How to bring the colonies out into the open again?

[chaotix14]

The problem with sieges is not that they don't have the right type of big guns.  The problem, as with sappers, is that the AI does not adequately manage/defend the siege.  For starters, the AI tends to target your closest colonist with mortars, which makes it easy to keep it from targeting valuable areas like farms and power plants until you are ready to attack, usually at night when they all fall asleep.  Better Mortar targeting, as well as bringing in battery powered turrets to defend at night would make sieges more dangerous.  It would still not address the fact that the AI is terrible against hit and run tactics.  Sieges should really be done by forces sufficiently large that you are not even tempted to raid them outright. 

All that said, making Sieges more effective will likely force dwarfing even more so.  Fortunately, with the additional events, sieges are less common than they once were.

The best suggestion, IMHO, is making roofs useful.  Allowing constructed roofs to generate power, allow sunlight in, have turrets, or other fun things which are not available in a mountain base is more likely to entice people to build outdoors then trying to come up with a bigger, badder, stick to hit them with.  Let's face it, the general rule of thumb is that the more dangerous the world gets, the better off hiding in a plasteel reinforced mountain bunker sounds.

roof based solar panels and proper greenhouse roofing, where do I sign up? If I weren't already driven out of hugging mountainsides by those pesky infestations I would happily move out for that.

Also props to this man for thinking of something that makes open colonies better rather than looking for a way to make mountain colonies worse.

[DariusWolfe]

I am in favor of all most carrot-based thinking, rather than stick-based.

The problem isn't that dwarfing is too attractive. The problem is that in-the-open colonies aren't attractive enough.

And please, for Tynan's sake, stop trying to discourage fortresses. So long as it's not only a possibility but a absolute certainty that a group of folks over there are going to come try to kill you in the near future, walls and passive defensive structures are going to be necessary. It was only with the advent of social structures where we weren't constantly under threat of a group of people from <somewhere else> coming to kill us and take our stuff that we stopped putting defensive walls around everything.

I *do* support the stick of making mining slower. It feels way, way too fast, especially when it's done by a freaking cat, since A14. I'm in favor of disallowing mining entirely, or making it idiotically slow, without some sort of mining implement. It's always struck me a super weird that a bunch of random crash-survivors just happened to have the tools on hand to cut into solid stone.

[Alpha393]

If you don't mind one hell of a stick being thrown at mountain bases, these might be of use. At least they aren't strictly anti-fortress/vault.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/360672137535751646/

[chaotix14]

If you don't mind one hell of a stick being thrown at mountain bases, these might be of use. At least they aren't strictly anti-fortress/vault.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/360672137535751646/

That event sounds like exactly the type of nightmare fuel that would drive people to hide in a plasteel reinforced mountain bunker. Or more likely just mod the damn event and a lot of the mechanoids proposed out of the game, because a lot of the stuff described there would make a bunker not made up to a specific building code as much of a deathtrap as an open colony when faced with that kind of crap.

On another note why do you have such a hatred for mountainhomes? Or is this some strange masochistic challenge you'd like to pull yourself through?

[SpaceDorf]

Maybe he is a pointy eared tree hugger.
It is not hate. It is fear.

[Alpha393]

A little bit of both TBH. And who said they would show up by the hundreds? Crabs should appear in small groups of five at most, and when they do they have no long range protection. Not to mention the plasma pumps being rendered useless by adding vents to the outside. The maw is definitely over the top, keeping in mind how much more damage it could do to an open base, where it can hit from any angle it wants. Locusts could literally be a drill with some form of locomotion and no armor. It can be balanced, as insane as it would seem.

Edit: poor word choice, not literally vents. Coolers or doors are also options, as well as a simple hole in the roof, or just shooting the crabs before/while they do their thing.

[Kegereneku]

So how would this be worse than explosives that completely ignore walls and blow up your buildings anyway? I don't understand how you came to this conclusion.

It can't be more straightforward, we don't want Rimworld to favorforce player to build fortress and bunker. Thing is : direct-fire cannon would annihilate any colonies that aren't a bunker or fortress.

1) Any child can imagine the concept of explosive thrown way up to land on an enemy behind a wall.
2) Ignoring perimeter walls is the very reason to build catapult and mortar in the first place.
3) talking in game-design, the goal is to make non-fortress open-colony just as viable (as they resist better indirect-fire).

You know what would strike a big blow against fortress colonies (underground and above ground) ? Wall maintenance.

It was already pointed out but I insist : your idea would achieve the exact opposite.
Mountain wall wouldn't deteriorate, and you would encourage building a single-building fort so rooms share as many wall as possible.
It would literally kill the very idea of "separated building".

So direct fire weapons that can destroy your outer perimeter should be used by your lategame enemy, together with
bunker buster mortars that can slowly break through your mountain and mess your inside up. And some EMPs for
your killbox. True Sappers ( Pioneers / Battlefield Engineers ) should be a fortress worst nightmare, they are the guys that make things go boom, not just a dude with a pickaxe.

Remember : We don't want anti-fortress weapons than are even more efficient against Open-colony.
What we want is for the specific design of "building inside a mountain" and "building self contained fortress" to NOT be "better in all aspect" than building a open-colony.

And the Idea to steal unpowered Turrets is just awesome

Thank you.

As said, my personal "top solution" to our problem are :
- Change the Manhunter-pack event so you aren't FORCED to build a perimeter
- Have the Raider steal anything that isn't being actively protected, not just destroying stuff.
- Add cave-in for bunker. (low risk but increase dramatically for any space are wider than 3tiles)
- Add "shock-shell" that cause extreme deterioration to structure and inevitable cave-in if it hit a mountain top.

[...] The solution is to catch the players once out of their bunker, and for the game to give them motivations and opportunities enough to do so : because their colonists need water, wood and healthy food, their stock needs to graze, or they need to find rare resources outside of their "comfort" zone (and why not other, adjacent maps), etc.

I followed your exchange with SpaceDorf, I think something got very wrong in our global argumentation (or wording).

We are supposed to encourage the player to get out MORE and also to not have more difficulty building open-colony.
Yet -to me- you look like you are talking of doing the opposite : encouraging the player to leave fortification as rarely as possible.
(we can't actually have Siege that last for month)

Aside :

There is simply no known artillery that can level mountains or large hills, even less human-deployed light mortars that could destroy fortified mountain bunkers.

If we go that way there is also no known Psychic-lance, mechanoid, and we can't build a bunker that resist modern mortar with only ten ~10 persons (and no industrial product like cement or advanced shock-resistant tunnel design), even less a indoor farm.

[Reviire]

But you're missing the point, current mortars are literally the same thing you are saying direct fire mortars will be. You're also wrong. Currently, mortars ignore all walls, and will cause heavy damage to an outside base, while doing absolutely nothing to a mountain base.

Direct fire siege weapons on the other hand, would be able to do something against mountain bases eventually. But they would also have reduced effectiveness on open bases, because if you prepare, you can counter them with perimeter walls. Just like an old castle wall being hit by a catapult.

I just don't understand how you can say this is worse, you can't be more wrong. You can't go from highly damaging weapon that ignores all defenses, to direct fire weapon that can be countered, and call it worse.

[Alpha393]

I've been doing some thinking, and I realized what really gets annoying with open colonies.l, or at least mine

The lack of a way to transfer heat between buildings.

Drop pod attacks, but those are countered by building a 'true' open base, as they'll get stuck in a building, letting you regroup outside.

No maintenance costs for tunneling. Enough said. Just requiring you to reinvest building materials or risk caveins would be plenty IMO.

Trees taking so long to cut down. Enough said.

Nothing for strictly outside bases that can't be brought underground, or close to it anyways.

Solar panel rooftops have been mentioned so I'd like to add an idea of my own: shielded rooftops to protect from solar flares. Probably not possible/plausible with real world physics, but then again neither is the charge rifle(considering how much damage it deals assuming it's non-pressurized plasma, or projectile speed if a laser or electricity)

[b0rsuk]

I *do* support the stick of making mining slower. It feels way, way too fast, especially when it's done by a freaking cat, since A14.

I bet humans in rimworld are called "dwarves" internally.

[chaotix14]

I *do* support the stick of making mining slower. It feels way, way too fast, especially when it's done by a freaking cat, since A14. I'm in favor of disallowing mining entirely, or making it idiotically slow, without some sort of mining implement. It's always struck me a super weird that a bunch of random crash-survivors just happened to have the tools on hand to cut into solid stone.

Don't you know they use small survival guns to shoot their way through the stone. The guns are absolutely useless against anything that moves due to their piss poor accuracy, but with the end of the barrel put right against the stone, especially against natural weak spots it can be used to chip away at the stone.

Also that'd be how people would start mining if you made mining really slow or impossible without mining equipment. And you can't really just improve the health of the stone to counter that either, because that would only further enhance it's defensive quality against non-sappper attacks.

I've been doing some thinking, and I realized what really gets annoying with open colonies.l, or at least mine

The lack of a way to transfer heat between buildings.

Drop pod attacks, but those are countered by building a 'true' open base, as they'll get stuck in a building, letting you regroup outside.

No maintenance costs for tunneling. Enough said. Just requiring you to reinvest building materials or risk caveins would be plenty IMO.

Trees taking so long to cut down. Enough said.

Nothing for strictly outside bases that can't be brought underground, or close to it anyways.

Solar panel rooftops have been mentioned so I'd like to add an idea of my own: shielded rooftops to protect from solar flares. Probably not possible/plausible with real world physics, but then again neither is the charge rifle(considering how much damage it deals assuming it's non-pressurized plasma, or projectile speed if a laser or electricity)

I'd be for the idea that you can't leave the stone bare without risk of collapses, also how about making overhead mountain require more supports? While keeping the 5 tile radius for immediate collapse, if there is no wall(constructed) within 3 tiles of a tile with overhead mountain it is liable to collapse during a random event or when the overhead mountain is hit by mortar strikes.

Also shielded rooftops would be plausible, not exactly practical with the current stage of our development, but plausible. Then again hiding in a mountain also gives protection against solar flares.

[Peng Qi]

Why not just let raiders attack with poison gas? Heck, even primitives could just start a big fire at the entrance if smoke dangers were added to the game. Make the smoke spread faster onto tiles with a rock layer above them and spread very slowly to tiles with open sky above (average spread speed to roofed areas).

There's a reason ancient people built castles instead of digging big cave complexes.

[SpaceDorf]

Well one of the bad things in mountain colonies are Stone Chunks
I start running out of outside places to put the chunks and stacks of stoneblocks.
I only had one Bulk Trader until now

Well I think the biggest difference is in personal playstyle and that makes the discussion very personal and sometimes the wordchoice may be harsh

I don't feel attacked by that, and I don't want to attack someone with it either.

That said I read up on Bunker Busters.
The problem is the interesting stuff about WWII Small Calibre Mortars was all in German,
but in the end, even those had a ground penetration of about 4 metres or 12 foot in soil and 40 cms /  1 foot+ in reinforced concrete. Rock is somewhere in the middle.

So I am still in favor that the big mortars should do some indoor damage to mountain bases. Just think of the bunkers and trenches in war movies. They don't get destroyd but shaken like a bad earthquake.

To really destroy or smash into the rock the payload goes into Sizes of 10kt and upwards, I know thats not feasible in Rimworld But a 155mm Artillery Grenade in the weightclass of 50kg can shake the ground pretty bad.
and I bet the payload of those grenades will not get smaller in the next 3000 years.

Also an earthquake event that shakes up the mountain base more than an outdoor base would be nice.

Sorry, I am tired and totally lost my point while writing.

What I still want to say,  more mechanoids would give the game more weird factor, but I only skimmed the text so I have no real knowledge yet if I like the suggestion or not.
I also want more scary alien animals like the V14 Hive Clusters which are finally no longer just meat farms

[Reviire]

Why not just let raiders attack with poison gas? Heck, even primitives could just start a big fire at the entrance if smoke dangers were added to the game. Make the smoke spread faster onto tiles with a rock layer above them and spread very slowly to tiles with open sky above (average spread speed to roofed areas).

There's a reason ancient people built castles instead of digging big cave complexes.

That reason being the labor and planning required being much to high. You can throw up a castle much faster than you could dig one out.

[Alpha393]

How about mortars just make stone chunks fall onto a random tiles with open space, crushing anything below when struck by a mortar shell. Less focused damage, more devastating overall damage.

Also, just throwing this out there: any one of those anti-structure mechs I suggested along with either the spider or the wasp could do marvelously at either suggesting or enforcing open bases, depending on player skill/overconfidence. Especially the crabs, blasting down dummy walls to get at the inner sections.