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I think if it was something to deter raiders to avoid your settlement, you'd do something like:

Have a big sign saying "This will happen to any raiders we capture"

And next to this sign if a bunch of raiders who died horrifically by jamming them butt first on a long sharp pike that drives all the way up the bowels and exits out around the shoulder bone. If I was a raider and saw that, I'd turn around and run the other way. Or, say, Nuke the site from orbit.

That's a small mini nuke then. What about instead of mini nuke use a Thermobaric warhead?

OHHHHH Sector as in a sector in the colony, rather than a sector as in a massive chunk of space several light years across. That makes more sense.

The only problem with that idea Trensicourt is that breaks the overall lore of the game. As you are on a rimworld on the outer rim of the galaxy it takes many decades if not centuries for news to reach those places due to the inability to travel faster than light. So, if your star system is 100.3 light years away, it will take a communication at least 100.3 years to reach you (as communications are usually transmitted by microwaves (Wifi/Radar) or radiowaves (AM/FM) which travel at the speed of light). So any news you'd receive would be decades out of date, if you received it at all.

Well if its big and important when you lose a colonist in a small colony, then why should it be allowed to "restock" dead colonists with new ones by purchasing slaves or capturing people? If people knew they couldn't reaquire people, they may consider the ones that they have to be far more valuable and make more of an effort to protect them.

Headshot in the UT Game Announcer's voice (1:05 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyc3fBNoZyw)

As suggested in a previous thread by Galileus (http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=1520.0), using food to limit population growth rather than having fixed limits based on storytellers.

How this could work out is having food over time decompose and disappear (rotting effect). Different foods could rot at different rates. Normal grown potatoes could rot within 3 days. Hydroponic potatoes could rot within 1 day (due to being grown so fast that they aren't able to resist disease and infection as well as a normally grown potato would). Any food stored in a Food Dispenser would rot at a much slower rate (say 5 days), but would have limited storage space for food supplies (stored food would be in the form of nutrient paste; say 100 units of food or 10 nutrient meals [10 food = 1 nutrient paste without research]). This would have an added benefit that nutrient paste dispensers would only need to be restocked every once in a while rather than have colonists haul food from storage to it every time they want a meal.

This could be potentially useful once cooking or other ways of preparing food is introduced. A food dispenser could store food supplies the longest but would always grant a debuff for eating nutrient paste. Whereas making it in different ways (ie a Oven Baked Potato) would grant positive buffs for eating it but would rot faster than raw food.

Having food decompose, would naturally limit your ability to sustain a larger colony. This way you also will not be able to forever sit on a large pile of food forever; you have to be constantly producing more to replace it. So instead of having a fixed limit of 13 or so colonists, your true population cap would be based on how many mouths you can feed with your food production without starvation setting in.

Rotting food... hmm... I think that deserves a topic in of itself... I'll go make one

You can macro yes, but as its not set up in this fashion, its more of a hack than anything at this point. Otherwise, yes I do agree with you. I think personally the reason people want larger colonies is that we are given the opportunity to recruit more people to our colony, until a certain point where the game arbritralily (I know I spelled that wrong) says no more colonists for you. If we weren't able to recruit people period and say started with 10 colonists to start off with and gained no more, then I don't think people would ask to have limits removed.

Basically, I think what it comes down to is greed. When we are given the ability to get more people, we will naturally want more and more of them, even if it may not be healthy game-wise or storywise to do so. And when the game says that we aren't allowed any more we get angry because we want more of them, but the game will not allow it. If the game didn't allow it in the first place, then there would be no arguments for no more people as we wouldn't have a foundation to stand on to make a case to remove the limit.

That's why I suggest a separate storyteller with no limits attached. So that those who want to play the game outside of the game's intended parameters can do so while the rest of the gaming community will play it how its meant to be played.

That depends on perspective. If you are playing from a micromanagement perspective, each colonist would be unique and you may get emotional attached to them. If you are playing from a macromanagement perspective however, you could simply see colonists as resources to be used and exploited to achieve your own personal goals.

From perspective a) people would feel a sense of loss of each colonist regardless of being able to resupply themselves. For b) your viewpoint would have merit as that player would simply see one resource die off to be replaced by a similar resource.

Because, a weapon rack takes up two spaces whereas a door takes up one. I dunno. I personally would like a weapon rack to store more than two weapons though, rather than have a massive armory with about 100 racks all filled.

Well the idea with the no conversion is that when you reach the population cap of say 13, you get a handicap to converting the prisoners. Once you fall below that cap, the handicap is removed until you get back up to the population limit.

Example: You are currently at 12 colonists with a maximum of 13. You have 3 prisoners, with a Warden w/ 20 Social Skill. The warden has no handicap while attempting to recruit any one of the 3 prisoners. Once one is successfully recruited, you get a handicap that prevents you from recruiting more. However, this doesn't prevent you from performing beatings or friendly chats. You are now at 13 colonists. After a raid, you lose 2 colonists and the handicap is removed for recruiting purposes. Those two prisoners that you continued to visit should be very easy to convince now, allowing you to regain your population quickly. Once you get 13 colonists again, the handicap reappears.

Fair point, though optimization of the game to allow more colonists active would make the game better overall, as each colonist would have to be more efficient with job tasking and pathing (which I think are the two hard hitting CPU hogs for colonists at the moment).

Example: If you set up an area of 75 x 75 (5625 total) squares to be turned into concrete that is a grand total of 5,625 DIFFERENT jobs for a colonist to pick from if they are listed as builders. That causes my game to slow to single digits or freeze entirely for several seconds, even with only 3-5 colonists.

I think that if Tynan wants to have a fixed number of colonists, instead of preventing you from capturing prisoners, one should prevent you from recruiting them once captured.

After all, whats the point of selling prisoners to slavers, if you need those prisoners to do stuff around the colony (except for say Nobles or Courtesans of course). If you can't recruit them, then the natural choice would be to sell them to slavers or to execute them for a fear-morale based colony.

Also, its not really "random chance" of incapping an enemy. I've taken a fair look at how the mechanics work via modding, and:

You can only incap colonists at 40 or less HP (even with Tough) and each damaging bullet has a 1% chance of incapping an enemy <= 40 (less than or equal to). Once you reach the desired maximum of a storyteller, it sets the incap chance to 0% chance of incapping an enemy. If the desired maximum was removed, then it would be up to random probability of whether you would or wouldn't incap people.

EDIT: Another possible option is that in the future Tynan could create a storyteller for larger sized colonies and state next to the storyteller potraits what their maximum population limits are so that people who want larger colony games will avoid those portraits for smaller colony storytellers whereas those who wish to play the game as Tynan initially intended it, would avoid the larger colony game storytellers. This way, Tynan supports both sides and people can choose how they wish to play. Afterall, large and small colonies create different stories, both of which are viable.

Well put Galileus. I agree with your approach. However, do you think there should be a way to determine if one is a pirate king, over someone close to a pirate king when choosing to display whose head is on display?

What I find interesting is that a colonist on fire, doesn't drop to the ground and roll around trying to put it out, like a semi-sane person would, instead of running around crazily on fire.