Too Hard for me so far: -18 ice sheet hardest difficulty randy largest map

[halby]

The huge map makes things much harder, because seiges/psychic ships can be very far from home.  lack of trees/animals/soil and weather cold enough to require parkas, but not cold enough to hamper raiders is hard too. 

The biggest challenge seems to be berserk from mood.  You'd usually combat it with high quality wooden beds (+15 comfortable), high quality recroom/dining room (+30)  and planting flowers along pathways (+10 beauty)  but NONE of that is possible at least until so late into the game that i'm usually dead already, because we don't have wood or soil.

rushing hydroponics and stoneworking, and building a base and a defense is a fun challenge, but one that you can succeed at nearly 100% of the time, even if sometimes it's close...

Psychic ships/seiges are usually handled in a normal game by sending out a few snipers, but on an extremely large map, with constant mood problems and not enough money to buy early sniper rifles, these can just be game ending.  theoretically tinfoil hats and sniper rifles could be bought, but it's a timing thing, i usually die before i've even earned my second thousand silver.

Ways I've died:

Starvation: (usually due to not enough steel, power generator dying, losing power, blight events, or taking on too many mouths before the first harvest is in)

Violence: needing steel for hydroponics can limit sentry guns, and poor mood soldiers or soldiers who are already injured from subduing broken teammates cant fill in the gaps... low population because you don't want to run out of food further exacerbates things

Frostbite:  More than once I've died of hypothermia because I tried to walk to the edge of the super large map with someone who wasn't wearing a good parka.  Also, poor mood + bad weather = frostbite death,  and loss of power without someone in a good enough mood to fix the problem often leads to frostbite as well.  If only I could make parkas early, but you need to build up that stockpile of human leather before it's possible.

Lack of Steel: losing power without steel on hand = death, running out of sentry guns without steel on hand can be death during a raid, just general lack of steel = death, you have to keep a stockpile on hand.





Notes:  prisoners just won't successfully convert unless they are happy, and a happy prisoner requires light/heat/ a good bed / table/chair/food ... that's a lot to ask in the super early game from a colony, so I often don't bother with prisoners until after the first rice harvest... but that means low population for me, which makes me far more susceptible to violent death.   In a normal game I get up to 7-8 pawns before the end of the first year, but on my ice sheet I've never gotten past 5 before completely losing the game.



Task List I'm using thus far:

I usually have a full time builder, miner, and crafter...  the miner will mine 10 steel, then haul them home, then repeat... crafter will research stonecutting/hydroponics then make stone blocks for a long time, then try and make us some money (though I've never successfully made much money from crafting)
For a long time I just used 2 miners and a builder, but I'm hoping that a crafter can get me enough money to buy tinfoil hats or sniper rifles... so far no success



1) set everyone to 'work only' cuz why sleep before bedroom is done.
2) make a research bench and start on stonecutting research
3) get power/battery/14x14 room/heater all made from steel
4) create 4 beds, and then reduce 'work only' to 12 hour days
5) make a bunch of limestone blocks, then start hydroponics research
6) get 7 hydroponics and a lamp and try for a rice harvest then reduce 'work only' to 8 hour days
7) run around the map hauling all the survival meals back to the base
paste dispenser
9) steel turret
10) outer wall
11) hospital
12) prison  (in a 'normal' game I do prison first, so i can catch the early easy prisoners, but on ice sheet, we wait til after rice harvest)
13) individual bedrooms
14) table/benches horseshoe pin.

If we make it this far, we're relatively safe and the game will go a long time (1-3 hours)... but quite often we don't make it this far, usually due to mood break, if we happen to get a colonist with bad mood traits, or we eat raw food, or sleep on the ground, or get too cold...


mid-game,
1) get trade going
2) increase defenses
3) make floors and flour pots
4) make parkas from human leather
5) buy some wood, and then craft/re-craft beds until you have 'good' or better quality super-beds for all colonists, move the old small beds into prison/hospital.
6) sterile floored hospital with vital monitors (i've literally never gotten this far)
7) more stuff I've never gotten far enough to try.


Here's a savegame file with 5 dudes about as far as i've evah made it... where to go from here?
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxMi84dRwntxODNRdTlMWWtLY3M



Finished up that game, I felt like i was doing amazingly well,
Died on 80th day to a psychic ship, spawned 2 lancers and 2 centipedes, the lancers kept 1-shotting my colonists from 3 range further than my survival rifle/great bows could reach... i needed either tinfoil or a sniper rifle, but yet again I NEVER GENERATED A SINGLE SELLABLE ITEM IN 80 DAYS
full joy/comfort, somewhat interesting dining room, lots of beer/food, 2,000 stockpiled steel, all imortant researches unlocked mortars/hospital beds/smelter/brewery/geothermal/etc etc...  20 construction skill on my builder, and masterwork sexy wooden beds for all.  noone went berserk ALL GAME... 80 straight days with noone breaking due to mood, that's gotta be a first for me on this difficulty, and was the main focus of this playthru... i kept a tiny stock of beer, and paid very close attention to keeping peoples joy/comfort/space/beauty bars full.

I feel like I've really improved in the one area I focused on (mood) but I still need a way to generate enough income to buy sniper rifle...   IE: within 60-80 days, I need to earn about 1,500 steel.   I feel like I should reserve all of my starting wood for butcher table, tailor table, brewery table... because masterwork steel beds are only 5% less efficient than wood, and buying wood hurts my goal of saving for a sniper rifle.   

Another possibility is that around day 50, once I'm all settled in, I should stop mining steel, and start hunting down plastasteel and uranium to craft gladiators with for cash... I've still never once made a gladius, despite reading and believing that its a good source of cash... I just always need more steel :p

[Livingston I Presume]

When Ice Sheets were first released as playable Tynan said that they'd playable, but surviving on them was another thing entirely.  But it sounds like you're giving it a good go (my thoughts are with your fallen colonists).

One way of dealing with crashed ship parts (or so I've heard) is building a roof over them then burning it down to crush the mechs below.  Haven't tried this myself but sounds possible.  Also if you can buy beer that's always a good step, just keep it forbidden and only have colonists drink if they need it, saved my colonists from breaks on a number of occasions.  Sieges are tough, the only real way to survive them is just either snipe them, or intensive counter battery fire which in a colony such as this is not feasible.  Playing on a more hilly even mountainous biome yields more steel, as well as bases less vulnerable to mortars

[Limdood]

the roof/ship tactic has been nerfed somewhat...i've been told it is still doable, but its buggy (or at least very picky in the conditions to make it work) at best.

Another trick is to build a wall all the way around it, leaving no gaps, then chuck grenades into the wall, damaging the ship part enough to trigger the mechs before the wall is gone.  every square adjacent is occupied by wall when the mechs spawn...so no mechs appear...then you can finish the ship off at your leisure.

Admittedly, this will be difficult in an ice biome.  You may want to build a few "base camps" along the way...single rooms with a bed, a couple forbidden meals, and if you can swing it, a solar panel, battery, heater (probably too much for a rarely used outpost, unless its an often-utilized central outpost)

I've also read that if you plant some early crops on the gravel that appears, strawberries are the best to start with for a first harvest, followed by potatoes after that (only on the gravel, not for the hydroponics), because on gravel in particular, strawberries have the best turnaround time from planting to harvesting, and potatoes have the best overall yield/time on gravel.  Again, this is specific to gravel farming...

[REMworlder]

I tend to play on ice sheet exclusively, though lately I've stopped because I get bored of the suicidal AI, especially that of the visitors and raiders. Here's my latest colony. For this same reason I tend to play Standard size on ice sheet. There's really just no reason to go bigger, the mechanics simply aren't in place for it.

The number one thing I'd suggest is getting a communications console first thing. Forget cannibalism, scavenging, rushing hydroponics. Just build a console and buy some food. The pain of money leaving the wallet does hurt, but it's the most reliable option I've encountered so far. An early coms console also puts you in place to buy cheap wood. Even on very difficult pricing, the basics are still affordable. Even steel, if you need it.

One thing that jumps out at me is you seem to wait awhile to build a joy item, unless putting up campfires is implied in your setup. Having more than one joy source is important, because otherwise you end up with colonists increasingly desensitized to the main job activities spending loads of time just to feel decent. On ice sheets, having productive colonists is key to me because you can only really create wealth with value-added colonist activity.

Other things you can do:
-Limit the allowed areas your colonists can go to. Maybe have one designated hauler.
-If your colonists spend time outside for activities like mining, clear snow paths since snow slows colonists down by 50%.
-If sieges are a problem, just kill them all while they sleep: http://imgur.com/a/nE7Km
-Build point-blank turrets for siege ships. I'd suggest mining with mortar shells, but they have disappointingly little damage when they explode.

[halby]

ya I make sure to make my ice sheet warm enough that raiders don't die to the cold cuz that'd defeat the 'make things as hard as possible' mantra... for similar reason, i shant go to a smaller map either.

I've never tried clearing snow, the one time I tried to turret a siege-ship I died of poor mood in the time it took to amass enough steel hundreds of miles from my base, i spent like 5 days hauling steel with all of my colonists, then a raid happened, and i had to heal up for a few days, then a siege happened, and i had to combat that for 5 days, finally it was 15 days in, i started to build turrets, but it was too late, berzerk

killing sieges while they sleep is something i've messed with a bit, honestly they aren't hard to defeat with long range rifles either, the main problem is the distance from home + cold + mood loss.  I wish I could order my guys to carry meals when they go out to fight, and beer... they sometimes carry meals but i don't seem able to tell them to do it, or to eat those meals.

As for limiting colonist access to areas, I definitely always try to exploit the fact that a 'bedroom' can contain 1 production building... so i like to have a sexy bed with a million hydroponics in it, and another bedroom with a stone cutter in it, another bedroom with research in it, etc... so that colonists go out and eat / joy, then spend all day in their room.  but mining/hauling is another matter.  Honestly I'd love to figure out a way to earn enough money from crafting that I didn't need to mine, just buy all the steel, but thus far on the hardest difficulty, I can't seem ot make any money doing anything.  selling a plastasteel good quality grand sculpture for 1500 is all well and good, but if it takes you 4 months to make it, the game will be over long before that.

Finally joy item thing, I hadn't heard that, that's cool, so if i make multiple joy items they will work better?  like chess + horseshoes + pool table (ya right, no way i can build one of those without soil to grow cotton, and wood)  ... i often wondered what the point of the television/telescope are, but if there's joy depreciation that makes sense!

I've done the best when my guys are 'luxuriantly comfortable', don't eat paste, and 'ate in an impressive dining room/joy in an impressive recroom' and 'tons o joy' ... but those mood buffs just seem out of reach on my ice sheet mostly.  I can usually get comfort taken care of eventually, but the rest, no dice.



I'm really curious what % of a roll colony wealth vs current_date vs faction attitude plays on difficulty of incoming raids, because I worry about not making plastasteel dining tables for fear that it'll make the raids too hard, but what if wealth is only 1/5th of the equation and I shouldn't be avoiding it.

[Britnoth]

13) individual bedrooms
14) table/benches horseshoe pin.
...
mid-game,
1) get trade going

Shared bedrooms and no table? well that is -15 mood right there. And no trade for how many months?

Are you using mods? Comfort is not +15, and a +30 dining room? Is that even possible even if all pure gold? 

I am curious what -18 refers to in the title.

[halby]

I've tried individual bedrooms from the get go, but the fact that they each need walls/heater makes it much harder than just sharing a bedroom early on... in the super early game you have new colony optimism anyway... same with the table, the more you put off the important stuff just to get +mood when you don't yet need it, the more corpses you pile up.

Also, vents seem pointless in extreme weather... it takes like 3 vents to get a room fully surrounded by 70 degree other-rooms to heat to even 60 degrees, and thats more metal than just making another heater would take... sure you save power, but not really very much considering your hydroponics room uses like 4000 and all of your heaters combined are a fraction of that.



"My rec room is sexy" +5  , "joy activity in a sexy recroom" +10 so total of +15... same goes for dining room, and bedroom (+5 sexy bedroom, +10 super comfy)  They are each +15... and the title refers to temperature, ie: not so cold that manhunters/raiders die of it, but cold enough to require a parka.

[zandadoum]

beer > mood
wood > campfire > freezing to death
roof collapse > evil ships
human meat & leather > beeing poor

once i figured these out, ice sheets wasn't a big deal anymore either.

[halby]

All problems can be solved for a cost of X silver, it really comes down to efficiency, and a race against the raid timers.

For example,
short: buying beer is a good temporary fix for broken folks, but it costs silver which is permanently lost
long: building more power/hydroponics/brewery and making beer costs way more, but at least all of that investment keeps paying for itself forever

both of those solutions take resources (work/steel/wood/silver) away from other tasks...

Your first 3000 steel is pretty cheep, you trade a little bit of labor for it... but after that, you're spending more and more labor per steel... at some point, be it at 3000 or 10,000, mining will finally be less efficient way of getting steel than simply buying it in exchange for some other labor-produced item..


For example buying 350 steel on this difficulty costs about 700 silver  mining 350 steel takes 1 day labor early, 3 days labor midgame, and 5-10 days labor later in the game.

generating the 700 silver needed to buy 350 steel by growing cloth, and making dusters takes an initial investment of 5000 steel, then 1 days labor in planting/harvesting/crafting

So in the early game it makes tons of sense to mine, but the later you go, the more you'll be relying on investment dividends... as we all know, the earlier you invest, the better off you'll eventually be, but if every bit of labor we have is needed just to subsist, we never get around to investing in sustainable economy, and then eventually (since raids get bigger over time regardless of what we're doing) we get overwhelmed.



The problem is the overhead... on a normal game, even on the hardest difficulty, I can easily plant vast fields of devilstrand in the first few days, so that in a few months when mining steel becomes unreasonably expensive in travel time, I can transition to living off my investments...

sources of cash such as art + stonecrafting are the same idea, it costs more as your supply of stone runs dry...  but in this case, stone doesn't really run dry very quickly, and you get the side benefit of free rooms with thick rooves..



I feel like i have a good understanding of the THEORY of how to play efficiently, but what's important is the exact details.   


For example: some made up numbers.

'wealth' represents the ammt of steel we can buy with the proceeds from selling this thing. 'day' represents 8 hrs of skilled labor

Mining Steel:  Overhead: 0steel/1worker 350wealth/1day early,  3.5w/1d late ... decreasing logorithmically
Hydroponic Cloth:  Overhead: 2000steel/1worker (to get enough to completely eliminate downtime)      10wealth/1day
Hydroponic Cloth Turned Into Dusters:  Overhead:  1000steel/1worker (because half our labor will be at the tailoring table)  20wealth/1day
Rich Soil Devilstrand Turned Into Dusters: Overhead: 0steel/1worker 30wealth/day
Buying PlastaSteel and crafting it into gladiuses:  Overhead: 0steel/1worker  35wealth/day   (though there is no permanently lost overhead, there is a huge requirement for initial capital that you invest then get back)

I'm making all of these numbers up, but you can see how, if we had these numbers, it'd be easy to decide what to do...  early on, mining is by far the best bang for the buck, but once your mining expeditions yield less than x steel/day (maybe 3.5?)  it's time to transition to the the best income source you can afford... the more profitable endeavors require more overhead, and some have higher risks... etc.

without numbers we're all just gut-feeling things, which is fine because efficiency doesn't really matter unless the game is hard enough to MAKE it matter...  the harder we artificially make the game by enforcing our own house rules, the more efficiency matters

[halby]

Task value math ...

one skill 0 colonist sleeping in the middle of a corn field with his own table and supply of refrigerated meals provided by someone else who spends 8 hours sleeping and 2 hours joying and 14 hours planting/harvesting planted in gravel... and his corn field is exactly large enough that he never runs out of things to do, and there are no blights...

generates X corn/day avgd over 100 days.

same situation, skill 10

same situation, skill 20

If we want to imagine how much wealth he's bringing to the colony we'd take the cost of feeding him away from the ammt of food he produced which we actually ate * price of buying corn... then the remainder * price of selling corn

We'd obviously find that the larger our colony is, the higher the value of this guy is, because more and more of his harvest is being valued at the 'we are gonna eat that' price.




Second dude is a cook, 0/10/20 skill  he has a stockpile right on his cook stove, and a bed right there too, and drops his meals onto the floor, spending all his time making meals... assuming he has unlimited raw materials, his wealth to the colony = num meals eaten by the colony * buy price of meals  + num meals he made that we didn't need * sell price - cost of what he ate/drank/his clothing wear. - cost of his ingredients that would have been eaten this month * buy price - cost of his ingredients that wouldn't have been eaten this month * sell price     

Again we can see that his profitability increases with colony size, and he also has a maintenance cost which can theoretically get quite high...   Mood is trixy here, because we trade huge ammts of raw materials, labor time, for a moodlet...  the increased raw materials/labor time don't translate well into sale price, but they translate quite well into buy price...  So for example if we assume that best quality meals are required for their moodlet for all pawns, then the maint cost of this guy = buy price of best quality meal + alcohol price + clothing wear cost ... that eats into his profitability quite a bit, and for some occupations such as a miner who's mined out all of the nearby stuff, it might make him completely un-profitable ...


profitability of a miner can theoretically be increased if he disassembles his bed and brings it with him to each dig sight, but it's questionable, especially based on biome, whether this increase in productivity will outweigh the cost of the outpost, and it also requires hauling time of meals and construction time from presumably some other builder, and his mood will probably be decreased but maybe he can manage that and so on... anyway...  assuming he just lives at home and goes on mining expeditions his profitability is probably the highest of any pawn in the game early, and then the lowest of any in the theoretical latest of late games when the entire map is mined out ... and the big question is, at what point is his profitability so low that we shouldn't bother mining anymore... I suspect most games actually never get to that point, especially on the largest map size... but it's an interesting question.... Again his value increases with 'demand for steel' though I honestly have never reached a point where I mined some steel and knew i'd never need it... that just seems absurd... his value decreases over time, and I'm quite sure that it goes negative at some point, cost of feeding him, clothes, beer... some super wealthy colonies might be giving him 8$ beer and 10$ meals every day so when he gets to the point when he brings home 75 steel per 5 days, he's probably not worth it anymore. 

cotton farmer

tailer

gladius crafter who buys plastasteel and crafts it then sells the knives

etc etc etc...

It seems like the whole game could be described in a spreadsheet,  it makes no math required sense that because of the huge overhead of buying plastasteel,  your gladius crafter will probably be xtremely profitable... because 'huge barrier to entry' usually means 'higher profitability' ... economics, yo.  but i suspect it's also higher risk, because of the quality randomness..

Fun.

[halby]

The math of the game is what I have fun with in my brain pan, and it ONLY matters if the game is super duper hard... if the difference btw plastasteel crafter and cotton farmer is "super protifable vs super profitable" then noones gonna care about the math.  it's only when many professions have negative profitability under specific circumstances, that the math becomes fun.

[halby]

medicine buys for 23, and sells for .23 ... hard to imagine buying, crafting, and selling of anything being profitable on this difficulty setting, but I think I heard plastasteel crafters were a thing? anyone know fo sho?

[halby]

Finished up that game, I felt like i was doing amazingly well,
Died on 80th day to a psychic ship, spawned 2 lancers and 2 centipedes, the lancers kept 1-shotting my colonists from 3 range further than my survival rifle/great bows could reach... i needed either tinfoil or a sniper rifle, but yet again I NEVER GENERATED A SINGLE SELLABLE ITEM IN 80 DAYS
full joy/comfort, somewhat interesting dining room, lots of beer/food, 2,000 stockpiled steel, all imortant researches unlocked mortars/hospital beds/smelter/brewery/geothermal/etc etc...  20 construction skill on my builder, and masterwork sexy wooden beds for all.  noone went berserk ALL GAME... 80 straight days with noone breaking due to mood, that's gotta be a first for me on this difficulty, and was the main focus of this playthru... i kept a tiny stock of beer, and paid very close attention to keeping peoples joy/comfort/space/beauty bars full.

I feel like I've really improved in the one area I focused on (mood) but I still need a way to generate enough income to buy sniper rifle...   IE: within 60-80 days, I need to earn about 1,500 steel.   I feel like I should reserve all of my starting wood for butcher table, tailor table, brewery table... because masterwork steel beds are only 5% less efficient than wood, and buying wood hurts my goal of saving for a sniper rifle.   

Another possibility is that around day 50, once I'm all settled in, I should stop mining steel, and start hunting down plastasteel and uranium to craft gladiators with for cash... I've still never once made a gladius, despite reading and believing that its a good source of cash... I just always need more steel :p

[koisama]

Psychic ships are insanely easy to deal with because mechanoids are vulnerable to extreme heat.

BTW, I don't understand why you're so obsessed with crafting and steel. Butcher raiders, sell their meat and skin, sell their weapons (or use them if they're good).