Topics

GOAL: unobtrusively / quickly / optionally, give people a way to think of their colony as a story to be shared as well as a game they are playing.   
Why?:  I think even when we DONT share a story, the act of thinking about a colony or colonist as something that we MAY tell a story about, makes us care more about whats happening... The important part isn't to get people to do more storytelling, it's to lower the barrier to entry to imagining that we COULD tell a story if we wanted to.

Challenges:   Moderation,  breaking the flow of gameplay, interrupting the flow-state of relaxed gameplay, or interrupting the tense action state of dealing with a cool challenge, feeling like homework, feeling like 'reddit already exists why should i do this', we want people to know for sure that whatever they post someone will see, but also we dont want them to be able to follow up on that and get distracted from just playing the game, no rating system, we want the effort of people feeling like what they said was heard, to come from their imagination,   

Ideas:  to avoid interupting gameplay, maybe do all of this on the loading screen? or when ppl pause, this could be the pause screen? so like you go to grab some water, and come back and just see a cool screenshot from someone else's game on the left, and then a few smaller screenshots from your game of how your base has changed or a colonist interaction like 'hey did you notice jane was flirting with benjamin at jakes wedding?'  etc etc... and then you have the option of just smiling and clicking unpause, or like tabbing thru more and more screenshots from your game, and finding one you like, and sharing it so that it'll appear on other peoples pause screens...      Then mid-game now that we've teased you with the pause screen, there's a button you can do to generate a screenshot of your home-area on the left and close up screenshots of all your pawns on the right, and you click that button when something cool happened, and maybe you can rewind thru time a little bit while looking... so lets say we save only the non-paused last 1 in game day of stuff, and you can rewind fast forward thru it and see your base, and each of your pawns, so like if you notice that jane lost a leg, and you didn't see it happen, you can click the pause thing and scroll back until jane gets killed by a squirrel, and be like, oh thats what happened, ha ha. 

The huge map makes things much harder, because seiges/psychic ships can be very far from home.  lack of trees/animals/soil and weather cold enough to require parkas, but not cold enough to hamper raiders is hard too. 

The biggest challenge seems to be berserk from mood.  You'd usually combat it with high quality wooden beds (+15 comfortable), high quality recroom/dining room (+30)  and planting flowers along pathways (+10 beauty)  but NONE of that is possible at least until so late into the game that i'm usually dead already, because we don't have wood or soil.

rushing hydroponics and stoneworking, and building a base and a defense is a fun challenge, but one that you can succeed at nearly 100% of the time, even if sometimes it's close...

Psychic ships/seiges are usually handled in a normal game by sending out a few snipers, but on an extremely large map, with constant mood problems and not enough money to buy early sniper rifles, these can just be game ending.  theoretically tinfoil hats and sniper rifles could be bought, but it's a timing thing, i usually die before i've even earned my second thousand silver.

Ways I've died:

Starvation: (usually due to not enough steel, power generator dying, losing power, blight events, or taking on too many mouths before the first harvest is in)

Violence: needing steel for hydroponics can limit sentry guns, and poor mood soldiers or soldiers who are already injured from subduing broken teammates cant fill in the gaps... low population because you don't want to run out of food further exacerbates things

Frostbite:  More than once I've died of hypothermia because I tried to walk to the edge of the super large map with someone who wasn't wearing a good parka.  Also, poor mood + bad weather = frostbite death,  and loss of power without someone in a good enough mood to fix the problem often leads to frostbite as well.  If only I could make parkas early, but you need to build up that stockpile of human leather before it's possible.

Lack of Steel: losing power without steel on hand = death, running out of sentry guns without steel on hand can be death during a raid, just general lack of steel = death, you have to keep a stockpile on hand.





Notes:  prisoners just won't successfully convert unless they are happy, and a happy prisoner requires light/heat/ a good bed / table/chair/food ... that's a lot to ask in the super early game from a colony, so I often don't bother with prisoners until after the first rice harvest... but that means low population for me, which makes me far more susceptible to violent death.   In a normal game I get up to 7-8 pawns before the end of the first year, but on my ice sheet I've never gotten past 5 before completely losing the game.



Task List I'm using thus far:

I usually have a full time builder, miner, and crafter...  the miner will mine 10 steel, then haul them home, then repeat... crafter will research stonecutting/hydroponics then make stone blocks for a long time, then try and make us some money (though I've never successfully made much money from crafting)
For a long time I just used 2 miners and a builder, but I'm hoping that a crafter can get me enough money to buy tinfoil hats or sniper rifles... so far no success



1) set everyone to 'work only' cuz why sleep before bedroom is done.
2) make a research bench and start on stonecutting research
3) get power/battery/14x14 room/heater all made from steel
4) create 4 beds, and then reduce 'work only' to 12 hour days
5) make a bunch of limestone blocks, then start hydroponics research
6) get 7 hydroponics and a lamp and try for a rice harvest then reduce 'work only' to 8 hour days
7) run around the map hauling all the survival meals back to the base
paste dispenser
9) steel turret
10) outer wall
11) hospital
12) prison  (in a 'normal' game I do prison first, so i can catch the early easy prisoners, but on ice sheet, we wait til after rice harvest)
13) individual bedrooms
14) table/benches horseshoe pin.

If we make it this far, we're relatively safe and the game will go a long time (1-3 hours)... but quite often we don't make it this far, usually due to mood break, if we happen to get a colonist with bad mood traits, or we eat raw food, or sleep on the ground, or get too cold...


mid-game,
1) get trade going
2) increase defenses
3) make floors and flour pots
4) make parkas from human leather
5) buy some wood, and then craft/re-craft beds until you have 'good' or better quality super-beds for all colonists, move the old small beds into prison/hospital.
6) sterile floored hospital with vital monitors (i've literally never gotten this far)
7) more stuff I've never gotten far enough to try.


Here's a savegame file with 5 dudes about as far as i've evah made it... where to go from here?
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxMi84dRwntxODNRdTlMWWtLY3M



Finished up that game, I felt like i was doing amazingly well,
Died on 80th day to a psychic ship, spawned 2 lancers and 2 centipedes, the lancers kept 1-shotting my colonists from 3 range further than my survival rifle/great bows could reach... i needed either tinfoil or a sniper rifle, but yet again I NEVER GENERATED A SINGLE SELLABLE ITEM IN 80 DAYS
full joy/comfort, somewhat interesting dining room, lots of beer/food, 2,000 stockpiled steel, all imortant researches unlocked mortars/hospital beds/smelter/brewery/geothermal/etc etc...  20 construction skill on my builder, and masterwork sexy wooden beds for all.  noone went berserk ALL GAME... 80 straight days with noone breaking due to mood, that's gotta be a first for me on this difficulty, and was the main focus of this playthru... i kept a tiny stock of beer, and paid very close attention to keeping peoples joy/comfort/space/beauty bars full.

I feel like I've really improved in the one area I focused on (mood) but I still need a way to generate enough income to buy sniper rifle...   IE: within 60-80 days, I need to earn about 1,500 steel.   I feel like I should reserve all of my starting wood for butcher table, tailor table, brewery table... because masterwork steel beds are only 5% less efficient than wood, and buying wood hurts my goal of saving for a sniper rifle.   

Another possibility is that around day 50, once I'm all settled in, I should stop mining steel, and start hunting down plastasteel and uranium to craft gladiators with for cash... I've still never once made a gladius, despite reading and believing that its a good source of cash... I just always need more steel :p

I had a poison ship that I never attacked, and a mechanoid raid that I left 'downed' but not killed... and I never again got any events, for like a year... finally I realized I wasn't getting events, so I killed the mechanoids, and instantly I got raided... so this seems to be a bug... either downed mechanoids should die after a day, or they shouldn't count as 'active event still in progress' when considering future events.

I suspect of course that high quality weapons do more dmg, and high quality armor gives more protection, but what about a high quality t-shirt?

1) can you order them all to melee a given target even if they have ranged weapon?
2) can you order them all to attack a target once in range?
3) can you order them all to attack a target without moving?
4) when people say "large maps" or "small maps" what do they mean? is it possible to make the play-area larger or smaller? I've only seen the large/small option when generating the big world map, and i'm not even sure why the world map matters cuz you only play in one small part of it

That way I could say 'do until we have at least 5 hats of hitpoints > 50, and quality > excellent'

if you tell your dudes to do whatever they want, they will tend to sleep for 8 hrs, joy for 2, then work for 6, eat for 2, work for 6 ... what that means is right in the middle of work, when they might be very far from the dining room, they head off to go eat... since they only eat once per day anyway, i'd like to have them eat when they first wake up, cuz um.. duh?   now i can micromanage this easy peasy, right click on food... but it'd be nice to add it to the restrictions list...

sleep/joy/eat/work/anything  ... obviously they should still eat whenever they are hungry, i'm just saying, during 'eat' time they should eat even if they aren't hungry, so that over time that'll be their 1 sustaining meal of doom.

Obviously if I say make cowboy hats until I have 1, and then I set the hitpoint filter to min hitpoints 50, I want it to check whether I have any 50+ hitpoint hats, and if not, make hats... but instead it checks if i have any hats (ignoring the hitpoint filter)... that's silly, what other possible meaning could the hitpoint filter have, it's not like I'm asking it to make low hitpoint hats

I suspect all production benches have same bug but i've only tested it on the tailoring bench.