Late game ship encounters

[Pangaea]

From what I recall last time, there should be pauses here and there. It's not like a constant raid for 15 days.

OMG was I wrong!! :lol:

3 days in and we've had 5 or 6 raids. Most recent was a double whammy again. A colossal horde of mechs (another 25 centipedes and 50 friends), and then sappers attack too, and of course to the vulnerable south, despite arriving from the north-east. Gah! No chance for inter-fighting this time, so I had to take on both. Mechs totally ruined our stuff, and several people, and the sappers were only one lousy tile short of breaking into the base. Phew!

Withering us down, fast



Screenshot got that weird line through it again, but I just closed down the game. 5 plasteel miniturrets got blown up, which hurts a lot. We're short on plasteel. Either the walls got taken out as well, plus all neighbouring turrets, or the walls were already gone in some places. It's rather chaotic. In any case, two explosions took out all five. And that's with 5-6 shield belters repairing them throughout. They are simply too numerous to handle at this point.

And the normal raiders? Feck knows how many are coming, but it must be 200 each time. Selected 80 from a raid earlier, and only a small section of them got selected. Nuts! 

[Pangaea]

There is also this... 78 dead buggers, and they made no attempt to run away. So yeah, they are rather numerous now.

It's fun in a sense, but the outcome is far from certain.

[B@R5uk]

SO MUCH MEEEEEEEAT!!!

[Pangaea]

Goddamnit! No two ways about it, this is starting to go really badly. I did NOT expect to have to deal with not just one, but TWO raids almost non-stop, with barely a few hours of respite.

I've changed the schedule of almost everybody to Anything, because it's impossible to have a somewhat stable schedule, and that way they will at least get rest here and there.

We had 150+ explosive shells and 25+ fire shells. All empty now, and it didn't stop any of the two sapper teams assaulting us simultaneously. Eventually I had to risk some people going out to meet them, and a doomsday rocket into some of them thankfully made them flee.

Total chaos on all fronts now, and there is zero chance to rebuild. Don't even know what to do any more, and it feels like a matter of time before they break in from several directions and kill us all. If they asked nicely, we would have taken some with us. And it seems an odd idea to want to leave the planet by hearing about the ship engine -- and then trying to burn everything down. Damn them all!

The sapper teams are ruining everything. If we could focus on rebuilding one section of the base it would be easier to get back to a defensible situation, but with three fronts, two of them very vulnerable, it's impossible.

Feels like a tide we simply cannot stop

South:


Ship area:


Waltz in and kick our arse area, previously known as the killbox:

[Pangaea]

We're still alive and 7 days to go still. Wish it was 1. So many attacks... Dead and dying bodies everywhere!

The zillionth sapper crew, and very well-armed ones at that. Ran out of shells again, and not many of them hit anything (hard with so much mountain around), and I felt there was little choice but to take them on in a shitty position. But probably better than letting them break into the freezer or kitchen.

Naturally this went roughly like expected: everybody injured. But thankfully no deaths, "only" a few downed. Thank you marine armour.


Very glad we've had the marriage ceremony to rely on so far for mood, but it expires in a few hours, so I fear everybody will take turns flipping out -- which is the last thing we need when all defenses need to be rebuilt twice a day (ofc not possible, but we try). And right now we can't, because everybody are in the hospital (which was too small).

An issue I didn't expect is that there our pawns suddenly have truckloads of sisters, brothers, uncles, fathers, kin, you name it - and they all want to kill us. So you then have situations like this, which won't be pretty with wedding and party goes away *gulp* And I have a lot of pawns like this, although hopefully not quite this bad.

I know it looks messy and spread out, but we had to try to dodge frag grenades (not very successfully), and it was mighty chaotic. Wish we could zoom in even more.

[Pangaea]

\o/



Seemed like the chance for evil sapper raids was about 97%. So horrible to defend, especially when several hit at the same time. Oh, and you're out of mortar shells, and Cassandra is her sweet, sweet self.



How the hell did we manage to survive that with the batteries already empty? It was a close call, and I had to sacrifice some panthers on the south front, because I didn't have shells nor the manpower. Set up in the north instead with most of my people. When they broke through into the ship area, I let it rip with one triple rocket launcher and two doomsday rockets. That convinced them it was wise to leave.


The horror...

The horror...





So many corpses everywhere. Utterly impossible to clean it up, even with 50+ panthers (I must have had around 100, but many children couldn't haul). At some point I did dare to send somebody over to torch the big cemetery during a clear day, and it actually burnt the whole lot evetually, plus most of the forest. They were littered everywhere else though, especially to the south and north-west, and outside our gates every which way you looked. With all the ones that burnt, either by us or 'naturally', I wouldn't be surprised if the bodycount was 1000. Totally ridiculous. Hadn't expected anything on this scale.

Actually a little sad to leave the place, after spending so much time building the base and then defending it from such merciless attacks. It was a good home to us, and it was fun to finally try a mountain base. Third time's the charm. An earlier one got burnt to the ground from several year one sieges, and everybody died (the last few to hunger while passed out).



This is what the base looked like towards the end.

[Canute]

Gratz on your success !!!!
But i even ask why did you even bother about these corpses ? You leave that planet anyway ! :-)
Ofcouse you could keep playing, a lonely wanderer will find your abandon base and you can start with him :-)

[Pangaea]

Thank you! It was quite a ride and really difficult with so many raids, especially two attacks simultaneously so often. Reckon we had about 25 raids during the 15 days.

In the beginning I did try to haul the corpses away, mainly with panthers, but pretty soon that was a hopeless task and they were lying everywhere. Pawns are ofc not happy with that because we had to rebuilt defenses constantly, and they see corpses everywhere. But thankfully the stacking stops at 3, though that is still pretty brutal with 3 corpses + 3 rotting corpses. Add all the family members attacking and dying, and most were either on the verge of breaking or outright breaking with regularity. So it was good to finally get them into the ship caskets and leave.

The rest is now an Animal Farm Took with us the 7 named panthers, as we happened to have 35 caskets and 28 colonists, so it fit well.

I'm now looking over some more mods for a next playthrough. Mainly more QoL, as I don't want to unbalance the game too much, and these various bionics and suchlike mods look terribly OP.

Amazing how tough these last 15 days were though. We started out with 7-8000 steel, and halfway in all of that was gone. Despite ordering the panthers to haul back all the steel slags that were on the map (at least that is one positive from massive drop pod attacks).

It cannot be overstated: You need to prepare exceedingly well before triggering this onslaught, and have mountains of excess resources, food and medicine. Ideally also fully equipped with marine armour. I think that is why we lost so few (big) limbs throughout (and some of those were actually to our own autocannons). And on that note, keep some backup bionics for when this happens.

I learnt a lot from playing this out, and from the advice of all you helpful people

Tactically it was very challenging because at least in my case the vast majority of raids were human raids, and almost all of those were the now hated sapper raids. Only 2-3 were mechs actually, which in a sense is actually easier to defend, because they are predictable as long as they don't drop into the middle of your base. Few attacks came the normal way through the maze and into the killbox. Therefore I think it's imperative to have layered defenses with thick walls and mountain, so at least you get a time buffer to move forces, or flank them. And change work priorities so (almost) everybody reasonable capable of construction will be doing that. You're looking at constant rebuilds for 15 straight days -- day and night.

Relying on mortars against sappers is highly unreliable. If you happen to land one or two direct hits, that is great, and can be enough, but the vast majority of shells will land off-map or in the mountain -- and shells are not cheap. It's probably a big reason why so much steel evaporated. That and traps.

They never did break through from the south, but that is only because they started digging parallel one tile from the inner base. Not sure what room they were targeting, but it could have been another storeroom, or even the sunlamp farming area. Hard to know.

I called for help twice, but it was almost hilariously underwhelming. With 200-ish raiders up against us, they send 8 and 9 people in drop pods (one of them scattered all over the map). Needless to say, this was not very helpful and didn't exactly turn the tide of combat.

Though I have to hand it to Priscilla. That is one hell of a brave woman!

[Shurp]

So... did you finally push the launch button?  And is there finally a launch graphic instead of the screen just whiting out as the engines fire and incinerate all life on the Rimworld you're leaving?

(Wait, they didn't tell you that?  The engines are so hot that it ignites atmospheric oxygen fusion and burns off the entire planet's atmosphere?  Well why do you think everyone was so determined to stop you from launching?)

[Canute]

In the beginning I did try to haul the corpses away, mainly with panthers, but pretty soon that was a hopeless task and they were lying everywhere. Pawns are ofc not happy with that because we had to rebuilt defenses constantly, and they see corpses everywhere. But thankfully the stacking stops at 3, though that is still pretty brutal with 3 corpses + 3 rotting corpses. Add all the family members attacking and dying, and most were either on the verge of breaking or outright breaking with regularity. So it was good to finally get them into the ship caskets and leave.

Maybe for the next time, made all fireproofed, then throw in some molotov coctails to get right of these corpses.
Ofcouse these fire made it hard for raider's to pass too except mechanoids ! :-)

[B@R5uk]

Can you add parts to the ship _after_ engine is on?

[Pangaea]

Maybe for the next time, made all fireproofed, then throw in some molotov coctails to get right of these corpses.
Ofcouse these fire made it hard for raider's to pass too except mechanoids ! :-)

Gourmand (x10) + Cannibal maybe? 

It's not something I considered, because there were many traps and a fair few IEDs (while we had decent amount of shells) in the area. Didn't want those to burn and explode. Did try to set fire to the huge cemetery earlier, but it rained away. For some reason there was a lot of rain during this whole onslaught.

If it was a semi-serious question: No, the ship is still a white-out or black-out screen, then the music and credits comes on. It's simple but well-done, and it was interesting to see some of the names that I now recognise, either from the forum or the wiki. And after that the map comes back, and the entire ship has left orbit. How these things can fly is a separate mystery, but let's not dwell on that

[Shurp]

Pogo stick to the stars!

[Pangaea]

A couple games later, and finally got a map/base that I like again. Some of the others felt flat for one reason or another.

Anywho.... why did you have to land exactly there?!



It's tuned down to Rough now, so if an attack on Savage yielded 15 centipedes, it should be 10-12 on rough I think.

Recently built two uranium slugs and have 4 autocannons. Everything is unusable here, and actually hurts me as they block range. And of course everything will probably be destroyed by mechs directly or by crossfire. Very expensive.

Since I have no idea how much death will come out of the ship, I'm trying to spam some traps to partially deal with it. No marine armour yet, not even helmets, so this is likely going to hurt no matter what. It's not very late game yet, we have around 300-350k wealth, but it's never comfortable taking on hordes of mechs without turrets support. Thankfully I am able to build EMP traps, so after quickly building some shells, I'm building a few of those and hope the bulk of mechs get busted by one of them. The mini-turrets will probably all blow up within 10 seconds, but as long as they get out one or two bursts it will at least help a little. And will be a distraction for a brief while.

A trade caravan just happened to drop by, but will probably leave before I can trigger combat. I need to get up some of those traps first.

[Shurp]

You can uninstall the mini-turrets and re-install them somewhere safer.  Don't know if you can do the same for the big turrets. but you could deconstruct them to save most of the resources.