[BEWARE -- SPOILERS --]
In a 100% challenge game, temperate forest biome, Cassandra Classic storyteller I managed to stay strong 5 years until I got bored with the colony and built the ship with room for my 22 colonists and left. Including 4 colonists that were in cryptosleep because they were abrasive or assassins.
Built principle - holed up in the mountain
I decided to build inside the mountain exclusively with a single entrance to the outside world. It was vital that I did not leave my colonist to wonder outside much. I had only a small area with no mountaintop roof that I enclosed so I could grow trees, and where I ended up placing 4 mortars and some shooting and melee training facilities. The cooler for my kitchen led to a duct that had no rooftop but was sealed off by several rows of walls.
Defense - semicircle of turrets and a single wall entry at the focal point
I originally planned on making a huge circular killbox at the entrance (51 diameter) as I usually do in other games. However, I did not have space on the map to make it inside the mountain and ended up making only a semicircle of that same size at the entrance, as I soon realized that I could not maintain such a huge killbox on an outside zone considering the hordes of enemies I faced with this mod. The semicircle with mostly advanced military turrets worked pretty well, but I kept loosing 1-3 turrets every time a had a huge raid.
The game-changing nuke trap
The most game-changing discovery for me, which would allow me to continue to play this game possibly forever, was a "trap" to kill nuke the first wave of enemies automatically, making only a single improvised turret (and some log walls) only get destroyed every raid. Since all I had to do was rebuild the "trap" and patch the walls, I was making more steel with trade then spending on defense. You can see the trap built (missing an obvious wall piece) at the top of the "killzone" picture at the album linked below. It was placed in front of the single wall opening and closed with walls on the sides. This "trap" consists of an improvised turret next to a nuclear bomb, closed with log walls on 3 sides and a moat on the 4th side. The initial wave of enemies would go for the improvised turret because it was the first thing firing at them when they arrived at the colony. The moat would hold the melee units off for a bit until more arrived. By the time they were able to reach the improvised turret, there was already a huge gathering of units near the turret (and the nuke) and the turret explosion set off the nuke too. This would outright eliminate the first wave, allowing my defenses and colonists to pick out the remaining units without a single additional loss. The improvised turret+nuke combo costs about 200 steel and 2 uranium. If you are trading well, it is quite cheap. The log walls cost only 3 wood each.
Different monster raids and how I dealt with them
This is how I ended up dealing with the advanced raids this mod pack offers after trial and error:
Other notes
Needless to say, it is vital for this strategy to have all of the food you need generated with hydroponics inside the base.
Normal human and mech raids were ridiculously easy compared to the most advanced raids of monsters. It was quite funny to get a combination of different raids at the same time as they would fight each other in addition to fighting you. One time an overwhelming zombie horde made pirates that arrived to assault my colony flee before they even got a chance to attack.
It is was also cool to see the stage 2 of the zombie virus - airborne. This means that dead people will always rise as zombies. I used to keep fresh zombie bodies in freezer for butchering and selling the leather until a zombie woke up and attacked my cook! No more, they get incinerated right away.
The most challenging thing was dealing with all of the dead bodies. Not only will the piles of rotting bodies drive your colonists insane, it will become harder to move around as the squares with bodies in them slow your colonists down. I had to have 2 crematoriums and 2 butchers tables working full-time just to keep the area nearest to the base clear of corpses between raids.
As I did not get a single ancient ship drop on the map during the entirety of the playthrough I had to buy and AI core for the ship's computer at the exotic goods merchant for 7000. Along with all of the steel I had to buy to make the ship for 22 poeple, it took quite a while to raise all the silver I needed once I decided it was time to leave this rimworld.
I did not think of taking a starting screenshot of the beginning of this colony but I uploaded an album of the base after my colonists left on the ship. You can see the date on the corner (5505) and and I can send the save file for verification.
The image album with explanations can be found at the following link:
http://imgur.com/a/V6ODU
Cheers,
MMOGOG
Edits: text reviews.
In a 100% challenge game, temperate forest biome, Cassandra Classic storyteller I managed to stay strong 5 years until I got bored with the colony and built the ship with room for my 22 colonists and left. Including 4 colonists that were in cryptosleep because they were abrasive or assassins.
Built principle - holed up in the mountain
I decided to build inside the mountain exclusively with a single entrance to the outside world. It was vital that I did not leave my colonist to wonder outside much. I had only a small area with no mountaintop roof that I enclosed so I could grow trees, and where I ended up placing 4 mortars and some shooting and melee training facilities. The cooler for my kitchen led to a duct that had no rooftop but was sealed off by several rows of walls.
Defense - semicircle of turrets and a single wall entry at the focal point
I originally planned on making a huge circular killbox at the entrance (51 diameter) as I usually do in other games. However, I did not have space on the map to make it inside the mountain and ended up making only a semicircle of that same size at the entrance, as I soon realized that I could not maintain such a huge killbox on an outside zone considering the hordes of enemies I faced with this mod. The semicircle with mostly advanced military turrets worked pretty well, but I kept loosing 1-3 turrets every time a had a huge raid.
The game-changing nuke trap
The most game-changing discovery for me, which would allow me to continue to play this game possibly forever, was a "trap" to kill nuke the first wave of enemies automatically, making only a single improvised turret (and some log walls) only get destroyed every raid. Since all I had to do was rebuild the "trap" and patch the walls, I was making more steel with trade then spending on defense. You can see the trap built (missing an obvious wall piece) at the top of the "killzone" picture at the album linked below. It was placed in front of the single wall opening and closed with walls on the sides. This "trap" consists of an improvised turret next to a nuclear bomb, closed with log walls on 3 sides and a moat on the 4th side. The initial wave of enemies would go for the improvised turret because it was the first thing firing at them when they arrived at the colony. The moat would hold the melee units off for a bit until more arrived. By the time they were able to reach the improvised turret, there was already a huge gathering of units near the turret (and the nuke) and the turret explosion set off the nuke too. This would outright eliminate the first wave, allowing my defenses and colonists to pick out the remaining units without a single additional loss. The improvised turret+nuke combo costs about 200 steel and 2 uranium. If you are trading well, it is quite cheap. The log walls cost only 3 wood each.
Different monster raids and how I dealt with them
This is how I ended up dealing with the advanced raids this mod pack offers after trial and error:
- Zombies: kill of the first wave with the trap. Lock my colonists indoors, have a nice night of sleep, make sure everyone eats in the morning and then I take all of the ranged colonists across the map to hunt the rest. It does not pay off to leave them on the map as they may wonder inside the base one by one and could bite an unsuspecting colonist. It takes two days, but it is the easiest group of enemies of deal with. Note: all the colonists that were still with the group by the time I killed the last zombie were going nuts with all the dead bodies littering the ground.
- Horrors: the starting horrors raids are quite weak. However, once the game starts sending spitters, they become quite nasty. These creatures will not go inside your base, they will just wait next to the entrance. They have a long range fire AoE spit. After setting my colonists and my defenses on fire trying to fight them off I decided to lock myself in and wait, hoping another group would come and fight them. I learned that they starve to death waiting for my colonists to come out in about 3 days. So I would just wait it off, rather then having to deal with the fire storm in the form of spits.
- Ants: The most annoying. The basic melee units and the middle-tier ranged ones are not so bad. My defenses would take care of them even without my colonists firing. However, last unit tier consists of ant queens. These nasty beings stay at the border of the map and continuously spawn basic melee ants. They do not starve themselves to death like the spitters, so I had to deal with them because the continuing crossfire at my base would take a toll on my walls. I ended up dealing with them with a set of 4 mortars (1 incendiary, 1 steel, 2 devastators - devastators are the best). I would have to manually aim at the queen ants for a long time, even with using colonists with good aim, as they would stick to the corners of the maps and were hard to hit. However, I discovered that once you "shred" them with a mortar, they get a bleed and will eventually die of blood loss or untreated infection. So at the end I would just make sure I got a few hits in each queen ant and wait it off inside the base, having my semicircle of turrets kill the basic melee ants that kept getting spawned for days straight if needed. I decided against manually targeting the queens until they were dead because it was so boring and because the colonists would switch targets if the queen they were targeting died and often hit my own defenses trying to target the basic ants that were making their way into my base. I set a geothermal on fire and even hit my ship once! I had 10 queens come to attack my base once and dealt with that with minimal losses. It did, however, take 3-4 days of mortar fire and waiting for the infection to kill the damaged queens.
Other notes
Needless to say, it is vital for this strategy to have all of the food you need generated with hydroponics inside the base.
Normal human and mech raids were ridiculously easy compared to the most advanced raids of monsters. It was quite funny to get a combination of different raids at the same time as they would fight each other in addition to fighting you. One time an overwhelming zombie horde made pirates that arrived to assault my colony flee before they even got a chance to attack.
It is was also cool to see the stage 2 of the zombie virus - airborne. This means that dead people will always rise as zombies. I used to keep fresh zombie bodies in freezer for butchering and selling the leather until a zombie woke up and attacked my cook! No more, they get incinerated right away.
The most challenging thing was dealing with all of the dead bodies. Not only will the piles of rotting bodies drive your colonists insane, it will become harder to move around as the squares with bodies in them slow your colonists down. I had to have 2 crematoriums and 2 butchers tables working full-time just to keep the area nearest to the base clear of corpses between raids.
As I did not get a single ancient ship drop on the map during the entirety of the playthrough I had to buy and AI core for the ship's computer at the exotic goods merchant for 7000. Along with all of the steel I had to buy to make the ship for 22 poeple, it took quite a while to raise all the silver I needed once I decided it was time to leave this rimworld.
I did not think of taking a starting screenshot of the beginning of this colony but I uploaded an album of the base after my colonists left on the ship. You can see the date on the corner (5505) and and I can send the save file for verification.
The image album with explanations can be found at the following link:
http://imgur.com/a/V6ODU
Cheers,
MMOGOG
Edits: text reviews.
