Funny, I am at 50 people and day 50 but the game has been crashing a bunch, including while saving which is rather annoying when I was trying to build a new arcology-ziggurat. Also seems the colony loads slower and runs slower with just the progression of time, I don't have as many buildings as that either.
No problems with stability here, though across 3 colony attempts in 47A around the 45-55 population mark every single time I've had a hostile nation attack of somewhere between 6-8 full units of kitted out troop that has killed pretty much everyone making carrying on that colony pointless. What hardware are you using? Way back I used to have performance issues around the 50 colonist mark before a series of optimisation and performance issues were cleared up. Last I built up a really big colony it took about 80 people or more before performance issues set in usually to do with longer delays recalculating pathfinding or such when placing new modules or buildings. Though 50 population at 50 days sounds a long time for such a low population, was that with a lot of killed colonists?
I was holding population stable to make a little simpler some experiments on wheat farming which you can see in the Crop Post. Yep, a great reason to be quickly grinding out that standing in the foreign office. Intel i5-2450M, with 2.50GHz and 2.50GHz 8 GB of RAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M Now that I think of it, I should just check the CPU and memory use when it is running.
Nice colony! I see the perfect place for a road functioning as your "Main Street". I have a hunch roads will be coming fairly soon...
Colony as it stood last night before it was promptly slaughtered: Not a fan of the mine in the bottom right, but couldn't resist it after my naturalist found a source of coal so close to the colony. After that the mine had broken the layout so I gave up keeping some sense of layout with the trade depot and foreign office also at the bottom.
Somewhere between day 11 and day 14 I had successfully turned the hostile nation to neutral. Definitely worth the investment for a little peace of mind, I guess. I haven't gotten hit by invasion (no one is hostile) or bandits (they are friendly) for the last few colonies, so I haven't been able to really see how bad the military are at killing enemies with proper guns (instead of, you know, Fishpeople Raiders)
I had one crash earlier. Given that the save file loaded and I've moved well past the point in the game when the crash occurred, I am guessing it was a problem in the transient data space... I've had a couple times where things are laggy, but I was not able to pinpoint the source...
It's very much a question of numbers. During a hostile nation invasion you're looking at between 6-8 full military units of something like 3-5 troops per unit all hitting your colony as a giant swarm at once. If you're lucky a friendly nation will send 1 single unit to your colony ahead of time to assist, and maybe even the fishpeople will send 1 single group to assist, but they arrive at your colony and just linger around the outskirts independently doing sod all until something hostile gets within their range to react. The empire will send you 4 landmines and tell you to place them in the path of the invading troop before they arrive, but the arrival point for the invading army is entirely random and you have no way of knowing from what direction they'll spawn from. One time I figured they must be coming from a direction that led to the border of the map so placed a landmine in each direction then one closer to the middle of the colony for when they ran in to chase civilians... but nope the invading troops spawned and after awhile wandered up to my colony from the direction where there was nothing but the beach and the ocean, so I guess they must have swam to my colony or had some kind of very large boat. And the spawn location is entirely random and determined at the time of them arriving, so even if you were absolutely desperate to keep your colony because you're trying to test something specific and need the colony to continue as it is and attempted save scumming, that wouldn't help as they'd spawn from a completely different point each time. So once they arrive, the first thing they encounter dies in about .5 seconds, followed by the prompt death of the 3 full military units you can put together about 5 seconds later... by 20 seconds into the fight you'll have lost around 15-20 colonists at least and even if you had equal number you'd likely still see everyone die because they spawn as a giant swarm cluster, whilst your military is a random disorganised noise that reacts individually. If you're lucky the invading army may creep into the edges of your 'help' and your backup will get one shot off before all dropping dead also. Put simply, the event is horribly broken. And having the single absolute option be "Use the foreign office or you die" is not a viable situation for it to continue as.
That is the engineer in me showing... I already have plans to change the layout of my next colony based on things I've run into with this one that trigger my OCD...
I have also noticed that refusing to accept bandit deserters and burying bandit dead seems to provide enough of a positive boost to stop bandit raids.
That may be, though then when your first encounter with them is 5 bandits shooting your people from the shadows it is rather annoying compared to the alternative.
