav4.png)
(click to enlarge)
no turrets?
or you sell them after the attacks stopped?
Sold them for scraps since there was no threat anymore :)
Your thread is awesome. It's one of the factors that made me decide to back Rimworld. So many incredible possibilities