Third Colony

[Nanvi]

Hi!

I'm just new to this forum and RimWorld in general and i'm now busy with my third Colony, first went to hell because of things that i didn't know.. it lasted 5,5 years anyway! Second one survived nearly 3 because of too many raids and less luck.
Now my third one is in Tropical biome because i still wanted some challenge (Of course Cassandra isn't enough.. ) on the Builder difficulty and i've got one or two question about that too, but later.

Now i would like to know from u guys if my base is.. okay? I mean simply the layout of it and everything, i'm not an artist so it's not in a shape of a star or anything: http://imgur.com/a/sQjOA

And now about the difficulty... well i like to build colony just on my own and see how far it can get etc. I like to make rooms for my colonists to fit their personality but often i get borred of it, because sometimes there's nothing to do like i have all the rooms i need for them and now what..? The problem didn't exist in my first colony on the same difficulty but then i didn't know that much about the game of course, and there.. well let's say Cassandra went crazy even when my colony didn't have that much wealth. Now it's pretty big and i have many turrets and my colonist shoot everyone and sometimes get killed (6 deaths till now..) or wounded but now like for 2 years (in-game ofc) it get's... boring. I can kill everybody pretty much and there's not that much to do so i began building ship.. but it takes so many materials! I thought about getting to Challenge difficulty but i've seen some let's plays and it looks like raids are starting way to fast and i'm really.. slow starter. Question is, do i have to learn to start just fast enough for challenge or is rough maybe an option too? Basebuilder doesn't seem a challenge for me anymore but i like to make bases too but after some time it get's boring if there are no raids and you can't check how your defenses are.

And main question is if you can give me some advice about making my base more.. productive but still personal?

[Shurp]

I'm new to the game as well, starting my fifth base on medium ("Rough") difficulty.  My recommendation is you should try the harder difficulty, and abuse the autosave if you get an event you can't handle.  Most early raids are just two guys with shivs that you can kill easily.  If you get a mad boomalope instead who blows up all your colonists, just back up a day and you'll get a mad hare instead

[A Friend]

Change the current difficulty into Randy Random (Extreme).

[Limdood]

something useful to learn for early raids.  take your shots early at the attackers, then run behind a door.  When the raiders are split up trying to get to you, have every colonist go out the door and bludgeon the nearest raider down with fists.  4 colonists with fists will generally beat 1 pirate with a good longsword...and will beat the shiv wielding weaklings hands down.  You'll have cuts and bruises on your colonists, but even without medicine they'll be fine...so free medical training too!

I use the colonist mosh pit tactic on a LOT of the early raids

[Shurp]

How do you decide which injuries to treat with a medkit and which without?  I don't want my colonists getting infections and dying...

[A Friend]

something useful to learn for early raids.  take your shots early at the attackers, then run behind a door.  When the raiders are split up trying to get to you, have every colonist go out the door and bludgeon the nearest raider down with fists.  4 colonists with fists will generally beat 1 pirate with a good longsword...and will beat the shiv wielding weaklings hands down.  You'll have cuts and bruises on your colonists, but even without medicine they'll be fine...so free medical training too!

I use the colonist mosh pit tactic on a LOT of the early raids

Then someone with a rocket launcher came from out freakin' nowhere and ends your game in an instant. Though this is a very effective tactic that I also use early on.

How do you decide which injuries to treat with a medkit and which without?  I don't want my colonists getting infections and dying...

Treat cuts with medicine. Herbal for everything else. Colonists with infections should stay in bed at all times.

[Nanvi]

How about defences then? Killboxes don't seem to work anymore and for sure not if you're not in a mountain, as you can see i was making one kind of "killbox" on the left-bottom side of the Colony but it takes way too much time and sapers tend to hit the walls anyway where are no traps. It looks like it is nearly impossible to defend yourself unless your building really slowly and build many turrets outside your base but after some time base grows of course and it's a waste of materials. About medicine and such I tend not to have a problem with it because I always start with an good medic and plant xerigium asap and try to make kind of workplace for him, because I tend to have good medic with research skill.

Also i tend not to load any saves because i really want my colony to survive... i did that sometimes in my first and second colony but it takes all the fun of the game if you ask me.

[Limdood]

i built a base once with no sandbags, no turrets, no killboxes of any sort that worked pretty well. 

The whole base was a 4x4 box of buildings (the buildings were roughly 13x13, split into 4 rooms, stockpiles, or dining/work rooms) but the middle was left empty (12 buildings in all).  There were 3 square wide hallways between the buildings, and i had doors facing the middle, and ALWAYS facing into the hallways straight across from each other.

Raiders would tend to scatter all over...i'd pick off a few on the way in to my base, then i'd hide in my buildings, popping into doorways, to take a couple shots at one guy, down him, and back to hiding.  When there were raiders wandering the exterior of the base, i'd send the melee team out to gang up on them before running into a convenient door.

Because the entire base was "outdoors" with separate buildings and a big open (garden) area, the sapper AIs in particular got really confused and usually wandered all the way into the center of the base, past massed gunfire, before deciding to try to attack a wall...by then they were usually 1 kill or so from fleeing. 

I also used a LOT of animals for diversionary tactics to enable getting good shots.  I managed to fight off an 80 man tribal raid with only 6 shooters and 5 melee colonists with no turrets in that base.  Just by using hit and run tactics in doorways.

also, killboxes do seem to work just fine on non-sapper groups....just treat sappers like sieges (before you have mortars) and go out and kill them.

[milon]

Toss a couple turrets into the middle of that, maybe a trade beacon too, and that sounds like a pretty great setup for pretty much any biome except ice sheet!

[cultist]

How do you decide which injuries to treat with a medkit and which without?  I don't want my colonists getting infections and dying...

If you can get a xerigium farm running, you should have enough medicine to spare for every kind of injury. if not, save your medicine for infections and diseases. A high skill (8+) doctor will prevent most infections as long as the wound is treated quickly.

[Limdood]

yeah...INCREDIBLY wounded colonists, infections, and diseases should be treated with medicine.
Most injuries can be treated just with doctor care.  In general, the longer an injury will take to heal, the more likely you want medicine...each injury is treated separately btw, so 6 squirrel bites for 3 damage each will heal 6 times faster than a single survival rifle wound for 18 damage, since each wound heals separately.  Survival rifle, sniper rifle, charge lance shots, thrumbo, muffalo, rhino, elephant, and sword wounds all take a long time to heal (unless they blow the limb clean off) and MIGHT be worth pulling out the medicine unless you got them to bed FAST.

Early in the game i also try to keep a few medicine on hand for prisoners.  it often takes longer to get a prisoner into bed and treated, so if the prisoner is promising (under 90 recruit difficulty, worth trying to recruit, no crippling injuries), i usually treat their injuries with medicine (herbal if i've got it, but i'll use regular medicine on them if not).

[Simon_The_Space_Engineer]

(I read the first post then jumped here to reply) I've been playing for quiet a while (like when there was casandras meaner cousin and no difficulty levels that I know of and when colonist had 100/100 health instead of what we have now) A real challange would to go to a place that's less friendly, such as a colder area with a shorter growing season and little resources. Other wise if you want more raids for a challange just piss off a few groups of visitors and you'll soon have more colonies attacking you

[TheStache]

WOHOHO we got ourselfs a badass over here!

Just kidding

If you want more difficulty then choose a more difficult region.. something like the desert or the boreal forest, where there is no year round growing season, herds of animals move in and out of the area, and the weather is abit more taxing on your survivors. Although if you REALLY wanna test your mettle, choose the icecaps, by far the most difficult region to survive in, even for the most seasoned colony managers.

Also for a neat idea you can "go in blind" with your starting survivors, in otherwords no rerolling them! the first 3 that yah get are the ones yah gotta work with.

Also there's always increasing the difficulty level, or playing with a different story AI, but I think those aren't really creative as my other suggestions.

[REMworlder]

If you want closure, you always could *accidentally* call up your neighbor factions on the communications console and insult them until they're at war with you.