Unstable build feedback thread

[Awe]

I'm on year 10 of my colony with over 30 pawns, and I can officially say I have begun cheating to survive mechanoids in 1.0...

It sounds like something's really going weird with your game. Could you possibly upload the savegame? If not...

- What's your wealth?
- Population is 30, right?
- How many days old is the colony?

Almost my situation. Last psy-ship was 27 centipedes, 30+ lancers, 30+ scythers vs 42 pawns(Cassy still allow me to easily recruit from prisoners, also one of last mans was chased refugee). Colony at 1.05 mil of wealth. 7 year. Hard. Direct engagement = lose without any chance. Centipedes too tanky and bring too much firepower if you try to deal with them just in one spot. But door cheesing still work. 

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Boboid]

Also, human bite damage is defined as equal to punches, I'm not sure why it'd do more. Any insight appreciated, maybe I just forgot how this system works.

Base damage 8.2
Random mult up to 1.2, can rise it to 9.84, which can be rounded to 10
biteDamageMultiplier adds 25% which leads to 12.5

That'll be it - Totally forgot about the random damage multiplier.

[Tynan]

How are you guys getting million+ wealth levels? What do your colonies look like? How are you playing - just to grow indefinitely?

[Awe]

How are you guys getting million+ wealth levels? What do your colonies look like? How are you playing - just to grow indefinitely?

Good/excellent(or better) equipment - significant boost to wealth. Just healthy pawn with some bionics and power armor set is ~8-9k of wealth. So 40 pawns is already 0.3-0.4 mil. Base is nothing specific - a few greenhouses, stockpiles and rooms, just for decent live in this cruel world. Almost w/o drugs! 

PS Sorry for resizing. Original resolution doesnt fit 600kb. This is almost full base. A little killbox(w/o turrets) to the north, and some empty rooms with insects jelly to the west under mountains not crucial.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Greep]

Yup, I've played a long term fort back in the day, and the high quality levels just absurdly increase wealth, particularly when multiplied on materials with already high base wealth like plasteel.  It gets worse when your workers have crazy levels of bionics.  The increased wealth also creates a feedback loop with mechanoid raids when you net ever growing amounts of plasteel from ever bigger mechanoid raids (which you just recently helped fix )

Drugs are great for the initial rampup in wealth but don't get any such multiplying effect.

[zizard]

Pretty sure an indefinite colony is the most common way to play. I have 13 colonists with 300k wealth after 200 days Cass extra nb temperate flat, and I have been trying to keep it down, smelting almost every weapon. It would help if we could view a break down of wealth by category, even just as plain text under the statistics tab. Weapons, food, textiles, drugs, etc. Btw do human corpses, corpse gear, or animal corpses count for wealth?

[Wanderer_joins]

Anti-grain vs centipedes was a huge disappointment.

I had the same reaction with my first shot. But you can easily get 10 to 20 antigrain warheads by the end game, and most quests are only a question of motivation. Antigrain warheads always deal a decent amount of dmg to centipedes if the shot is not totally off, which is really significant. You should be perfectly fine without antigrain warheads until the ship warm up, then they are a precious ressource to fight already half dead centipedes. A shorter fight always means healthier and happier colonists. And now coupled with sniper turrets, centipedes are dealt with relatively quickly.

Orbital bombardment or power beams are not really effective against mechs, still devastating against pirates or tribespeople.

I don't think any of these weapons needs to be buffed.

Yup, I've played a long term fort back in the day, and the high quality levels just absurdly increase wealth, particularly when multiplied on materials with already high base wealth like plasteel.

But a high quality power armor is also absurdly powerful as mentionned by mehni.

Pretty sure an indefinite colony is the most common way to play.

I think it was true because there was no real challenge to launch the ship. Now you should try to take off once, to keep in mind that leaving the planet may mean trade-offs on wealth. Individual threats from the standard cycle can be dealt with until relatively high wealth, coping with the same threats on a fast pace is a different story.

[Boboid]

@Awe: Ack, when I look at that all I can see is wealth bloat
The gigantic chicken farm, the animal beds/chairs made out of leather instead of cloth, the jade sculptures in every room, the gigantic surplus of heavy leather and what looks like thrumbofur, lamps in every room, the power infrastructure.
Also you could save some power by not cooling your Geothermal generator and just leaving it exposed to your main batch of sun lamps

Really though that silver stockpile is bonkers.. there's uhh.. 193? tiles I think per trade beacon and if that silver is all merged then it's 500 silver per tile which is uhh.. go go-napkin math.. 965k? - the ~25 squares is somewhere around 800k.

That silver is a gigantic lead weight around your neck, remember that every time you buy something that object is worth less than what you paid for it, effectively lowering your wealth in addition to you now owning something useful.
If you spent all that silver on things to defend your base against mechanoids you'd be in a better spot
You also look like you've got a massive gold stockpile.
I dread to think of the wealth locked in those sculptures too. You can get a lot of mileage out of normal/good small stone sculptures in bedrooms. Jade is often ridiculous overkill

[East]

Insects come together at the start of the map. Wild-man does not fight against insects. Even they are sleeping together.

It does not matter much, but I write it down for fun.

[Awe]

@Awe: Ack, when I look at that all I can see is wealth bloat
The gigantic chicken farm, the animal beds/chairs made out of leather instead of cloth, the jade sculptures in every room, the gigantic surplus of heavy leather and what looks like thrumbofur, lamps in every room, the power infrastructure.
Also you could save some power by not cooling your Geothermal generator and just leaving it exposed to your main batch of sun lamps

Really though that silver stockpile is bonkers.. there's uhh.. 193? tiles I think per trade beacon and if that silver is all merged then it's 500 silver per tile which is uhh.. go go-napkin math.. 965k? - the ~25 squares is somewhere around 800k.

That silver is a gigantic lead weight around your neck, remember that every time you buy something that object is worth less than what you paid for it, effectively lowering your wealth in addition to you now owning something useful.
If you spent all that silver on things to defend your base against mechanoids you'd be in a better spot
You also look like you've got a massive gold stockpile.
I dread to think of the wealth locked in those sculptures too. You can get a lot of mileage out of normal/good small stone sculptures in bedrooms. Jade is often ridiculous overkill

Gold(4k) stockpiled for future grand statue. Im just waiting for inspiration on proper pawn. This is only purpose =)
70k of excessive silver. Aquired just for selling leathers/jelly/worn equipment.
8k of insect jelly not on screen(another 64k), legendary golden royal bed - another 60k of useless wealth. Jade statues not too costly - i think like 600x40, lets round to 30k. Chickens are cheap compared to all above, and allow me to hunt less. =) Soooo. 40+70+60+60+30. -250k. Just 25%. I dont think, if i burn this all and ship bring 22 centipedes instead of 27, it help a lot. Centipedes is directly manageable while they are like 5-6-7 in a group, but not 20. -_-

PS Geothermal near greenhouses not cooled. Here is some unroofed spots for wenting heat. This coolers for greenhouses. Just some of heatwaves rise temp to 45 and need to cool plants a bit to get rid of bad temp penalty. 

[Oblitus]

Wealth bloat is effectively uncapped, and if you decidedly keep wealth low, you are missing any sense of progression quite soon.
Raids are based on wealth and scale infinitely.
New 1.0 gameplay insists that thou must use your pawns as a primary combat power.
The more pawns you have, the more difficult it is to gain more, and more tedious managing is.

But this is not the worst part. Getting more population turns the colony into the ant farm, and I simply can't care about them anymore - they are losing any personality. No personality - no story. My personal comfortable maximum is 8-10. No matter how picky I am in recruiting, sometimes I just need that pawn now, so 1-2 would be incapable of violence, and 1-2 other would be just awful fighters, so I somehow have to fend off endless hordes of enemies with 5-8 capable pawns.

[vzoxz0]

How are you guys getting million+ wealth levels? What do your colonies look like? How are you playing - just to grow indefinitely?

Tynan wants to know so he can get rich and finally retire to that tropical island he's been dreaming about.

[Madman666]

Yep, i also play to survive as long as i can and to hoard as much stuff as i can get. I think its pretty common way to play Rimworld and frankly most fun way as well. Especially combined with Randy's over 13 population cap.

After a while of play raids tend to get ridiculous though. As i said earlier it turns into tower defense more or less, with fire power most of the time being an only meaningful factor. Or it turns into a complete disaster, if they drop righ inside of your base (well for me at least, i suck at dealing with drop pods). I thought that with me surviving up to maximum 2,5 mil in B18, i was as greedy as you can get, but 5 mil... Man. I still have ways to go. I wonder, how you even live through a single raid with such crazy wealth without a hard cap on raid's strength.

Thats why i welcome small scale fights that are world quests now - those fights are much more immersive and interesting, than a huge slaughterfest lategame raids turn into. Your gear, skills and proper tactics actually mean something now, when you fight out there in the world map. I really hope that world map events will get a threat point cap, so that it won't ever turn into regular raid like mess.

Though i must say, i wonder if i will ever be able to live to over a mil wealth now that in 1.0 most strategies that allowed to survive crazy raid sizes were somewhat deprecated. Because fighting ~200 raiders even 50 colonists head on... Heh. Just no way.

[Boboid]

@Awe: Ack, when I look at that all I can see is wealth bloat
The gigantic chicken farm, the animal beds/chairs made out of leather instead of cloth, the jade sculptures in every room, the gigantic surplus of heavy leather and what looks like thrumbofur, lamps in every room, the power infrastructure.
Also you could save some power by not cooling your Geothermal generator and just leaving it exposed to your main batch of sun lamps

Really though that silver stockpile is bonkers.. there's uhh.. 193? tiles I think per trade beacon and if that silver is all merged then it's 500 silver per tile which is uhh.. go go-napkin math.. 965k? - the ~25 squares is somewhere around 800k.

That silver is a gigantic lead weight around your neck, remember that every time you buy something that object is worth less than what you paid for it, effectively lowering your wealth in addition to you now owning something useful.
If you spent all that silver on things to defend your base against mechanoids you'd be in a better spot
You also look like you've got a massive gold stockpile.
I dread to think of the wealth locked in those sculptures too. You can get a lot of mileage out of normal/good small stone sculptures in bedrooms. Jade is often ridiculous overkill

Gold(4k) stockpiled for future grand statue. Im just waiting for inspiration on proper pawn. This is only purpose =)
70k of excessive silver. Aquired just for selling leathers/jelly/worn equipment.
8k of insect jelly not on screen(another 64k), legendary golden royal bed - another 60k of useless wealth. Jade statues not too costly - i think like 600x40, lets round to 30k. Chickens are cheap compared to all above, and allow me to hunt less. =) Soooo. 40+70+60+60+30. -250k. Just 25%. I dont think, if i burn this all and ship bring 22 centipedes instead of 27, it help a lot. Centipedes is directly manageable while they are like 5-6-7 in a group, but not 20. -_-

Well there's still a lot of wealth locked in leather furniture instead of cloth furniture but hrm... 
Just to humour me could you post your wealth graph? curious about animal numbers. I'm a little bit suspicious that the fact that you've placed a bazillion walls might be a contributing factor.
Obviously the amount of steel invested in power is eating a bunch too.. how refined is that power grid anyway? Given access to a river it's surprising that you've got so much solar. Especially with so few batteries.
Plasteel doors everywhree are obviously adding a bit but I understand why you'd use them..
I guess you could cut down on your chemfuel stockpile..
What the hell is in that room just below your devilstrand? It's a 1x2 table, 6 stools and...?
Fine/lavish meals are worth more than their parts but.. again I understand why you'd have a large stockpile..
---
Out of curiosity have you tried using EMP IEDs? You can't build them within.. 4? tiles of the ship without triggering it but their explosion radius is gigantic and the mechs will trigger them when they pop out quite consistently.  They're a million times better than mortars in my experience.
Frankly when I look at a mech raid of that size my first thought is " If I can kill those scythers during the emp blast then I can just beat all the mechanoids to death with melee weapons" but.. that's because I've been playing so many melee colonies lately

Especially combined with Randy's over 13 population cap.

Cass isn't anywhere near as limiting when it comes to population now. You can quite consistently get 20+ colonists now which I personally find more interesting. I've gone as high as 56 in a 1.0 cass game but, that wasn't in the current version.

New 1.0 gameplay insists that thou must use your pawns as a primary combat power.

Really couldn't disagree more.. Frankly I think there are more ways to invest your wealth in combat power which out-scales raids now than there ever were.
And that's really the whole point.

Can you spend wealth on combat power in a way that increases your combat power relative to raids inclusive of the wealth spent on said combat power? Yes. The answer is Yes

[Oblitus]

Can you spend wealth on combat power in a way that increases your combat power relative to raids inclusive of the wealth spent on said combat power? Yes. The answer is Yes

No. The answer is No. Sure, power armor can give you an edge. Some edge. But at the end of a day, it can only buy you some time. No armor will help when you are outnumbered 1:20. Or when your pawn is set on fire and decides to run away from cover under a crossfire. You can use turrets, but you can only have so much turrets. They have an upkeep cost, they need replacements after raids, they need power, they need space. You can buy some time, but you are doomed by design. One day you will see an eclipse caused by hundreds of drop pods falling right on your heads, and this will be the end.