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You're right! Orion can actually start with between -100 and +40 relations to you. It seems I've just gotten lucky. I'm sorry about that. That's not good, Orion are impossible to counter in the beginning, but very interesting to fight later in the game.

If you go into \Mods\Glittertech\Defs\FactionDefs\ and find the Orion faction file, there is a definition called <startingGoodwill> with a <min> and <max>. Change the min to 25, or something safe like that.

There's also a <naturalColonyGoodwill>, which I think is an equilibrium range their goodwill decays towards. But I don't know, honestly.

The single greatest desert map: seed 8awm, site 6.93°E 18.13°N (look for a little peninsula/island thing in the southwest).

Desert with lots of soil, animals and rain. Large, defensible mountain for building either inside or outside. There are a few small-to-medium open air caverns in the western and southwestern parts, and a large cavern with soil in the eastern part. Primarily granite with some marble in the east, which is perfect for construction/art respectively.

(Credit: someone, in some old thread)

I'm liking the mod overall, however, maybe a month into the game I was sieged by a large force (approx 15) of Orion Corp soldiers. They came with more than double the people that the last pirate siege did, and more than my entire population, and their shielded melee guys sprint at me so fast, my entire militia gets 1-2 shots off at most before being cut to pieces.

Seems a bit early to be facing such large numbers of such well equipped enemies to be honest. Those shielded melee guys are too fast and they take people out in just a few quick hits armor or not. They even tear through my turrets with their melee.

If you're getting attacked by OC in the first month, it's because you did something to antagonize them first. Just don't do that. Orion don't start hostile and are actually harder than Arrow Men because of the nearly universal exoskeletons (+80% movement), very good shields, high proportion of brawlers and larger numbers.

I try to keep on friendly terms with everyone except Arrow Men and the local pirates for the first year or so, and only then I might antagonize OC too.

seems i cant really give combat drones any orders at all besides conscripting and telling them to move, no equip this, no man that mortar, no capture that person. not sure if that was intended as your notes only mentioned that combats couldn't equip weapons now.

Same here. What's the point of combat droids if they can't hold weapons, anyway?

I play with Glittertech with no other combat mods. I find it reasonably well-balanced, certainly not much less so than vanilla combat itself. It's arguably a little more balanced, since you need to use defense in depth rather than just funneling them into a progressively larger killbox. To deal with the early Arrow Men raids, build series of free-standing walls for your combat colonists and fall back under cover as the enemy advances.

# wall
- nothing
| edge of pathing range

Code Select Expand

#--#--#--#--#--#
|---------------|
|---------------|
|---------------|
|---------------|
|---------------|
|---------------|
#--#--#--#--#--#
|---------------|
|---------------|
...

Try to prioritize buying advanced bionic legs for faster retreating (= more shots in between falling back to next defensive line).

A little more advanced: Orion soldiers don't start hostile, so just don't antagonize them directly. Build a guest room and wall them in while they sleep, then grab their stuff for your combat colonists after they starve to death. Once you have 4-8 colonists with OC rifles, defending from Arrow Men raids is much easier.

How do you even build a killbox that stands up to an end-game mechanoid raid in vanilla? I have an absolutely insane setup, but a 29x29 block of mechanoids still has so many inferno cannon-wielding centipedes with a billion HP that I literally can't seem to fit enough turrets within the turret range.

You need to build something like this:

-----------------------
I    ----------------    I
I                             I
I                             I
I                             I
I                             I
L  ______________ L

I,L,-=Walls
_=Turrets and/or walls

Everyone in the killbox will be in your turrets range.

In my Glittertech game, I've had end-game mechanoid raids take down my 300k HP primary blast door standing in the middle of a killbox like that while a 20 Construction colonist repaired it from inside, and had to defend room to room. The mechanoids are still vanilla, but I'm not sure if Glittertech ups the maximum raid size.

Besides that, drop pod-based raids often fail to deploy properly due to lack of space, so I'll get as much as 20-30 dropped directly into my mountain base.

I put a self-sustaining base entirely within overhead mountain, manually constructed (repairable) room walls, walled off a psychic drone with all Psychically Deaf colonists, and wait for siege camps to kill each other in fits of psychotic rage.

Then, I put a small stockpile for meals dropped by raiders at the edge of my turret batteries' range. As the finite amount of food they start with dwindles, this causes a slow trickle of starving, desperate raiders to run directly to their deaths in search of food. When the debug log starts to pop up reporting a reservation conflict over a survival meal between two raiders, you know things are about to get good.

Make money off everything.

How do you even build a killbox that stands up to an end-game mechanoid raid in vanilla? I have an absolutely insane setup, but a 29x29 block of mechanoids still has so many inferno cannon-wielding centipedes with a billion HP that I literally can't seem to fit enough turrets within the turret range.

How do I make titanium?

You can make it from plasteel in the electrolyzer.

Do they auto-equip things? They shouldn't be doing that >.<

Yeah, they do. I think it's fine if you have a good setup, and I was actually just now trying to give the combat droids the ability to hold weapons too!

Also, the droid builder station seems a little off. Sometimes it won't build droids even though I have more than enough resources, and doesn't respond to right-clicking if I attempt to assign a colonist directly. It also seems you can't use "Do until X" because there are always zero droids. I'm trying to set up a fully automated base, and this would be handy for repairs.

We call this Tuesday in Hive V.

If you get sufficiently late game, the raids get so big (29x29) that they fail to place properly. They just drop pod directly into ... everything, everywhere.

Great update. I managed to load my existing save with the new droid version by deleting all my droid-related stuff and rebuilding it, then spawning the droids.

Edit: It would be nice if they would stop hogging the recreational room, though!

[Destroying]

Is there a known crash bug related to OC or Arrow Men raids? Everything works great, except that Rimworld seems to hang whenever a raid from these groups is almost defeated. I can't tell what is happening because of the freeze, and my tests are inconclusive.

• The problem consistently and only occurs when an OC/AM raid is nearly defeated.
• Using "Kill all enemies" debug command triggers the crash instantly during OC/AM raids.
• Repeatedly saving the game during an OC/AM raid leads to a point where the game will freeze as soon as you press play.
• After extensive manual map cleaning (removed ~2000 entities) and removing inventory drops from the XML files, the problem did not improve―at all.

I imagine there isn't a workaround (would be really nice if there was, though!), but I thought it would be helpful to report it. I can upload a save, if it is helpful. Thanks for a great mod all the same.

Update: Destroying most of the last commandos in a raid via debug, then letting turrets and colonists finish the rest, allowed me to proceed. Maybe it's a specific commando, or a specific item drop? Nothing I can find, though.