Is it viable to accept every newcomer so you can kill them and reduce raid size?

[vampiresoap]

I'm thinking of just accepting anyone who wanders into my innocent looking colony. I would then anesthetize them, harvest their organs and then kill them. (Human leather hat and clothes are optional but encouraged) I read somewhere that having your colonists "downed" would reduce raid size, but I'm not sure if that's still true. What do you guys think about this?

[giltirn]

If you enable debug mode you can view a debug plot in the history tab that shows two figures that I believe are relevant to raid size: "fun points" and "recovery". If I understand correctly these both enter into the raid formula, the former presumably related to how well you are doing overall and the latter a dampening factor based on recent casualties and whatnot (it would be great if someone more in the know could clarify this!). You could try to see if your uh.. experiment affects these figures.

[zizard]

Yep works great.

[Razzoriel]

"Sacrificing" one useless colonist to Moloch Randy, Cassandra or Phoebe will greatly reduce raid sizes for a year. Making a tradition to "sacrifice" each colonist a year will keep your colony under "recovery" status forever, which means you'll get pitiful raids and the worst case scenario is a small mechanoid raid which you'll dispatch quickly. Does not mean you get less "bad" events, simply means raid sizes are reduced because the AI will remember that death and will put a handicap.

It is abusable, and it is the new "killbox" OP strategy to beat the game. Sustaining one additional useless colonist for a year is much less costly than losing your good colonists and your base. IMO, the mechanic needs to be reworked, and should take into account the "value" of the pawn lost, as well as the colony size, because the effect is the same if your colony has 4 or 20 colonists.

[RemingtonRyder]

If you gain a colonist then the adaptation days counter starts over at zero. So you don't really need to sacrifice your newly-recruited colonist.

Effectively, after starting from zero, you get a grace period of about 30 days before raid sizes become 100%, and after that it takes about 230 more days for it to reach the maximum adaptation value of 160% assuming that nothing happens to set back the counter.

I mean, you can sacrifice colonists if you want, but adaptation isn't really as big a problem as you think.

Sources: StoryWatcher_PopAdaptation.cs, Storytellers.xml

Turns out I was looking at the wrong thing.

[vampiresoap]

Hmm...I'm getting confusing answers from you guys ;P I guess I'll have to see for myself before jumping into this discussion more...I shall build a dark shrine and honor the gods once a year!!!

[Mkok]

We had cannibalism, inhumane torturing, organ harvesting, slavery, human butchering for profit, etc. But this is the first time I hear of human sacrifices to the gods of the Rim. I know what my next colony will be... Welcome to the occult mountain. Our slogan is "you will be offered" 

[RawCode]

actually it is not viable and won't have any effect on raid power

adaptDays have bounds of 0-100

gaining colonist reset value to zero
killing colonist reduce value by 28 but this value can't drop below zero

Code Select Expand

this.adaptDays = Mathf.Max(this.StorytellerDef.adaptDaysMin, this.adaptDays - num);

killing colonist you just recieved will just keep value at zero a little bit more, still viable if you get no new colonists, but prisoning your own colonist and recruiting it back will have same effect.

real reason to kill useless colonists - less people you have, more options to get new ones, especially noticable with pirate caravan, that will not sell any slaves if you have population over 1.00

[zizard]

I don't think adaptDays minimum is 0, since this is in the storyTellers xml:
<adaptDaysMin>-60</adaptDaysMin>

I'm also not sure about gaining colonist resetting the value. Are you sure it's not resetting pop recovery, which is not the same as raid point recovery?

[vampiresoap]

Why would getting new colonist reset the "adaptation" thingy? Shouldn't the game be more hard on you when you have more people?

Also, I think it is a very good idea to imprison the useless pawn before the sacrificial time of the year comes. That way the raid size probably won't be as large while you wait.

[RemingtonRyder]

Why would getting new colonist reset the "adaptation" thingy? Shouldn't the game be more hard on you when you have more people?

Well, technically, it is harder anyway due to the increased wealth and points that this new colonist adds.

As for resetting the adaptation points, well that works both ways. Gaining a colonist will zero out a previously negative 'adaptation days' as well. Either way, the adaptation factor is going to tend not to get too high unless nothing changes e.g. you constantly kill all the raiders in an incoming group without any of your guys being downed.

[Bolgfred]

If the formula in the wiki is correct, the game doesn't differ between death and downed.

For this reason I created a heat box: small room filled with heaters, big enough to put all my naked colonists into. After they were all downed to heatstroke, adaption graph dropped a lot and a stranger appeared ( it was a wimp). As I did repeat the process, no wimp appeared and no more graph reaction was noticed.

[vampiresoap]

If the formula in the wiki is correct, the game doesn't differ between death and downed.

For this reason I created a heat box: small room filled with heaters, big enough to put all my naked colonists into. After they were all downed to heatstroke, adaption graph dropped a lot and a stranger appeared ( it was a wimp). As I did repeat the process, no wimp appeared and no more graph reaction was noticed.

Does it confirm that you can only do it once in awhile?

[bbqftw]

If the formula in the wiki is correct, the game doesn't differ between death and downed.

For this reason I created a heat box: small room filled with heaters, big enough to put all my naked colonists into. After they were all downed to heatstroke, adaption graph dropped a lot and a stranger appeared ( it was a wimp). As I did repeat the process, no wimp appeared and no more graph reaction was noticed.

heatstroke does not affect adaptation, but possibly painshockdown due to burn damage will.

Death is definitely more adaptation than down. I have been letting refugees bleedout in my games. You definitely see impact.

I will post some adaptation graphs when I can to show that you can push adaptation days into the negative.

[spidermonk]

Well, this is how all this ice sheet extreme players manage to survive.