Larmantine wrote:
Wow, that's a lot of cash... Yes that's a typical killbox. Although when I read that you said your base was in a mountain, that's not what I imagined. I imagined that you're (just as me) dug up in a big-ass mountain that covers half of the map.
Oh gods no. I only had enough mountains on my map to put the living quarters and key production facilities within them, and they're still partially exposed due to having connected a few smaller mountains together with structures I built, so those are still vulnerable to mortars. The only thing the mountains did for me really is allow me to not have key facilities or characters get randomly blown up, while I still had to deal with fires and explosions in my courtyard area, which still could hurt an awful lot.
But yeah, I could see how having a map covered in mountains could wind up feeling really cheap. I just had enough that they were basically a limited resource that I had to plan around.
Don't the raiders usually destroy your walls?
No, all my walls were granite and thus really tough. I basically saved all the granite I found for building walls, and all other stone for making art. There's also no way into my central base without going through mountain side (or double thick granite walls in some areas), and my peeps were usually hidden in the interior whenever an attack occurred.
If they were to destroy any of the single thick walls, they'd just wind up in my storage rooms and then inevitably in my courtyard where my turrets are, and in practice, that never happened. I was planning on thickening the walls at some point, but they never took sufficient damage for me to get worried about it and make it a priority.
I have this prosthophile-hauler guy that has a jogging and brawler trait and two bionic legs. He's incredibly fast, compared to others, and usually just flanks every raider and kills them from behind with his scyther blade and his personal shield, while one my badass construction thugs, Dmitri, shoots everyone with his centipede minigun while others cover him with snipers. The bionic guy usually just finishes the job by chasing down stragglers and cowards.
Ummm...yeah, no, that doesn't even sound like the same game I was playing :)
My guys generally couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, had crappy equipment, and I was playing almost entirely defensively. I wouldn't let them engage in direct combat unless I either had no choice or unless I had first called in a couple of waves of military support from other colonies to soften up the opposition (I blew tons of cash on that over the course of the game). Eventually I had one dude with a sniper rifle that was able to pick off mechs from a sufficient distance that I wouldn't get shot in return, but that's as close as I ever came to owning anything in combat, and I usually used it to hit the AI canister to piss off the mechs and lead them into my kill box.
Now in hindsight I probably could have focused more on leveling up my combat skills, but the impression I got very early on was that combat was so deadly, and opponents would arrive in such numbers, that it wasn't worth it to risk my colonists on it.
EDIT 2: BTW, I don't quite get the stockpile chains/priorities. As I understand there are materials delivered for Olga, and she crafts the art and puts in the same stockpile where she takes materials from. How do you make that the finished art is then carried from that stockpile to the orbital beacon? Does she just dump in the closest stockpile, ignoring the priorities?
I let the artists deliver the final product to the outgoing stockpile. I just had the different stockpiles set to allow for different items to make that bit happen. Towards the end I noticed the workbench had the option on it to just drop the final product on the ground instead of delivering it somewhere, and I suspect if you have that set you can get your haulers to do that part. By that point though I already had so much cash that I didn't bother with it.
Will spoiler some of the following as it's a bit of a cheap way to game the system once you know about it, and I'm glad I only figured it out on my own later in the game:
That part might require some balancing, as if you manage to get a colonist that is passionate about art, initial skill level doesn't really matter as they'll level up super fast. I think Olga there started at level 5 and after a year or so making small statues full time was level 19 and occasionally making masterpieces which I could sell for a couple of grand. By the end I was causing the exotic merchants that arrived to totally run out of cash when they visited, and my second sculpture wasn't even very high level yet.
Keep in mind the money I have there is *after* I've bought a shit-load of resources to build my ship too, so I actually had way more than that.
Larmantine wrote:I played on rough difficulty. Definitely will higher it.
Yeah, that's too bad. I was actually thinking that this is one of the best balanced games I've played in a long time, which is particularly impressive given it's early access.
I know that now that I've figured a lot of stuff out, it would be much easier on a second go, but this game I felt like I was constantly on the verge of disaster right up until the end, and I'm really glad I got to experience it fresh that way going in with zero knowledge. I think it's a big part of what made it so addictive for me, as there always seemed to be something I needed to work on to prevent things spiraling into chaos.
The difficulty menu is a little ambiguous in that Cassandra is selected by default, but there's no difficulty level assigned by default. After considering it, I chose challenging as the most likely to be the one that was balanced since all other difficulty levels are described relative to it.
