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Here's Little Dhaka again at day 159. I'm going for a "Redwall" approach now:

http://puu.sh/8d2ba.png

I was hesitant to try the walling-off strategy because it feels cheap, but I just tried it on the last raid and it worked marvelously. Multiple attackers suffered mental breaks and I managed to capture two of them. The next step is to make the walls double thick so that the defenders don't have to run around repairing everything while the attackers scratch the surface of our defenses. Making a sortie against the enemy is as simple as deconstructing walls, which can even be done while the game is paused. Hopefully the next release will mix things up with artillery.

Before this I tried making fire-trap gatehouses. These gatehouses have floors lined with power conduits, which are flammable, in order to use fire to either damage raiders trying to break down the interior doors or to simply prevent them from pathing into the base. It's fun to use fire as a defense, but the plan went awry during the raid before last, resulting in the death of one and the incapacitation of two.

Here's my latest: Little Dhaka.

that's quite the sad story i must admit. But you do know about Molotov's right? burn the bodies with alcohol!

Yeah, but with these extra-large tribal zerg rush raids there are just so many bodies that finding time to burn them all regularly in between the regular rebuilding, cleaning, and successive raids can be difficult. Overall I think it would make more sense and be more practical if corpses could be thrown into, say, 5x5 tile piles which could stack multiple bodies. All those bodies add up to a fair amount of horizontal space, which makes clearing them more time consuming than it might be.

When setting up my defenses, I've found it frustrating to try to assign particular pawns to a task. If I want Joey Jabroni, my best builder, to set up a turret, chances are Bob Jablobi of skill level 4 has already taken the task. To get Joey on the task, I have to right-click on the task, find out it's taken, pause the game, find and recruit Bob, go back to Joey, give Joey the task, unpause the game to let Joey start working, and remember to unrecruit Bob a couple minutes later.

My suggestions are thus:

1.Let players override current task assignments through right-click prioritization.
2. Let players reserve a task for one pawn exclusively.

As things stand, I have to limit the number of pawns assigned to construction to only the best if I want the important things done quickly. However, that's sub-optimal when the only thing to do is lay down some power conduits.

Here's my latest: Little Dhaka.

http://puu.sh/8bNmM.png

The day is 107. The picture you see now is the colony in the aftermath of a large raid. The Irgo Polema tribe came in at night from the south-west and attacked immediately. As narrow as it is, the open entrance to that part of the map did little to slow their advance. The raiders rushed our defense, incapacitating three and forcing those still standing to retreat. Two colonists died as a result of their wounds, and the Irgo Polema chief, Polar Bear, who had been our captive for some time, escaped.

The large building on the north edge of the colony was originally devoted to hydroponic farming, but it proved too labor intensive, so now it just serves as a convenient warehouse for the immense amount of corpses generated by the raids. Honestly, the leftover bodies are the worst part of the raids. I wish we could put them in piles to burn them.

At this point, I'm just surprised the colony is still alive. I thought I chose Tough Cleopatra, but I don't think it would exist if it were on Cleo.

Dealing with the factions has been kind of interesting, but not very. I managed to alienate the only friendly faction, Hamlet-at-the-forest (love that name), by taking one of their people as a prisoner. Before that, they were the only group that passed by at all; now they don't.

1. Not sure how cheap this is in terms of either coding time or cpu cycles, but I have a suggestion for countering the wall-off-a-colony-inside-a-mountain strategy: if a colonist doesn't have any available path to the edge of the map through a door or open space, the colonist receives a -10 happiness buff that lasts at least as long as there is no path. Maybe call it a "Feels Trapped" thought.

2. It would make sense if prisoners would occasionally attempt to escape by turning hostile and making a run for the edge of the map. Low happiness, moderate fear, and high health would make sense as the most likely precondition for attempting to escape. Escape attempt events by groups of prisoners are the next logical step.

Edit: Almost forgot! 3. An event in which a novel plant lands on the map, spreads geometrically, and must be destroyed with fire, explosives, or simply by time-consuming plant-cutting. Possible effects of the plant: turning areas of fertile terrain into infertile terrain, area damage effects (i.e. anything walking through it gets hurt), negative psychological effects within a certain radius of the plant.

Graves should protect bodies from being burned (or damaged by explosions, but maybe that's more reasonable?). It's sort of a pain to worry about raids and also remember to keep grass away from the grave of That One Pawn Who Sacrificed Itself To Save The Colony.

I think it would give a good flavor to the new factions system if factions had individualized ethical systems which affected their diplomatic relations with the player. If I waylay a member of The Helpful Geese while they're walking through my colony and kill them for their +boomrat hide trenchcoat+, it would make sense that their faction would respond in a particular way to that act. Potential demands for restitution by that group might include giving up one of one's own colonists to be killed, paying a certain amount of silver for the +boomrat hide trenchcoat+, or the surrender of all our weapons. Alternately, their ethics might simply demand the extermination of one's colony.

With enough parameters, one might never encounter the same group twice. The Careening Alligators might be peaceful Luddites who secretly harbor a shameful love accele-potatoes, whereas the Childish Wombats are intolerant technophiles who only like mohawks.

It could probably get goofy and unrealistic at times, but "goofy and unrealistic" are known human traits. Overall I think it would bolster the theme of endless, wild diversity to which the game aspires.

Aside from the resource compression mod I made, my preferred solution is for gunfights to be much more dangerous and for guns to be much rarer. IMO, gunfights should be tense, and getting enough body armor, helmets, food, and ammunition to survive really large conflicts should be a challenge.

-snip-

Awesome that you had the time to make a gif for it.

It didn't take me much time overall; maybe half an hour in total, most of it spent fiddling with file sizes and finding a site to upload it to. http://gifmaker.me/ is very useful for simple gif making.

Probably because of the way the game handles hostility. On Tynan's twitter account he mentioned a bug where a colonist went to feed a pawn from a friendly faction, but instead shot the pawn with a rifle. Not the same thing, but it just shows you where the game is at right now.

In the future, it would be neat to have turrets turn hostile and fire on one's colonists or on peaceful wildlife because of power surges, computer viruses, etc..

I do love me some glitch art.

Here's a thing I made after trying to load a mod into an incompatible save and noticed a lightning strike burn into the screen:


http://i.minus.com/iWqaCuOBOuAxA.gif
http://min.us/i/WqaCuOBOuAxA

Here's a version of the mod that is compatible with existing saves. This allows you to create food and weapon crates, but you won't be able to sell them. The alterations to Uranium are also left out. Silver is still stackable to 750.

The original version is technically useable with an existing save, but the game would crash if you contacted a trader.

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Tynan has said that he wants to do roughly monthly releases. Somewhere on his twitter feed he announced that this month's release would be delayed until some time in April because of some technical problems and because of his trip to GDC.

[stuff]

Resource Kompression Mod

Is your base overrun with psychotic potatoes?

Are you drowning in pistols, rifles, and grenades, with no idea how to get rid of them all?

Do you desperately need options to deal with the sheer volume of stuff that accumulates in a long-running colony?

Are you pulling your hair out over all those darn simple meals you have to keep track of just to keep people from cracking?

Worry no more! The Resource Kompression Mod is here! Now you can use up to 90% less space for storing items.

What it does:

The Resource Compression Mod adds (semi-)balanced in-game options for packing resources into smaller spaces through special recipes. At two new worktables, you can:

• Pack 300 of Potatoes, Berries, or Agave Fruit into food crates at a new Cannery Table (requires the cooking skill).
• Convert Simple Meals into MREs, meal items which have no expiration date and which stack to 25 units, also at the Cannery Table (also requires cooking).
• Create crates of 10 weapons at the Packing Table (requires the crafting skill)
• Buy and sell crates from trading ships.
• Stack Silver to 750 units per tile.
• Buy Uranium at 1000 Silver each, and sell back to any trader for 750 silver. (Uranium now stacks to only 4 units).
• Arrange for "special" surprises for raiders who are foolish enough to burn your Frag Grenade or Molotov Cocktail crates.

Screenshots

http://i.imgur.com/n2JNZ96.jpg


http://i.imgur.com/NmOm1TB.jpg

How to use:

Download and install in your mods folder, then start a new colony to use the Resource Kompression Mod. Warning: because this alters too many def files, this mod is incompatible with existing saves.

Authors:

Nasikabatrachus: New def files for mod.
mrofa: New textures for mod.

Known Issues:

• Incompatible with existing saves.
• Meat Crate recipes are not included in this version because the game doesn't use meat defs in recipes properly, so including them would allow "laundering" of human meat into muffalo meat, etc.. This functionality will be fully implemented when Alpha 3 comes out. Short of that, I will post another version of the mod with meat packing recipes in a day or so.



• Grenade and Molotov Crates don't automatically explode after they are "lit". If they are damaged enough to be "lit" by the old Blasting Charge "about to go off" texture, they will remain that way indefinitely unless they are destroyed or consumed by the unpacking recipe. If you manage to save your explosives crates from a fire, you don't have to put up with them permanently sparking: just unpack the affected crates and repack them.
  

Please let me know of any issues you encounter with this mod so I can fix them as quickly as possible.

Existing Save Compatible Version [link]

Original Version Download \/ \/ \/

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I do agree that the "hairy" deserts, as you put it, don't look the greatest. But grass and other plants CAN grow on sand, but it's usually very sparse, or specially adapted species. perhaps you could change it so grass grows, say, three or four times as slowly on sand if that's possible?

You can fix this modifying desert zones for cactus grows only.

One problem is that if you set it so that only, say, saguaro cactus can grow on sand, you'll get a hell of a lot of saguaro cactus. Not that that's a bad thing, but it's hard to balance. I'm not 100% clear on how ecology works, but the game seems to balance every factor automatically. Remove one thing, you get a lot of something else. There are certainly many alternate ways to structure ecology that would be just as good, though, so there's a modding project in there somewhere.