Recruiting new characters?

[Fried Noodles]

I kinda like the mechanic where you can capture hostile characters and eventually convince them to join your faction. But is this the only or best way to collect new folks for your group?

I'm playing a medieval'ish modded game with the Lord of the Rims package.

So far I've only been raided by Dwarven bandits a few times... and once by goblins. So I've only managed to recruit 3 random dwarves who survived their attacks (none of the goblins lived).

Should I have some kind of less lethal weapon sidearm or something to try to capture more characters?
Does a weapon that's more bashy and less stabby mean hostile characters might die less frequently?

Also, I assume who raids your community is a factor of proximity to your settlement? Or is it random? Because I am not sure where the dwarves are even coming from...

I would like to get an Elf or Hobbit pawn but I am not sure how.

[XelNigma]

Recruiting is the main way, but with ideology dlc you can have a ritual that has a 50% chance in a major success to have a pawn show up and join instantly.
There's also normal events where they will join but that usually only happens when you have just a few people.

In the story teller settings in the options menu you can adjust the chance a downed enemy pawn instantly dies. By default it's pretty high to keep you from having loads of prisoner. But if you scale that down you will capture more people.

There's other mods like hospitality that lets you chat with visitors and recruit them peacefully too.

[Bullwinkle]

Blunt weapons are only slightly better for recruiting than ranged. And it is because blunt doesn't start bleeding. If you quickly rescue/heal someone bleeding, then blunt and ranged are pretty much equivalent for downing-but-not-killing. The more important ingredient is weapons that deal small damage. You want to deal enough damage to down them, without dropping them to zero. So a legendary uranium mace might be blunt, but will not be great for recruiting.

Using the Scenario Editor, you can adjust many different things that impact recruitment and other parts of your game. Unfortunately, the SE only works before you start the game. If you wish to make adjustments with SE after the game starts, get the mod, Scenario Ammender.

[Fried Noodles]

Originally posted by VoiD:

Storytellers have a desired population cap, which some people like to pretend it's some myth by playing semathics saying they are not trying to diminish your population once it's high enough, they are just "taking away the bonuses" instead, so you don't get any more pawns, but the end result is the same.

Is there a specific number for this population cap?

My current community is at 7. But I guess my weapons must be too lethal.
I'm using mostly halberds that I've crafted, and a fairly high powered crossbow and some 'legendary' bow I found on a quest for ranged.

[VoiD]

I forgot the values, but I found this mod, it explains the whole thing in it's desc:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=726096646

"As a general rule, the population caps were doubled compared to the vanilla storytellers. Here are the new caps compared to the vanilla caps:

Cassandra
Desired population: 26 (was 13)
Critical population: 36 (was 18)

Phoebe
Desired population: 26 (was 13)
Critical population: 36 (was 18)

Randy
Desired population: 26 (was 13)
Critical population: 100 (was 50)


But what does those values mean?!?! Well, its pretty simple:
Desired population: The population value where the storyteller will not make more effort at increasing your population. Your population can still increase but will have a tendency to drop with incidents.

Critical population: The population where the storyteller think you should really not have more people and will actively try to ruin your day."

Edit: The comments are saying the mod might have some problems, as all mods do.

[Jigain]

The whole "the storyteller will actively try to kill your pawns" myth has been debunked so many times. If it ever was true, it hasn't been since early alpha versions of the game.

[whatamidoing]

Yes, the pop cap doesn't try to actively kill pawns, it prevents you from getting new ones. No more wanderer joins or slaver caravans, increased chance for enemies to die when downed.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

increased chance for enemies to die when downed.

Yet at the same time, with how wealth scaling works, by the time you have enough pawns to hit the storyteller soft cap you'll see so many raiders that even with the increased chance of instant death, you'll see more downed enemies regardless. 20% of 5 raiders is 1 raider, yet 5% of 100 raiders is 5 raiders. Just by sheer volume, you'll find it very easy to get to 100+ pawns. Think my record is somewhere around 200-300 pawns, and I sure didn't need any mods to alter population levels.

[eharper256]

It's actually one of the things I miss about Dwarf Fortress, not getting random migrations of new colonists and trying to figure out what that new Legendary Cheesemaker Urist is actually good for.

[whatamidoing]

Yeah, it "prevents" you but it's very much a soft-cap.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Jigain:

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

increased chance for enemies to die when downed.

Yet at the same time, with how wealth scaling works, by the time you have enough pawns to hit the storyteller soft cap you'll see so many raiders that even with the increased chance of instant death, you'll see more downed enemies regardless.

What "increased chance" are you talking about? The chance on pain down is 60% throughout the whole game (apart from the intro raid, where it's 0%) unless you specifically change that value. Nothing about the storyteller caps changes that. The reason why more enemies die later on is usually having harder hitting weapons.

Population intend just changes the free colonist events, slave trade and quests. That is it.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Originally posted by Jigain:

Yet at the same time, with how wealth scaling works, by the time you have enough pawns to hit the storyteller soft cap you'll see so many raiders that even with the increased chance of instant death, you'll see more downed enemies regardless.

What "increased chance" are you talking about? The chance on down is 60% throughout the whole game (apart from the intro raid, where it's 0%) unless you specifically change that value. Nothing about the storyteller caps changes that.

You are correct, I think I mixed it up with raid strength (which IIRC increments by 20% each raid until it reaches 100% at raid five). In my defense I do currently have a fever, so some rambling is perhaps to be expected.

[VoiD]

That doesn't seem right, even in vanilla combat where weapons are less damaging it's not uncommon to have entire 100+ pawns raid having exactly zero survivors late game.

While if you use some mod that removes instadeath chance you can end up with over 50 raiders on the floor lagging your game to ♥♥♥♥.

Edit: Think you can even try it without a mod nowadays by adjusting difficulty during the game.

[Astasia]

I just ran a test with 35 colonists armed with machine pistols against a raid of 43 tribals, I trapped them in a box surround by deep water while my colonists behind cover shot every single one dead or downed. Ran it 5 times, every time I was getting 5-8 enemies downed with the rest killed. It's hard to say how many of those killed legitimately died instead of being culled by the mechanic, several had destroyed torsos and heads from the concentrated weapon fire hitting them, I'm sure several hit 0 consciousness from wounds, blood loss and pain, and I'm sure several ran out of total HP. It's a healthy amount of potential recruits at any rate well above the supposed "soft cap."

It's better to think of the "soft cap" as actually a population minimum. At low population the game throws free colonists at you so you can get established and reach a reasonable size, those freebies eventually slow to almost 0 once you reach the minimum and after that you rely on the normal intended recruit methods like capturing and using the social skill, or doing the new ideology rituals. The game is never trying to limit or slow your population growth.

Originally posted by Fried Noodles:

Also, I assume who raids your community is a factor of proximity to your settlement? Or is it random?

It's mostly random. Each faction has a raid weight defined by the game or the mod, when a raid is triggered the game rolls that weighted dice and sees what it lands on. Some modded factions might have particularly high weights which means you might see them much more often, while other factions might have lower weights and you might never even be raided by them during a playthrough. The more factions you have in your world the less likely you are to see any specific one raiding you. Location on the map is never factored into it, as long as a (non-hidden) faction has at least one base anywhere on the globe they have their full raid chance against you, even from the opposite side of the planet.

[Narrowmind]

What about body damage? Are the chances of head wounds no more greater when you've passed the soft cap?

[ACS36]

Originally posted by VoiD:

That doesn't seem right, even in vanilla combat where weapons are less damaging it's not uncommon to have entire 100+ pawns raid having exactly zero survivors late game.

This just isn't true.