How selective are you in prisoner recruitment?

[khearn]

trigger-happy colonists should do just fine manning a mortar as well. No point wasting someone who can shoot a gun on that job.

[Toast]

Trigger-happy pawns fill a specific combat niche with both miniguns for manhunter packs and tribal raids AND with granades/EMPs against mechs. I like having one around for those reasons. The problem is having more than one in a small colony... or having one early, before you have any of the weaponry than can make their trait into an advantage.

Brawlers similarly have a useful combat niche of plugging doorways and ambushing gunners around corners. Again, the problem is having too many of them. I once had 4 in a 6-person colony and that forced me to adapt my defensive strategy very differently to standard raids. I did eventually become good at fighting them off, but mech raids were just hell.

I think this is perhaps the biggest difference between selective (small) and less selective (large) colonies: in a larger colony, if each pawn can do only one useful thing, that's fine. A small colony has to have pawns whose strengths and weaknesses work together in order for them to succeed. And that can be tricky to finesse.

[dv]

I am very picky. There will always be another horde of Tribals, and there's always 2-3 wounded. If I run out of prisoner beds, I call up a neighboring settlement for a slaver convoy and sell the difficult/useless ones.

[RazorHed]

I always play with a mod that lets me make bionics . So I always chop a leg off any prisoner I want to recruit or use as an organ donor. This prevents prison breaks and berserk prisoners. It also allows me to wait out a drug addiction safely . Then when they get recruited , I give them a peg leg until a time where good meds , good docs and bionics are available .