This post could be subtitled "Fun with Psychic Animal Pulser." I think you know where I am going with this.
So I'm having a successful run. Already have over twenty colonists, it's the late stages of year five, I think. Our killbox is almost done. One of the reasons it took this long to begin with is because I have four Goliath turrets, and a bunch of laser turrets, and those ridiculously expensive military grade turrets that require 270 steel apiece.
I have like thirty or forty of them.
Plus a power grid that is woefully ill-equipped for the monstrosity I am building. Which is why I have large areas of enclosed space set aside for power generation. It's going to take a few seasons, I think...if we can only avoid a dire raid until then.
The notification almost makes my heart stop. Dire raid. With 59 soldiers. I've heard of much worse, but the salient point is my base, at its current level of development cannot possibly stop a party of 59 raiders. We're probably going to die now, I think. Not a hope in hell of coming through this one. But what if...I suddenly recall that psychic animal pulser we liberated from a crypt years prior.
I've never before chanced to use one of these. Could it possibly save us?
I grit my teeth, send a colonist to activate the device...and pray.
Immediately, an alert hits the board. The dog, warg, muffalo and gazelle that were living inside camp turn berserk, attack my colonists. We suffer some injuries. One colonist that was on her way to the front lines is waylaid by the muffalo and gazelle, but suffers only minor injuries in dispatching them. The warg gets shot in the halls before it can do too much damage, but the major concern in this situation is the dog, which manages to severely injure three men working in the quarries before it is incapacitated.
This could have been so much terribly worse. About one season prior to this, the colony had amassed an army of about fifty or sixty aerofleet...all of which fortunately died in a raid when I moved the restricted zone to intercept a group of particularly ominous raiders. In hindsight, I am really glad I did this. However, now I'm thinking, great. My only psychic animal pulser, and I just wasted it on the colony animals.
Then I look at the raiding party.
The raiders landed in the worst bloody place imaginable. In a cul de sac. With one opening. Which is where I now notice an army of rhinos, muffaloes, squirrels and ferralisks are coming from to attack them. Boxed into a corner, the raiders can only die screaming horribly before the brunt of forty rampaging animals, while one panicky raider desperately tries to mine an escape route. By the time the escape route is opened, approximately half of the raiding party is either dead or in no condition to pose much of a threat. The remainder flee.
So the raiders will no longer be a problem. But we still have problems of our own. While the raiders are still desperately fighting for their lives against all of the animals that were occupying the southeast corner of the map, I realize to my regret that virtually every other animal is headed right toward base. And the only thing standing between them and my colonists is a flimsy wooden wall (the only wooden wall still left in my mountain base, as it were) and a non-functional killbox. A group of stampeding rhinos effortlessly smash down the structure. And immediately there are ten huge creatures in my killbox. Props go to Vang, who held off that hostile line singlehandedly (albeit armed with an APB rifle), despite harboring serious injuries of her own while colonists finished dealing with our animals and rushed to support her. But by that time, the base was completely overrun. I had to station gunners in hallways adjacent to the killbox to prevent the defenders holding off the advancing line from being attacked from all sides.
In the end, we had three dead colonists (the three that were attacked by our dog, and a demented bouldermit that had snuck into camp through a gap I had lazily left in the southern wall, and it was a bloody fortunate thing that that area was cut off from the rest of the map from my building) and so many injured, we didn't have enough hospital beds to accommodate everyone. But after a grim battle, we finally turned the tide of fighting to our favor.
The saddest part of the whole ordeal is that our freezer had already become so bloated from vegetables and meals, there was really nowhere to put all the animal corpses.
