How to bring the colonies out into the open again?

[EvilMoogle]

Also the first new mod would be a new building (well) that will infinately produce water. Which wouldn't really solve anything (my dwarfs people would still be happy in the mountain..)

I'd actually see a well in vanilla, but a well should have to be built on dirt and wells only provide X water/season (determined either by biome or just randomly on the map).  Multiple wells don't really increase the amount of water available, just how quickly you can get it out of the ground.

I would like to see mechanics such as snow being melted to water, barrels to hold water and water collection. But I think this would detract from the 'fun' factor. Especially at the start of a game. A player would see their colonist spend most of thier time hauling water from A to B and that would be most of the activity for the day.

That's why I would suggest water as part of cooking rather than a separate need, you wouldn't need water for colonists until you're cooking foods.

In most biomes you'd be able to grow crops outdoors without additional water.  So only people that are rushing underground would need to worry about hauling water, which would just make it an additional consideration.  Which is kind of the point there.

This mechanic wouldn't 'force' players outside. It would just make them re-roll maps until they got 'mountain' + water outside mountain' which they would wall in for protection.

Sure it's not perfect by itself, but the idea isn't to make it perfect, just to encourage being outdoors as an easier option.

[Blastoderm]

With new unstable build open colonies' flaws are more apparent than ever. It's way too easy to storm and raid a open  enemy colony or settlement. Ironically, enemy suffers from open colonies way more than player does.

[Reviire]

This isn't a necro is it?

I'm just going to keep saying what I always have. The way to fix the problem is not to keep nerfing mountain bases, it's to fix the problems with open ones. The problem with open colonies is the game lacks the means to defend yourself against what is thrown at you. There's just no way for an open colony of say, 20 pawns to protect against a siege of 80+ raiders. Between the mortars and the sheer amount of them, rip you.

Combat Realism helps with this a lot, honestly. It adds various new defensive structures, such as embrasures (Which are amazing.), new mounted guns, and parapets. Aside from that, combat is just better. Bullets are lethal and cover is amazing. A rapid fire gun into a crowd is very effective compared to vanilla.

Compared to vanilla, your best defensive structure is a sandbag, or sandbag + wall. It's terrible, it doesn't help against the huge raids you begin to face, and the what, 75% chance for a sandbag to absorb a bullet is quickly made irrelevant when you have 60 raiders shooting bullets. The only step up from here is to begin exploiting game mechanics and enemy AI, which is where killboxes in a mountain come in.

Then there's the mortars and (I could be wrong on this, they could've been removed) the pirate raids from space going through the roof. There's literally no way to defend against these without mods. You can't stop a mortar shell without dealing with the mortar itself, and then we come back to the problem of good enough defenses. Except this time you'll have none, so you're dealing with a siege where you're outnumbered 3:1 or worse. Or they're already in your base because drop pods.

Personally, I think the best solution to this would be to make mortars direct fire weapons, while adding new sorts of siege weapons in specifically to deal with mountain bases. The reason for this being, a direct fire weapon can be countered, even if for a limited time. You can build thick walls to defend against it, while you have your pawns try to deal with it. For an open base, it'll also be stuck to line of site, so you won't have to deal with a mortar behind a mountain ruining your life.

Then there's what it'll do to mountain bases. For one, it'll be able to hit them. The siege will be able to slowly chunk away at the mountain, eventually exposing the succulent interior of whatever you have inside. It might take some time, but the important thing is, there will be a counter (Because sappers suck dick, too.). Then, if somehow that fails, eventually raiders will start taking heavier siege weapons, which for balance reasons, will only be taken if there's a lot of "Overhead mountain" in areas you've built in, because at the end of the day, a mountain base will always be superior, so it's unfair that an open base has to deal with the same things it has to.