Outposts and Caravanserai

Started by Jorlem, December 20, 2016, 11:15:54 PM

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Jorlem

I posted this in the comments on the blog, as I had somehow forgotten about this subforum, so I am reposting this here, with some tweaks:

Watching the video, here's an idea I had for something else that could be done with encounter maps: Outposts and Caravanserai. (Which would basically be the same thing, but used for different purposes.)

For outposts, lets say you've exhausted all your surface steel, and don't have access to deep drilling. To get more steel without needing to buy it, you'd send a caravan to a nearby mountain or hills hex, and set up an outpost. That would just create a semi-permanent encounter map that you'd be able to mine in, then bring what you'd gathered back to your home base.

Caravanserai would be the same, but instead of being intended for resource gathering, they'd be supply drops and semi-secure places for caravans to rest and heal, or relay points for drop pods.  For example, instead of the people at your home base always knowing exactly where caravans are to send drop pods with food or meds with drop pods, they would instead target the caravanserai, send the supplies there, and the caravans would know where to head to resupply. (That lack of knowledge would be an RP thing, I'm not suggesting a fog of war or anything like that.)  Perhaps once the system is made a bit more complex, AI caravans could head for your caravanserai as well, and two caravans could meet up and trade with each other.


These wouldn't be full bases, just encounter maps that stick around until you decide to abandon the outpost.  Abandoning it should be more than just having all your colonists leave it.  I'd love to be able to leave a mining outpost in fall with the intent to come back in the spring, only to find that it has been ransacked while I was gone.