Darkness stirs on the rim. Survive flesh infestations, cultist attacks, shambling undead, blood rains, invisible hunters, and other sanity-shredding perils. Capture and study entities to harness the power of the void. Conduct psychic rituals and awaken an evil machine god.
So a couple of tips I’ve learnt along the way: what makes a killbox work at all is managing how you can be attacked in the first place. If you can decide the battlefield and delay them as long as possible to be fully prepared, then you’re going to be a lot better off. Use traps everywhere, have more turrets than you do people, use artillery when you can, and give your enemy no cover to work with. It doesn’t have to be a killbox, but plenty of damage along the way and natural choke points can often defeat a raid before they can even score a hit.
The main point of wealth is that it scales the size of an attack proportionally. People have the greatest weight for wealth, so make sure you can hold off a raid before recruiting 20 prisoners. I don’t usually worry too much about keeping wealth low, but you see harder raids if your wealth has outpaced your defence.
The wiki also has plenty of solid strategies for defence if you’re stumped, and often working with the environment you’ve got can be much more fun than creating an artificial killbox (in my opinion anyway). Good defence is the basis for completing any of the quests I’ve found, so surviving long enough should absolutely help complete them.
Edit: I’d 100% recommend the game to anyone who’s interested in a colony builder that’s got a decent focus on survival, I’ve seen many hilarious and really fun things happen with a story that comes simply from chance.
Thanks a lot! Usually I’m okay up until I reach near the end … spoiler-ish warning:
spoilers for nearing the end of the game
I was doing great up until psychic ships kept crashing. I’d arrange all my colonists in a circle around the ship, and usually they could kill the mechanoids pretty easily. But sometimes one or two of my colonists would die. I tried to keep going after that, but then another ship part crashed within what felt like a few days (maybe it was 7 days), then I lost a few more. I had barely recovered from the last one.
I may have tried to start building the ship too soon. I think I had assault rifles for several colonists, and marine armour for a few.
But anyway, for a psychic ship, are you supposed to attack it, run away, and kite them back to your well defended killbox-ish base? Maybe that was really my biggest mistake. I would have just left it way on the other side of the map, but the psychic drone was getting bad. And I think there was a fire or something too?
(end spoilers)
It’s also possible that I had tried to challenge myself and set the difficulty to the mid level, but forgot.
Oh, also I often find myself running out of components, and just barely making it to component manufacturing before I run out. I always buy them all from traders, and try to conserve them. But even with component manufacturing, it feels like it takes forever to make one, even if I have like ~15 colonists, where a few are dedicated crafters. Maybe I just need to stay in this stage for longer, until I can get assault rifles for everyone?
And I never really read much about strategies, I generally just like to figure it out myself, but I suck at trying new things.
I guess the main thing is that I love the part where you try to survive against natural disasters and have enough food, but I’ve never gotten too into the combat. Plus it felt like it was always pretty easy up until I got to the kinds of enemies that you encounter regularly at the end of the game.
I also used to hit the component bottle neck until pretty recently. Unless you want to figure it out yourself:
spoiler
What you want to do is try to get the long range mineral scanner and drop pods quickly, scan for components, and then drop pod in your miners with some supplies, maybe an animal to carry stuff, mine out the resource node and then travel back home with the goodies.
I went from struggling to get components outside of traders to having full teams in power armour pretty much instantly. Now my problem is that I accumulate wealth too fast and end up fighting off huge raids.
Fair enough if combat isn’t as much your thing! I find the stories that are generated to be excellent, and there tends to be more combat than most similar games which is why I focused more on it.
My usual approach here is to either bombard it with mortars, have a trader “accidentally” set it off, or if neither are available set up a lot of traps and sandbags and get ready for a battle. Make sure you always have plenty of cover, and for psychics especially destroy them sooner to minimise the effects. If they’re the newer style of mechanoid raid, you may need to get really close and throw a few explosives in there or otherwise be inside the area and have everyone attack at once.
You can start building whenever you’re ready really, but definitely have a good defence set up before you start. For components I usually send a few people off with cattle to carry everything back from a friendly town (since traders can be somewhat sparse at times), and if you trade enough you may even be able to request reinforcements. I try to make sure everyone has the best armor and weapons I can afford/make - if you’ve got golden tiles but not much better than dusters, then a lot more deaths are likely. Even with the best gear, one of my characters was once killed by a lucky shot in the eye from a measly bow!
If you’re more for the survival aspect then definitely feel free to keep it on lower difficulties (I often do at the start), and you can usually make do without much strategy as long as you have good gear, decent cover, and a medic on standby with the best meds you can afford. Turrets or other friendlies are often great distractions, and if they’re taking the bullets then none of your colonists are.
Edit: I’d also add that learning from mistakes is great for all areas of life, if you can look at why you failed (not enough farms, too little meds, etc.) and learn from it then you’re going to do better the next time. Even if the general strategy stays the same, small changes can make a massive difference.