Messages

[your]

Yes, and if your walls were prone to exploding and bursting into flame every thirty days, you wouldn't bloody well surround yourself with them, would you?

[Only]

This idea seems to be the favourite and i think this plus increasing the price of a turret dramatically but then balancing the hp or stop it from exploding (so people feel confident enough to use them) could be the first steps to help solve the problem. Though this would probably take some time for Tynan to implement.

Only if the turret:
a: Does not explode or otherwise kill the occupant when the turret is destroyed.
b: Is not stupidly combat-ineffective. It's a goddamned mounted LMG, it should be spewing hot death, fully automatic, and suppressing the hell out of every raider it sees. Being caught in open terrain by a spray of machine gun fire shouldn't be an "Oh shit, run towards it and melee it to death!" situation, it should be an "Awh fuck! Get into cover NOW!" situation. One turret should be capable of mowing down an entire mob if they face it clumped up together under its effective range and out of over.
c: Does use the colonist's own shooting skill, so you can put your assassins, space marines and pirates in it, so the turret isn't so fucking laughably ineffective.

There is, in fact, a claustrophobia random trait. However, if the claustrophobe's room is big enough, they should be happy, even under the mountain.

There should probably be an agoraphobia trait to balance that out - someone who's unhappy in wide-open spaces but likes having a tiny little snug hidey-hole to bed down in.

[not]

I didn't read all five pages of this so forgive me if this has already been said. Why are the turrets not manually operated? You should be able to put a colonist in a seat on the turret and allow him or her to fire it and without the colonist it does not work. To me its an easy compromise because then you can only build so many turrets due to only having so many colonist and it still puts you on edge because your colonist could die if it gets blown up.

No, no, NO! Putting colonists inside fucking explosive barrels with crap-ass guns pointing out is not a solution! It's another fucking nerf, and an unneeded one!

Players wouldn't be relying on turrets and explosive highways of death so much if they didn't need to, but they do! So players do. Stop trying to kick the player in the crotch for playing effectively!

[The core of the problem is that combat is the problem.]

The problem is raiders altogether. They run in and try to burn down everything you've built/murder all of your colonists. You can't bargain with them, you can't reason with them or try to recruit them.

They only exist to be a zerg-rushing lunatic horde. As long as that pressure exists, combat defense is going to be the single and sole concern for base-building. Making them smarter won't solve that. If turrets stop working, players will just use massive waffles to shoot helpless, bogged-down raiders. If raiders are changed so they stop pathing straight to the nearest colonist to murder him and start pathing to the nearest structure to set it on fire, then players will start building in the mountain exclusively. If raiders are changed so they shoot mines upon first seeing them, then players will just use hydroponics tables to make a zig-zag shooting gallery.

The core of the problem is that combat is the problem. Combat screws with all of the player's plans, and it's the primary reason for a fort to fail and game over to happen. Therefor, players are going to do everything in their power to minimize the amount of combat they have. Nerfing the tools they have at their disposal to effectively defend themselves won't change that core requirement - "Survive combat with as little damage to me and my things as possible." And you're never going to change that core requirement, because contrary to what DF players tell themselves, losing is not fun. If the player doesn't yet know how to play, it can be a learning experience, but it's not fun. If they already know how to play and simply lost because they couldn't get everything set up in time/lost their most effective tools/raiders were patched specifically to work around the most effective solutions, then it's a kick in the crotch.

Boring but Practical is a valid strategy, and it should be so.

Not to mention it's a hell of a lot easier to implement.

Firefighting shouldn't just be something everyone does - I mean, it should be. But colonists who do it more should get better at it, like everything else.

I also think hauling should be a skill, in that people who haul a lot should get faster at moving. This would allow us to chase down those last few jackass runners without breaking down walls.

It would give a reason to have full-time researchers.

I think the numbers could stand to be brought down, though. Say, about 50%. It'd be easy to get a little ways into any research tree, but still make absolute dominance a pain. Also, leave it open-ended.

Your point? You want to kill all and everything without doing nothing, right? Seriously, this is getting boring. All you ever post is "gimme a magic one hit kill gun or god mode! otherwise too hard". Turn the darn difficulty down, there's no shame in that. Other people want to have their enjoyment too, you know?

Seriously, there IS an easy mode for ya. You can turn it on whenever you want.

You know what the point of battle is?

It's to inflict enough damage on the enemy that they stop fighting you, whilst taking as little damage for yourself as possible.

And in this game, we're outnumbered both tactically (number of raiders on the map versus the number of colonists very quickly goes pear-shaped,) and strategically (infinite raiders waiting to drop in and go suicide fanatic on you,) and the raiders have vastly superior gunnery skills.

So yes. We do need magic guns, because that's the only way to survive a raid without having taken ridiculous casualties that leave you pretty much incapable of fending off the next raid, and utterly incapable of fending off the raid after that. So, quite honestly, two guys at the end of a narrow corridor should constitute complete and utter death for any raiders attempting to traverse that hallway - they file in, they drop like flies.

Because strategic positioning and control of the battlefield are the only defensive mechanisms we have.

*snip*

So you keep saying you want to nerf them, what you're really saying is that you just want to make the game a lot harder and more painful to the player, and make it a lot more likely for him to lose by giving him no effective defensive options, forcing him into a stand-up fight against superior numbers of superior enemies who have limitless reinforcements, which will inevitably become a battle of attrition in the player's disfavor.

Actually i have never thought of it in that way. I just want to feel more proud when my colonists defend their camp well. Not stupid when they had to fight when I could have just planted 200 mines outside. Because the game is still going to change a lot. I was merely hoping the unfairness of current raider attacks would change with time.

If it matters I will append to my statement that fighting with colonists is more fun, but the usefulness of automated defenses should not be overlooked. But be honest that it is -too- easy to use them (gun turrets) right now?

Not really. Frankly, without the mines, gun turrets simply serve as something to draw Raider fire while my colonists shoot them down. Even upgraded, they're utter shite at killing raiders on their own and they blow up way too easily, exploding like a goddamn blasting charge themselves.

And since something of mine is gonna get destroyed when I fight raiders, quite frankly I'd rather it be 375 metal worth of blasting charges than 480-640 metal worth of gun turrets, which is still preferable 1,800-2,200 to sky's the limit metal worth of basically irreplaceable colonist.

Then what good would it be? You nail the first guy in the corridor, get soft-stunned, and the second guy beats your face in. Even if you have two guys at the end of the corridor, then it just means the third guy gets to beat your face in.

Unless of course, you rush for the explosives. Then you can have it inside of about five days with a decent researcher, or 2 if you get like, a midworld nerd/navy scientist researcher.

[dead]

I agree that the fight is much more fun with the colonists instead of turrets.

And I disagree wholeheartedly. You know what happens when fights with colonists happen? Some raider sonofabitch lobs a grenade that gets lucky, and now one of my colonists is dead. To the AI storyteller, if that's the only casualty that happens in the battle, then it's still won, because it has cost me a finite and very difficult to acquire resource - a whole colonist - and it has lost nothing.

The storyteller has infinite raiders. Spending 200 raiders to kill one of my colonists is a defeat for me, because I've lost something I can't replace easily, and probably can't replace at all, given how bloody fickle capturing raiders alive is and how much of a crapshoot it is waiting on slave-traders to come by. (And I'm pretty sure that raiders are coded to fight to the death rather than get incapacitated the more colonists you have, as well as slave-traders not coming by at all if you have more than ten.)

So now I'm down an irreplaceable, precious resource. I'm going to deeply regret the loss of his labor, as he could be busy mining/sowing/whatever, when the raiders aren't here, and his rifle is now without hands to shoot it when they do show up again. It doesn't matter to the AI - it has no finite resources upon which to draw, it does not run out of money with which to train troops. It just arbitrarily drops more raiders on my map any time it feels like trying to screw me over again.

And worse, colonists are really, really crap in a fight. If I didn't have absolute control over the battlefield and the approach, I'd be slaughtered, given that the AI sends more raiders than you have colonists, and they tend to be both better shots than my colonists, and have destructive weapons that I'd be an idiot to attempt to use in my own defense, yet they are free to use.

Turrets, explosives, and baiting the raiders into traps are the only tools I have at my disposal to overcome odds like those, but they are effective.

So you keep saying you want to nerf them, what you're really saying is that you just want to make the game a lot harder and more painful to the player, and make it a lot more likely for him to lose by giving him no effective defensive options, forcing him into a stand-up fight against superior numbers of superior enemies who have limitless reinforcements, which will inevitably become a battle of attrition in the player's disfavor.

By which you mean it adds an obvious landing point to be set up with landmines so you don't even have to wait for the raiders to get in motion before you evaporate them all with explosions.

Why does every freaking suggestion on this forum function as a way to kick the player in the crotch for doing the smart thing and building in the manner intended to minimize the mayhem and damage they can incur from random events and raiders by increasing the damage they take from raiders and random events?