Late game ship encounters

Started by Pangaea, August 21, 2019, 01:12:40 PM

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Limdood

i think consciousness being reduced to 0 can kill a pawn, so a 20% brain, plus 20% more consciousness damage from other sources could kill a pawn...I'm not 100% confident though.

For the rock chunks, they can't be dropped on traps, so if a chunk is generated somewhere (as can happen from metal objects being destroyed into slag, or a pawn who was hauling a rock chunk being drafted, or the fertile fields mod changing rough stone to gravel) the rock chunk will be placed at the nearest open tile, and doors count as open tiles, and items in doors block them open.  So it isn't a hauling issue, it's more a LACK of hauling, since chunks aren't automatically hauled, so your pawns won't clear them out without being specifically told to.

I do believe there is a mod that prevents items from being dropped in doorways though, so if that is an ongoing annoyance, it might be worth looking into.

Pangaea

Cheers. Might have been other injuries that killed her off then. Don't recall exactly what it was, just that I was surprised.

I have a horde of panthers, like 30-40, and several places for stone chunks, so I'm not sure why they keep ending up in doorways. Usually I catch it, but sometimes not, and when raids hit it's tough.

Goddamnit though. Feels like things are starting to spiral out of control, and I'm still only dealing with normal raids. They're simply too darn big to deal with. Need luck to get out of it alive and without too much damage to people or the base. And then it takes a week to heal up + rebuild afterwards. Or near enough anyway.

Double-whammy now. First a horde of pirates, once again during the evening/night, so people need to fight tired and upset, and the next day is a mess. People still in hospital and infrastructure not up to par yet, and 45 mechs drop down and attack, including 20 centipedes. This time there even was a visiting caravan that took a little of the heat initially. Sadly they got torched, including an Archotech arm, heart, TV and various other good pieces :(

Post-battle, and so much to fix up. Most of the walls are almost torn down as well, so either need to tear it down first and rebuild, or spend a long time to repair. I'm less and less confident we can weather the storm from "normal" (yet big-ass) raids, never mind once the ship is started up.

A more zoomed out view, in case you see something awefully dim I've done that can help me survive these onslaughts better.



If only the mortars were more precise... They're going every which way, and can easily do more damage to the base than to the mechs.

Wealth is over 600,000 now, and keeps rising despite the fact I'm not crafting much. Some infrastructure and the odd bionic to replace lost parts.

Old sow Iskra sadly suicided on a trap. Maybe she was tired of life in the colony and saw which way things are heading. RIP, old girl. It was a good ride. 17 years  :(

Shurp

You should be getting a lot of plasteel and components from those mechanoids you're disassembling, right?  Maybe you need to build a field of plasteel simple turrets in your killbox to slow them down (and give them targets other than your colonists)

Added bonus: next time there's a ship part landing, you can pick up all the turrets, relocate them with a few batteries to power them, and splatter the mechs as they come out.

Put a few turrets in your freezer / anywhere else sappers like to hit you... only thing turrets aren't effective against is siegers.
If you give an annoying colonist a parka before banishing him to the ice sheet you'll only get a -3 penalty instead of -5.

And don't forget that the pirates chasing a refugee are often better recruits than the refugee is.

B@R5uk

#33
Did you try to call for help at least once? I had a game when friendly faction raid suddenly showed up during mecanoid raid I tryed to repel and they steamrolled mechs like babies!!! I think it's nice feature that solves all wealth-danger problems, as you in fact just hire mercenries to fight for you if you can't or don't want to fight yourself.

Canute

QuoteIf only the mortars were more precise...
IED traps, sure they need componets too (i think) but you can made a pretty nice minefield before your maze entrance. Just don't place them to close to each other.

Pangaea

Tried to call for help (hadn't before), but they couldn't get there in time -- just a tribe.

Quote from: Canute on August 30, 2019, 05:34:27 AM
QuoteIf only the mortars were more precise...
IED traps, sure they need componets too (i think) but you can made a pretty nice minefield before your maze entrance. Just don't place them to close to each other.

Tried out this as well, and it looked like a decent plan. Maybe it will be. Later.

A ship landed in a horrible location, in between my walls, and with the path north blocked off due to a deep water lake (I opened the doors, but it was no use).



It's truly amazing how quickly 45 mechs can smash up 10 turrets. We're talking seconds here. Kept pounding them with mortars (but of course the vast majority missed by impressive margins), and kept building walls to prevent them from breaking into the ship location. We had 100 shells. Found out that when you run out, people will stop manning the stations. We did kill off a few lancers and scythers, but not one of the 14 centipedes -- none were even close to anything dangerous.



Despite my best efforts they broke through and started smashing up the engines. Had little choice by then but to open up the doors and cross my fingers. We had prepared further south, but yeah...



For the first time ever I tried to unleash the panthers. But it went pretty much as expected: a total suicide. At least 16 panthers and two muffalos perished, and probably mostly to friendly fire from what I have seen in the death log.

The hospital wasn't big enough this time either, with 17 of 20 people injured. Thankfully I have a spare kidney and enough bionics, but this was horribly ugly. Sure hope this doesn't happen again, because there probably isn't a good defence against this.

Right now everything in that general area is messed up, and it was a big area with many thick walls separating the base. At least all those walls meant we got enough time to build some plasteel turrets, a few traps (including a few IEDs) and a protective wall.

This stage of the game is unquestionably very brutal  :( :'(

Limdood

If you use animals, assign them all to one pawn, and have that pawn stand on the opposite side of the enemy from your other pawns, or at least to the side...that way the animals will hit a side that bullets aren't incoming from, which will cut down greatly on casualties.

From a metagame perspective, it is actually better to have all the tribal factions as enemies, and the outlanders as allies.
1) outlanders will respond and help in combat.
2) outlanders have more useful goods for trade
3) tribal raids are generally easier than outlander raids, especially with mortars
4) having more enemies, of easier types, will increase the pool of prospective factions when a raid is generated, making it more likely to get the easier factions (tribals) and less likely to get the hard factions (mechs)

Pangaea

#37
I'd agree with that, but in depends on game events how this turns out. And at some point it's too risky to do quests, so at that point the factions are kinda set. Unless I ship most resources over to them I suppose. Trade is a slow way to increase points.

Using animals in combat appears tricky/suicidal, at least in the late game with so big forces up against us. I lost almost all haulers before, so I've turned off that option now. Trying to build up a force again as haulers, because it's needed.

Speaking of that, big forces... this was probably not the wisest move...



As usual the refugee was beyond useless (I hoped for another cook). Moved him a bit closer to base (so they wouldn't just kidnap and leave, if such big forces are content with that), and hoped he would die.

Total chaos of course. For once I'm glad to have a handful of melees, because they bumrushed us something fierce. Tried to hit them with mortars as they moved in, but it was useless of course. Think 2-3 people got hit.



I'm counting 70 dead and 60 fleeing or downed. Give or take a few I may have missed when zooming out. Massacre? Kinda!  ;D

I'm seriously starting to hate the sapper attacks though. Several times they've arrived from the south and started to dig along the very south border deep into the mountain. Which means I can't fix it later either, because we're not allowed to build there. Opened up a cavern there too, so I kinda wonder if they knew about that beforehand.




By the way, I did make some IED traps before the maze. It hasn't worked as well as hoped though. Usually you get a few people on heavy drugs that run ahead of the pack, and either get blown up or run through injured. So instead of the IEDs blowing up a fairly big group, they take out a few people at best. It may work better against mechs, however, as the different types tend to bunch up more.

Pangaea

A more literal meaning of the thread title soon?



Would prefer some more food first, and wood for that matter. Toxic fallout really hurt. Most food got wiped out, and pretty much all the flora. Trees still haven't grown back. But unless something drastic happens, I'm thinking about triggering the final assault soon.

Don't know how severe it will get with 700,000 wealth on Savage, I've only done this once before, and it was probably on Medium, with presumably less wealth. But we do have 21 guys, 22 if I get a recruitment inspiration and can get the 99% prisoner. Even if we lose some people, hopefully we won't get wiped out.

Have also finally managed to get the 'good' outlanders as allies, so should be able to get them to help at least once.

Around 1000 uranium, 1000 plasteel and a whopping 10,000 steel, so I'm feeling good about that. Wood is basically zilch, since it's expensive to make chemfuel for mortar shells and IEDs. But given the amount of steel, I could easily replace all wood traps with steel at this point.

There are probably soft spots in the base that I'm not terribly aware of yet, and I am a little concerned about the south passage that the sappers revealed (I've put a bunch of traps where I could). But as long as we're able to soften incoming raids with mortars a bit, I do hope to be able to deal with them, even if they breach the inner walls.

Shurp

Let us know how (badly) it goes when you push the button... my guess is that given the trouble you're having with regular raids, you're going to get buried.
If you give an annoying colonist a parka before banishing him to the ice sheet you'll only get a -3 penalty instead of -5.

And don't forget that the pirates chasing a refugee are often better recruits than the refugee is.

Pangaea

Quote from: Shurp on September 03, 2019, 07:28:52 PM
Let us know how (badly) it goes when you push the button... my guess is that given the trouble you're having with regular raids, you're going to get buried.

Still hope we can make it, but I go from thinking "no chance" to "we can do this" every so often. Like when 8 centipedes + friends dropped right on top of us during the night recently, and kinda smashed up a lot of stuff, and killed our pet self-tamed rhino that got in the middle of the centipede pack. Not a nice way to go.

Have been close to flipping the switch a few times, but then half the colony goes down with an illness or two, we need to rebuild, toxic fallout, no wood, too little food, running out of marine armour and lacking plasteel. There is always something.

A little moment ago a horde of people attacked us again, and for the n-th time it was sappers (does the chance go up in the late game?). Thank goodness they didn't come from the south this time as they surely would have gone for the weak spot that we can't fix. But with such big forces, only one or two direct hits from mortars can take out 20+ people, and eventually they gave up and made a run for it. Amusingly a good few people decided to run around the whole mountain chain, where unfortunately for them they came across some traps and IEDs. Others fell over and bled out on the way.

This should suffice for a while (and there are about 15 more scattered around the map that we need to fetch):



Many sisters and a wife was in that raiding party, so five of my people will most likely flip out a lot over the next two seasons. And the volcanic winter is still in effect, though it doesn't hurt as much after I made in-doors farming with sunlamps. Toxic fallout is much, much worse.

Limdood

#41
First...i think you need a mass dump stockpile a ways away from your base (zone it as "not a home zone" so you can molotov the corpses and clear them easily).

Secondly, flip the switch the moment you get another psychic or poison ship.  Save triggering the ship for the first nasty non-mech raid....then just leave the ship and mechs alone as long as you can and you'll be surprised how many raids divert into those mechs....you're "what if we don't get a raid in time" concern is alleviated by the ship forcing more often raids.

Lastly, get 1 animal madness pulser.  About 10 days into the ship startup, start using your animals....all of them...in base defense.  Once your animals are toast, use the psychic animal pulser on the next non-mech raid and every animal on the map will go manhunter (your pets included, hence waiting for yours to die off).  With that, a mech ship, and an allied faction, you have 3+ raids that you'll have help managing.

Pangaea

#42
Quote from: Limdood on September 04, 2019, 02:41:30 PM
Secondly, flip the switch the moment you get another psychic or poison ship.  Save triggering the ship for the first nasty non-mech raid....then just leave the ship and mechs alone as long as you can and you'll be surprised how many raids divert into those mechs....you're "what if we don't get a raid in time" concern is alleviated by the ship forcing more often raids.

I've been growing restless recently. Feels like the base is "done", and I'm getting a hankering for starting anew. We just had a wedding so people are generally happy again.





Still low on plasteel - we rely on finding it abroad - but food and other resources is good, so time to sink or swim :) Means I didn't follow all your advice, but then I didn't want to kill off all my animals anyway. Wanted to take some of the pets with me, which is why I overbuilt sleeping quarters. Since then we have gotten more pawns, almost 30 now (!), which I didn't think was possible on non-Randy.

I'll come back with updates about how we fare. I do hope we can make it, but it's definitely not a sure thing with so many people and inching closer to 1 million wealth. First up is a siege, which should be okay since we have mortars. Wish it was possible to select more than 80 items in the game though, so we could tell how many raiders are in these late game attacks. Think the "normal" is around 140-150 now, which is quite brutal. They tend to bring the quite literally big guns as well. One of my pawns took a doomsday rocket to the face earlier, which wasn't too pleasant despite being behind a wall and sandbags.

Edit: Err, oh dear. Suddenly my confidence took a bit of a dive. Not even fired a mortar yet against the siegers, and 67 centipedes attack as well, from the vulnerable south. They bring 25 bleedin' centipedes. Gulp! That's a lot more than we have ever faced.

Best I can hope for is that they end up killing each other, but the timing may be off given their distance from each other on the map. Wish me luck!  :-X :-\


Limdood

...And we never hear from Pangaea again...

Pangaea

#44
Haha :)

Round one is ours!



As expected it was very, very tough, and I'm glad the siegers eventually engaged the mechs. A few centipedes and the scythers fought them, while we struggled with 20+ centipedes in the killbox. Not losses on our side, however, which is always a great end.

So many corpses and weapons that they started spawning through the wall upon death.

I hope we get enough time to fix some of the structures and turrets, but it depends. Too much to fix to get it all sorted, that's for sure. From what I recall last time, there should be pauses here and there. It's not like a constant raid for 15 days.