ALPHA 44: THE MEMORY OF INFINITE TERROR OF MALIGN VASTNESS

In the last revision, I mentioned that it seemed like my colonists all hated each other now, but this evening I realized what was actually happening: I stopped getting notifications when they befriended one another, but not when they made enemies. Which, of course, resulted in my notification panel being little more than a wall of hatred the first couple evenings.

The event for whether or not you want to show respect and bury dead bandits or not is often not firing off upon the first bandit you kill like it used to. I still need to do some testing on this, but I think it may have something to do with whether the bandit dies inside or outside the bounds that are considered The Colony proper.

Lastly, a question: what, if anything, triggers the fishpeople raiding parties? Will they raid you whether or not you've been cordial with them?

 

I'm curious about the trigger as well. Interestingly, when I butchered the fishpeople raiders, the raids kept repeating. However, when I ordered burials for the dead fishpeople raiders, the fishpeople raids stopped. Had a convoy of fishpeople bringing gifts soon after the burial and no fishpeople raids so far.

 

I'm pretty sure at the very least that you have to have picked a non-diplomatic way toward them as the first contact event choice, otherwise the raids will never happen no matter what you do.

I think it has since been resolved but in 43B/C I noticed it was possible to pick being diplomatic with fishpeople and then give orders to attack a fishperson to have your colonists stance switch to attack them on sight, however the 'diplomacy' overall colony policy never changes so due to how the fishpeople system is set up they would still send envoys with gifts over and over again and never attack you except in self defence, which meant I had a constant stream of fishpeople meat to use as food, plus the gifts they were bringing to the colony before the soldiers all killed them.

So I think the raiding itself is a hard coded event that only triggers if your colony policy toward them is set to certain requirements. Providing you initially set your stance a certain way they'll never raid you no matter what happens later on. But hopefully that will change further down the line and something a little less rigid and easy to exploit will come into play.

At the very least the new possibility of individual fishpeople attacking when your colonists try to intimidate them means they're not just giant fluffy exploitable bunnies now.

 

Huh. I'm going to have to see if it happens again with my next attempt, but with this first colony they did indeed send raiding parties at me even though I had been peaceful with them. The dialogue box saying they had been sighted popped up, I chose try to communicate with them. A short while later, a group wanders through my colony. My NCO intimidates it, but when the dialogue box comes up, I choose to only give them trouble if they start it. Right as night was falling that night, I get a notification that some fishpeople carrying goods were seen leaving the vicinity. A couple days later, a fishpeople raiding party attacks. 2 days after that one, another one. Also of note, I buried the corpses of the first wave of raiders.

 

"BETTER MAKE IT 12!! " (Attendants administer hypos and a straight jacket.)





As everyone seems to want to get back to basics ,peruse these if you will.
lists of cults
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_death_deities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu
http://www.cthulhu.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal
EDIT: Offer some design suggestions?

 

Am I the only one who's main aim is to make the most cultist, deranged and insane colony possible? Surely not! It must be my DF roots...

I usually start with Lord Palmerstoke's "for science" starting set and the first thing I build is a lab (just in case I get an early fishy idol that I can use to transform a colonist - though I still have yet to see this happen). Although even if I build the smallest possible 3x2 lab it doesn't leave enough glass for a macroscope or vacuum chamber - which is daft.

I was fortunate enough to start near an assemblage that immediately awakened on my arrival and promptly died to gunfire from my starting NCO (she was badass) - the horror then exploded killing my NCO which was brilliant. After a brief recovery period I managed to get a naturalists office up and as you can imagine I immediately told the naturalist to dissect the horror. To my disgust and horror upon dissection she found........2 metal bars (I can't remember which). I have to be honest it was a bit of an anticlimax. As a player if I am choosing to dissect horrors it is clear that I am not as concerned with the mundane - I don't understand why this was even a possible outcome?

I'd also be interested to know if cults can actually form in this revision; I am not feeding my colony (crops anyway), they never sleep in a bed, I allow fishpeople to run amok and I often build a chapel as soon as a colonist is deemed insane enough to preach. I have had plenty of insane and broken colonists, I have had many colonists who wish to be a part of or form a cult. I have still not seen a cult form, which is a shame.

This. 100 times this.

 

Are fishpeople a possible satirization of attitudes and actions done to "previous inhabitants" in real life colonization events (I am assuming that the fishpeople were in New Antipodea/New Sogwood long before we arrived)? First came, the change from simple antagonism to a choice of friendship/war between your colony and fishpeople. Now, each individual fishperson can choose their level of diplomacy independent from the main fishperson group adds another dimension and another element of surprise to the colony simulation.

 

Yep, that change happened a couple of versions back. Burial/dump jobs trigger based on proximity to civilisation, with the prompt showing when such a job appears.

 

IIRC this came up in discussions not long after CE went into Early Release, and the response from Gaslamp was no - while a similarity can be seen with interactions between colonizers and native peoples that's not the intent.

 

Confirmed that OC-4068 is still extant in this build; standing orders for basic food/basic drink can never meet quota and will block everything below them in the list (so the one kitchen can continually produce either food or drink but not both).

(Sorry to keep on about this one, but it's the one issue that causes me to quit the game without saving. )

 

Excellent, thank you for clarifying.

I've done everything imaginable to get cults to form for the past few weeks (since the social jobs re-balance I believe) using all the old tricks and the fun new ones, and couldn't get anywhere. The most I managed was a single mad colonist attempting to form one once, getting refused, then never trying again.

I'm excited that you're working on allowing them to at least show up for the next experimental. Many thanks!

 

How dare you bring reason and logic into this discussion. Madness, I tell you. MADNESS.

 

Don't think anyone who posted was taking Nicholas' post as a serious suggestion of what could happen, but thanks for the clarification on the subject dbaumgart.

Looking forward to attacking 44A with the nearest blunt spoon for madness tweaks.

 

It seems that cults should be more of a late game issue anyway, providing additional complexity and choices for the player around the time they've built most or all of the available buildings and that part of the game is basically over. Not that they should never show up early on, but it should be a threat that grows over time.

Besides colonists just being crazy, a few other circumstances could help with cult creation/growth:

1. Easily Influenced colonists, of course, should totally be up for joining cults when asked. Worship this big rock that weeps blood? Sure, why not?
2. Depressed people are prime cult recruitment material IRL, so perhaps colonists whose dominant emotion is sadness should be more likely to join when offered.
3. Colonists should be more likely to join if the recruiter is their friend, of course (didn't check, but my guess is this is probably already the case).
4. There should be a class element - a recruiter of higher class than the potential cultist should have more chance of success (and less when it's the other way around). That might seem like it would reduce cult recruitment, but really it would just do so in the early game. Once the colony is well underway, upper class twits with nothing better to do will be wandering around, and that leads into the biggest source of cults after just being crazy...
5. Upper class twits! These schmucks are legend in Lovecraftian horror for goofing around with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know just because they're bored. UCT should have all sorts of bonuses to join/start cults.

 

Personally I would say cults are a "Any part of the game" issue. They are and should remain a symptom not a independent system that triggers when at xxx size, yyyy buildings or zzzz days in.

So for one colony that has had little hardship that wasn't soon overcome, and no real occult finds through labour, being 20 weeks in and not seeing any sign of cult activity would be perfectly normal.

Yet for a colony constantly struggling to survive, rampant death and loss of loved ones. Fishpeople abductions and said colonists coming back transformed, and workers digging up a large volume of ancient relics, leaving giant gaping holes for dark influences to flood into the colony 1 week in and seeing excessive cult activity as a result, would also be perfectly normal.

Sure, things like scientists experimenting and naturalists poking around where no man should venture, should offer ways for creating additional cracks for dark influences to sneak in and take root. But it should be a additive factor on top of the ever present possibility of cracks able to be opened at any point, not milestone activities to unlocking such things even being possible.

The only roles colony size and later tier activities should play in the system is as various factors that increases probability.

 

What could be interesting to see is a more subversive way for colonists to form cults WHILST they work, rather than being entirely dependent on off-duty behaviour.

So on one hand there would be the current system, when a colonist directly approaches another and makes them the offer. This has a greater chance of failing if the colonist being asked if just picked at random.

However a behind the scenes manner to create a cult with someone could take place within the workcrew passively whilst working. So someone within a workcrew wanting to form a cult could initiate a hidden "Subversive recruitment" activity which remains open and in itself does nothing, and the cult forming then resumes other activities.

As they work at their assigned task however the 'Subversive recruitment' activity progresses relative to the number of other workcrew members they're working alongside. The longer the crew work together and the more colonists working at the job at the same time the more the initiator is planting the seeds to persuade their crew mates to join up.

After at least a couple of in-game days worth of work the activity completes and there's a % chance of each member of the workcrew being drawn into the formation of a cult, with the % chance being significantly greater than the likelihood of them accepting if they were just direct invited... as this isn't just a invitation, it's reflective of what is essentially mild brainwashing/persuasion to ones views over time.

Who initiates the cult forming activity could either influence the % chance of how many of the workcrew get dragged into the newly formed cult, or otherwise speed up the rate of completion.

So a worker may only really be effective at convincing fellow workers to join, with the % chance of convincing their overseer being significantly lower.

Middle class overseer would be more persuasive in drawing most if not all the workers into the formed cult at the end of the activity.

Whilst a upper class military general overseeing multiple military troops may actually luck out at having a pretty good chance of drawing multiple NCOs into a cult... though this passive cult formation on such a large scale would likely need to take weeks of in-game interaction to fill up due to how significant the consequences may be.


This makes cult formation less roadblocked by overall madness, and instead gives extra weight to the importance of the sanity of colonists in positions of power overseeing many other colonists.

Having your farming work crew have the largest worker populations for example may start to have side effects if your highly trained farming overseer has a mental breakdown, as through subversive approaches they could drag all farm workers under their command into a newly formed cult, almost entirely against the workers 'original' will (again, think brainwashing) across the space of a few days of hard labour in the fields.

And suddenly due to not reacting to your key food producers drop in sanity across a few in-game days, you're faced with the majority of your colony food production being controlled by cultists.

You don't get any obvious advanced warning of "Clive Cummberfish has tried to convince Sara McCabbage to join a cult". But you do get advanced warning in that key important colonists have gone insane, if you don't cure the madness or remove them from positions of power opting instead to leave the situation unresolved then across a few in-game days a 5 member cult may suddenly spring up consisting of a entire workcrew unit.

 

Can I check if the allocation of work for farming has been cleaned up against last build. If I assign the same working party to 2 fields will labour be divided or is it best still to have one/field?