Are map missions ever worthwhile?

[Vlad0mi3r]

Do map missions scale with the difficulty level?

Not to my knowledge but I only attack Pirate bases have never felt the need to harm other factions. The biggest things that add difficulty is biome rainforest is hard work and if the base has a mortar or not.

[Blastoderm]

I never go for them. Mostly because messing with caravans is a pain and brings me more frustration than benefits.

[PatrykSzczescie]

Enemy colonies are not map missions but I'll say you may attack them if you have a psychic animal pulser and a place to hunker down but then you'd have 2.5 days to leave, which is too little time until all the manhunter animals go to sleep. You'd have to use a trick by claiming the place as a part of your colony then leave once you loot.

Outposts similar to colonies - a psychic animal pulser and easy win. It's even worth launching one of your pawns and earn ~2000 silvers for the cost of a psychic animal pulser which has no other purpose to be used. Also, the timer won't start until all turrets are captured and all manhunter animals calm down, in contrast to the case of raided colonies.

Item stashes are the easiest missions, especially in the beginning. The difficulty depends on wealth of one of your colonies (depending around which colony the item stash decides to appear, it's hard to determine if you have multiple colonies near each other) at the moment an event message about item stash pops up. The threat may be shown.

• If the threat are turrets, the enemy is an outlander (confirm?) or a pirate faction. There are plenty of turrets (and a mortar if your wealth is greater) and one (or two with decent wealth or a bit more, but relatively a small amount) armored pawn. You may build up a cover and wait until the enemy pawn attacks or try shooting turrets, bateries or solar panels, though these building contain metal and components you may want to loot and send with cargo pods back to your colony.
• If the threat is a bastion, the enemy is a tribal faction. It's similar to outposts there, but an amount of tribals guarding item stash is a bit more than raiders attacking colony after rescuing a refugee, it may be not worth a toss.
• If the threat is munhunter, it's a bit animal assaults than during a manhunter pack event. You may consider building a shelter and wait.
• If the threat isn't determined, it might be one of these above or it may be no danger. You can flee from the map if the threat appears to be too big.

If a non-hostile faction offers a trade - use your common sense. You may not want to trade thousands of food or plants for a masterwork stone sculpture, but trading 8 longswords (whatever material/quality/durability) for ~5000 silver is a great deal.

[Yoshida Keiji]

I'm another Lost Tribe player, also in Cassandra rough.

I'm not doing any of them either and by the time I get an efficient team like mentioned by others, I would probably be almost launching my ship and had already declined like 50+ of those incidents before. Which means bad game development.

For tribal games, we need a grade scale down so that it becomes more viable. The same could be said for Ancient structures. Opening early with two short bows, a wooden spear, club and jade knife versus 4 mechanoids is ridiculous too. It looks like Tynan designs only for Crash-landed and then just passes new features equally to lost tribe without any adjustments.

I would really love to see those World quest incidents allowing players to claim "captured" outposts so that we can turn them into peripheral colonies for ourselves, instead of banishing into air in 24hs...

[Vlad0mi3r]

I'm not doing any of them either and by the time I get an efficient team like mentioned by others, I would probably be almost launching my ship and had already declined like 50+ of those incidents before. Which means bad game development.

That is the end game at this point "Launching the ship". Just because you put self imposed limits on how you wish to play the game does not equal "bad game development". As you stated you do not have to do these missions in order to complete the game.

I am also surprised that playing tribal you don't find yourself in a position to take advantage or explore this aspect of the game. Maybe its Cassandra I usually play Randy Rough but I don't see how that would make a huge difference. You still should be able to get colonists with an assortment of weaponry from sniper rifles to chain shotguns (if you like) with armour vests and helmets prior to building the ship. you can have a go with 6 colonists with this setup if you wanted to have a go at the missions, that is enough to get the job done.

[Yoshida Keiji]

No, I didn't self-impose not doing. I was attacking everywhere in A16. But since A17 and all the limbs loss, is when I decided to stop caravanning.

My current game for example, I'm at day 170 and so far only seen 1 Bionic Leg and 1 Bionic Eye from traders, and I didn't had the money for the BL by the time they came. I lost one guy recently out of 4 who had a peg leg. I have a Prosthetic Leg still boxed. And 10 pawns. My latest raids count is 7 straight mechanoid attacks in a row, so I'm farming Scyther Blades (4). I can't improve my economy with 2 chemical fascination guys. Playing in Boreal Forest, and it doesn't look worthwhile to build greenhouse to produce devilstrand at this point. Already researching ship technologies.

In A16, it was easier to go caravanning with pawns who had no movement injuries or just scratches that wouldn't slow them below 90% (that requirement is my own).

[Bolgfred]

I never went much for caravaning for several reasons:

1. The loot ain't trustworthy
I dunno but I never was interested in the loot that was offered. Most ressources aren't very valuable or not transportable. Only things that would trill my mind would be plasteel, and even then I mostly don't need it then, but in a far future or so. Problem here isn't the fact that the reward ain't good, it's that there is no ressource of interest, as you don't need things very importantly quick and can be replaced. The only thing I ever care, would be components.
About neurotrainers, there ain't many skills that cannot be trained by itself in more ore less time, so I rarely think them necessary to be used. Many skills aren't even worth to raise up to higher levels.
Guns and Armor could be a thing, but most time I have no usage for 3xplasteel shiv, 1xpistol and a bad quality LMG.

2. The difficulty
Especially early, when you ain't got the colonists affordable, the advanced equipment or animal support, it is probably not worth the risk. Probably because You have no clue on the actual difficulty of the encounter, so I cannot calculate as long as I doesn't have my win-'em-all Team. I'd wish there to be a small clue about what you can expect( e.g. "There are about one dozen of bandits armed to teeth", " Five madmen with rocket launchers", "Two jerks and a coma" or "It's a horde of furry tortoises!)

3. The hunger
Food on caravans doesn't feel balanced. When there's an AI caravan visiting you see 10 people with 3 pack animals and 99% of their goods aren't food.
When I send caravans myself about 50% have to be food, and it would be best to put a pool table beside them to prevent joy crisis.
AI caravan never had a pool table with them, but multiple bad quality granite sculptures (who the hell would carry these??)
I think there is no way on how to reduce food consumption in traveling, but I think it needs a way to resplenish it. Here I think about pawns hunting offscreen, animals producing milk or eggs or something.
This could be toggled in caravans, similar to colonists timemanagement, preplanning a caravan's relax, travel, hunt and sleeping time. By this a well prepared caravan could make very big journeys, presupposed, they have a good hunter, medical supply and weapons.

4. Defense
The game design, or better said "Tynan's wish", is to make us go out and travel around the world. Meanwhile the pressure on our colony is getting is getting higher and higher, by a permanent shedule of raiding types that require most attention of the colony management. Both alone are cool things, but in the end "the risk" you take in a caravan, ain't the caravan, it's the weakening of the colony, think.

5. Hard work all day
A minor, or maybe a major, issue is that most of the time there is quite enogh work to be done in your colony. Especially when the lategame infrastructure isn't fully completed yet, my colonists are 24/7.. I mean 24/15 busy doing things.
When everything is done in my colony, I already built the equipment I need, don't need to skillup my colonists, and have the industry to buy everything that I want. going out for a treasure would be only for the fun, not for the need.


I might be doin it wrong, but caravaneering doesn't make me happy.

[SpaceDorf]

What makes map missions worthwhile is : Droppods
( and free loot and prisoners. )

Embrace Maxim 1.


1.) Fly in.
2.) Crush your enemy.

=== PILLAGE ! ===

3.) Exploit the map as much as you can, while ressuplying your guys from home. Leave everything on the ground.
Only roof stuff that deteriorates.

=== THEN BURN. ===

4.) Leave when the time is up.
Exploit the fact that you can overload your caravan at this moment and take everything with you.
Your caravan will not make a single step.
Instead.
5.) Create a new outpost.
6.) Drop only what you need from your pawns, they will move just fine with tons of stuff in their backpack.

=== GET PAID TWICE. ===

7.) Exploit the shit out of this map.
8.) Build Droppod Launchers and send everything home.


Finally I have to admit, especially in early game it would be nice if World Events would be closer than a half-year long round trip by foot.
And I only think about this when there are at least one or two pieces of good quality endgame equipment on the line.
The cheapest mission of them all is the peace talks ( is this even vanilla ? ) Get there, talk to some guy, hang around to exploit and collect the stuff lying around, gain additional points by caring for starving friendlies.
Gain additional loot by stripping them.

[Yoshida Keiji]

...and of course on top of all the already mentioned difficulties...we also have Infections.

This spring - summer time I had a nice window to go caravanning as all the harvest was done and abundant with pemmican already made from early seasons...but...

* Fibrous mechanites.
* Flu.
* Muscle parasites.

All three waves one after the other stacking on my pawns...

... but Tynan wants us to go out... yeah, right.

Do pawns self-tend now in A17 while traveling?

[Ragnarok]

2. The difficulty
Especially early, when you ain't got the colonists affordable, the advanced equipment or animal support, it is probably not worth the risk. Probably because You have no clue on the actual difficulty of the encounter, so I cannot calculate as long as I doesn't have my win-'em-all Team. I'd wish there to be a small clue about what you can expect( e.g. "There are about one dozen of bandits armed to teeth", " Five madmen with rocket launchers", "Two jerks and a coma" or "It's a horde of furry tortoises!)

Agreed. It would be nice to have a better idea of what you might face otherwise there's not much point sending people in early game because you might be up against a well armed horde and get slaughtered, but it also means you might pass up on raiding that settlement that had only two jerks guarding it. Not asking for an exact number of enemies and exact weapon types, but something like those examples you just gave would be great. Maybe we could even get a new type of tech as an exploratory/scout drone. We have bionic body parts and mechanoids that attack us, why can't we build a drone of some sort to scout out an area and give us more detail of what we might find. Number of enemies, equipment, number of buildings and infrastructure, and even how much natural resources/ore there is in the area. Or you could have it as some sort of researchable/trainable skill to teach a pawn (so tribal's can also scout) so they can move alone without needing a caravan, can move faster, and have whatever skills needed to scout and survive alone while doing so. Maybe it could just require a pawn to have a certain value in certain skills, like melee and/or ranged, animals and/or plants (to hunt and eat on the move), good eyesight, no/minimal movement penalties, etc.

3. The hunger
Food on caravans doesn't feel balanced. When there's an AI caravan visiting you see 10 people with 3 pack animals and 99% of their goods aren't food.
When I send caravans myself about 50% have to be food, and it would be best to put a pool table beside them to prevent joy crisis.
AI caravan never had a pool table with them, but multiple bad quality granite sculptures (who the hell would carry these??)
I think there is no way on how to reduce food consumption in traveling, but I think it needs a way to resplenish it. Here I think about pawns hunting offscreen, animals producing milk or eggs or something.
This could be toggled in caravans, similar to colonists timemanagement, preplanning a caravan's relax, travel, hunt and sleeping time. By this a well prepared caravan could make very big journeys, presupposed, they have a good hunter, medical supply and weapons.

The food thing for caravans doesn't make much sense to me either. AI caravans don't carry that much food and it seems rather sucky for us to have to take so much food which means we can't carry as much other stuff which is the main point of caravaning. Like you mentioned it'd be great to see some on-the-move foraging. Unless it's a desert or ice biome there should be plants and berries on the map you could harvest or animals you could hunt as you move through. Automatically of course. That would suck to micromanage.

[Wanderer_joins]

Let's be basic: by year 2 on a 30 days growth period tile you can easily have 100k+ worth of items. Reward of an outpost: 2k.

Rougly 2% of your item wealth for maybe 50% worth of manpower + travel costs + potential loss. Most of the time, these are just for fun.

[s44yuritch]

I mainly do the outposts for two reasons:
1. components (if the map is at least hills)
2. prisoners (because with my usual 2 bases there usually is a need for more people).

This is for mid-late game of course:
1. Prepare a number of drop pods.
2. Load your ranged fighters into pods, load melee fighters (with plasteel swords, and power armor + shield belts) into a different group of pods. Have a couple more empty pods.
3. Launch the ranged group, set to drop at edge.
4. Once they are there and you have the sight of the place, launch the melee group so that they drop on the enemy. Meanwhile start attacking with the ranged group. This tactic gets the enemy killed fast. (ranged group can be small, their main job is scouting the area before droppod assault).
5. Now use the empty pods to send some components + chemfuel, with which you build a pod launcher on site (enough steel can usually be found on site). And start mining every component/gold/jade you can find on the map. It's very much possible to collect up to 100 components in those 2 days you have, and send them back via pod launcher.
6. Before leaving, don't forget to uninstall any turrets/furniture there might be, and take them with you if you have capacity. Turrets can instead be disassembled for components.

Now the optional parts, if you have some mods (misc robots and dropships):
5.1. Send a couple Hauler bot bases in pods. Since the outpost will have a solar panel, you can connect them to it, this makes fast mining even faster (bots haul the components to the launcher). Don't forget to deactivate and uninstall them before leaving.
5.2. Send in your dropship to pick everyone and everything up, instead of going back by foot.

[TheMeInTeam]

Missions are rarely worthwhile, and sometimes impossible (hey bring us 1000 agaves soon trololol).

Occasionally you get stuff like "bring ~1k or less potatoes", which is great if you're growing potatoes in gravel, you get way more silver than normally selling them and only need 1-3 pawns to carry the stuff.

Outposts for stuff like megascreen TV can be decent too, if you figure out a way to beat the outpost without sending most of the colony.  An added bonus is deconstructing their stuff for components, and mining stuff on the map for additional resources you might not have at home. 

[Yoshida Keiji]

Player base conclusion:

* We have eradicated "Caravanning" for safe travel via drop pod. So "Misc" like Caravan Spot are literally useless.

* World incidents have been pushed to late game only, meaning that all other proposals before that are just annoying pop-up notifications that serve no purpose.

I guess this only makes happy the sedentary players who stay longer than 5 years but to those who launch the ship A17 only meant rivers and roads, just an aesthetic update.