How to bring the colonies out into the open again?

[jaeden25]

Removing automatic turrets is not a solution for killboxing abuse, but for the problem that it is possible to get practically infinite firepower with as long as you have enough metal. A single killbox can take dozens of turrets, and if that still isn't enough for some reason, you can just build another killbox behind it and chain them as much as you like. Without turrets, you would always only have as much firepower as many colonists you have. It would not remove the strategy of turtling yourself up in a hole, but it would stop it being vastly superior to all other strategies.

Nobody is objecting to defense being a viable strategy, people just don't like it being the only viable strategy - which it currently is once you are far enough into the game, because fighting off hundreds of raiders with just your colonists is rather futile.

And that's not mentioning other problems with turrets: they take many colonists' roles in combat. I'm pretty sure many people who like turrets would object if we could build an unlimited number of robots that could cook, construct or research, yet it is essentially the same thing. Perhaps turret removal should get it's own thread?




As to other problems, the combat side of the game is not too strong. It can be fun in a city with plenty of passageways and buildings to block the line of sight, but there aren't many tactical options if you fight in the open, and especially not in a typical mountain base. I suppose that's a part of why people want to automate the defense and just want the raiders to die under a hail of turret fire without having to do much. Perhaps if the tactical part of the game was expanded and improved, people would try it out more instead of hiding behind turrets?

I don't think making kill-box abuse super powerful is really an issue, after all those people that would find it an issue simply wouldn't play like that. I certainly don't feel forced or interested to play the kill-box game even on extreme difficulty. I do however find bad game play issues refusing to play like that. For example not being able to attack a siege because of how quickly mental breakdowns occur when running across huge maps, or not being able to kill anything because of the very high risk of dying due to the many snipers that reside in the sieges. Also the lack of resources to rebuild my defense after a big attack.

What the problem with tactical options boil's down to is the contradiction between how you should play the game and how you need to play the game. What I mean by this is your colonists and resources are precious and need to be kept alive at all costs, but if you want to defend your base against huge attacks with colonists and turrets, you have to play them like they are expendable and you just can't do it.
This leads to things like only being able to fight with m24's, because if you use any other weapon your in range and just die and only having the option of waiting for sieges to starve to death, you can't even kill them with mortars because the accuracy is so bad.

By introducing some cheaper different defense options you help erase these problems, pillboxes are a cool solution, made from stone blocks they would be easier to replace than turrets and also being manned by colonists it automatically limits how much you can spam them. There is no point having 100 if you only have 10 colonists, but you can place them throughout strategic point in your base to deal with those enemies that drop into your base, and it won't be a huge investment for something that gets used very little.

At the end of the day the only 'downside' which in my eyes isn't even a downside is it may make kill-boxes stronger. Again though how can it really be a big deal. If you don't want things to be easy you can make the game harder for yourself, and do you really care if the game is easier for someone else who wants to play like that, there is just no reason to care.

[JimmyAgnt007]

I think things should be geared towards balance while playing without killboxes.  Yet not stopping people from using them.  so the people who dont like them can play without them, and those who do can do it.  if you are making killboxes then you want an easy defence, so making it easier for the sake of those who dont use them wont really change much.  (if you can follow that logic, kinda confusing)  basically it means, you shouldnt NEED killboxes, but they are there if you want.

[stefanstr]

I think things should be geared towards balance while playing without killboxes.  Yet not stopping people from using them.  so the people who dont like them can play without them, and those who do can do it.  if you are making killboxes then you want an easy defence, so making it easier for the sake of those who dont use them wont really change much.  (if you can follow that logic, kinda confusing)  basically it means, you shouldnt NEED killboxes, but they are there if you want.

This. I wouldn't even have searched the forum for good killbox ideas if I wasn't getting destroyed by zerg rushes and mechanoids.

[Matthiasagreen]

now that alpha 7 is out I can say that it helps a lot with the amount of raiders in the end game as long as your wealth isn't extremely high and therefore leaves less need for kill boxes. This is my personal experience and may not be the case with everybody.

[Varnhagen]

No one is arguing for the removal of kill-boxes it has been pretty well established in this thread that it has to be about incentives to play in the open instead of spanking the tunneling dwarves with diseases, blights and quakes.

I myself am an open terrain player and very much like to layout a town with a lot of overlapping fire zones and ambush opportunities. Thus I'm not so much bothered by raiders dropping in¹. In my last few games I have entirely forsworn the use of mining and turrets. Metal is obtained by my folks by gathering drops or melting scraps. And it is very well playable:
Lesser turrets means lesser wealth means lesser attackers. Turrets multiply the problem. Bothered by 250+ doom-stacks? Stop spaming turrets. A moderately wealthy colony of 10 might attract up to 50 raiders after a year. A very manageable crowd on a large map with good prepared defenses outside of the home-zone and an elastic defense. So (Map) size does matter after all.
On the upside of not having to mine is that my colonists have a lot of spare time they can use to clean their mess, wash the stains, cremate the corpses and tend the gardens. Most of the time they are very content and mental breakdowns are rare and far between. Thus they survive even long distance treks to the opposite corner of the 400x400 map. Small outhouses of a couple beds and berries do the rest.
Living outside is about being prepared the same way as living indoors. But instead of constructing industrial murder processing facilities one lives of the land. Both are very well viable and I think that has to be communicated more often, hence this wall of text.

Disabling turrets would diminish the play-stile of the kill-boxers, even though I think that a remotely managed, tech guy operated turret variant would fit the theme of the game very well. Why not have a research option of utilizing the AI Core as a base defense mainframe, complete with total control of all turrets and doors(sneaky little bugger), a chance to snap and screw the player over ("Sure, you can have a bazillion turrets in the endless Maze of Mayhem... Muahahaha!") and a dislike for being shutdown for power preservation considerations. Players could build as much turrets as their egg heads could maintain or risk having entire swaths of their own base being impassable. Lots of kinks in this but a chance for game-play.

And with game play I see the largest problem for outdoor colonies: It doesn't matter whether you mine the mountain or tame the wilds - the game has no middle game to speak of and thus it'll be a man-made mountain in the open in the end, including at least 60 rows of wall to the edges of the build-able map.
Due to the escalating nature of resource hogging simulation games like this one, you need some projects to sink the man-hours of your imps into lest you start building wall after wall. Dwarves suffer the same problem but at least they have a mighty mountain to mine to build Moria and can man-handle passers-by pretty unscathed.
A good trade and diplomacy system to gain wealth by and waste your riches on is mandatory from my point of view. A waaaaaayyyy more (MOAR^TM) complex progression of materials, crafting and research opportunities is needed as well.² Perhaps a world map meta game of sorts to struggle for villages, tribes and tributes.³
I'm pretty positive that a lot of those concerns are being acknowledged and worked on by Ty and ison (STUFFS! and stones! Yeehaw!). The binding of population size and raider strength goes into the right direction of easing the prevalence of doom-stacks for hoarders.
But as of now I think people are building mountain bases because there is not much else to be done.

TL;DR: Towns are fun and require a very different early and mid game approach than fortresses but it's very worth it.

¹ Once a derelict dropped in my food storage. Not so much being not bothered at this point.
² A big THANK YOU VERY MUCH to all the talented modders of this great game!
³ EDIT: A more difficult survival experience would go a long way, starting with no weapons but to be able to manufacture them. Sticks and Stones. More needs like hygiene and water, recreation and socializing. I'm so hopeful for the future!

[JimmyAgnt007]

agreed.  im going to try a long term open town, im thinking jungle.  i will mine only to clear area and gather resources, but nothing under a mountain.  see how things play out. 

[Varnhagen]

Try to take a coastal site. You'll be protected at least from one site and a fair chunk of attacks have to travel a very long distance to you. Try to make good use of ruins by punching holes where appropriate to shoot through and build some single walls for cover where no ruins are.

Edit: And dont forget to kill the homezones or someone might try to sweep the grass.

[JimmyAgnt007]

does alternating solid wall with sandbag help?  #-#-#-# and have the colonists behind the solid wall?

[Varnhagen]

Skip the sandbags. Waste of scarce metal. If you want to improve the position put the sandbag in front of the wall so that the badboys can't use your defense structures as long range sniping encampment once you've retreated to the next line of defense.
I usually do:

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[JimmyAgnt007]

i get you, good to know!

[EarthyTurtle]

Good discussion to have. Thanks for bringing this up.

It is a tough balance problem to solve. I think the best, most obvious solution is to put players on the offensive more often. I tried to do that with sieges and the ship part, but I think it's not quite panning out that way with sieges. So maybe I could rework sieges and make them a bit more common, and perhaps add another kind of threat or opportunity that draws people out of their base. Anyone have any thoughts about what this could be?

Adding some further mood penalties for being underground for long periods may be a viable option as well. You can live underground, it's true - but it's really awful to be underground all the time.

Graboids?? 

heh heh

You madam are a genius, and hilarious xD.

No, it really doesn't. If they had magic drills that can go through rock like that, they'd be much better off drilling into the mountain themselves to get a metric assload of metal to sell off for money for which they had to fire off precisely zero shots.

Their Pirates, they raid/punder/kill and all for the riches they will receive from winning. A drill that can bust through a wall into an otherwise secure base would be a very valuable weapon they could use. Also consider the game-play value over realism, more tactics and raid types would be fun, especially creative and bizarre innovation.

Insane micro is not very fun at all for most people, no. That's part of the problem - another is that a real-time strategy game does not lend itself well to X-COM style battles against forces which are vastly superior in number. (Not to mention vastly superior in skill, which is what happens when you're forced to draft every tom, dick and harry in the settlement.)

Raiders raid because they have relatively few resources and they want to claim those which others have. Raider, for those reasons, do not like to attack well-fortified positions. The Raiders in RimWorld, as it stands, aren't "Raiders" in any sense of the word, they're Borderlands Psychos who only want to kill people.

Which, you know... Is legitimate, but they're not raiders. Raiders shouldn't even look at a well-armed, well-defended settlement which is so paranoid that every tom, dick and harry goes about their daily lives with a military pulse rifle strapped around their chest, in an underground bunker, an aboveground castle, or an aboveground castle with killboxes leading to an underground bunker with more killboxes. That's not a raiding target, that's a suicide meatgrinder - which is exactly what happens. My personal strategy has always been (bear in mind it's old, I stopped playing when it became clear that Tynan was just pulling out stick after stick to nerf all the effective defensive strategies so that players inevitably die to doomraids,) to use craptons of mines on concrete roads (that they inevitably path down because it's easier) lined with graves. When the majority of the arseholes are in the suicide path, I blow the mines, which (1) killed the baddies, and (2) emptied the graves, which the now-dead baddies were shoveled into. Collect the guns, rearm the mines, rinse, lather, repeat. You'd have to be an utter moron to fall for that trap, but you'd have to be equally moronic to think that under any circumstances attacking people who are so paranoidally xenophobic as to create such a trap was any kind of a good idea.

Maybe some of Tynan's earlier methods weren't the best calls, but even he has stated he's interested in reducing the number of enemies per raid and making outdoor survival more viable of an option. Atm players are building 'fault proof bunkers', how do you deal with that? Previously it was only to increase the number of enemies per raid until you get to these ridiculously high numbers of pirates that they just overwhelm defenses.
If you have different tactics for different raid types, then that will cover more defences and force players to adapt their strategies. Which in turn means you don't need that stack of 200+ raiders anymore to break 1 killbox.

Zergrush should be restricted to animals, zealots and armies, but it shouldn't go away completely. On the other hand, it should be really, really easy to defeat zergrushes with prepared defensive positions.

Yup it is, it involves walling yourself in and preparing a kill box to hose down enemies as they come through a choke point. Usually built into the side of a mountain so players don't have to deal with drop raids either.

Agreed, but the AI should not be able to bust down walls/powered doors by punching, unless the AI in question is (a) a muffalo, or (b) a battering ram/siege engine.

Or a great big drill? :-D

After a certain point of defensive preparations, raiders should just say "not worth it" and move on. If they have to blast down more than one wall and climb over a field of jagged rocks, crashed spaceship junk and sandbags to get to those walls, they should just pack it in and call it a day.

Consider game-play value. What would be the point of the attacks at all if the pirates did that? That's why we are saying reduce the numbers, make them use an even greater variety of tactics, give them a smarter A.I. So make raids fun instead of overwhelming.
Did team rocket give up trying to capture pikachu after the first attempt? No, which is why we find their presence in the pokemon series so amusing, even irritating (Prepare for trouble, and make it double...).

If you can build hydroponic farms, you can build hydroponic grass farms to feed your animals. But it ought to be more of a PitA than just paddocking them outside, of course, and raiding for these tamed animals should be something a lot of folks might be interested in doing.

Of course, you'd have to make them very useful, what with the extra exposure - raids for your animals which simply would not happen if you didn't have any, a paddock full of your valuable animals and the Rimworld's legendarily inflammable grass is a great recipe to watch a lot of your valuable tame animals go up in literal smoke, etc. Basically, they'd have to crap out money, fart rainbows (of happiness,) and piss heroin before it'd be remotely worth it for a RimWorld player to go to the trouble and expense.

We cultivate crops, we tame wild beasts. 1 sole purpose, to make food.
Muffalo would be prime for this because they seem like the milk providing types.
You could additionally breed animals, for food. Some animals might not be tame-able in this sense, though it would be quite amusing to see people have megascarab paddocks.
hydroponic grass.... hydroponics doesn't quite work that way. It's 1 thing to grow crops/grass in a water basin and another thing to stick a 1 ton muffalo on it so it can eat the grass. You wouldn't be growing grass in the paddock you would be feeding the animals harvested crops. which in turn gives you other types of food. Besides it's more something to entice players to build outside, giving them an inside alternative is kinda counter productive. Besides most large animals will outright refuse to enter caves, some turn violent when forced.
They would be exposed, to me that's kinda the idea, it's a trade off but the game should leave you exposed to have tense moments where you have to run around madly. Players have now started building huge fortified bunkers, so we need ways to draw them out of them and build in the open while reducing the attacks and providing more manageable challenges. If you experience an enemy raid, it should be the case you can deal with it.

This would be nice, I'll admit, but I'd rather build dune buggies and PMVs in underground machine shops than deal with the hassle that comes with paddocking animals (see above,) except maybe in the very early game, if a horse wandered by. Also, you can totally ride a horse underground if the ceilings are high enough, and it ought to be able to make them high enough.

Again this is mainly an idea to promote players building outdoors. Horses are a good means of transportation, they carried man for thousands of years before the steam engine/internal combustion engine was conceived. I can assure you, man didn't take horses into caves then either.

RimWorld really, really has too many sticks already, including the huge sticks which drive players who are not looking for a micromanagey real-time-pause combat sim, into underground bunkers. Outside castles used to be good enough, then the mortars came out. Do you just want RimWorld to be a painful exercise in kicking the player in the teeth because no matter what they do, the RNG is going to screw them?

Yup! Well in truth a lot of the events that happen now happen to those who build outside. Lighting strikes, flash fires are the first that come to mind. This about time the underground dwellers get their just dues as well . Nothing serious, and you can always reduce the rate of which these events happen to make room for more.

Proper ventilation can sort that out, making sure that gas pockets don't happen anywhere that's ventilated. It could be a risk, but one that could be mitigated by proper construction.

Less mitigate, more deal with. A filtration system of that complexity that could mitigate a dangerous gas leak isn't something they would have access too. But definitely some sort of system to deal with gas leaks would be implemented. If a colonist remains in an area where there is gas for too long they would suffocate, those with poor breathing even more so.
Ofcourse this isn't a timed event, you run into them when mining. Gas chambers that need to be ventilated before their safe to re-enter.

Yes, because what RimWorld really needs is more ways for the RNG to say "Have you got the time? To get stuffed!"
(That was sarcasm.)
Honestly, this would just be a massive pain in the ass.
Freak lightning storms every third day are annoying, but those only affect outside dwellers. Tone down how often the event happens. Maybe earthquakes are a once a year event?

Plumbing isn't a thing, I guess? Nor are underground springs, or condensing the water that's coming out of our many and copious steam generators?

How about not, because caves which have been prepared for living aren't any dirtier than your average dwelling. Sure, going out into the uncut stone areas might get you grimy, but that's what sending all of your labourers to smooth it all out is for. Or just putting down metal walls and flooring, which ought to include metal roofs to boot.

How about no, because you know what frontier life tends to involve? A lot of getting dirty. Sure, maybe some delicate glitterworlder might be this way, but someone who's been trained as a miner or is from a medieval world is unlikely to be overly bothered by getting a little dirty.

Water, yup your right pretty much could exist. Underwater springs are considerable variables, just need to find them ofcourse. Although I wasn't too keen on the idea of water, it would probably be an unpopular idea for most.
Hygene was a random thought so I thought I'd put it down. But glitter worlders, urb worlders, medieval nobles and other developed society/high ranking members might consider this irritating. But it's implication in the game would probably be very unpopular in itself. Yeah labourers can do that, but caves are by no means the same thing as houses. Houses have better filtration by far, even with modern filtration systems.
Agreed though that we can really do without these.

THIS! This is what I'm talking about. Pure carrot, a reason to want your mooks to go outside, possibly up to and including drafting them all and sending them scurrying out into the moonlight if it lasts a reasonable amount of time.

Need more events that are positive , Aurora are something people around the global come to see.

[JimmyAgnt007]

The Horta would totally kill a Graboid

[Johnny Masters]

thought: endgame for dwarfers is to become a horta

btw, graboids, as awesome as they are, travel in sand only, so they'd be another thing to worry about in the open. Not that i'm complaining, sandworms are one of the first suggestions i thought about.

[Goldsmyths]

Why I build a bunker INSIDE mountains:

• Raiders attacks walls, for "I don't know why". Minor irritation right? Till you overlook one repairman who went [yaomingface] to repair the wall while the enemy is still there.
• Artillery and Raiders bypasses walls and constructed roofs. I'll understand your point of an orbital drop army flanking me. But knowing how to make stone walls but not blast-proof is kind of a waste of materials.

Based on the above 2 (action), here's the reaction:
Store all your (valuable) assets in a safe place. (Read: A bunker in the mountain)

How to stop me from building inside mountains:

• Stop making raiders attack random wall, or make a "camo wall" that would only be attacked by raiders if that is the only thing left that I had build.
• A reasonable method to defend against artillery. Stone roofing?

BS, that only sounded that it's an outdoor mountain bunker.
Walls of Jericho, Medieval Castles, Star Forts, Firebase. Defensive construction is nothing new. If anything, it's a sound plan. Building houses outside while your enemies rains fire or drops from the sky on the other hand is an invitation for a massacre. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

[Angie]

thought: endgame for dwarfers is to become a horta

btw, graboids, as awesome as they are, travel in sand only, so they'd be another thing to worry about in the open. Not that i'm complaining, sandworms are one of the first suggestions i thought about.

Well, in my little worlds the mountains tend to start at ground level... so you know there be some strong-assed sand under them hills. The thought of digging out a beautiful cave and lining the walls with gold, then have a handful of pretty wooden floor boards ready to place ever so delicately yet firmly down... and then WHAMMO!!! some snake-tongue-claw-slime-covered thingamajigs burst from the ground and swalla' ya' up!