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Hypothermia!


Power cost is rather crazy to keep it that cold with doors open to the outside world, but as you can see, it's very effective. Though, Scythers are too fast to freeze at this level of cold, but they're easy enough to kill through other means.

Also, have you ever wondered what would happen if mechanoids could get back up after losing their weapons? Well you can totally do that by shutting the coolers off before they die, though I wouldn't recommend it. They wander around (semi) harmlessly, though they'll break any doors laying around and will punch colonists in the face if they get too close.


Note: Should you want to try this, keep in mind that the outside temperature drastically affects how effective the coolers are in this setup -- The map I made this in generally ranges from -10 to 10C, which makes the temp range from -110 to -90. So colder maps have it easier with freezing mechs, and hotter maps have it harder. Also, there's a turret placed to the left of the maze that is covered by the health menu, to give raiders/mechs something to target rather than deciding to poke my wind turbines.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this actually mean that Oak is the best as long as you don't mind batches of wood taking longer, since it effectively saves on space and/or work for an equivalent amount?

Since say you want 1000 wood, you either ...
Plant 20 Oak and get it for 24000 work in 50 days.
Plant 20 Cero and get it for 35000 work over 2.5 harvests in 50 days.
Plant 50 Cero and get it for 35000 work in 20 days.

Funny you discovered this; it's actually a bit of an exploit. Bullets are more likely to hit targets that they just randomly pass over than those they were actually fired at :p

Can't take all the credit for it, I remembered reading on another thread on here how animals in the crossfire were more likely to get hit than the actual targets, so I figured "what if I purposefully make shots be crossfire for the actual targets?"

Uh, how did all those people die on the path between your killzone and the front door?

At a point I was using a different design which made most pawns just stand at that one clump until going crazy, at which point they killed each other/starved -- never bothered to clean them up. However, I got tired of mechs trickling in 5 at a time and thus decided to find an efficient use for Miniguns.

Target ground is a flag in the xml. Check my more weapons mod ive done it there with my flamer thrower and my flaregun. Easy to change.

Oh, I know it can be changed in the xml, I just prefer playing games completely unmodded, which is why it bothered me that Miniguns don't have it by default.

Wow a 10 year colony amazing..
Yeah its bit frustrating that you cant target a ground, but due to the way tynan made it for now the ground cant be targetted because it is a terrain entity therefor an invalid target so it needs to be a specific target e.g pawns or buildings in order for the attack to work.

Well the thing with that is, targeting the ground is already programmed in and works fine -- see frags and molotovs. It's just not set for Miniguns (or any other gun). But yeah, between being in a mountain and with a defense that shreds any number of enemies, the only thing that could defeat this colony is my computers inability to handle the raider amount -- I've already had to turn it down to 60% for that reason, even with keeping colony wealth low as best as I can.

Really wish the game would have a hard cap for raider count.

Place sleeping spot, force fire. But man its awesome youre still using colonists for defense after all that time.

I don't know why it never occurred to me to use a sleeping spot, that's brilliant. I spent a good hour trying to figure out what to use for a target, and that sandbag got damaged the least. But damage is irrelevant when you can just replace it instantly at will.

Also yeah, colonists for defense are the only thing that can stand up to the insane amount of mechs and raiders at this point. My only use for turrets is strategically placing them to give enemies a target to lock onto so they'll path to it rather than smashing random things that are closer.

... is that Miniguns can't target an area, and are forced to target "things." It doesn't make any sense, since you're obviously not going to try and pinpoint shoot someone with a Minigun -- you're going to fill an area with bullets and shred anyone who passes by.

Fortunately, a sandbag is a good workaround -- albeit requiring a bit of maintenance:

But for balance reasons, I guess I can see why -- 60 centipedes and 24 scythers cut down in a heartbeat, and nothing in the path damaged except the mechs due to bullet-logic.

There really is no way to maintain it. You can save edit all your colonists to lv20 in all skills and within a few game days, they will have degraded to lv16-17. It makes those well-skilled assassins and such kinda moot, they'll end up only marginally better than everyone else because they will forget how to gun in a week and the 100-man raid will not help them remember. Same with any really good doctors. Temporary benefits at best.

Not entirely true, you can use cryo pods if you absolutely need to keep colonists from degrading in skills, since everything about them is saved and set as-is. As an added bonus, they don't consume food or count towards your colonist count while in the cryo ship pods.

Devilstrand is definitely worthwhile if you have a small colony, since not only does it not require constant harvesting, but also 1/10th the amount of hauling that cotton of an equal value would take.

Just plant a large enough area, and eventually you have enough devilstrand for 60k silver, without constantly tying up your growers and haulers with cotton.

I've yet to try it out myself, but stuffing two traits on all your starters which makes them more likely to go insane, and the loss condition being anyone in the colony going nuts or if any of the original 3 colonists die.

As far as I understand, it relates to either being in a home zone, being in a stockpile, or both.

If you remove both a home zone and stockpile where items are, your wealth will drop -- and if you make the entire map a home zone and stockpile for funsies, your wealth will skyrocket on a world you're played a while and haven't cleaned up much stuff from.

No idea on the formula itself.

With that kind of defeatism attitude; I've built and survived multiple "city-like" colonies that don't use kill boxes or cheap exploits to sustain myself. It's possible. It's just really annoying seeing people promote exploits as real game tactics.

Somehow I doubt a design like that can withstand a 80 centipede, 70 scyther mech raid. If there's a video showing that though, I'd love to see it.

Also, unless Tynan/a dev says otherwise, killboxes/building in a mountain are no more an "exploit" than your city-like designs are. They could so easily counter making killboxes/dwarfism if it was a gamebreaker/exploit.

There's a glitched event where each square or so will have a dropped raider, This includes spaces underneath mountains.

So drop pods can go through mountains, its just incredibly rare. Like once per 2-3 years.

I'm pretty sure it's more along the line of the game just having too many raiders being dropped in at once, so it just starts throwing the excess drop pods to random locations without checking whether or not they're valid to drop in at.

@FMK

I like the design but how do your colonists get in and out? Do you just let them take an age to walk on the sandbags?

On another note, thanks for voting people!

The current map that screenshot was taken from basically has interconnected mountains spanning the entire map, so I just pop out through holes every so often to grab stuff and then seal them up the instant any trouble shows up. Otherwise I'd just go out where you see the wooden door in the picture.

@FMK, can you explain further (or post a pic in action) of your Logic Locker?

-snip-

Basically this is what happens. As you can see the mechs are all grouped up near the middle, because as they near the bottom they realize the path to their target is the right side and head towards the top, but as they near the top they change target to the other turret and realize their target is back down the left path.

It basically takes advantage of the fact that enemy AI can re-evaluate their task every so often, along with the fact that the closest target doesn't necessarily mean quickest to reach -- even though the game likes to think it does. (I'm looking at you, colonists going to the longest stockpiles to reach just because they're closer)

This is mainly theoretical (haven't tested it for longer than a few in-game months and forced raids), but I dub it the logic locker. How it works is that when raiders enter through the top, they target the left turrets and thus head right -- but when they get over to the right, they check for threats and detect the turrets on the right, which makes them head left. They continue going left and right until they give up/go crazy/etc. Mechs will literally just do it forever.

This is my normal defense though, which takes out everything and wastes no resources: