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Haven't gotten many sappers. The two times they came around, both times they reached my walls and started throwing molotovs at it, only to set most of themselves on fire in the process, then eventually - after failing to break through my slate wall by throwing molotovs at it - gave up and walked away.

[telling a story]

This game on the other hand is a survival sim, which imo should focus on survival, progressing and telling a story. That's why relationships and advanced factions is such a good idea, it adds to the sense of tale going on.

Cleanliness and proper waste disposal is extremely important to survival, and accomplishing it functions both as another challenge to overcome in terms of the gameplay, and as another source of stories through putting demands on the characters and the base design. It's also somewhat conspicuous in its absence, considering just how important it is. It feels a bit weird that my characters are more concerned with cloud watching or meditating than they are with what happens to the waste in their hermetically sealed bunker with no toilets or sewer system. In fact, I'm kind of concerned about it on their behalf!

Sure, there are strong objections to the features, such as that the opportunity cost to implementing them might be too high, or that the way time is managed in the game makes it impractical to have pawns dedicate time to it (though I would argue that's just another challenge when it comes to base design, and in any case I'd rather see them spend time showering than cloudwatching, but I digress), but that it doesn't "add anything to the gameplay" or doesn't have anything to do with "survival, progressing" or "telling a story" I don't agree with at all.

I tend to agree. It makes sense that someone might decide to die rather than fight fire or shoot someone, because they might be paralyzed by fear, or have powerful ideologies, or whatever, but for people to choose to starve to death instead of gathering or preparing for themselves food, because - as a medieval lord - he's too important to do such things himself, is kind of extreme.

Guys, I think you're forgetting what's unambiguously the most important missing feature.

Hygiene and waste management! My Colonists neither poop nor shower! Not only must they smell worse than your dog after it rolled in that rotting cow cadaver, but they're all chronically constipated too! Cleary, this desperately needs to be remedied.

Really like this mod. Cleaning and hauling droids especially are a godsend. Mining droids and the ore extractor are pretty overpowered, though. Pretty sure my 2 mining droids would mine out the entire (mountainous!) map in a year or two all by themselves if I let hem.

I second the request by an earlier poster, for a recharger that recharges almost nothing that my rarely-used drones (like combat drones) can stand on without me having to constantly toggle power on and off for them while making sure that my druids standing on them are all inactive and fully charged for when I do need to use them and whatnot.

I even had an accident not that long ago where all my 12 combat droids exploded... I put them on their offline chargers, but forgot to disable the droids themselves, and ignored the critical warning since I assumed it was a builder that had gotten lost or something. Then I was like, where did all my combat droids go?

And maybe somehow let us designate locations for the droids to go idle in when they're not busy, if that's at all possible? Looks strange to have all my temporarily inactive droids wandering in circles in the common room.

Seems kind of redundant to me, unless other forms of recruitment were added their own severe disadvantages.

You can either spend lots of resources and 2+ years of in-game time to grow an emotional cripple with no skills, that even risks killing the mother (or the other way around if the mother dies or is injured), or you can pick whichever guy you like from one of the many battlefields that occur naturally anyway and recruit them, often getting yourself an amazing guy with useful traits of your choosing. Or you can harvest some cotton and buy a slave... hmm...

Anyway. Maybe if you could design the kid, or it had some other major advantage that would make it preferable to other forms of recruitment, but as-is it doesn't look worth it, and the vat growing is really awkward.

[dangerous wildlife]

Personally, what I would like to see in the (maybe distant) future is an emphasis on the colony itself being a safe place for the colonists (or at least being dangerous in a different way), while the rest of the world is a dangerous place.

Right now, besides the random raids, the world itself isn't especially dangerous. You could have your naked colonist effortlessly swag naked across the entire map to pick some berries if you felt like it. Diseases were a good start, but I feel like we need much more.

Stuff like dangerous wildlife (ideally unrelated to random events). Minor threats that anyone with a pistol could handle, like enraged deer. Medium threats that would overwhelm your lone pistol-wielder, but would fall to 2-3 guys, like big, durable, aggressive herbivores, or fast, extremely deadly predators. Major threats that your colonists would run away from when they saw it, unless they were well-prepared, like, I don't know, elephants, or rhinos, or even space-dinosaurs; go nuts.

Weather! Heavy rain, even in temperate zones, can be dangerous. It may not kill you outright, but if you wander around completely soaked for a day or two, you're going to be extremely unhappy, and you will eventually manage to kill yourself. It's a little silly, but no more - I think - than having people die of starvation right next to an endless supply of berries that they haven't explicitly been told to harvest.

Temperature! I don't have any good ideas for hot regions, but cold biomes would definitely benefit from having just traveling outside of the confines of the colony carrying the risk of freezing to death. Add weather to this, and you can have your guys be caught in a snowstorm far from the colony, only to have their trek back be so slowed down by the weather that they may have to just build a shelter and wait it out, to keep from freezing to death. Of course, you should be able to protect yourself through clothing or other technologies.

And, to supplement all of this... well... this is where I would put my long post extolling the virtues of fog of war as a game mechanic, if it wasn't so incredibly long. Suffice to say, if the rest of the game world were made more dangerous, the fog of war would further help colonies feel like a safe place. Also, many other things... but again, too long a post to pretend it's on-topic here.

Basically, I would like to see more external conflicts, innate to the basic world itself rather than special events.

A better AI is always welcome and I'm pretty sure, that it waits for us somewhere down the line. But it is one of those 20% things that hog the ominous 80% of resources to be done right and according to Ty's blog and his work method that might still be a long way to go.

Yea, I didn't need to (though I did) read his thoughts on the matter to understand why such AI improvements are probably a far away off. My post didn't articulate that, though I suppose I should have. I also probably overestimate the importance of these changes as I tend to play with mods that add a greater end-game, adding way more value to my colonies than would be possible in vanilla. So far all my colonies have literally ended because they were hit by raids with so many attackers in them that I dropped to sub-1FPS and had to eventually just abandon the game. Though I suppose that's more a problem with mods than with the base game.

On another note, I have no non-trivial diagreements with the points made in your post. Mining probably is too easy; it's very fast, very easy, and very cheap. Making it more difficult would do a lot to mitigate the problem, but it doesn't solve the killbox problem. Though I suppose not everyone agree that killboxes are a problem.

Personally, I find them very boring, and I worry that they're so easy and powerful that the game's military challenges have to be balanced around it, which means that players *have* to use killboxes to survive (otherwise, the military aspect would be so easily overcome it may as well not even be there), which I really don't like.

The biggest problem is that the end-game enemy waves are just too punishing, to the point where you *have* to funnel all of them into a killbox to even stand a chance in hell of surviving (be that through building a giant fortress with only one entrance, or by digging deep into the mountainside).

I think this could be fixed by first severely lowering the strength of the enemy attacks, and then making the ones that do attack do things like refuse to march single-file into the killbox. Spread the attackers out, make them attack from several different angles, and add units like sappers that blast through your walls and cause cave-ins if you've buried deep or left only one (or very few) entrance(s). If you've dug too greedily and too deep, make them spawn inside the mountain with you, and start blasting their way in your direction. Stuff like that. Anything to punish ultra-defensive strategies that rely on walls and single death-rooms to keep safe.

We should have to use our colonists as mobile defense to protect our colony too. Doing this was overly punishing (if you ask me) pre-7, but now that we can fix up their legs and organs, this would give us lots of really cool battles where our guys and gals fall in battle, only to get patched-up and maybe turned into battle-hardened cyborgs over time. Or maybe they'd steal the organs of their attackers, who knows! That's way cooler than locking them up behind walls of turrets all the time.

Just giving players incentives to move outside isn't enough, we gotta be punished for staying inside and using only fixed defences.

All this in my opinion, of course.

Hey guys. First post, etc. Now, on to the colony.

This was my first one (after a unmodded 30 min startup to learn the game), and I think I must've made a bunch of mistakes with it because I just have to abandon it at this point.

Anyway, here's the overview, complete with Squirrel being useless as usual (click for bigger view):

Yeah, don't bother helping cleaning up or gathering resources or anything. Just stand there practicing your shooting skill; maybe it'll climb above 20 sometime, eh? Jackass.

I had great plans for the layout, but I can't seem to find the time to properly build it in-between all the massive raids, AI crashlandings, lack of resources, and constant need to focus on repairing and upgrading my defences, leading to many hastily constructed sections that wound up looking more ugly than they did well-planned. I'll have to work on that.

Here's the entrance to the colony, complete with the ever-present pile of bodies:


It seems my defences are inadequate to deal with the threats of a 3+ years old colony, but I don't get enough time between waves to gather enough resources to improve them.

Doesn't help that the entire surrounding area constantly looks like this:


Raiders drop by to launch their ill-fated assaults on my colony, only to lose their minds on the way there from all the dead bodies they come across, usually like this: One guy loses his mind, the other guys kill him, guys with slightly better mental constitution than him now just watched an ally die, so their minds broke as well, which leads to more mind breaks, and so on, until roughly half of them end up either killing each other or wandering around in a daze outside of my base. They're still happy to kill any of my people who stray outside though, and I've lost too many guys to lucky one-shot-kills at this point to risk sending teams out to clean up anymore.

I kind of feel like the way that dead bodies (and equipment) never truly decay becomes a problem after a while. The entire map right now is filled with bodies and various items:
http://i.imgur.com/R7poHbc.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8wruIww.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/iZ8aoHg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/MPtHagI.jpg

Most of these are remnants of the abovementioned mechanic. Their huge horde arrives, to siege me or prepare before the assault or whatever. One guy loses his mind, his buddies kill him, and so the chain begins. The entire map is so filled with dead bodies at this point that sending my colonists out to clean them up risks them losing their minds to psychic pain, or them forgetting to eat before they leave the colony, or them getting really tired on their way there, or something.

I'll have to plan my next colony a little better than this one, which is just one bad drop or solar flare away from oblivion. Maybe take some advice on defences from the dedicated thread on it, eh.

Really great game so far though, gotten tons of fun out of it already. Looking forward to A7 and the ability to finally repair people's legs. I eventually had to put Farmer down, as one of her legs got blown off and she never truly recovered. 3 years after planetfall she's put down like a common animal lived past its purpose. Tragic. Her execu- er, euthenasia was pretty tragic too. The, uhm, skilled professional who handled it was a very skilled doctor but not as skilled a marksman. Let's just say it was a long, sad, very traumatizing process, made no better for being performed with a gatling gun. She's in a better place now, though, having been reduced to soylent green like so many before her. Circle of life right there.

This planet truly is a harsh mistress.