the unconventional colonies (strange starting choices)

[Skaliton]

Basically I've been having alot of fun using ridiculous combinations using prepare carefully and wanted to ask if anyone else has tried it.

Like the talent less geniuses
industrious and fast learning (plus whatever you want) with intentionally gimped starting stats makes this entire group start out entirely worthless but just a bit of dedication and planning makes them great (difficulty can be changed by learning speed, burning passion being easy mode)

the psychopathic cannibals:
exactly what it sounds like, oh the enemy raid is coming...you mean the free food right? Just remember your visitors don't really appreciate the food or dead bodies being butchered. Oh and to make matters worse a self imposed-human leather only for clothes.

One trick ponies?
add a few more starting units. But everyone can only do one job with any skill. Essentially each colonist gets one skill starting at 10 with burning passion and everything else must be lowered to nothing (or as close to nothing as possible) what good is an animal tamer who must have an escort with him for if the animal attacks?

Devils bargain
Start with two luciferium per person and soon as the game starts each must take it immediately. . . . admittedly this one is a real hit or miss. If you get lucky there isn't much of a problem and you get an early trader or raider who is carrying quite a few. If not the game has a very unsatisfying end that was wholly unpreventable

one I was thinking about trying but haven't gotten around to.
The near amish
One ship reactor (I forget if you can add it initially or just add the components to the starting items and immediately build it) . . . that is all the power you get. Which you will realize is extremely limiting. Do you pick a warm climate and not store food? What about a cold one and rush parka's while accepting the negative mood while buying all the food you possibly can? How will you defend yourself? Turrets will drain the batteries quickly but it is a needed evil.

If anyone has thought of other unique ones feel free to add them to the list (and please don't suggest any that require you to play on the easy difficulties or are reliant on save-scumming/removing massive parts of the game in order to balance it. There is a difference between a challenge and exploiting the game)

[melia_romulans]

Hm, I haven't tried any interesting combinations of colonists, but I do like to try out the weirder biomes. Temperate forest with year-round growth? Pass. Frozen wasteland with a tribe? Now we're talking. I think I'll try some of your suggestions though! Looks like a great list.

[Skaliton]

thanks :) just know the game ends up being quite different with them.

The first tends to make the storyteller severely overestimate you because of the massively inflated skills your colonists will have (with burning passion you are still leveling up incredibly fast even after the 4k limiter per day) for example. But I think they are quite enjoyable

[liosalpha]

* The cult.
Start with a lonley tribe shaman. with two animals of your liking. (i did monkeys )
Addin the effect that all pawns are getting bloodlust.
Rollplay as a tribe cult that only alowes the oposite sex to join and kill the others for your animals. Dont eat your picked animals. just let them die of there own.
Work your way to make the shaman your god king/queen. And let him/her do nothing but sit in his gold/silver/jade throne room surounded by the animals.

(if you dont like to be sexist, you can ad in a 50% triat change for something you do like and only alow those in.)


* Fight club.
Force the traits of stagering ugly, abrasive and blood lust up on everyone (80 or 90% chance). and install a mod to alow 4 traits per pawn.

[Astasia]

I do the first one all the time. I usually don't use fast learner as it's overkill, but I'll have all my starting colonists with like minimum skill and a passion for everything, then based on what early recruits I get I will specialize my starters to fill in the holes.

I occasionally do psychopath or cannibal only runs, but never together. The traits have too much overlap so it feels kind of wasteful to combine them. Other traits can be interesting to play with as well, like a chemical fascination run with an objective of making a highly profitable drug farm, dealing with colonists constantly binging on the product.

Often I extend restrictions to recruitment for an extra challenge, so I'll only allow colonists with specific traits, genders, hairstyles, or even only allow people with relations to my existing colonists to join.

[Jhonny G]

Interesting list, it certainly provides some inspiration if one is about get bored with the stanard scenarios. I hope more peps will add their ideas over time.

Dunno if it's allowed to include other changes than EdB, but just started my most unique scenario so far and am pretty excited to see how it turns out..

Scenario: In a post apocalyptic world plagued by nuclear fallout, a group a soldiers are ordered to set up an outpost in a destroyed urban city and recruit whoever they can. Then lay siege toward the enemy.

World: 3x2 factions at constant war with each other, 1 neutral faction, urban cities & buildings

Modifiers: Constant fallout, cleanliness set to 0, beauty set to 0, global work speed set to 65, mental break threshold set to 75, deterioration set to 200, research unlocked; hydroponics, blowback operations, medicine, survival package.

EdB: Start with 5 pawns that got a passion and skill level between 8-12 in either shooting or melee, only allowed to have one additional passion and burning passion between 8-12. Rest must be set to minimum. All must start with faction armor (Rimwave in my case).

Artificial Limits: Only allowed to repair and rebuild old ruins as base structures (beside small 'guard posts'). No ridiculous killboxes or giant walls.

[Wolfguarde]

The slave colony: Two seperate castes in the base, with the living quarters of one surrounding and protecting the other. Upper caste is psychopathic, with good social, arts, shooting/melee and not a whole lot else. Lower caste deals with everything the upper caste doesn't. There's a lot you can do with this depending on how far you want to take it, but it creates an interesting extra dynamic in the colony's development.

The nomads: Tribal start, not allowed to develop beyond primitive tech. Settle briefly, stock up on food, move on. Scavenge high-tech weapons from incoming raiders, move on with the seasons or when larger incoming threats make it difficult or impossible to survive.

Gunless ascendancy: No restrictions - except that guns, mortars and turrets are prohibited. Brawlers, nimble and bloodlust pawns are more valuable than gold. Play in permadeath.

Bandit life/global genocidist agenda.: No permanent base. Crashland start, with at least automatic weapons, along with the pod/chemfuel research done. Raid other tribes or colonies, settle on their bases, recruit what prisoners you decide to spare and move on to the next base. Work toward wiping the map.

[Skaliton]

wolf I was actually considering a similar one to bandit life but never got around to it. Perhaps one day I will

[Wolfguarde]

I play with mods for variety, but these are things I've thought about doing a few times... I really like the idea of a gunless run, though the difficulty curve would be pretty steep. Once you get a couple of brawlers in power armour with good weapons or claws, you're set. But getting there takes a fair bit of time... especially with how bloody long it is between trade ships :|

[ambi]

Originally posted by Wolfguarde:

The slave colony: Two seperate castes in the base, with the living quarters of one surrounding and protecting the other. Upper caste is psychopathic, with good social, arts, shooting/melee and not a whole lot else. Lower caste deals with everything the upper caste doesn't. There's a lot you can do with this depending on how far you want to take it, but it creates an interesting extra dynamic in the colony's development.

I did a slave colony playthrough once. Psychopaths are OP as hell. You can butcher anyone and harvest their organs and roll in cash very quickly. Very fun, though. I made sure the 'slaves' were unarmed, and made them addicted to flake so they could work harder without mentally breaking (kinda like in RL with hookers). Any berzerking = death sentence. I modified the scenario so that 33% of all NPCs were psychopaths / bloodlusters / cannibals, and recruitment chance was 1000%.

[Wolfguarde]

Nice. I hadn't thought of drug dependencies (I rarely use luciferium if I get a pawn that's already addicted to it, but otherwise mostly ignore anything other than smokeleaf), but that's an excellent way to make use of them. I'd like to see a mod that makes caste systems easier to manage - it's possible to take and recruit captives, but you can't really make captives into slaves. Which is understandable, given the game's not really about that, but it would make recruiting a whole lot easier if you could just draft someone into bonded labour for having attacked your colony.

[Skaliton]

so I thought of another that seems to 'work'

the ultra specialists. You can start with however many people you want but each person is allowed to do exactly 1 thing (not well, but do one thing)

this isn't a ridiculous 'one guy can hunt, another can defend the base' thing but more of a 1 person is allowed to shoot at all. For the sake of fairness everyone can do things like haul and clean otherwise the entire thing becomes absurd

that said: that is the sole limitation - start with whatever you want (just remember while having 3 people who can shoot and are armed to the teeth may be great for defense it cuts down the number of other tasks that can be performed.) and while you may take prisoners. . . why? Recruiting people has the same problem just without the level 20 stats

My attempt:
cook
shooter
construction
dr
miner
research

after a very rocky start it turned out relatively ok considering everything. (Basically dug into a mountain and no one ever left except the shooter)