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No problem, its 2nd alpha after all.  I just moved onto a new world after saving for your analysis.

OK - still over 600 kb <smile>

Here you go:  http://www.mediafire.com/download/j4mamrjb1owkjp5/Survived_again!!.zip

Just go to the lady at the table and click on her.  Ctl-Atl-Del to task manager to recover...

No... not by the neck, and no, not what your thinking...

I have a colonist that is sitting at the dinner table and doing nothing.  If I click on HER (told you it wasn't what you were thinking), I get some really basic stat, like 100/100 and lose all control of my other colonist.   Bugged presumably.  Where should I send the save file? (7mb)

One suggestion:  Put an 'about' command somewhere - and display the current game version, storyteller, etc.

There are times I swear I've picked the wrong storyteller and really wonder.

Played for several hours (like 10?) yesterday against the Alpha1 release and had a few comments:

Love the new resource management and flexible storage sites.  Particularly like that I can set priorities so that I can stockpile things like food, and then overflow to the launchpad whatever "excess" I have.

Had a few problems with Manual priorities (not sure if defaults have this, I tend to switch to manual pretty quickly):

*  In the early game, I'd fine my crew going idle, despite there being work to do.  This seemed to be a range thing.  I did check, and even though there was construction pending, nothing would happen.  Later that would occur when I ran out of metal, but doubt that was the issue (although I'll need to run again to verify that).  It might be my imagination, but it appeared they refused to doing anything north of a certain virtual latitude.

*  Random daze/leavings/berserk without warning were a pain late game.  Sometimes I could see it coming, but often not.

*  Feeding everyone was a LOT harder. This felt buggy, like me have rooms full of hydroponic tables and multiple growing zones bursting with goodness and people starving.  If I marked a bunch of outside plants for harvest they ravaged the plants and would be happy, but they were not harvesting from the tables/zones.  I could fix this by forcing cooking to be #1 and eventually balanced around that.

*  Overworked and hungry being a "Mental Break soon" event when there were plenty of beds and food seemed odd.  Fixable by removing most work assignments until they recovered.

*  Laughed when I realized I had too many potted plants.  Apparently those now require maintenance and seemed to take priority over planting food.  Each 5x6 room now gets just one in each corner instead of lining the walls with them.

*  Had several disabled colonist die in bed.  Almost like doctoring isn't working.  If they were active prisoners, they apparently got fed and recruited (I always recruit everyone - you can always use them as cleaners/haulers!)

*  Really tough time avoiding abandonment in early game.  They REALLY hate sharing a bedroom.  Ended up getting by this by building a lot of 3x3 rooms which I used as prison cells/overflow rooms later in the game.

Just my 2 cents!

I like it.  Suggest reducing the blasting charge room down to 2 charges - that is all it takes for 100% kill, more is just a waste.  2 outside the door, two in the room should do you just fine.

I really do like the friendly fire protection.

Results from a tighter box arrangement, with extra turrets... results were as expected.

I didn't bother with a colonist line - they would likely have Friendly Fired my turrets to death.

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Actually I played around with the balance at the mouth of the funnel a bit.  Originally had rubble to the end but found it simply took too much of my limited colonist time to transverse it cleaning up after the dead.  Thus the backward open path along either side - the raiders always want to go forward, so it didn't hurt.  It also allowed the raiders to come forward a bit for easier access by the turrets.

One key is the 2 segment wall piece opposite the opening.  That prevents the raiders from standing in the tunnel and shooting.

Alas,  all that firepower was mostly unused. It was only useful to kill  6-10 raiders - if 50+ came thru they would easily overrun everything.  My goal was to create a sustainable kill zone that did not require "reloading" with blasting charges and new doors.  I failed at that.

I do think it would work if colonist and raiders took up real space.  e.g. 50 of them could not stand in a single square.  Then they would have to single file out and would be eliminated (presuming 15 turrets firing 4 rounds each plus the colonist fire was sufficient to kill a couple at a time).  Of course, if dead bodies took up space, that would quickly become a problem and we would be back to blasting charges to clearing dead bodies.

Maybe I will rebuild with a tighter circle, reducing range, and see if that helps.

Oh, note that NO wild animals are allowed inside the compound.  Between things I took 1-2 of my best shots and used them to kill all the squirrels, boomrats, and Muffalo inside.  That helped - seldom did the colonist ever go out. It was kind of silly to see a squirrel bang on a door until it destroyed it...

Thanks.  I would have thought all those sand bags would help the raiders.  I've used rocks in the past hoping they would provide less defense but still slow them down.

Anyhow, I did a bit of overkill tonight.  Played all but the last half-dozen days with 9 colonist - FINALLY got a slave ship and bought two more. 

This was more of an experiment for me than anything else, but:

I started out with (1) kill box that holds (2) Blasting Charges.  Box has a door going in, which pretty much lets all the stragglers catch up,  and another box going out.  Timing changes depending on how many are beating on the door, but generally I light the fuse when the first one reaches the outgoing door.

As CC sent bigger and bigger raids, I needed to add additional kill boxes - both because I missed timing it sometimes, and because they were sometimes just too strung out.  As you can see - I tried dealing with them via Turrets, but they were never enough.  Blasting charges are WAY more effective.   Don't forget to shape your room so there are no safe corners!

CC sent me 9 colonist via the usual ways before she shut me out for well over  100 days.  They built the vast majority of the area shown.  Obviously, I had hopes for having a lot more...

At least I had the colonist long enough to get them decently trained.

Cheers!

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I've been fooling around with the different storytellers:

Randy Random can be challenging at the beginning, but settles into a easily sustainable game within a few hours.  I use Randy when I want to have >20 colonist.

Phoebe Friendly is great for playing around with base designs when you don't want to be hassled.

Cassandra Classic is proving a challenge.  I seldom get over 14 colonist, with various losses sometimes not being made up by the very rare slave trader or wanderer later in the game.   I actually managed to keep 11 alive from start to near-finish, until one got mauled by a muffalo while outside collecting.  Those and boomrats are a real pain.  I think that when defending against 50+ Raiders, kill boxes are pretty much required, with blast charges doing most of the work, and turrets/colonist doing cleanup.

Has anyone come up with a sustainable killbox design that is 100% effective against any number of raiders using the CC storyteller?  I'd love to try and build a large colony (e.g. 50+ colonist) using CC, but am not sure that is even possible  - between the every  two or three day raids, and the low recruitment opportunities, I'm just not getting there.   I've come close, but raids during solar flares causes losses that I haven't been able to recover from, and sooner or later, those get you.

Any suggestions?  I need some inspiration!

Thanks in advance.

I've lost count, but well over 50 by day 140. 

I never lost a single colonist to raiders - although I'd lose them to Muffalo, insanity, etc.  Solar Flares were the biggest problem, since I'd almost always having somebody go nuts.  Solar Flare's immediately followed by Eclipses (24 hour?  Really?) were particularly troublesome.  Raids seem to come every 2-3 days, often well before repairs could be made.  Final death came when attacked during one of those very routine Solar Flares (really?  Why have electronics if they are offline ~20% of the time?).

Without turrets, I suspect the game would have ended much sooner - well before any significant colonist development would have occurred.   

Will try again after the next release, hopefully with some balance changes.  Might try a turret free game to see if there is a survivability option that way.

Several screenshots attached:   A typical raiding party, a party after blasting charges thinned them significantly,  one once they started running, and a layout shot (which doesn't show the geo-thermals that power things during eclipses)

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