Messages

Technologies don't give passive bonuses but allow the creation of new items and buildings. It makes no sense to increase raid strength based on progression through the technology tree.

If raids scale with number of pawns, there is an incentive to keep the number of pawns low, or at least to avoid taking bad pawns

If raids scale with wealth, there is an incentive to limit one's wealth. This leads to absurd situations like not wanting good equipment, high quality rooms, a large base, etc.

Raids should not scale with wealth. Instead, they should scale according to how much harm previous raids inflicted on players. I'll not try to describe the exact algorithm but it would involve counting pawn death, temporary and permanent injury, wealth destruction/theft resulting from the raid in relation to total wealth, and work required to fix things again, and look at several of the last raids. This is roughly how a human game master would do it.

Just try to build animal farm one time. Im ok with overall concept, but currently game dont have good enough tools to make animal farm worthwhile. Im tried to do chicken farm 2 runs ago and its just a annoyance - too much player micromanagement to control over population and too much pawns work time required to feed animals and gather their products. Imho, in current state only few pack animals(like 2-3 muffalos) worth their keeping. Even a hauling doggos is a whim - its just better to recruit more pawns to do exclusively hauling job.

I agree. I'm trying to make it more worthwhile to keep animals for things other than defense or hauling.

I think meat should come mainly from animal breeding, milk producing animals, hunting or trading.

Did you try to feed 20+ mans colony via animal breeding or milking?

Apologies for the theorizing.

The way I envision these changes as follows:

Manhunter packs no longer yield cookable meat.

Animal breeding and milking is buffed a little, but not so much that it becomes as good as cultivating crops in terms of nutrition per work. Animal protein should represent a food resource that is somewhat more valuable and difficult to acquire.

Players are allowed to change the eating behaviour of colonists. What meals they are allowed to consume, whether they take meals into their inventory, and whether they are allowed to eat human meat. This works similar to the medical care settings.

With these changes a colony can produce a variety of meals and control the consumption. In your 20+ people colony, some pawns will get cheap meals while others will get expensive ones. To get anything better than simple meals and nutrient paste you'll have to hunt, breed, milk or trade (and breeding/milking is more viable).

This also solves the problem of trying to produce survival rations for later use in caravans in a colony that depends on nutrient paste (where every pawn, including the cook will immediately take a survival ration for later eating).

I think meat should come mainly from animal breeding, milk producing animals, hunting or trading. Not manhunter packs that bring thousands of units of meat in nice packages.

A pack of manhunting animals gives a lot of meat. Maybe the animals should be poisoned so that the meat is inedible.

Relying on nutrient paste as main meal while also producing survival rations for caravans results in a lot of micromanagement since pawns will immediately take a survival ration into their inventory. So I have to watch the survival ration production like a hawk to immediately forbid any that are produced, and often having to persuade the cook to drop the ration he just produced.

Why isn't there a meal schedule like there is for drugs? It would be nice to control what pawns are allowed to eat, and what they are allowed to take into their inventory.

What is the pro of teetotaler? As far as I can tell its all downside. Late game, it's practically equivalent to a pessimist for me, and even if you aren't running drug schedules the lack of emergency mood booster hurts.

I'm going to guess they have certain ineligible mental breaks involving drugs but even that is a drawback imo

I believe they will never binge on drugs during a mental break. That's a good thing if you're producing a lot of flake/yayo.

Recreation needs are easy to meet by the way. There's very little pressure to add more recreation sources. Just having a table and horseshoe pin is enough for a year or two.

- You can "game" the AI by artifically lowering your wealth, sacrificing bad pawns, keeping your colony small and use door-peeking will make your game a cakewalk regardless of difficulty. Changes need to be gradual. I cant stress how important this is. Tynan, if you cant implement exponential functions to calculate these, this will always plague your game.

I do try to avoid rapid growth of wealth because I know wealth influences raid strength. I don't try to stay below some wealth threshold though.

Not letting every pawn join is also a legitimate playstyle. In most cases I just can't be arsed to deal with the withdrawal period of an addict, the frequent mood breaks of the depressed or nervous, or to have a pawn around that refuses violence or hauling or cleaning while not having any other desirable skills/passions.

Traits like psychopath, bloodlust or teetotaller are more interesting in that they have pros and cons.

Crafting in a cold room with an unpowered tailoring bench seems to be a way to increase the experience per material. Good if you're in a biome with few tailoring materials.

I think you need a wealth graph to truly reflect how important adaptation was in such case

What happened on day 144, that looks like a lot more than one bad pawn dying

I am not sure because it was some time ago, but I had times were most of the colony was ill with malaria/plague/sleeping sickness (before scheduled penoxycycline for everybody). At one point I also had two deaths. It looks like there were two raids around that time.

[attachment deleted due to age]

Here it is. Do you know how to interpret it?

[attachment deleted due to age]

In my last playthrough, merciless Cassandra was so easy as to be boring. I don't know how adaptation works but I wonder if that was due to my habit of regularly letting bad pawns die. Sending them away in a caravan, or just using them as meatshields during raids, or just leaving them to die when they arrive in a drop pod.

Storyteller: Cassandra
Scenario: Naked Brutality
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Tropical Swamp / Flat
Commitment mode: Yes
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20

I haven't finished this playthrough yet but it's getting boring because it's too easy. I'm on day 232 with 96k wealth and 9 pawns and am starting to get all the techs needed for a starship. There are no economical or military challenges. I do have occasional mood breaks but think this is mainly due to choosing to have one very impressive barracks instead of separate sleeping rooms. Ironically there often were minor problems with food production because I can't seem to balance between over and underproduction of food crops. I also had some difficulties and deaths during caravaneering, mainly due to illness and mood breaks.

The beginning was challenging of course, but then it just became easier and easier. I suspect this is due to a combination of things. Wooden traps are overpowered in biomes with abundant wood. A few versions back, something was changed about the raid scaling and this made raids a lot easier. I built traps along the outside of my buildings and laid down a concrete path through traps, and enemies prefer to walk on concrete rather than swamp terrain. The slow movement in swamps also makes it so that approaching raiders spend more time exposed to my weapon fire. "Door cheesing" is too strong against melee enemies or enemies with slow-warmup weapons. Having a perimeter wall or surrounding all important things with walls is a strong tactic because the AI doesn't know how to handle it: the raiders will spread out and bash walls, achieving little to nothing, while they can be killed off one by one (with or without door cheese). My economy is a little too good: yayo is highly profitable with no downsides so far (shouldn't this attract drug lord pirate raids?), raiders provide a steady supply of adequate weapons, wooden traps are too good for too little resources and work, herbal medicine is enough for almost any medical problem, and raids are ineffective at reducing wealth. Components were a bottleneck until the fabrication bench was unlocked.

I try to keep all pawns on a penoxycycline every 5 days schedule because diseases can be really nasty in combination with other events or problems.

I did do a fair amount of quests on the world map, but had little motivation to do quests that involve saving a person because most randomly generated pawns are not worth saving.

I built an uranium slug turret to see how good it is and it seems very powerful: it killed a lancer, scyther, centipede coming out of a poison ship with barely a scratch.

To illustrate how easy raids are, on day 228, I got a refugee chased event and as experiment, decided to hide my pawns in the base. The raiders triggered about 8 traps, managed to kill one isolated light turret, moved on and started shooting at another turret and then fled due to losing too many people. Stripping a downed rsider gave me a good flak vest, good flak jacket, normal simple steel helmet, cloth t-shirt, good camel pants, almost all at high durability. They also left two normal machine pistoles, 3 steel spears and a steel gladius and some silver. This raid caused very little loss of wealth (94 steel, 280 wood). Without doing the math, I suspect I got more resources/wealth out of this than I lost. See the raid.jpg screenshot to see the aftermath (the attackers came from the left)

Smelting weapons is annoying and can't be automated the way I want (which is, keep a well stocked armory with weapons for different ranges and smelt any excess, beginning with the weapons of the worst quality, then of lowest durability. It would be nice to have a way to designate items in the stockpile for smelting or destruction.

Another pain point is not being able to see the terrain type while planning base or creating growing zones. It would be nice to have a view mode for terrain types similar to the view mode for roofs.

Having meat for survival rations and/or fine meals is important. I noticed that elephant tusks sell for a lot less now, and that rhinos and elephants seem to move faster. Even with that, I still think hunting rinos and elephants is overpowered. There are too many of these animals on the map in tropical swamps, and they respawn fairly quickly. Hunting an elephant takes relatively little additional time compared to hunting a monkey, but yields a large amount of food and top quality leather.

Rhino and elephant leather is almost as good as devilstrand which takes research to unlock and is a pain to grow even with permanent summer. Flak jackets are stricly worse than devilstrand dusters and only a little better than a rhino leather duster while not covering the legs. This doesn't seem right because flak jackets are harder and more expensive to make, at least with current hunting balance in an animal rich biome, and they slow people down. Part of the problem may be that we can't make a flak jacket out of better materials than the default.

The mad animal event is appropriate early in the game but later on it's not threatening and somewhere between nuisance and irrelevant. Up the difficulty of this or stop triggering it after a certain point.



[attachment deleted due to age]