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Urist likes Dorfs for their casualness.

Fencing wouldn't be different from walls other than the fact that you can shoot over them. It creates the illusion of being open, but there is in fact still a barrier around the entire town.

And yes you can cheese the heck out of the manhunter packs, until their AI get's fixed and they will properly smash doors you use for the cheese tactic. The only way to deal with that kind of attack(in a none-cheese way) is a killbox or a perimeter wall.

Also you might want to take another look at the wool carrying animals. Alpaca's give 120 wool per 15 days, and wool is the best temperature isolating material, just make a duster and make sure not to hit the floor with your jaw. 

i don't know i play on forest or temperated forest small hills but almost every raid that spawn on my games brings at least 2 frags and 1 molotov guys ... and they dont care about my open entrances XD

Maybe they'll stop sending grenades and molotovs if you get rid of the killbox single entry design. Because grenades on every raid against a killbox sounds like the AI is finally smart enough to not run full charge to their deaths.

@spacedorf, rice isn't exactly efficient outside of the hydroponics(and even then it's only because hydroponic corn doesn't exist). On regular soil and gravel potatoes will yield more food, on rich soil corn does best. Rice is only useful outside of hydroponics because it's the quickest growing crop overall. At least that's been my observations, the lessened degree of dead time(time between plant getting harvest ready and sowing new plant) could be a factor in this.

Speaking about the overcoming the first winter, I usually find it not that big of a deal. I'll usually have enough veggy food stocked to not have to worry about that, and I usually get by with the meat stored and some hunting. As for animal feed, well usually I don't have a zoo to tend to, last game though I got a chicken pack wandering in(which if you get like 2 hens per colonist means meat overproduction), but there's always the helpful raiders who will gladly offer their bodies to be mixed with hay to make kibble(which makes any hay stored last 2.5x as long as you have enough tall pork to mix in). Usually by the time the next growing season comes around I'll have my farms(which are generally centered on some decent rich soil patch) indoors.(because it is just the best way to go, no real way around it)

That's my two cent on that stuff


We, or at least I believe I don't stand alone in this, don't want indistinguishable benefits between mountainhome, perimeter complex and open colony. We want each to feel differently have their own pro's and cons. But currently the mountainhome trumps all, with it's superior defensive position(attacks are far more predictable where they'll go when only the front door is attackable without sappers and it's mortar fire resistance) while trading in very little in return(maybe less ideal in the early stages with regards to farmland, and less access to the geothermals out in the field).

http://imgur.com/gallery/RDveH

The only thing I have ever really felt bad about was turning Tynan into a hat...in a kinda roundabout way.

Though the funniest thing to me is how he basically is a pretty useless character, except for his aim(pre-brain injury). Slothful and low skills all around, he's going to be doing nothing beyond hauling, cleaning and shooting.

Either butchering up raiders, mixing them into kibble and feeding them to the pets. Or butchering chickens(I use colony manager, so a lot of chicks bite the dust in an attempt to manage the population) then mixing them into kibble and feeding them back to the pets(and chickens). Despite using a lot of meat to basically increase how much I can do with the limited hay I have, I still have enough meat incoming from the slaughtering that I don't really have to hunt anymore.

It gets weirder when cassandra gets bored. Toxic fallout(blasted event lasted for a season), heatwave and a drone ship all within a day or 2, I literally couldn't get my pawns to the drone ship without heatstroke death(I saved and tried it to see if I even could reach the damn thing). Juggling the only sniper rifle I had between all my pawns so none would cave from the toxic fallout was annoying, but it had to be done.

No one is forcing us, but it is a fact that mountainhomes are basically superior in defense while not really having any downsides to balance them. It is no directly an issue, but it would be nice if there were pros and cons for all building styles, not the situation as it is now, where open colonies basically only have things that they are worse in than perimeter walled complexes(and perimeter walled complexes are worse than mountainhomes) and mountainhomes.

And Tynan isn't going to remove sappers, they are about the only thing that do damage to a mountainhome in the current game, it's kind of what they were designed for. Well, mostly for getting around killboxes, but it also works wonders in avoiding the mountainhome killbox/defenses.

This get's a big +1. It's a big pain when setting up farms, because ideally you'd want to put corn/rice(maybe some healroot too) on high fertility and potatoes on low fertility ground, but without the ability to clearly see which tiles what(due to overgrowth and the subtlety of the differences) it's a bit fiddly to get it right.

Interesting thing is this can potentially kill people easier : pain normally functions to show our limits, but if its less, one will take more of a beating, get closer to death from it.

Yup, that's the double edged knife side of things. You don't get downed as easily, but chances of death instead of downing increase a lot.

Oooyy!
Don't tell me you guys have never had your hunters trying to trickshot a squirrel from behind a corner and furthest possible range ruining part of the wall in the process

the problem here is with AI

Yeah, hunting is quite wonky, and still very friendly fire-y. Hunters will happily stand in one another aim, and shoot from the longest range and the worst possible positions. I once had a hunter who cornered himself while hunting a bear, as in he ran into an area where he'd need to run past the bear to escape from said bear, then shot the bear. We should all keep in mind that our colonists have the moods of dwarves not on alcohol, the bravery of dwarves on alcohol and the stupidity of Kerbals on alcohol.

Thanks for the replies guys!

Any tips for custom start settings? I'd like a slightly toned down version of the game without disabling any central mechanics (like raids etc) or gifting myself too much starting equipment (like turrets etc).

Cheers guys!

First game, without having watched a lot of youtube let's plays?

I'd play Phoebe Chillax on Basebuilder, I'd use the crash landing scenario and play in a large hill temperate forest.

Will I still be raided etc with those settings? I know I'm being very picky here, but I don't want to develop a strategy that relies on bad stuff not happening, but at the same time I don't want to get owned. I'm very familiar with these types of games so I don't need it to be TOO easy.

Yup, Phoebe as a storyteller will put large breaks between events, so stuff doesn't come at you all at once. Grabbing a lower difficulty will effectively lower the budget for raids and manhunter packs that are send to you(less people and less well armed). The low difficulty can lock out a few more severe events, but starting out those could make for a quick game over.

I read that in Alpha 15 you can call allied fraction traders. It might make sense to include space traders as well. Or maybe you could even send out one of your colonists to another fraction for trading.

I was playing a ice map and was depending on imported wood. Which was a problem because sometimes no traders came around for several years.

It doesn't make sense for space traders. The ones you get are all the space traders that come within reach of your comms console, which means you need a stronger receiver and transmitter to even be able to ask them to come to trade. However the idea of sending colonists to trade would be a nice.

Also what exactly were you doing depending on a steady supply of wood on an ice sheets biome? That's asking for trouble. Vanilla ice sheets is perhaps one of the hardest biomes, contending for the spot with the extreme desert biome. If you want to make it there you need to know the do's and don'ts when given very limited soil and near permanent freezing temperatures.

Hunting can be a lot of "fun".
The survival meals you get at the start usually aren't quite enough to last you till your first harvest(especially not with the local wildlife also liking the taste of survival meal), use the harvest order to harvest some nearby berry bushes or agave(the agave should be cooked prior to consumption, raw it has a less than great taste).
Reroll your starting survivors until you get a group that doesn't have some whiner complaining he's incapable of x or y, it'll be a godsend not having to deal with that in the first few days as a starting player.

Seems the spambots are a bit later than usual today. Hopefully someone's still/already awake to slap them down.