BETA 54B Send me big colony saves!

How big are we talking about? Here's an unstable 50 pop one (you have to immediately open a production menu after launch), if it helps.

 

I don't know if this counts as a big colony. Reached 50 pop as well, but didn't start using the steel maintenance modules.

Start was dauntless dare in the arctic. Arctic isn't even that bad, since the forests are decent. While in steppe you can plant the same things as in arctic, but timber is scarce. Even in the desert you get the advantage of glass, which is a good cash commodity.

The style of colony is probably not a common one, since I play passively, allying all nations as soon as possible. Neither do I attack fishpeople, because there's no real rational reason to besides roleplaying.

These saves should be stable, only the one called unstable isn't, but the earlier ones are less advanced. The slightly volatile I called such, since for awhile event arcs stopped appearing, but I got a meteor shower later on.

edit: It turns out that the saves aren't in fact unstable, I loaded them up and they worked fine, so it was probably just my computer overheating.

 

I've been at EVO this past week, so I haven't been able to play, but I'll try and make a max size colony when I can. Did you guys see the 146-population colony I made from 52B? I hope that was useful.

 

Sadly since 52 or so across various experimental builds I'm getting quite a few more crashes, the save related ones seem (mostly) resolved but still getting various random ones. Kind of put a dampener on building a large colony when often 10 minutes or so of progress might just up and get lost, especially with the lower rate of colony growth now.

I don't (and never will) subscribe to the silly 3x3 beach hut approach to hackily gaming the current behaviour to just rush immigration and other aspects, so even after playing hours into a colony they still tend to be pretty small and sparsely populated with how I play since the recent changes.

So what exactly would be the criteria for a "Big colony" to gauge how people are approaching things? Hours put into the colony, or active population/industry capacity?

As I can only imagine most of the large population examples achieved in any kind of timely fashon you'll find will have a rather prominent use of tiny beach hut approach due to the way immigration is currently implemented that breaks your choices down to:

* Beach huts and consistent growth.
* Proper buildings and borderline stagnation.

 

Yeah, I like that we're forced to build houses now, but having to build so many feels pretty grindy. I had no interest in continuing, or starting another game after I reached 50.

But, Nicholas mentioned on the Steam forums that houses will be upgrade-able to allow for more colonists per household, so that will be nice.

 

As it stands, I too feel that the shantytown meta is kind of brain dead, offering no challenges and breaking immersion. On my own save, I decided to make a compromise, by building more interesting houses than plain 3x3s with decor only in the lower class ones.
But I'm sure all of this will change, so I won't worry about it.

 

What's a proper building? I'm sure that even if you built something larger like 5x7 or whatever, it's still very doable.

 

Biggest colony I've managed in a while.

Probably not the most efficient sprawl, but it did highlight some issues I hadn't encountered before with smaller colonies; upkeep becomes a much bigger problem when people are running all over the place to perform it for one.
Also building compact results in a graphical soup whenever you're trying to plonk down modules + decor. An amusing side effect of not having proper "streets" is that after certain events I ended up with corpses all over the place that I didn't notice, so occasionally I'd spin the camera and find a surprise skeleton (turns out if you order colonists to "dump bodies" their definition of "away from the colony" seems to underestimate how large said colony is).

 

Beta 53

139 colonists

 

Beta 53, 68 or so max colonists, most dead due to cultists. I should really have finished that church.

The upkeep trunks are a pain, especially since houses require upkeep as well. I was having a lot of trouble with it. I built a power saw for my carpentry workshop, but the upkeep trunk for that takes steel. Trying to build enough steel, turns out my mine doesn't have chalk. What do I do?

I also don't have any copper on this map, as far as I can tell. This really put a damper on my ability to go up the tech tree. I ended up going too top heavy, without enough lower-level buildings to support the insane upkeep costs.

I was also having trouble with certain modules just not working anymore, I had to destroy and rebuild them, which also screwed me pretty good.

I couldn't get enough clay to build the second level upkeep trunks from my mines once I got larger. Several times my colony basically collapsed due to upkeep problems. Bleh.

Also, the scrolling through the work crews when you have a lot of overseers gets wonky.

Oh, and it's so hard to manage all of your work crews from the menu without knowing what type of building they are assigned to, and farms don't show up as workshops so there is that.

Edit: I just loaded Rentahampster's save out of curiosity. A bit of gaming the system there. Clever, though, much better then the way I did it.

 

Thanks

By the way, what things did I do that you would consider "gaming the system"? From my point of view, it's all just playing the game. I'm always interested to hear other peoples' approaches to the game.

 

I don't think that's working as intended. I mean, that's ridiculous despite there being enough beds in other buildings, the colonist housing capacity is larger than the number of tiles in the building.
(From Rentahamster's colony)

 

Ah, I figured that might have been what you were talking about. Is that the only thing though?

Regarding housing, the way the decor mechanics and the immigration mechanics interact with each other, that is currently the most optimal way to run an efficient colony. Given the inefficiencies that compound the longer a colonist has to walk to and from something, it's a lot easier to have them all sleep in one place. Also, creating enough decor for multiple houses and having the tile space to fit all of it is very taxing. Especially now that rugs don't overlap anymore.

 

And you also have to take upkeep trunks to only one building instead of multiple.

But that is the reason why I dislike it so much. Now when I choose to engineer my colony in the way that would make sense I always have the feeling that I'm needlessly wasting resources.

 

Yeah. As they say, the fluff doesn't match the crunch. Getting the fluff and crunch to work together and in a meaningful way that gives player choices may be hard. Personally I think the max number of colonists should be just based on how many cots and beds you have, and their sleeping quarters quality has a stronger effect on their mood.

I think the quality values of all positive objects should drastically increased, and each consecutive one you add gets one less bonus. That way you don't have carpet spam or whatnot.

I dunno, it's a hard problem to solve.

 

Here's about a save with 90ish people

 

This save is ~80 citizens big on 53A.

https://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/stahlmark-prove-smithing-progress.18010/

 

My latest crash save from 53A is from a town with a lot of people in it. Go to post to see files.
https://community.gaslampgames.com/goto/post?id=116548#post-116548