I want to hear about exploit strategies!

[pdxsean]

I hate to give this up, but it does feel pretty exploitative.

Rather than assign pawns to cut down trees, I'll assign them to build graves on top of the trees. This gives me the wood and clears out the tree, usually faster than plant removal, and costs no resources. Deconstructing a grave is super fast. Also this allows you to cut down trees when you have few/no colonists who will do plant removal... that's how I figured it out in the first place. 

RIP Grave Tree Garden A13.

[b0rsuk]

You can detect air pockets within mountains with the No Roof Area tool. Drag mouse over an area and if there's an air pocket deep in mountains you will see it's possible to unroof it.

[b0rsuk]

I just had an evil idea. I noticed my colonist who lost a kidney to a charge lance has a market value of only about $880, compared to the typical $1300 of a healthy colonist. Kidneys and perhaps lungs have little practical use in the game right now - I believe blood filtration might be involved in resisting diseases ? Anyway, if you have a great doctor you can mutilate your colonists, extracting a kidney and/or a lung from each of them to artificially keep their market value low and have easier raids.. There is a slight chance that those colonists take a hit to second kidney or lung, killing them instantly, and there's one less body part to destroy. But for the ruthless there's a way to keep raids smaller... and train Medicine! You can even sell those kidneys.

[silenced]

I just had an evil idea. I noticed my colonist who lost a kidney to a charge lance has a market value of only about $880, compared to the typical $1300 of a healthy colonist. Kidneys and perhaps lungs have little practical use in the game right now - I believe blood filtration might be involved in resisting diseases ? Anyway, if you have a great doctor you can mutilate your colonists, extracting a kidney and/or a lung from each of them to artificially keep their market value low and have easier raids.. There is a slight chance that those colonists take a hit to second kidney or lung, killing them instantly, and there's one less body part to destroy. But for the ruthless there's a way to keep raids smaller... and train Medicine! You can even sell those kidneys.

Without that they may die to a simple infection ... happend so often.

[wbonxx]

I'm not reading the rest of the posts to prevent spoilers... I don't want to know about "bugs" to exploit while I'm actually playing.
I think easy exploits heavily impact the fun during the game (having the feeling the game is stupid creates a loose of interest).

1 - I noticed is possible to build lot of turrets or simpli put 2 snipers next to any landed ship (psyco or toxic). In general ships are OP (but I play at high/extreme level).
2- To kill bus hives when they get too big is enough to put them on fire with molotov and wait.
3- Having a long wall with two dors at the extremes makes it easier to kill raders... just with 2 snipers that go out and i of the doors.
4- Killing caravans to steal everything is kind of easy (and sometime wrongly triggered by riders).... with the obvious downside (still wondering how to recover reputations, thought trading would have helped.

[RemingtonRyder]

I just had an evil idea. I noticed my colonist who lost a kidney to a charge lance has a market value of only about $880, compared to the typical $1300 of a healthy colonist. Kidneys and perhaps lungs have little practical use in the game right now - I believe blood filtration might be involved in resisting diseases ? Anyway, if you have a great doctor you can mutilate your colonists, extracting a kidney and/or a lung from each of them to artificially keep their market value low and have easier raids.. There is a slight chance that those colonists take a hit to second kidney or lung, killing them instantly, and there's one less body part to destroy. But for the ruthless there's a way to keep raids smaller... and train Medicine! You can even sell those kidneys.

N.B. Only the population figure is used in raid calculations, as far as I know. The actual value of a colonist isn't considered. I've looked at the bit which does this calculation, and made a mod which does the calculation differently, so yeah.

[Chozo Nomad]

As much as I'd hate to make it known, there is an exploit with double doors you can do. If you have a room with the hive inside, you can have your colonist start to walk inside, pause, command them to fire at whatever's inside the room, and the bugs will never fight back. The door opens but the colonist never goes inside. Colonists will try and walk through the door, but they register seeing the bug before they even get to it...



Makes harvesting Jelly virtually risk free, so long as you stay on top of the bug count.

(My justification is the colonist is just cracking the door open and the bug can't get to them  )

[Jorlem]

Not sure if this is an exploit, but I've stumbled upon an interesting way to deal with sappers.

I cut through a nearby hill to lay a power line to connect with a geothermal, and filled the one tile wide tunnel with stone doors, to keep raiders from shortcutting through.  (There were around 10-12 doors involved.)  However, when sapping raiders spawned, they pathed through the tunnel.  Their melee guys tried to punch the doors down, as the sappers blew them up.  The sappers ended up blowing up so many of their own men that the raid fled, well before ever getting near my actual base.

[b0rsuk]

Not sure if an exploit - if you put a plasteel turret in front of others, attackers will focus on it. It doesn't deal any more damage. That's just bad AI priorities. If turrets are quite close to each other, raiders should walk that extra few steps to target the soft turrets.

[Vaporisor]

Not sure if this is an exploit, but I've stumbled upon an interesting way to deal with sappers.

I cut through a nearby hill to lay a power line to connect with a geothermal, and filled the one tile wide tunnel with stone doors, to keep raiders from shortcutting through.  (There were around 10-12 doors involved.)  However, when sapping raiders spawned, they pathed through the tunnel.  Their melee guys tried to punch the doors down, as the sappers blew them up.  The sappers ended up blowing up so many of their own men that the raid fled, well before ever getting near my actual base.

That is an AI process I guess.  One potential way is to put the AI so that they do the ! run away attempt from grenades?  What you said is the one bit of combat with sappers that gets to me.

[Britnoth]

I want to hear about exploit strategies!

If it is an exploit, I'd argue it isn't strictly a strategy. Generally just abusing a bug or serious behaviour oversight in the AI.

There has only been 1 or 2 real bug exploits in 9 pages of this thread. 

Oh, and if out ranging a siege is an exploit, then the seiges are an exploit too, as those mortars out range my pistol. Next siege I should just use dev tools to delete them, I guess. 

[Zombra]

There's a thread about mortars in which people are talking about noncombat characters being able to use them.  This seems like an oversight to me.  Maybe should be reported as a bug instead, but there you go.

[b0rsuk]

Non-combat in the sense they have 2 or less Melee and Shooting skill, or missing eyes and fingers, and no passion in skill. Such characters are only good for handgrenades and mortars are less risky.

[Zombra]

Non-combat in the sense they have 2 or less Melee and Shooting skill, or missing eyes and fingers, and no passion in skill. Such characters are only good for handgrenades and mortars are less risky.

Ah, okay.  So Empaths and Healers etc. still can't?  Never mind then!   

[Mathenaut]

Mortars require math, not shooting skill. That isn't how you aim a mortar.