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Messages - giltirn

#1
Congratulations Tynan! You made a true masterpiece here.
#2
General Discussion / Re: Clothing economy is still broken
September 15, 2018, 01:37:14 PM
Wow, really? My entire economy is based around clothing manufacture from hunted leathers, but you're telling me I should just be selling the materials? That kinda sucks.
#3
Quote from: Shurp on September 09, 2018, 10:05:26 AM
OK, so unsurprisingly I got killed on Naked Brutality.  Question: what is the secret to surviving the initial raid?  You can only get off two shots with a shortbow, and the knife the first raider comes with is more dangerous than a wooden club... Is a slate club a better choice?  Or should I have mined some steel and made a knife of my own?

I find door micro or traps a good way of surviving the first raid. Of course you are SOL if your guy doesn't have a high enough crafting skill to make a bow or traps (this was the case for my current game); I had to hope and pray with a wooden club - and reload a couple of times! If you don't like savescumming you're probably going to end up repeating the first month several times.
#4
Quote from: RawCode on September 04, 2018, 03:05:39 AM
killing colonist you just recieved will just keep value at zero a little bit more, still viable if you get no new colonists, but prisoning your own colonist and recruiting it back will have same effect.

Lol, that's amusing. In my current game I've had to quite regularly imprison my own colonists as they spaz out and go on murderous rampages or drug binges. I wonder if I've been unwittingly cheating all this time?
#5
General Discussion / Re: Trap costs in 0.19
September 03, 2018, 02:56:06 PM
For anyone interested, FrozenSnowFox has released a nice looking mod "[FSF] Better Spike Traps" that reduces build cost by 2x and removes the distance limitation. This seems a lot better balanced to me.
#6
If you enable debug mode you can view a debug plot in the history tab that shows two figures that I believe are relevant to raid size: "fun points" and "recovery". If I understand correctly these both enter into the raid formula, the former presumably related to how well you are doing overall and the latter a dampening factor based on recent casualties and whatnot (it would be great if someone more in the know could clarify this!). You could try to see if your uh.. experiment affects these figures.
#7
Quote from: RicRider on September 03, 2018, 01:21:52 PM
Heck, I disable insects in most of my games too because I think they're impossible to deal with until you get some real guns (or have crazy kiting skills like the latest video from Gaming by Gaslight with a bit of luck thrown in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HamnKnGGkkY&t=0s).

Give em another go in 0.19. The armor changes seem to have made a big difference in melee survivability. I had 2 guys in marine armor and one in plate hold off an insect armada using a door funnel (3 guys behind an open doorway that allows only one insect at a time to engage) equipped only with steel maces with only bruises to show for it.
#8
General Discussion / Re: Overkill Pirate Raid
September 02, 2018, 03:51:54 PM
Randy? 5 doomsday is a bit... much. A spare antigrain warhead could have worked, or an animal army. Alternatively you could hole up and call for allies to help. Have them waste all their ammo on expendables. Could also try kiting them with snipers, or sending out melee in shield belts to draw their fire. You just have to get them to waste their shot after which they are just cannon fodder.
#9
General Discussion / Re: Trap costs in 0.19
September 02, 2018, 03:03:53 PM
Quote from: vampiresoap on September 02, 2018, 10:32:34 AM
It's actually not that bad. I set a grow zone for wood, and if I run out of wood, I'll just rely on the turrets. I build the traps whenever I get enough wood.

In my boreal forest playthrough I found this strategy hampered by the long growing times, long planting times and the short, 20-day, growing season of my biome. It is year 4 now and I have only just harvested my first tree farm. In the very long term I could probably expand out my production to cover expenses but it would require a serious time investment and by that point I will have long-ago had to switch to more powerful traps or IEDs as even now the raider's armor usually allows them to trigger 2, 3 or more traps before they are brought down. I finally have deep drilling so I'm going to see what kind of rate I can pull up stone blocks.
#10
General Discussion / Re: Trap costs in 0.19
September 01, 2018, 11:37:01 AM
Quote from: JimBeam on September 01, 2018, 03:51:00 AM
throwing down pre-made traps is "too" easy

I agree, the cheap trap costs have sucked most of the fun out of strategic laying of traps. I have advocated increasing the upfront cost of traps and reducing their maintenance costs, which would encourage a more strategic playstyle and also move the burden of deciding how many traps you can support to your current number of resources and not the rate at which you accumulate them, the former of which is a much more visible and reliable figure.

Edit: Oops, I missed the 'pre-made' part of your comment. I actually quite like being able to move them about. If this was coupled with a more significant upfront cost it would make strategic deployment more important, adding a nice layer of forethought to the process.
#11
General Discussion / Re: Trap costs in 0.19
August 31, 2018, 07:47:23 PM
Quote from: JimBeam on August 31, 2018, 05:11:41 PM
i think the new trap systems allows for interesting situational plays

the building time makes it possible (for skilled builders) to set up the traps near the enemy, luring them in, retreating and killing off the slowed down meele fighters

if they prepare before the attack thats easy to set up

if they attack immediately  and are further away its possible near the base

this allows very interesting gameplays early and mid-game by using the map

You can actually reinstall traps, so just build them in your base and move them into the line of attack when you need 'em.
#12
Problem is they melt through even granite walls like a hot knife through butter. Your wall would have to me mighty thick. Plus mortars got nerfed even further in 0.19 IIRC, reducing their accuracy even further than they were before. Endless mortar shells is really the only way to do anything with them these days.
#13
General Discussion / Re: Trap costs in 0.19
August 31, 2018, 03:00:58 PM
Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
It's frankly just not that hard to request a constant supply of caravans from allied factions. Iirc it's a 4 day cooldown per faction so you can get a Bulk Goods caravan every 2 days. They have ~300 steel 100% of the time.
If you make a concerted effort you can trivially afford the cost of the steel and the subsequent gifts required to keep the faction relations high.

That's a good point, I forgot about requesting caravans. This certainly makes the acquisition of large amounts of steel or wood much easier provided you keep up with trade good production.

Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
As for wood? Well it's essentially infinite in half the game's biomes.

Did you not see the part where I completely emptied a large map of all harvestable wood in the first year? It's not amount, it's rate. Steel is also infinite because it drops from the sky in the form of cargo pods and meteors, but the rate is too low for it to be a practical long-term solution for steel issues.

Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
As for stone? Have you actually used a deep drill on a location with no or exhausted resources? If you want stone chunks.. you can have as many as your mining skill allows.. And it's plenty!

I haven't. Let me ask; how many chunks can a decent miner expect to extract per day?

Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
The turret comparison is.. pretty freaking invalid for a variety of reasons. The way you're approaching this topic is pretty bonkers to be honest.

I mean did you write that with the intention of nobody thinking about what you'd said for a quarter of a second? The accuracy alone of turrets alone makes the direct damage potential comparison completely invalid.
Turrets can be destroyed by attackers without ever interacting with them.
They have a constant power drain.
Turrets can't be made out of renewable, cheap resources.

It's not just an apples-to-oranges comparison, it's apples to coyotes at this point. There are so many differences in their basic design and use.
Moreover every possibly defensive tool shouldn't be expected to be equally powerful.

Using that logic SANDBAGS should be as powerful as IEDs or turrets.

Here you lose me completely. Sandbags are not defensive weapons, they are cover. The defensive weapons are mortars, ieds, turrets and traps. All of these things have an amount of damage to enemy forces that they might be expected to do over their lifetime, and an associated resource cost. I pointed out that there's an order of magnitude of difference in damage/resource between turrets and traps to the point where only a particularly stubborn person would bother using them once turrets become available. Plus turrets are area-effect weapons whose potential scales with the number of turrets and whose costs decrease proportionately (you lose less turrets if you have more). Most of the other 'costs' of turrets are easily manageable. Constant power drain? Build a switch for God's sake! Non-renewable resources? You just spent this entire thread telling me how trivial it is to get enough steel to build the Golden Gate Bridge every other day. And if you are losing turrets to attackers outside of the turret range you really need to work on your turret placement - a couple of walls carefully placed and this will never happen.

Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
I get the impression that your main concern (that traps -in your mind- aren't viable in whatever your idea of long term is ) is derived from you not actually attempting much of what you're complaining about.
You can easily play for 10+ years and make good use of traps throughout on most difficulties in most biomes.
Their effectiveness will vary but.. they're quite viable.

As I have pointed out several times, these concerns are based around an ongoing game that I have been playing now for a few weeks (currently ~4 years in). In this game I had serious serious wood issues *on a forest biome* even with what I consider modest trap usage. I admit it has been better since tree spawn rates were buffed, but it is clear this strategy will be ineffective on a desert, plains or tundra biome. Unfortunately I'm going to have to transition to more powerful traps as these days it takes 3 or 4 traps to bring down the heavily armored raiders that are hitting me. I intend to look further into deep drilling as I am down to the dregs on stone chunks on my map already.

------------------

To elaborate on another aspect of what bothers me about the trap change is how one of the goals of 0.19 was balancing to prevent the overwhelming use of killboxes. But when it came down to it, turrets were only given a relatively mild nerf whereas door-popping and traps were nerfed into the ground.

Killboxes are boring! So so boring. Build a few walls, drop down a bunch of turrets, go to sleep. And now we have even more powerful guns to further trivialize the experience. Autocannons for making mincemeat of mechanoids and long-range uranium-powered sniper turrets for ripping holes in their lines from the other side of the map!

Door popping was fun because it requires careful control and placement of travel and exit routes. Traps were fun because they had a high upfront resource cost which encouraged careful placement and funneling. These tools require forethought and preparation. Now doors take forever to close, drastically reducing the effectiveness of door techniques, and traps are changed into a mindless spam fest but with the wonderful addition of becoming more expensive the more effective they are! I don't even bother to think about where I put traps now, just dump a bunch down and forget about them until I see that once again I am low on logs and my map is as bare as a baby's backside.
#14
General Discussion / Re: Trap costs in 0.19
August 30, 2018, 03:55:00 PM
Quote from: mindlar on August 30, 2018, 03:28:59 PM
The defense changes in .19 make it so the trap corridor of death strategy no longer works. For me they've been working fine as part of a layer of defenses. 300 wood by the time you're getting raids that have 10 traps triggered shouldn't be too expensive, that's approximately the cost of setting up a new bedroom for a pawn. For me the cost is approximately 2 pawn days of work to chop trees and reinstall the traps. Obviously this is biome dependent as to how available the resources are.

A direct comparison to turrets seems like an apples to oranges comparison. Turrets have a larger up front cost to build, maintenance issues (power/batteries/breakdowns/etc.), and can catastrophically explode if things go wrong possibly including other turrets if placed too close together.

Well you don't need to set up a new bedroom every 5 days; comparing the ongoing cost of traps to the one-off cost of furniture really is an apples to oranges comparison. OTOH it makes perfect sense to compare two components of the varied defense strategy that Tynan wishes us to adopt. A turret costs 100 steel + 3 components (which can be crafted for a further 36 steel), i.e. the cost of 4.5 steel traps. Maybe you lose one turret every couple of raids so lets say your entire killbox's worth of turrets costs only say 2 traps worth of resources as an ongoing cost. And unlike traps this cost is reduced if you have more turrets!
#15
General Discussion / Re: Patch note questions
August 30, 2018, 02:48:36 PM
Quote from: Awe on August 30, 2018, 06:52:23 AM
Quote from: Sola on August 30, 2018, 03:04:13 AM
Improved caravaning:
-Admittedly, I never gave caravaning the time of day, due to the learning curve and myriad complaints people seemed to have with it. Is this a noteworthy improvement?  Can I get a quick "Caravans for dummies" seminar?

Caravans for dummies(short version):
Dont go to caravans unprepared and all be fine.

Long version:
1. Dont go caravans alone. 2-3 melees and 2-3 shooters is ok. Must be well equipped. Must have doctor(s).
2. Take meds and some easy drugs with you. Psychoid tea help with fast recreation refilling, smokeleafs help with pain after fights. Both obviously help with mood(beer is also good option for mood).
3. Going for 3 days trip? Take week of food supply. Wounded/ill guys slow you significant.
4. Use pack animals. Even if you pawns can carry all you need. Usually dont - food, medicine is heavy. So having a few excessive pack animals increasing overall caravan speed. Muffalo females most optimal choice - easy to tame, good temp range, gives milk between caravan trips.

You must have gigantic colonies then to be able to spare 4-6 pawns for multiple days. How do you keep your base defended during this time? OTOH small caravans have a small 'visibility' making them less likely to be attacked.