Rate my base setup.

[Puch22]

Hi!
Rate my base and give me suggestions, k.
No cheating.


It has a prisoner block with indoor and outdoor defenses, a main power supply in the top left with the power storage at the top, and a large wooden structure for main housing and storage. It's all surrounded by a 3x3 wall of stone to stop fire and tunnel access to certain points. It has four points of entry each of those guarded. There is a mini-power supply beside the house itself because it was my first power source before I bothered to make the walls.

I moved my colonists out of the way for the picture because I didn't want to see their names in it. Some graves and a farm near the entrance to the main house. Lastly it has a small dumping stock pile built out  near the bottom with a AI persona core guarded by a turret, because why not?

(http://prntscr.com/4csuu2)

[HatesYourFace]

Sweet colony man! But, why have more than one entrance? If your not forcing the enemy pawns into a kill pit your doing it wrong in my opinion. (No offense lol!) Other than that, it's a very nice colony! I'm giving it... 3 and a half out 5 stars. Mostly because I don't think it would survive a large attack? You certainly have a lot of prisoners, I'll give you that! Your prison is practically bigger then the normal living area! You'll notice I don't even really have a Prisoner area...it's funny how people prioritize different things. That's what I love about Rimworld. : D

Here's my longest running colony from Alpha 5, it has  a right-proper Turret farm/Killbox: 27 turrets all capable of firing on the same point. Notice the fallback defensive pillars and the last stand hallway. (That plus almost 20 Colonists all in power armor with Miniguns/R-4 charge blasters was barely enough to send the last raid packing, I had to rebuild more then half the turrets after, and I was in the process of abandoning the pillars to fall back to the hallway when the raiders gave up and fled.) The long shaft on the bottom is to launch my ship from...not required I know, but it doubled as a mine lol. (Ignore the Visitors in the screenshots lol...they love hanging out down there for some reason.)


Suggestions for you:
-Build walkways between buildings to speed up colonist travel time.
-Close off all but one of your entrances and consolidate the turrets to that entrance. (I'd say the bottom one.)
-Build a room around that Geothermal generator on the left side so it doesn't get struck by lightening and explode. (Happened to me a few times)
-Make growing zones with flowers around Mortars/Sandbag areas. They will help keep your colonists mood up while they fight!

[Rahjital]

Very nice base indeed! I agree with HatesYourFace that it might be a little bit too open to attack, but unlike him, I do strongly recommend to always build at least two entrances so that you cannot become trapped in your base when a too strong raid comes (such as when something bad happens and the raid comes too soon to get it fixed). The base appears to be too small for more than two entrances, but if you ever expand it, a third entrance may come beneficial. Killboxes and such are rarely necessary when you fight tactically instead of just sticking your colonists next to the nearby sandbags and hoping for the best, so you should feel free to build your colony in whatever shape you want, as long as you are willing to learn the in and out of the combat system and think a bit during battles.

I see two major flaws in the base design, though:
#1 - EXTREMELY vulnerable power production. Your batteries are all over the place, but often clustered, which is dangerous. If your north battery building ever gets set on fire (either by a raider or a lightning strike), it's very likely to end with a disaster - the fire will spread to the batteries, which will explode and set the surrounding batteries on fire, causing a large chain reaction. It's a rather slow process, but if your colonists are far away or preoccupied (such as during a raid), it is very likely the entire battery building will be lost and spread fire to all power conduits connected to it. The same applies to the other battery stacks.

Your solar panels are extremely vulnerable as well. They are put so close together that colonists can't walk around them and put out fires. If fire ever gets there, your solar panels are going to quickly burn down without any chance of being saved.

Either of these things happening can mean major damage to your colony and power outage that can force the colonists to eat raw food which is quite damaging to morale. A power surge, a lightning, a fire mortar or even a simple raider can set the initial fire quickly, and once that happens, you will have a lot of work on your hands. You should make it safer, even if it will mean you will get less power to use.

#2 - General vulnerability to fire. This is partially tied to the first point, but applies to the whole colony. Most of your town is built out of wood or metal walls, both of which burn. The rooms are directly connected and there is no space between them to prevent the spread of fire. And finally, there's plenty of wild plants growing inside the colony walls. This can be a rather volatile combination with the aformentioned power security issues. You should cut all wild plants inside your settlement and make at least some of the buildings out of stone walls - this is especially useful for the buildings housing batteries.

Overall, I would give this colony 3.5 sheriff stars out of 5 - this isn't a complete starter colony and you seem to have learned some of the ropes, but there's still much to improve!

PS: My own best Alpha 5 colony here, maybe it will give some inspiration:

[HatesYourFace]

-snip-

Wow love the colony Rajhital! So neat and orderly. I especially like your main streets with the sidewalks, quite charming lol. Still doesn't seem terribly well defended to me, I don't see many turrets? What AI are you guys playing on? I played on Randy Random back in Alpha 5, and even though he's not quite as hard as Classic Cassandra typically, after 2 years hes sending ridiculously large raids at me. (50+ pawns) How do you guys survive raids that size without a turret farm? (although I imagine it's a totally different story in Alpha 6 with the new damage system, but I haven't done enough actual playing yet to form an opinion.)

Oh and I have an escape plan, The ship! Lol. (No seriously, if a raid got to bad my plan was to grab the A.I. core and hole up in the ship room, finish attaching the core with the metal I keep in there and leave with as many colonists as I could. Or, just hole up at the very end of the cave in the side tunnels and hide. lol.)

[DeltaV]

If nobody's said it yet, you want to have space in between your solar panels so that you can put out fires and stop them from spreading like, well, wildfire. With your current setup, a lightning strike on the top-left of the base could completely cripple your power supply.

[Neurotoxin]

Yeah, them solar panels are a fire hazard and too many entrances for my liking, otherwise it looks alright. At least it helped you survive long enough to build it right? But I actually am posting to let you know, if you wanted to embed the image, right click the picture on printscr and select copy image url and put THAT url in the img tags, in this case the image is.

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[img]http://i.imgur.com/kImVagT.png[/img]