TLDR; Fishpeople murdering me. What do I do? Greetings! I recently decided to give Clockwork Empires a go and I have to say I am quite enjoying it! I am having a small issue though and I was hoping folks with more experience playing might provide some advice. First, allow me to describe the situation: I had, what I thought, was a reasonably successful colony established. I had most of the critical buildings (kitchen, farm, etc.) established and had received several more colonists. Fishpeople showed up and I was prompted with an event asking me how to handle them, to which I chose a diplomatic tack. The fishpeople walked through the colony, most people freaked out (this is diplomacy I think) and the military (read: one soldier) harassed a bit. I then received another event in which I told the military to stop harassing fishpeople. The fish people left. All is well, I thought. However, fishpeople returned! This time, they were walking through the colony once again only this time, something went wrong. I'm not exactly sure what, but next thing I know the military, again one soldier, fires on one of the fishpeople. All hell broke loose at that point and when it was all said and done all of my colonists were very much dead and no fishpeople were dead which, most decidedly, indicates a problem for me. Is there something I should be doing differently? I feel like I didn't have enough colonists to truly devote any to the military, not to mention I had not built barracks. Even then, I am not confident it would have made much of a difference judging by how little of a dent my one solider put in one of the fish people.
It's a little hard to say what happened without seeing it. The best guess is that you might have accidentally given your soldiers to shot them on sight, or one of the fish people started it and your army retaliated. Even if you don't have a barracks if you have spare weapons you can at least let a work crew hunt to arm them. But yeah, it can be tough to survive in the early game against any type of aggression or attack as with the time period this is based on a lot of winning a battle is simply having more guns and men than the other side.
It used to be that choosing diplomacy and enforcing rules would guarantee profit without risk from that quarter. From memory, recent updates have given individual fish more agency in their responses, so you might have got an angry one who attacked a colonist, setting off a chain reaction.
This. Also if you click on a Fishperson and select the attack option, this will actually flag Fishpeople hostile as a colony policy until the end of time with you having absolutely no say in changing that stance further, instead you end up stuck in a situation where your colony policy is "Interact through diplomacy" but the hostility flags for Fishpeople as a entity are "Hostile. Kill on sight". So unless you want a unending 'diplomatic war' where your colonists will shoot or flee from every Fishperson forever, NEVER use the attack option... it be currently borked. Also I'm not sure if it's intentional, but since around 43D/E/44, even if you have diplomacy set hostile Fishpeople party attacks events will now trigger regardless to whatever else has happened. I've had some colonies where I've met Fishpeople, selected diplomacy and had nothing bad happen from the first encounter with them, a day or 2 later I get informed a hostile Fishpeople party is heading to attack my colony. Other times I'll have first encounter go well, get a envoy with gifts where again nothing bad happens with interacting with them, then it's promptly followed by a hostile group attack event being triggered. So as far as the actual events go, it now feels like there isn't really any actual cohesion to things at present. Instead it seems like a generic roll of the dice occurs to decide if a Fishperson faction groups goal is friendly or hostile when creating objectives for them.
to counter this, 2 things, right away when you've decided where to start, build a little 3x3 (2 wood 1 stone) barracks a bit outside of your planned village even if nobody uses it. You can put a crew in there in case of trouble and they will run, get guns if available, and assist. They can be then unassigned the barracks to return to work duty. Also, you can minus crew members from other crews and throw them in with your starting NCO and they will act the soldier part without needing a barracks, but pretty much all your starter characters will have low moral issues, and one swipe of the fish person will render (usually the nco) too scared to fight any more. Further down having your NCO and crew assigned to a barracks will increase their moral (tankability?) some. Having the barracks for a second crew is also helpful when bandits try to raid you early on. Also if you click on the overseer's you start out with, you may find some with military traits already there, and you can say "oh hey, remember the overseer "Tie Myshu" has military trait, so i'll keep him off the farmfields and use him as a backup."
spoiler alert -- heads up somewhere after you have 25-30 villagers you will get a message that says "your going to be attacked in the next couple of days" by this point you will really want as many barracks built as you have crews in total. In my village I have 8 little 3x3 huts outside the village that are all unassigned barracks. On day one, you want to shutdown all workshop production, and move the crews over to the barracks. Make sure each workshop has completed whatever they were working on before you unassign workshop and assign to barracks. Move all other crews over to barracks, but Leave your farmers in the farms. Then go through enable 24 hour work-time.(including farmers) You don't want your soldiers sleeping when the enemy invades, and the transition period for colonists when you swap around their worktimes takes a day. On second day, use the Rally button on each of your new soldier crews and pick a spot to make your stand. For the moment, there's some issues with rally, and military, so you want your rally point to be inside the town, not way outside somewhere. From here it's zzz and wait until you get the message "here they come!" Now you shut down your farms, move those crews to the final barracks, rally them to same location as the rest, and ... pray. afterwards you get to find out who made it and how to re-distribute them. Good Luck
Events are entirely random. So not really a spoiler in any way. You can get to 6 weeks in and have over 70 population and not get attacked... it's all down to blind luck. Though it sounds like what you're describing is either the hostile military invasion event, or the unified bandit attacks? As I've never seen a large scale fishperson raid event that has a timed warning days in advance.
yeah the hostile military. I'm not sure I've gotten the unified bandit attack, just a bunch trying to raid me. oh and may as well throw in, if he still reading this, if you build a chapel, don't put in an operator(overseer). It currently is glitched, and will cause villagers to get "stuck" in the system. Hopefully we will have that resolved in the next update, but if you are seeing people starving while they are standing around, this is one of the current main reasons why.
Yes, I am still reading! And I greatly appreciate all the insight! I still feel this is shaping up to be a wonderful game and I am pleased to see that there is some randomness (and possibly some bugginess?) at play here and this isn't simply me misunderstanding something causing the problem. Thank you for all the responses! Any additional suggestions on how to handle the military side of things would be appreciated as well!
