Unofficial Earlygame Hell Rant Thread

[0cra_tr0per]

My least favorite part of this game is before you get everything reliably stabilized, with a working freezer, proper defenses, and a food source secured ingame, because it really feels like the game's 10x longer until you get all 3 of those done.

[Canute]

Me too, the beginning of the game is that what made the most fun for me.

Once every pawn got his own nice room, clothes, weapons and bionic (or similar ) enhancement, the gameplay becomes pretty boring.
But i know many people just to enjoy this, growing up their colony with more and more pawns (50+) .

[Boston]

Protip: the nonelectrical versions of, well, -everything- are there for a reason. Use them. Instead of trying to rush electricty as fast as you can, take smaller incremental steps.

- your pawns will survive without private bedrooms for a decent amount of time, so long as the barracks is clean and quiet.

- you don't -NEED- a freezer until you have massive surpluses of meat. Vegetables can last for a long time unrefridgerated, and so long as you dont have a glut of meat, you can make pemmican on a steady basis, which in and of itself lasts for forever. I restrict pemmican to meat and the berries you can gather ASAP.

Generally, so long as you keep your wealth down, you can generally ignore the first few raids.

Keeping your wealth down, in this case, also means keeping your population down. Some pawns are effectively useless, but even a useless pawn adds several hundred silver to your colonies value.

- dont produce what you dont need. Food surpluses are great, yes, but they also increase value. Same thing with cloth or statues or..... Well, anything and everything, really. Either keep smaller surpluses, or be ready to defend it.

- make friends with the tribals and the townies. Pirates and mechanoids are the only hard-coded hostiles in the game, and tribals and townies can attack in much greater numbers. By making friends with them, you tend to face smaller raids, which means you need fewer defenses, which means you need fewer resources, which means your wealth is lower, which means you tend to face fewer raids.....


Yadda yadda yadda

[zizard]

Crashlanded gives you so much steel to start that you could drop a greenhouse day 1 if you really wanted to.

[cultist]

The only major issue I have with the early game is that the default scenario tries to tempt you into building with wood and then (mostly cassandra) promptly sends a firestorm or raiders with molotovs. You should always build with stone IMO, but this has the unfortunate effect of massively slowing down the early game, since you need to produce a good chunk of stone blocks before you can even get started.

I usually just make some very basic shacks for sleeping and storage with wood that I move out of as soon as I can. Or use an existing building, if it's in a good spot.

[Tober6fire]

Huh never really had much problem with wood in my experience it is really good for fast construction and great when I try to build huge walls to surround my colony. Even though yes wood is flammable I use the multiple adjancent walls that help cover the first wooden wall layer if it burns down first so that I don't have to micro as much when fire spreads quickly. Usually late game I try and build some type of stone suoronding walls since by then I have enough coloniest to focus more on the security of the place then just survival period. (And yes that's with Randy Random and The steadily increasing one on intense, sorry I forgot her name lol)

[Canute]

I think you played mosttimes are normal biomes.
But once you play at some extrem biomes with perma winter or hotter biomes, you barely find any wood.
Then wood becomes a more valueable resource then steel.

[Dargaron]

Amen to Canute: on the Tundra, you build in stone, or not at all, I've found. Plus, the wood is so useful for:
-Workbenches
-Beds
-Bedroom Furnature
-Emergency Heating
-etc.

(My one exception is early-ish flooring: I'll plant some fast-growing trees to provide wood floors for the first couple years, since I HATE the idea of using up stone for floors only to tear it up and put down carpets, since stone is technically a non-renewable resource).

[Tober6fire]

Yea true mostly I play in biomes rich with wood  mostly because well easier and still grasping the game and how to play even though lol I have been playing and still love this game for a year now. Also I should play more difficult biomes to get a better grasp on how it's possible that wood can be rare. And yes I probably will think twice about using stone because technically as Canute says it isn't a renewable resource. 

[Seriously Unserious]

Huh never really had much problem with wood in my experience it is really good for fast construction and great when I try to build huge walls to surround my colony. Even though yes wood is flammable I use the multiple adjancent walls that help cover the first wooden wall layer if it burns down first so that I don't have to micro as much when fire spreads quickly. Usually late game I try and build some type of stone suoronding walls since by then I have enough coloniest to focus more on the security of the place then just survival period. (And yes that's with Randy Random and The steadily increasing one on intense, sorry I forgot her name lol)

I prefer to avoid building with expendable resources, especially stone, early in the game. It takes a very long time, requires 2 colonists to be dedicated to building (1 to build, 1 to make stone blocks). Also, early game is when you're most likely to have a low skilled building doing the work, so more risk of a failed build on even easy things like walls and floors, which means wasted stone and time. Wood seems to be less likely to produce a failed build too, and wood is renewable so no big deal even if you do waste some from time to time training up that unskilled by passionate builder. Even in the harshest climates, you can dedicate some agriculture to tree farming if you need some building material.

Yea true mostly I play in biomes rich with wood  mostly because well easier and still grasping the game and how to play even though lol I have been playing and still love this game for a year now. Also I should play more difficult biomes to get a better grasp on how it's possible that wood can be rare. And yes I probably will think twice about using stone because technically as Canute says it isn't a renewable resource. 

Very good idea to try new things. I also prefer to use wood early game as it's generally easy to get in most climates, and fully renewable as I said above. You can demolish small sections of wall and replace them with stone later on when you're econamy's more secured, or you have a larger talent pool to draw upon to make the switch.

Just remember not to fall into the "it has to be this one way and no other way" trap. Technically, every map and every climate is different, so the exact strategy that works for one may MAY not work for another.

[Perq]

Building from stone takes a while, therefore game keep flowing for quite a while.

That said, there could be a never-ending scenario in which you can't really win, but only survive for as long as possible. I always feel like I don't want to win, but to keep on going until something challenging happens. I mean, I like it when my fully built up colony gets struck by drop-pod robot assault. :-2