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A PSA about putting vents on the side of your buildings (unless you like all your prisoners getting cooked alive).

Looking back at what I wrote I misremembered and was more talking about the scyther blades rather then the power claws although the power claws do still have an effect too although small enough that it can be negated by buffing your colonists sight with one or a pair of bionic eyes although the cost of negating that penalty is pretty steep. Scyther blades on the other hand make your colonist basically next to useless even with the eyes.

looking through the effects of powerclaws i don't even think the claws are even good for melee because it lowers your manipulation percentage to 20% thus reducing the percent chance to even hit with a melee attack as well as ranged attacks. This also affects every stat that relies on manipulation from crafting to surgery so not only are they worse at fighting now they also cannot effectively craft or do medical work. The upside to this is that if they do manage to hit it will do more damage then even a masterwork Plasteel longsword.

I think it might be the fact that sandbags provide more cover that causes them to be destroyed faster as they are soaking up all the hits and if I'm not mistaken both sandbags and rubble have 300 health. although rubble costs nothing but the labor to move it while sandbags cost 3 metal per tile.

I don't think even roofs will save you from mortars, or at least the thin rock/metal roofs. If mortars did use ammunition it would be a good idea to buff their fire speed as currently you have to wait half a day for mortars to fire another round off. Also it would be nice if fast forwarding was possible even while under a mortar attack as the chances of your colonists dying from them is slim.

I have had this problem also except it was two of my colonists that had gone insane. I had made a hasty prisoner room in my equally hasty 5 by 4 power storage room which had four batteries, a lamp and two sleeping spots. One of my prisoners kept going insane almost instantly and attacked the other and it was not until I had recruited the second prisoner and built a proper prisoner building which had more space, beds, tables and flowers that he stopped going insane all the time.

It is definitely related to their mood and with the removal of fear, insanity is much easier to happen. Raiders fall victim to going insane too especially when they siege you. While they have food they lack proper sleeping spots and if you manage to injure some of them either using counter mortar barrages or general fighting their mood may dip low enough to cause them to go insane which then causes them to fight among themselves until their siege breaks on its own.

I have found the psychic drone event to be very inconvenient at times as I tend to run my colonists far to gather materials that have dropped. This event becomes a much more serous problem when it happens anytime before or after a major battle. On cassandra classic difficulty in the day 150-200 range, raids tend to be significantly bigger then my population and the combination of injury, corpses, and lack of eating or sleeping due to being drafted tends to tip them right over the mental break point. I do manage them well enough that only 2-3 have mental breaks and I managed to subdue them and re-recruit them each time, it is very frustrating that this event comes around and I have no hard counter to it unlike the crashed space part. I think instead of a flat -25 to mood it should cause an affect that causes one of your colonists to go insane but when you incapacitate them they remain apart of your colony and you do not need to re-recruit them, exactly like the secondary random affect the crashed space ship part causes.

with how guns seem to work a manned gun may actually be more effective, a turret seems to have low to no gun skill while a colonist would appear to be more accurate with a comparable weapon. I may be wrong but it would be nice if this was the case.

My usual strategy is to get everyone tightly packed into a group and have all the animals funnel down a long straight path and hope i have enough DPS to take them all out. It's not perfect but it works most of the time.

The bottom group is to provide primary fire usually being the first ones to shoot.

Regarding the first picture, how do your colonists not hit eachother? If I ever position any of my colonists too near eachother their shots occasionally hit the person in front.?

I am sure it happens some times but more often then not if they are close to eachother they don't really hit the other unless the enemy is also close. I never really had problems with friendly fire with tightly packed groups of people

In this instance i spawned some using the developer console but yes i have dealt with some fairly large raids although in randy random raids are a little unreliable.

It has been a while sense my last post of my colony and as you can see it grew bigger. You can see my aversion of building over soil.
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How do you defend that?
Could you post some pictures of a battle?

As most colonies I see are walled off bunkers I wanted to do something that did not involve being dug in deeply underground. I have been defending my colonies in this fashion for a while and although I have taken some casualties it was mostly due to me not paying attention rather then any inherent fault in the defense.


Building properly is key to this type of defense. as you can see here I positioned my colonists in the doorways of their houses which provides with excellent high cover while providing fire from the flanks of any raider that runs down this path. The bottom group is to provide primary fire usually being the first ones to shoot.


This group of colonists I positioned in various places so as to deny the enemy any cover advantage from my buildings while keeping mine in the high cover doorways in the same way of the last picture. I made a effort to have guns spread throughout all paths of advance so they will be under constant fire.


Here you can see that the raiders divided into two mobs and are attacking along the north and south and being further divided engaging my colonists. if you look at the bottom right you can see that even a lone colonist defending a flank is very effective at stopping their advance.


Now as I was positioning and repositioning defenders one of them got incapacitated. this is what happens if you do not pay enough attention to the health of your colonists. luckily he got incapacitated inside his high cover and should be safe from stray fire until he can be recovered. If your colonist takes too much fire they can fall back inside the safety of their house until you can bring a group to wipe out the raiders banging on the doors.



On the north it is about the same story except only few split off from the main group to bang on some walls. The group on the bottom is the first to fire.



As the raiders funnel in they attempt to take cover only to walk into the line of fire of the second group of colonists in the doorways. Any place they attempt to take cover they will be exposed to fire. This is what is usually called a killing zone. Most of the raiders die in this intersection.


Occasionally there are raiders that manage to take a roundabout way to flank your defenders. It is useful to have a mobile group of colonists so that you can react to them. The downside to this is that you would not have all colonists on your defensive positions but it does allow you more flexibility when you need it.



When the raiders rout all that is left is to mop up any stragglers. If you have a body problem then it may be wise to let them go otherwise feel free to move groups around to take care of them.


After all that is done the only thing left to do now is to undraft all your colonists to clean up the bodies, rescue any incapacitated colonists or raiders and repair dents in the walls.

It has been a while sense my last post of my colony and as you can see it grew bigger. You can see my aversion of building over soil.

This minor modification changes many aspects of vanilla weapons to become more deadly which makes raids play out a lot faster then before.

Weapon damage, fire rate, bullet speed and burst size have been increased across the board. To compensate accuracy has been massively decreased although this does little to mitigate the lethality. Grenades have a very minor range buff from 12 to 16 and bow weapons and rocks had their damage fire rate and range increased also.

The shortest range of weapons is now 24 squares for the shotgun and the longest range is 64 squares for the M-24.

Fire rate has been increased by a factor of two or more for almost all weapons except for grenade and Molotov.

All weapons also now do more damage with the exception of the grenade and molotov. Most weapons do 20 damage per shot while the M-24 does 50.

Accuracy for all weapons now range between a number between 0.0 - 1.0 making them much more dependent on skill level of the shooter and a bit of luck.

This mod is basically complete as it's scope is to tweak vanilla weapons to be much more deadly while being balanced. Please note I did not modify the minigun as it seems to be a weapon for a future feature. Feedback on this mod is encouraged so as I can tweak the values to be more balanced.

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Alpha 3 seems to have removed the ability to sort colonists bodies from raider bodies and is now under a new nebulous category of human bodies. A subsection under human bodes that separates colonist bodies from other human bodies would be nice to have back especially for graves.

Also weapon racks would be much less frustrating to use then they are currently if there was a way to select or deselect all the guns they accept. Right now you have to deselect all the weapons you don't want to have on a weapon rack to have it hold only a specific weapon, which for one rack is no big deal for for about a dozen of them it gets tiring clicking though all of the check boxes.