Obviously I'm doing something wrong but what...

[Untrustedlife]

Hmm. I thought this might happen. I tried to soften the timing a bit, but yeah, the stockpiling adds more labor for the colonists to do in several areas, so your development will be slowed. I'll look into balancing this back a bit for Alpha 2.

I haven't had any issues, it just takes a little longer, which is fine in my opinion.
But the ai might need tweaking.

[Tynan]

The terrain movement penalties aren't as bad now, so transit times are a bit quicker overall.

[Nasikabatrachus]

I havent really encountered any differences other than it takes longer to build things due to stockpiling and having to build hoppers for nutrient paste.

what enrages me the most about building is that usually when I tell someone to build something small like a mine, they will grab the metal from the stockpile, drop it at the blueprint location to start construction, but immediately leave to do something else and then someone on the complete opposite side of my base is assigned to continue the construction.

I usually encounter this problem when I'm doing something like walling off an in-mountain base. I'll tell Owen McBuilder to prioritize construction of a wall, and he'll move metal to it immediately, but then will go off to sleep because he's been kept awake for a while, meaning I have to pause, recruit him, unrecruit him, prioritize the wall again, then unpause. The micromanagement is annoying, but not terrible.

Overall, though, I haven't had the problems mentioned by Torgaddon City Builder. My first reasonably successful Cassandra Classic colony in Alpha 1 is about as easy to manage as a colony in 254. Perhaps because I've been trained by DF stockpiles, which is weird because I can barely figure out the minecart system in that. I suspect if we saw Torgaddon's stockpile layout we'd understand the problem.

[colonistPally]

Hello, If you want to see my build orders, check out my later games. http://www.youtube.com/chancepaladin The earlier ones are me perfecting it and figuring the game out. Try Colony 7 and Colony 8 (in a little bit when it gets uploaded).

It's basically this:::
1 person on food
2 on gathering/mining/building

(dole out the firearms)
1 solar
(get some walls up)
2 batteries
1 food dispenser / 2 hoppers
(wall those in)
(move bed spots inside)
(clean up inside both boulders and grass)
(start building your farms. I do between 4-6)
That usually gets you into day 2 pretty strong.

I'm about to start "Colony 9" and I'll specifically walk through my build order.

Hope this helps.

[DethBringa]

I have been watching this game for ages and waiting until I have enough money to get it. That day has finally come! However it feels a lot like starcraft, as in, you have to have the perfect build or its GG.
I can not work out how to get everything up and running before the first metal break hits. Once you get that first mental break thats it, restart. So I tried to concentrate on what I need first. ! farm, shelter, power, nutrient dispenser. After about 5 unsuccessful attempts I finally got it working, chucked down 3 sentry guns just in time for 3 raiders to turn up, kill all 3 guns and slaughter everyone... restart again.
IDK if the game is supposed to punish new players to the point of wishing they had never forked out $30USD or if I'm just missing something simple.
It seems you can not get the resources fast enough with 3 people to build enough so they don't leave/rampage/wander. If you do manage to just do it, 3 raiders are enough to wipe your whole base.

Am I missing something?

[dd0029]

I have been watching this game for ages and waiting until I have enough money to get it. That day has finally come! However it feels a lot like starcraft, as in, you have to have the perfect build or its GG.
I can not work out how to get everything up and running before the first metal break hits. Once you get that first mental break thats it, restart. So I tried to concentrate on what I need first. ! farm, shelter, power, nutrient dispenser. After about 5 unsuccessful attempts I finally got it working, chucked down 3 sentry guns just in time for 3 raiders to turn up, kill all 3 guns and slaughter everyone... restart again.
IDK if the game is supposed to punish new players to the point of wishing they had never forked out $30USD or if I'm just missing something simple.
It seems you can not get the resources fast enough with 3 people to build enough so they don't leave/rampage/wander. If you do manage to just do it, 3 raiders are enough to wipe your whole base.

Am I missing something?

A couple of things.

First - Sentry guns are never a good idea unless you can get them up in the space of the raiders appearing and coming. They count as colonists for the purpose of raider waves. They are distressingly short range and very prone to explosions.

Second - Pause at the outset and scout out the map. Zoom out and unforbid all of the food and minerals on the map you can find. Then I look for somewhere near your initial placement hopefully with a steam geyser. If there's a spot close enough, start your building. 

For building, I always dig in. Some day, I will do an all exposed base to try it, but not yet. While colonists prefer 6x6 rooms, my first rooms are generally just big enough for a door and a bed. I will mine out the rest of the area once I am in doors, have food situated and research started. I build a single exterior room in front of the bedrooms big enough for a nutrient dispenser, one row of hoppers, small 4x4 table and chairs and the research table. Then I attach a solar panel or two off to the side leaving room for a kill box out front.

I don't start specializing guys until I have the research table up. Then I switch someone to research. I get hydroponic farming and nutrient resynthesis in that order. My next priority is generally mining out a prison room. I usually have to have someone go back to the outside sleeping pallets for one night when I get my first prisoner.

From then, I generally mine out the mineral pile that is right next to every starting position as well as plotting out the hydroponic room. That's my start.  From then on I build my base prepping for known events and responding to new things as they happen.

Tips - Always get your batteries under roof as soon as possible otherwise you will be fighting fires non-stop as they short in the rain.

Set your home area to include at least 3 squares beyond your buildings to handle the fires that will erupt. You don't want large things like solar collectors to catch as once the fire gets to the middle square you can only wait for it to burn down and rebuild.

Set a single line dumping area to use as an early free defensive bulwark and to clear out cover for early raiders. Keep an eye on what raiders use as cover and consider mining convenient spots flat to eliminate cover.

Have a care when setting up flooring. Smooth stone is free and gives a pleasant environment bonus, but it takes comparatively longer to build. So build it in small chunks.

The best, most efficient hydroponic layout is a u with a two benches on one side with a sun lamp at the bottom. Unless you are using Randy, you will only need at most two of these setups to have sufficient food for everyone plus a trade surplus.

Don't forget to equip all three guns before leaving the initial area. Always police up any new weapons raiders drop, swapping for better ones as they show up. My progression is pistol, uzi, M-16/Phase thing. M-24s are nice, but they need to be micro managed to counter snipe. It's a waste to let them auto target whomever is closer.

Finally, everyone should be cleaning, fire fighting and hauling. I also generally have everyone repairing, warden and doctor, but I'm not so sure about those last two. By the time I have my colony ready to get killed by raiders, I have only one or two growers. I only start specializing once I have 5 or 6 colonists.

[DethBringa]

OK I finally got a base up and running. Everything was ticking along ok. Then a solar flare hits wiping out all electronics (i.e. no defenses), 4 raiders land and a boom rat decides to kamikaze into the front entrance of my base.
While I'm battling to put the fire out the raiders come in and destroy all my unpowered sentry guns and then proceed to kill my people....
Once again restart. I MUST be missing something somewhere. After over a dozen restarts in and I still have yet to get a 4th person yet.

Anyway, as for the advice, I gotta say its all gold. I'll keep persevering.
As for sentry guns, I'd rather lose those than 1 colonist. Only get 3 and once you lose one its gg.

Scouting is great advice however I always scout and do exactly that.

Sometimes I get lucky with steam, each time I have its taken too long to get a generator, nutrient and indoor beds. I usually go for food over beds as the negatives for raw food stack very fast and you only get a couple of days before a mental break from raw food/sleeping outside/darkness from not enough lights yet/ugly place/injury or whatever. Never been able to survive long enough to add a table and chairs. I've tried digging in but it seems to take longer to set up than building outside.

Always put my batteries indoors (learnt that fast).

Never made it to research yet.
Never survived first raider wave yet.

[DethBringa]

Had another attempt, lasted 15 days before everyone starved to death (after one person rampaging from starvation). I had 4 hoppers full of food beside the nutrient dispenser, enough power for everything now I just have to work out how to tell people to eat. Or is it that you NEED a table and chairs first?

[dd0029]

What narrator are you playing on? I haven't moved to Cleo yet, but that start will get me up and running with everyone else unless Randy decides to bork me with a massive early raid.

The real trick is starting small and fast. I can have that initial starting stuff up and running by the middle of the second day. You don't need to and really shouldn't start farming until you have hydroponics. Granted, you will need to get them up immediately once you can.

I only start to get mental breaks even threatening if I have lots of unburied raiders for a long time or have them mining in the dark for long extended periods of time.

Here's a post with a SS of a common building pattern for me. The three bottom rooms on the right were my starting rooms. If you look closely at the grass in front of them and the floors, you can get an idea of how small they were to start. I have refined since then. Getting smaller of the start, planning to get bigger later and skipping the outdoor farming all together.

[dd0029]

Were you all incapacitated? Were your hoppers next to your dispenser? I've always assumed that they have to be to "work" correctly. People will sit an eat on the floor. Tables aren't necessary, but they offer opportunities for chat which is happy making.

Oh, on the topic of chairs, I started always leaving a space between because I thought they would like more room, just like me, but not so much. I believe they have to be next to each other to chat.

[DethBringa]

Well I did a SS of my latest fail. One person in bed, one went on a rampage VS a buffalo and the other just left. The one that stayed was the only one that would eat, the other 2 had mass negatives from starvation.

Each hopper has 75 food in it.

[dd0029]

I'm gonna guess the hopper thing is because they aren't right next to it. Especially from the second message in the upper right that looks to be saying "Need Food Hopper". Did you ever see them eat from the dispenser?

I see your bedrooms are a bit small. While it's ok to start that way, 6x6 inside walls is what they want. I might also tone down the lighting. They can step over lamps so you want to put them in the middle of the room to get the most out of them. I also see from your panels on the left that you have conduit running all around them. While the redundancy is nice, it's mostly a waste. I have one connection between panels.

For prisons, unless you are playing Randy, you generally won't ever have more than 4.

For buffaloes, you are going to want to recruit all three guys and have them shooting as early as possible. Those things are nasty.  Guys that leave can be arrested and re-recruited. I found that out the only time I had a guy walk off on me.

[Vastin]

The biggest problem with that layout is that the hoppers have to be directly adjacent to the food dispenser. Your people went nuts from eating raw food - which has a nasty stacking morale penalty.

This is why solar flares are currently so dangerous. You have no choice but to eat raw food during a flare currently, and it makes everyone in your base really unhappy (not to mention the darkness).

All the rubble left on the floors indoors doesn't help either, as that creates a 'hideous environment'. Cleaning is one of the lowest AI priorities right now - but really that's a mistake, as it is very important. I always manually set one of my colonists to clean as a higher priority, and designate all indoors areas as part of the 'home zone'.

[dd0029]

Cleaning is one of the lowest AI priorities right now - but really that's a mistake, as it is very important.

Quoted for truth.

Solar Flares aren't all that bad, they only last a day. It's the eclipses I find the most difficult if I don't have steam power or significant battery power to last it out.

[DethBringa]

The message about "need food hopper" is because the 4 I have are full.

Small rooms because the furthest I have ever made it is 15 days. I would rather get them inside first in a small room and expand later.

The prison was the last thing I added. In my record breaking 15 day play I have 1 bed for a prisoner but kept failing the recruitment even tho their loyalty was max, then I had someone else wander past and didn't have the room for an extra bed.

The buffalo was only an issue because one person decided to leave and the person I sent after them only made it halfway to them and then went on a rampage and decided to chase a buffalo.


Oh btw.. My build order... (Might help in trouble shooting).
Power
Batteries
Farm
Dispenser
Bedrooms
Prison
Usually followed quickly by FAIL.
So the hoppers have to be where the table and chairs are?

Can't clean the rubble as I can't last long enough for that to be a worry yet.