Anyone doing the travel to the Spaceship victory?

[Seygas_theatear]

Currently I just setup my third base.  I've got a small army of muffalos who are carrying everything from food to turrets.  It's slow going, but it's a lot of fun making new bases with skilled up pawns. 

[Canute]

I did once.
I played with the Tiberium mod and once i notice how to handle the tiberium i allready was covered with it.
I managed it to wall up my base, and got some hydroponic to work for food. But it was impossible to free the whole map from the green pest. Most visitors and caravan's die on the way to my base so i was loosing reputation with these faction, but raiders barly made it to the base too, sieges never could build up any mortar.

So i decide to build some tents,sleeping bags and launcher pods and left the map to the friendly AI.

[Seygas_theatear]

I've never actually won a game yet, but this seemed like something fun and challenging.  I only play vanilla so far,  up maybe after the next update may look at mods.  My next caravan will probably be a hybrid with a few farmers and builders sent ahead to get a leg up on the next settlement.  I keep getting lucky meeting traders on the road, my last journey was 10 days with 4.6 days worth of food.  Luckily I brought enough silver and trade goods.

[b0rsuk]

A16 doesn't have a way to measure distance or plan your journey until your caravan is packed and ready to go. That's very inconvenient.

The plus of the friendly AI ship is that you can take an entire zoo with you.

[kenmtraveller]

I did it, on Randy Extreme, but I used drop pods for all moves except for the final move to the spaceship.
It would be tough to do it just with caravans, caravan loading currently has some issues and also there's currently no way to see how long it will take to get to a destination without heading out.

Ken

[Seygas_theatear]

Admittedly I had several problems caravanning out.

1.  Prisoners killed themselves on traps trying to leave several times
2.  Animals gave birth and the puppies got left behind
3.  They hung up nearly every time and ran circles around a room for almost a whole day
4.  Several starvation warnings and prisoners attempting escape when it got bogged
5.  Severe lag when the caravan decided to leave the map, it was strange but there was a noticeable spike
6.  And my big personal gripe, there is no Take All option on any of the screens.  It was very frustrating having to load everything several times.
7.  Dawdling colonists and pets, several stuck around in my base consuming hours of time where the caravan was otherwise ready.

Basically, I had to save scum a bit to get them to leave without glitches.

[blub01]

the pods have quite a high range, and the wiki says if you do it right you can get the required materials for a new set down to 10kg weight, so I don't think it'd be particularly difficult.

[Seygas_theatear]

Yeah I think max range is 66 hexes.  Since I have a massive desert ahead of me, I'm going to try and pod launch over it, including my muffalos and caravan through the rest.

[Kerbin Dallas Multipass]

Yea I kinda did it twice

First podfrogged (leappodded?) to the ship at the pole. On a 30% world it was just 5 hops and a 10 day hike. My goal was just to get my rich explorer off and it was actually a bit easier than I had thought. Funny sidestory: I had a married couple build up the final pod station before the pole. When she had a pyro breakdown I noticed that neither of them was capable of firefighting, so he grabbed all the food he could gather from the burning base and hopped in the last pod north. He died literally 200m from the ship from hunger and hypothermia.

Then I tried to get my 3 starting colonists to the opposite side of a 100% map. By the time I had saved up enough pemmican 2 of them were already dead and someone else had dementia and was married.. Anyway... Took off with 3 colonists, 2 Muffalos and a panther, restocked on food at a friendly trading post (I had taken some drugs and scyther blades as currency) and made it to the edge of my continent. Pod hopped across the ocean (Lack of fuel made me leave one muffalo behind because I wanted to take the panther). At this point I was almost completely out of food and stuff, so I settled for good. 3 years later I had a really flourishing colony with 8 or so colonists and remembered my initial plan. So, I made 5500 pemmican and a new group of 3 left for the last leg. Took them about a year of nonstop caravaning to travel 1/4 around the planet nonstop. In this scenario I abandoned left behind bases although they were functional and inhabited.

Things I learned:

The world screen is terribly slow and un-optimized. Even with all bases abandoned it took the lenght of a movie realtime to have the caravan travel for 1 year.

The caravan pathfinding does not take into account changing seasons. Some biomes have vastly different travel speeds for summer and winter. For long trips don't rely on the calculated route, better have it recalculated every season. Make sure you don't get snowed in, your progess will almost grind to a halt.

The most important resource for pod hopping is chemfuel, followed by components. Chemfuel is really hard to get while especially steel can easily be found and mined on a fresh map. To a degree that's also true for components.

If you plan on podding a larger group from A to B, make sure that the last colonist to hop is capable of constructing the pod AND hauling the chemfuel to refuel the pod launcher.

Before sending colonists on long trips, give them fresh clothes so they don't throw a fit due to tattered apparel as their clothes will deteriorate.

Pemmican is ideal for caravaning if you make it yourself. Here's what 1 colonist eats in 1 season (15.2 days in this calculation):

32 Simple meals weighing 14.08kg worth 800$ base price
or
485 Pemmican weighing 8.73kg worth 1455$ base