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Total havoc 

20 centipedes and 9 lancers.



This wasn't a ship encounter, but two groups of mechs dropped in pods and attacked. Definitely getting way out of hand. Glad I put that fire popper there as it helped a bit. Sorry I didn't install a EMP trap. Had some other traps by the entrance from the killzone so figured it would go too far in. They've never ventured this far in before. But then I haven't seen 20 buggers attack us either.

Actually had 4 guys man the mortars and keep pounding them. Looking at the injuries not many hit them, but it was worth a try.

Recently upgraded those 3 vulnerable mini-turrest to plasteel. Had two guys repairing them, but one of them blew up. Surprised me that both walls got taken out. Granite is sturdy stuff. But without those walls all three would be wiped. Autocannons actually ran out of juice and I tried to rearm them with a shielded guy, but then the electricity went out as well. The two uranium slugs almost ran out too. Nuts.

Horrible attack, but we got out of it without too horrendous injuries (no deaths!). Lost a lung and another eye, the lung ironically to a missed autocannon shot (on fire, running around). The guy is probably alive thanks to the marine armour that reduced the damage to 20.

yes i meant mint 18.3 sorry but thank you for helping me

Did you manage to get the game running, or get a bit further?

Personally I think this makes sense. A mortar is a stationary, big weapon and functions quite differently to your normal assault rifle or whatever. Would probably be pretty annoying if shield belt users couldn't use them tbh. Unless they're drafted, we don't see the "sphere" around them, and could end up in situations where they are manning a mortar, but unable to fire it.

Manned turrets might be different because then the pawns are in the thick of combat and shouldn't really be bulletproof while being able to fire at the enemy. But these come from mods, and aren't in the base game.

That does sound intriguing. Let us know how you get on

Since I start to lose interest in the mid to late game with the base "done" and just the incessant mech attacks left, I tend to start dreaming about changing everybody to bionic super-fighters. But never get there because it takes a long time to make new bionics (+advanced components), so I just replace lost limbs instead. Maybe one day?

That does sound pretty useful, especially for truly rare apparel like masterwork marine helmet and the like. But don't you just end up with more materials than you'll ever need? That's already the case for me. One mass animal insanity attack, and there is enough material for years. Small patch of cotton, and you suddenly have thousands of cloth. A few muffalos or alpacas, and you have wool up to the rafters (which is incidentally why I tend to kill off all the males, to prevent breeding out of control).

Does make sense that we should be able to fix clothes ofc, but I suspect it has been done like this for balancing purposes.

As a related point, I'm a bit confused why people don't automatically put on normal and good marine armour in my current game. Surely the protection must be better than good to excellent flak vest+pants. Even have a bunch of rhino pants (see point about animal insanity) that people don't use, and devilstrand button-down shirts. Pawns don't always make the expected decisions.

This may not be related, but...

A bit similar, I ended up using the gaps between my walls as a prison cell to prevent a downed raider from bleeding out. Since it's technically a room (1 gap between the walls), it worked.

It's pretty frustrating when farther afield though. Should be possible to stitch them up a bit before carrying them home. Same when your caravan gets ambushed or stuff like that.

Haven't had that issue, but yes, then it's better to set it to 51%.

Similarly, I have a few bills for flak vests and such, and have it so that if I have 3 or less of 55%+ quality, new ones will be made. So a bit more leeway there.

It also somewhat effects the difficulty and resistance when you capture a prisoner, and seriously affects the chance of an enemy pawn dying when downed by damage (note, they won't go down from hits that wouldn't normally down them, but when they are downed (from damage), they'll be IMMENSELY likely to die even if no body parts are destroyed or the overall damage suggests they shouldn't be dead)

This is what really surprised me with the recent captures. Just about nobody have survived for eons due to what you write. However, I carried out a base destruction quest, and 3 of them survived. Another time half the crew was gone to mine some steel (long range scanner), and a 30-person horde attacked our remaining 8 guys. 4 more raiders survived (although I let two useless ones bleed out) -- including a chap who took an autocannon shell to the gut and survived to tell the tale.

So either I was extremely lucky in these events, or it looks like the game only considers the people in the actual base/map rather than everybody in the full colony.

It's so much more fun to fight human, partly because it's more of a fair fight, and partly because you can capture prisoners and possibly recruit them.

That can be a pain for sure. One way to handle it is to change the Apparel rules. You can disallow tainted apparel (worn by corpses), and set the percentage to 50-100%. Just make sure you have enough backup, so they don't start wandering around naked.

Once the ship part got below x percent (i think 50%) the guarding mechanoids start to invade your base.

But that split the attacking forces and if you got a second exit, you maybe can kite the centipedes around, and when you defeate the scythers you can go out and snipe the centipedes.

Only used one shell to trigger the ship, and got a direct hit with it. The ship went to 790 HP I think, so well above 50%. Once I looked over the corpses post-combat, I noticed a few had mortar injuries, so that one mortar must have somehow hit a few as they popped out of the ship, which caused them to attack. But given the distance I was quite surprised they kept going. Expected them to turn back any moment, which they never did. Total carnage, but it's so much better to fight from a defensive position. Even so, 8 centipedes and a horde of lancers and scythers, most which made it through the maze (and ofc all centipedes were unhurt, coming last) was still no easy task.

If the centipedes had turned back, I could have tried the kiting thing. Or pummelled them with mortars if they all went back to the ship.

Given the enormous forces they bring now, probably 30+ units next time, I'm definitely going to try the mortars next time a ship lands, especially if it's far away.

Very glad I posted about this and got some excellent advice, because these encounters were getting increasingly suicidal. Wealth is actually over 400k now, and keeps increasing. Probably mostly due to better equipment (marine helmets and some marine armour), plus loads of bionics because parts keep getting blown off. One pawn has two bionic legs, two bionic arms, and a bionic eye. All parts were shot off or cut out.

Sorry (?) for all the threads, but new questions keep popping up. From what I understand each storyteller has a target population; Cassandra is 12 I think. Currently I have 14 pawns, and 5 prisoners. All 5 are half-decent, so I hope to recruit them. However, do you know what happens if we were to end up with so many people, well above the "target" for the storyteller? Will my pawns die to the tiniest of hits from now on?

Interesting. I was going to test out the mortal approach. A psychic ship landed.



Had four guys by the mortars waiting for the mechs to turn back -- but they never did. So we scrambled into defensive positions and awaited the "guests". 28 mechanoids (!), including 8 centipedes. Holy smokes!

Nice of the visiting bowmen to join in, although some of them lost their lives. Took some heat off my dudes though, since they are standing in front of the firing line.



It's hard to see it being possible to beat such a colossal force with a conventional approach, ie taking them on in the open. Fortunate that they attacked the base here, otherwise I would have had no option but to pummel them with mortars and hope we hit them enough. Each centipede is a bullet-sponge fortress, and 8? Crikey!




So errr, I'm still to try this approach properly then. But I will next time a ship lands far enough away that they won't directly attack the base. Really surprised me that they did here, because as you see from the first picture, the ship landed pretty far away. Before this one another one touched down south of the wooden bridge in the bottom centre of the image, so I expected them to attack through the trap maze. That was 6 or 7 centipedes.

This most recent force had 10 scythers and 10 lancers. Those scythers could have single-handedly destroyed us. Just too many, and it takes too much time to kill them all off, even if I were to be fortunate with EMPs.

Thank you! It felt really good to finally sort her out again.

Sort of related here, about injuries.



Look at the damage amount and its max HP. Then I looked about at some files, and see that the pelvis, clavicle and sternum is indestructible. I did wonder why it didn't get blown to smithereens there.

Before reading this post I actually happened to try out mortars against a siege. They landed in a really awkward place protected by mountains far away from the base, and we were still a bit messed up from previous fights. Most didn't even have weapons equipped, and were asleep. Had 3 mortars with shells gotten from previous sieges, and it worked really well. Many misses of course, but the first one killed one person, and a while later another explosive shell (some incendiary were used too) landed right in the pack and killed 3 people outright and damaged several others quite badly. They attacked the base. By the time they got around the mountain and through the traps we were in position and could deal with them fine.



Ships is of course much, much harder, but think I'll try out this approach next time and see how we fare. Need more shells, so I'm building more of them now. It's pretty expensive in steel, but the damage potential is higher than traps as well, which can only hit one pawn/mechanoid.

If we manage to take out the ship and they attack us, it will be much easier to deal with them, not least because it won't be everybody at once since lancers and scythers are much faster movers.

Didn't wind up with the same setup as you explained, but have four mortars now (no tech yet) which might be sufficient based on your post above.

One exception - antigrain warheads are UNBELIEVABLY devastating.  Even with the miss radius, you're nearly certain to kill whatever you aimed at...and EVERYTHING else on the side of it that the warhead landed on - raiders, mechs, wildlife, trees, buildings, a good chunk of mountain...

On this... if the antigrain warhead lands in the mountain (but somewhat near enemies), will it still deal devastating damage, and not be "wasted" like normal shells?