Messages

[obtaining metal through trade]

IMHO we definitely need some additional types of materials. At least one more for the start.

And recycling Debris would also be great thing to have.


Another idea I might suggest is obtaining metal through trade. Imagine that you have colonists with arts skills - allow them to... say: manufacture sculptures or jewellery consuming 1-2 metal units that can be sold to traders for ~5 metal units. Proper balance of time would be required, but if colony got enough members - it could allow it to sustain itself without endlessly digging through all of the mountains. Of course this can be expanded to a whole crafting system and live supply/demand economy (more you buy = higher prices. More you sell = lower prices).

Draft one colonist(press r) and tell this colonist to arrest the traveler. You have to have a prison ready for your future colonist.

Cheers
That's all I wanted to know - I was familiar with all the other steps, but it might help other guys reading though this topic

Cave, small rooms, 2 or 3 batteries per room in different sections of the base. Alternative would be 1 battery behind the wall in generic rooms spread around the base (to minimalize risks)

They are heavily adaptive, actually. Cassandra is mostly just adaptive, the ramp-up aspect is quite small.

However, she's still not a genius. E.g. you'll get strong raider attacks if you have lots of turrets even if they're not powered and you have one colonist alive, because she's cueing off the turret count. Some of that randomness is okay, but not too much. I want to make her cleverer.

So.. no turrets == easy mode?

Perhaps if she took into account the amount of power the colony has, or, even better, the total amount of power that could be allotted to the turrets. Sort of an "All power to forward shields" sort of situation. So she'd count the amount of power each turret takes to operate and then looks at how much power you are producing/ have stored in cells and says to herself, "Well. If they shut off all of their doors, lights, and food supplies, they can get that 4th turret online too. TWELVE PALS ENJOY."

It doesn't make much sense. Current system is more realistic - raiders look at your base from orbit - see lots of guns - send lots of raiders. Lesson for player: Never deploy turrets unless you can actually power them.
Besides - it still doesn't make sense, cause raids sometimes happen during the night or eclipse - and if your colony is purely solar-powered than this calculation is failed, because you can be with no power during raid deployment, but full on when raid attacks you. Or the other way around. So whatever it'd try to balance - it won't. It's better to just force player into powering turrets 100% of time - if he looses he will be the only one to blame for that.

ps. Please, please, don't use colors. It makes eyes hurt, and your post isn't any more special or important if you use color all over the place.

From time to time I see a refugee passing by my camp - any idea how to capture him/her ?

I click him - and all I can see are stats. I select one of my own colonists, right click on a guy - but nothing happens.

I like the idea. I think 1/2 demolitions guys should be a standard of every raider team after the first few ones.
This is also one of the few things that DF does not have (wink, wink.....)

Hehe. DF, DF everywhere! ;P
TBH: I think that adding demo guys to every raid would be slightly annoying - not because of their potential, but because they'd need to change a behaviour of a whole group (otherwise they'd die before doing anything) leading to constant demolition of rocks / walls, and constant rebuild cycle.

I think Tynan will e-mail ppl when updates are released
Or at least - hope so!

It looks MUCH cleaner than building walls in caves.

Yea, oxygen would be great. It'd force you to invest in ventilation system while building caves and make them less desirable than now (right now caves are basically be-all-end-all of protection).

It could also lead to some nice events - like air poisoning - where you'd use O2 tanks to protect your colonists. And thanks to this we could discourage people putting graves/dead animals in buildings (they'd poison the air).

You know you can build power lines, right?
There is no need to build walls in caves.

[Add a Demolition Team Raid.]

Right now building an ultimate base can be as simple as placing some walls and few turrets next to lone entrance to the base. As it was well illustrated here: http://imageshack.us/a/img19/5613/9zb1.jpg
IMHO something like that is an exploit, cause very cheaply you can turn your base into indestructible fortress.

So here's an idea:
Add a Demolition Team Raid.

Basically - a group of pirates armed with short range but powerful weapons (shotguns / SMGs) and one demolition expert with explosives.
Team will try to find an approach to your base that's away from sentry guns - plant explosives on a wall or rock, and... boom! Break into the base bypassing security!

(say - arm them with 1 randomly picked type of explosives - regular charges will do 3x3 explosion (like Molotov), shape charges will do 1x5 line. 6 seconds timer. Player can manually plant them on his own if steals them from dead AI, but they're still limited to timer - no remotely controlled explosions (again - too exploitable)

It's needed because right now if you can afford 3-4 towers and some walls - almost nothing can become a threat to your base. And as game progresses you only build up stronger and stronger defences wiping enemy clean faster and faster. Sure, you can give enemy more health, but they're still limited to one approach into the base - which is like asking yourself for exploits.

I suppose writing AI for that might be a bit challenging. AI would need to protect the demolition guy on his way, hope he will demolish the walls quickly enough before other guys die, and than all raiders should run inside of the building wrecking havoc / stealing stuff as quickly as possible to retreat right after that ignoring fire from colonists (perhaps: run&gun escape).
But I think it will be worth adding it into the game as it'd make it much more interesting by forcing players to use colonists for defence more, not just exploit impenetrable walls of sentry guns.

Notepad sounds better than planner tool. Much better actually. And it's MUCH quicker to do.

Planner sounds  nice in theory, but in actual game it's next to being useless (yes - I do play PA too) while most likely it's development will take quite a bit of time - time that can be spend on improving the game instead.

You can choose your body shape. The clothes, of course, will change during the game. There are 5 shapes planned: fat, thin, male hulk, male normal, female normal. The first two work with either sex.

Can we pick hair color / facial hair / long-short-medium-ponny tail hair cut?

Aye.
Riddick probably comes first as an inspiration, but there are dozens of amazing ideas to pick from (dune worm... please....).

[Water]

As for production, storage and tech - I think it should apply not only to power, but also:

- Water
Obvious stuff. Store water to survive droughts and heat waves, water the plants. Clean water for safe drinking. More advanced systems would allow you to turn water into hydrogen and use it as a power cells for weapons (or perhaps in future: vehicles). Finally you'll have to gather purified water and hydrogen for your space ship (hydrogen again can be used as a fuel).
Extracting hydrogen could also produce oxygen to be use in "air" part:

- Air
It's something oriented more at the space ship construction. First you'll be able to install air filters in the indoors areas and tunnels to prevent some catastrophic events (like dust storms) from harming your colonists. Eventually you will need oxygen pumps to pump fresh air into very long, deep tunnels, finally you'll be able to adapt some of air-clearing machinery onto the space ship for life support.