So, I am going to create a guide for making a Planned Colony, which you plan out everything from the beginning instead of letting it grow naturally over the course of the game. This style actually shows several GUI issues, so I made a sister thread (Click Here) to talk about the issues. Anyway, you want to choose your Natures Bounty as your starting loadout. This is so you can flatten a large area at the start without having to worry about food. You want to choose a starting area that's relatively flat, and most importantly has no terrain elevation changes. Generally what I go for is the starting area you see must have no terrain elevation changes and only dips or small hills to worry about. At the start, draw your flatten tool multiple times over the area you want your base to be. It should be about the size of your screen, default zoom. Multiple times because as far as I know only one workcrew can work on each command, so if you do it multiple times it means more then one crew can flatted at the same time. Now, you sit back and wait. Maybe eat something. Make sure it's at x2 speed! Here is mine once it's been flattened a lot, around day 2. Not quite done, but getting there! We can start harvesting resources, Take out all the trees and rocks in your chosen build area. That should be enough to get you started. Make sure not to overstretch yourself! And don't worry, you have plenty of food. Don't build a stockpile, so they don't waste their time carrying materials around. They still will walk two feet before placing down the goods, though, for some reason. Possible bug? Try to remember where your ores and other things are, for when you build a mine later. Check your job list. Once the number of jobs gets below 7, the number of starting workcrews, it's time for operation unlock buildings. Build a small carpentry workshop, then a small ceramics shop. You want to build 1 brick and some planks. It's also a smart idea to add forage jobs during this step, as you may be running low on food. Once your carpentry workshop is built with two workbenches, assign your best carpenter. Make sure to send over one of the workers! After you have your first log, build a ceramics workshop. After you build your first brick, delete your starting workshops. Once they are gone, pause. It's time for the magic to happen. You should have everything unlocked but the chapel, training office and lab. If you have one of each building, there are a total of 15 workcrews needed. However, you will probably have more then one of each, and that doesn't include farms. So, worst case, lets say 4 farms, 2 barracks and 5 foreign offices. That comes out to be about 23. Plus you need various workcrews for tasks like logging and other things, so it comes out to around 25. Now, because the Dev's hate us, the minimum number of beds per house needed to get the bonus is less then the total number you can get. In other words, if you build 3 cots per laborer bunkhouse and 2 bed per middle class house, you wont have enough beds for everyone. So lets plan this out! Each middle class house can support 4 total, and laborer bunkhouse can support 5. But wait, you have 7 starting overseers! Add two extra beds per house. With 4 total overseers houses, that comes out to +16, with your starting 7 is 25 workcrews, Perfect, although you will have one extra bed. Plus all the houses will look the same, which is IMPORTANT because I SAID SO. I suppose later on if you expand you would want 4 overseer beds per house, not 6. As for the ratio of workers to overseers, each overseer can support 4 workers, for a total of 100 in this case. With 5 workers per building you need 20 workcrew buildings. In other words, a ratio of 1:5, so for every overseer building you need 5 laborer bunkhouses. Now lets get to work! First, MAKE SURE YOU ARE PAUSED. Then, make your overseer house, then the 5 worker bunkhouses. Make sure there is room for 5 beds in each, plus stuff like cabinets and rugs to get the quality up. MAKE SURE TO DO THEM IN ORDER, THIS IS IMPORTANT. 1 OVERSEER->5 BUNKHOUSE->REPEAT. I build them as the wall around the starting area. Once you have 20 bunkhouses and 4 overseer houses, take a deep breath. Notice how I placed modules in the first two to make sure everything would fit, then just copied the size for everything else. I also forgot to add two extra beds to the overseers house, I only added one, but luckily I was able to move stuff around and fit it. You may also be able to squeeze it smaller if you plan it right, but I like having them larger then normal. NOW SAVE. Anyway, keep it paused, and go to the jobs menu. All those construct building jobs? Pause them. The reason you did things in order was so you could remember what comes next! It will still be confusing though. Now set a random job and pause that. That's to keep track of the housing and industrial planning. That paused job will act as a separator between them, so you can keep track of everything better. Save again. After you do that, plan out the industrial part! Build your kitchens, carpentry, ceramics... make sure all the modules can fit. It may be frusterating, see other thread, but stick to it. Make sure to leave room for the chapel, training and lab, since you can't plan those out. Try to remember the order you built them in, or build them in a logical order. I did neither, and it's going to be annoying later. After you built everything, pause all the jobs as per usual. Unpause what you want them to start with, then sit back and watch your colony grow! Also of note, if you do it right this can be very defendable, so make sure to build those gabions in those gaps!
I like your approach to colony defense. In Banished, I would do something similar to this technique when starting a town. Just make the whole damn thing from the start, and then unpause and wait.
Each bunkhouse unlocks up to 7 slots for labourers and each middle class house up to 5 slots for overseers. Therefore you need at least 7 cots/5 practical beds per house to keep a sufficient number of "beds" for your citizen.
With the rare paintings? Yeah, that's the case. I calculated it without rare paintings though. Also, I think it's 6 for overseer houses, not 5, since rare paintings add 2 and you get a base of 4. In hindsight, I made a few mistakes. First, you need to plan on two full mines. One for supporting your upkeep, making repair trunks in the stoneworking workshop. The fact that you need a mine dedicated to this for larger colonies is a little annoying and I hope they change the meta in the next version. The other mine is of course for metal, hopefully iron and copper. Second, you need to focus on higher-level alcohol when your colony gets bigger. When you have some sort of horrific event, the memories can stack up. It takes awhile to forgot, so you may end up with crazy cultists over and over as the memories of the previous horrible experience make the survivors go crazy and start a cult, thereby giving the next group of newly arrived survivors horrible memories who then start a cult, and on and on. Whiskey can make your colonists forget memories, so that can be useful for keeping everything under control. Laudanum would also be very useful. Lastly, defense. I ended up not leaving enough room for some of the massive farms you get from research, so there were holes in my defenses, that horrible things managed to slip through. Instead of Gabions, I feel like a brick-fence perimeter would have worked much better. My colonists refused to finish the gabions because there was never enough wood nearby or some bullshit like that. Basically making more space at the start and having a bigger perimeter would let me set up a colony with only one entrance that can be guarded. I didn't really check, but from what I saw the soldier rally point can make the soldiers stay at that point for too long, causing unhappiness? Or will they automatically take breaks? I didn't want to try, but it would be nice if it was clearer, or we had more commands to give. Basically having them always hang out by the entrance would be awesome. I found they do like to hang around the barracks, but that was hit or miss.
Using segments made of housing "buildings" is probably the fastest and cheapest (therefore faster) way to get a really large wall up. Maybe the removal of gabions/fences is fixed, but otherwise there's also the ability to set up alternate openings which you can control by moving modules/doors in your wall houses.
Would love to see the introduction of fences designed more to fit into acting as alley walls rather than the current examples which are all very much defensive or border defining in nature. Chain link fences probably wouldn't really be directly appropriate, but something that would allow for creating alleys interconnecting sides of buildings but then having options for fences that actually look appropriate to block up alley paths that could pose a security risk (or to better control foot traffic flow) would be pretty handy for people like myself where aesthetics take priority over compact efficiency. Now that having multiple buildings with connecting walls doesn't immediately break all sorts of things like it used to some time back, there's much more flexibility in how you place buildings... but if you want security alongside back alleys and such you currently end up with something that just looks really out of place when your alleys abruptly end at an low farm-styled brick wall, or worse a load of gabions.
Yeah, defences and fences are a WIP. I hope the next round of updates covers defensive structures more!
