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[Darth Fool:]

Darth Fool: I think this is a good example of how an open colony is viable; The problem that a lot of the discussions here are trying to address is the moderately steep difference in difficulty, and the lack of any sort of real reward for playing this way. I've also argued that open layouts like this may actually be better against manhunter packs than traditional forts (assuming "wait it out" isn't your go-to strategy). Larger raids still seem like they'd be pretty murderous in this sort of layout, since you're going to have multiples of raiders per every colonist, and there's not an easy way to mass fires while the raiders are still grouped up.

Actually, this is at least as easy to defend as a single entranceway.  Raiders come from one direction and in general there is time to line up all ranged weapons on the far side, with melee weapons hidden behind doors on the near side to clean up.  Raiders will typically mostly come through one of the four entrances with only a few stragglers on the other entrances.  A minigun, a couple of charge rifles and the survival rifle have generally been more than adequate at eliminating even a fairly large tribal raid.  And the distraction of multiple doors wants they are in the central plaza tends to keep them from all rushing at once towards their exterminators. 

While I have repaired doors during manhunter events, with granite doors it has not been necessary so much as just a matter of efficiency to take advantage of my otherwise waiting melee units.  I have not  had to repair doors while they were still being attacked to prevent a break-in.

Yes, this does take more attention than having an automatic kill box of turrets behind which one can completely ignore all incoming threats, but it is not that much.  It requires occasionally moving a pawn behind a door when melee units get too close, and moving them back into the doorway when the opportunity arrises.  The major potential difficulty  is the question of scaling.  This has worked well for a colony of between 4 and 9 colonists.  At a certain point I will need to create a second square or expand the first to accommodate larger numbers of colonists and deal with the resultant larger number of raiders.  I have not yet hit that limit, however.

At the risk of annoying the hell out of people who are invested in this topic, I have decided to post a picture of my most recent adventure in building an "open" colony.  It was played on a vanilla Randy Challenge with a randomly selected biome (flat temperate forest) started in Winter.  The picture was taken after one in game year.  It survived multiple man-hunter packs and raids, and a poison ship.  No fatalities yet and only a few permanent injuries.  Shortly after this picture was taken, a toxic fallout proved to be a great source of meat, and as it came in winter, it did not kill off the crops.  That and a couple more raids proved impotent.   A man-hunter pack of elephants are now recovering in the barn waiting to be tamed...

The only major event that has been suggested in this thread as a reason not to build in the open that has not occurred is a siege, which I suspect could be as problematic as has been discussed.  Everything else has been a piece of cake, largely because the multiple doors tends to cause the AI to lose focus, and the power doors allow effective hit and run sniping.  So, with the current build and balancing I am gonna say that with the possible exception of sieges, there really is not a problem with the game or events forcing under-mountain homes so much as with the fear caused by these events.  At least with Randy, a well planned open colony is defensible. 

Some might argue that it is not truly open because, despite the lack of a perimeter wall, because the rooms are still fully enclosed and that there are no historical examples of buildings with walls on all four sides punctuated only by doors.  I really don't know what to say to those people.  Others may argue that this is not a fair example since I have not used any turrets in the defense of the colony.  They are correct.



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As for RAIDER ? Do you see any middle-east civilian settlement today taking the time to build defensive wall ? Not even redneck would do that.

Do a wikipedia search on Qalat

but failing that follow this link:

http://www.afghanistan-today.org/en/articles/society/162/

Yep, single family home made fortresses in modern times.  Whodathunk it?

1) I think that video link proves the point that the player did not set up an outside base in a way to deal with manhunter packs.  For one, an all wooden building against boomrats?  Of course wood is going to burn.  Second, he tries to take the manhunter pack directly on, which is not the way to do it.  Rather he ought to engage in hit and hide tactics from within buildings by hopping in and out of doors and repairing the door if when it is attacked by reacting pack animals.  Many dispersed buildings is actually ideal for this tactic as opposed to a single wall, as the pack tends to split up between different doors.  Man hunter packs are non issue.

2)  Yep, wholeheartedly agree that in some biomes you need to farm year round which can only be done indoors.  But then again, that is the nature of the biome.   You do not need to be indoor farming in tropical forests.

3)  Resistance to mortar fire is a true benefit to mountain biomes.

I disagree that the problem is solved only if mountain bunkers and open colonies are of indistinguishable benefit in all biomes.  I think it ought to be the case that mountain bunkers should be preferable in some biomes, and open colonies in others. 

I realize that it is fun to come up with new ways to destroy mountain bases with weapons and events, but I don't see this as a solution.
One can kill off mountain bases easily by just making it 10 times harder to mine out the mountains, but in general this is uninteresting.
To me the real solution must be to have interesting tradeoffs between the two.  Useful roofs is one method, but there are, I am sure, others.  What I am interested in is hearing other ideas about how to adjust the tradeoffs between interior and exterior bases that do not involve new fangled weapons for the AI or Deus ex Machina events that target the mountains.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't find that manhunter packs are such a problem that they force me to build either a perimeter wall or dig underground.  Usually, I like manhunter packs because with a little micro-managed urban fighting I can acquire a bunch of meat without having to go far from my base.

I won't ask for a screenshot since you seem morally opposed to providing the minimum that would help people diagnose your problem.  So instead, I will ask you, do you have a savegame?

ping predators with a survival rifle to turn them into man hunters, then lock yourself indoors and let the predator attack the caravan.  Works best with slower predators especially if you can recruit multiple ones.  Even more useful against raiders.

Coolers are effected by the temperature difference between the side they are trying to cool, and the side that is heating up.  Thus, if you have a cooler wear the hot side vents into a closed area, the hot side will get very hot, and the cool side will not cool very much.  This is why venting the hot side is important.  If, the heat wave is making the hot side very hot, even with good venting, the coolers will be much less efficient.  It will be like venting into the closed room.

I believe that the problem is that you need food to train these creatures, and at least for the thrumbos, they only seem to eat trees and bushes.  Lumber just doesn't cut it, so there is no way to train them.  This is purely based upon observations from an earlier build, so it could have changed since then.

The problem with sieges is not that they don't have the right type of big guns.  The problem, as with sappers, is that the AI does not adequately manage/defend the siege.  For starters, the AI tends to target your closest colonist with mortars, which makes it easy to keep it from targeting valuable areas like farms and power plants until you are ready to attack, usually at night when they all fall asleep.  Better Mortar targeting, as well as bringing in battery powered turrets to defend at night would make sieges more dangerous.  It would still not address the fact that the AI is terrible against hit and run tactics.  Sieges should really be done by forces sufficiently large that you are not even tempted to raid them outright. 

All that said, making Sieges more effective will likely force dwarfing even more so.  Fortunately, with the additional events, sieges are less common than they once were.

The best suggestion, IMHO, is making roofs useful.  Allowing constructed roofs to generate power, allow sunlight in, have turrets, or other fun things which are not available in a mountain base is more likely to entice people to build outdoors then trying to come up with a bigger, badder, stick to hit them with.  Let's face it, the general rule of thumb is that the more dangerous the world gets, the better off hiding in a plasteel reinforced mountain bunker sounds.

Frankly, given that fortresses are so effective in Real life, I would be surprised if there was a way to balance the game to make them not effective in RimWorld without ridiculous Deus Ex Machina mechanisms. 

We've seen the addition of new events to which the only adequate response is: build a mountain-base.
Manhunters, toxic fallout, sieges, volcanic winter.

Of the above, Only Sieges require mountain bases.  All the others just require interior passageways. 

Personally, I would like to see the roof mechanic updated to make the decision more interesting.  For example, imagine if you had options for roofs, like, glass, which would allow for green houses, or solar panel roofs for power, turf roof for insulation, or reinforced concrete which would allow you to build bunkers.  Imagine if different wall/column material had different distances over which they could support, so roofs supported by wood or stone columns might only allow a 5x5 room, but plasteel would allow 12x12.  Then imagine that different roof materials might give penalties or bonuses.  So, a wood roof might give a +1 bonus to room size, whereas a concrete roof might be -3.  Imagine that your mine roofs with overhead mountain would need more support then empty air.  So, mountain bases would inherently need more columns to support the roofs.

I have long been an advocate for opportunistic hauling.

I have pondered the idea of an extra stat called concentration that would basically serve the 2nd function.  People with high concentration will work a longer time before considering alternatives than someone with low concentration.  Obviously some things would break a pawn's concentration, like being attacked.  I think that the advantage of this over a simple one size fits all AI change is that it would provide more variety as well as encouraging the player to make different decisions about the allocation of their human resources.  For example, you might choose to send a worker with high concentration but lower skill on missions that are on the far side of the map.

Another alternative that would address the issue in a completely different way, would be an overhaul of the work/restrictions system.  Instead of having "anything,work,sleep,joy", allow the player to add their own categories in which the priorities would be manually set.  This would allow a single pawn to prioritize warden work in the early morning, construction during the day, crafting in the evening, and cleaning just before bed. 

Beginning of game unforbidding of resources.  Hunting through the whole map to make sure that I have unforbidden all of the survival packages and steel is quite cumbersome.

This is easy fixed when you hit pause before your guys land, you then can mass select the whole map.
The you only have to unforbid the stuff that lands with your guys.

Does not work with tribals

Mass selection priorities are  Pawns -> Stuff -> Animals

Does not work on larger maps where you have to scroll around to see all the map...

Here is a brief summary of items that I find myself having to micromanage that I would prefer not to:

Colonists working while standing in an open door in the middle of winter.

Colonists seeking warm temperatures do not wait until they are no longer shivering to go back to work.  Thus, as soon as their hypothermia is no longer serious, they run outside and two seconds later have a hypothermia warning again, which they pay no attention to until they finish their next task.

In harsh environments one generally needs to hunt immediately at the beginning of the game, as larger prey will often leave very soon and it is rare for them to come back.

Opportunistic Hauling.

After combat in freezing environments where corpses won't decay having colonists hauling high valued weapons before corpses.

Post Victory Insanity Spiral.  It would be nice if there was a boost to moral for repulsing invaders, but instead one ends up with half your colonists being depressed about witnessing the death of the people that just attacked them.  All while dealing with seeing corpses lying around.  Victory should feel good.  Even if just for a short while.

Deconstructing items before constructing new items.  It would be nice if this was reversed.  Or if they were separate prioritizable tasks.

Preventing several haulers from all running to pick up three different piles near each other of something that can be carried by one.  Especially at the start of the game.

Beginning of game unforbidding of resources.  Hunting through the whole map to make sure that I have unforbidden all of the survival packages and steel is quite cumbersome.

Hunting with the survival rifle when animal is moving to edge of map and the hunter keeps running forward, stopping to shoot, and having the animal run out of range.

Controlling what food gets fed to prisoners.

In low food situations colonists choosing to eat raw corpses as opposed to butchering and cooking them.  Especially irritating when the perpetrator is the colony chef who after eating the corpse starts butchering and cooking meals for others, but then goes insane in part because he ate a raw corpse.

Dazed discarding of gear that then must be unforbidden.  Dazed discards should be unforbidden by default.

Other random suggestions:

It would be "nice" if there was a psycho hard break mode where the colonist destroys stuff instead of attacking people. 

Similar, it would be interesting if there was a berserk mode where the perpetrator would actually fire ranged weapons.

It would also be nice if mood boni and bogi gradually ended instead of suddenly ending.  If someone is sad because of the death of their pet, it usually doesn't just end, it gradually diminishes.  The mechanism could be similar to the health mechanism but for mental health.  Thus, annoyances would slowly go away (unless the irritant is still present).  It might be possible to even have a social interaction that would sooth peoples mental mood debuffs.  Thus a skilled social worker could help mend mental health the way a surgeon bandages wounds thus speeding up the recovery process.  Some  mood problems might even require counseling the way frostbite requires treatment.