Prioritize More Player Squads/ Player Population

[Damon-Vi]

Dont get me wrong, i love the game as it is, but there's just one problem.

Expansion.


Now by this, i mean to say that the game is expanding so rapidly, there's so much more that you can do when first starting off it's almost over-burdening (even in late game). micro managing one character to start from the bottom to work his way into prosperity, gradually getting more characters to join you. now most people often get about 6 or so members before they start to get more confident with what they want to do in the game. i actually waited until i had about 8-10 members before starting my own outpost (glad i did!). after that, everything was downhill. i acquired more squad members after doing some production and selling goods from attacking bandit loot, yada yada.

but then, while i was working on developing my outpost further, an update came out: prospecting. this was a whole new kenshi. now i couldn't just be where i was settled to get the most production out of my resources, if i even had any available. so i was forced to put an iron mine outside of the safety of my walled in outpost. this was a problem. workers getting attacked, the hauling was a b*tch, overall just plain toiling. dont get me wrong, i LOVED the limit on resources! made it all more realistic and more like the RTS's i'm used to.

while all this toiling was going on (be advised, i only had a very small handful of characters, maybe 4, that could moderately combat, the rest were all workers) i really needed more people to guard and fight to defend from getting stomped around by the waves of bandits showing up (a slight glitch or bug, was getting wave after wave of 20+ starving bandits even with enemy-squad-multiplier at the lowest setting). so i recruited more folks, made them stand around and wait for bandits, and then i noticed something else. there was no one to guard my little mining outpost away from my main, and those guys were just picked off like olive garden salad and breadsticks for bandits. i eventually dealt with it any way i could.

now here's my point. that was fairly early to mid game. i was so limited and confined because of my lack or personnel. even now, after my fight squad basically fought until god status, i cant step foot outside my base without risking exposing my neck. including, the map is so large (even though the 4x larger map was just announced) you cant fathom to expand your outposts without just abandoning your main outpost. there's even many more things to come to kenshi, and once the npc trading system starts to work, we'll be left hindered because we wont be able to establish multiple colonies to benefit from just even the trading (mass marketing, to put it shamefully, building lot's of kenshi walmarts). if we even had the ability to have multiple squads now, assuming we'll have more than 20 characters as our maximum, we'd be able to still have as much fun as the current build, but just with more outposts. sure, you cant do much except produce and sell, but that's (more or less) the point of kenshi right now. the only exception would be to have an entire squad of combatants to send off to the cannibal camps and save everyone, or just purge them like a raid (which seems pretty endgame to me, as kenshi stands now).


so simply put, i think the highest priority chris and the other dev's should (or need, however you see it) focus on expanding the GUI (solely) in order to expand our character limit. emphasis on LIMIT. we are limited without a means to expand WITH the game. put it out as a quick "hot patch", with JUST the squad GUI revamped to just through simple "squad 1, squad 2, etc." hot buttons (and obviously increase the max squad limit above 20). quite honestly, i would much prefer THIS over any other updates right now.

[PnzrNorm]

I honestly think that raising the squad cap before the new world map is released would just slow the devs down, not to mention there aren't enough NPCs available for hire in the current map to get any more than ~50 members, and that requires visiting every bar in every city.

Plus with that many squad members available to control, I believe it would require a different organization/control scheme that will allow the player to give multiple commands/Jobs to multiple members, or whole squads, that the current "1-10" selection system isn't capable of doing.

I believe there is a discussion thread regarding organizing multiple squads if you want to pitch any ideas there.


With the problems you're encountering, I think you should have all of your squaddies focus on combative tasks more than economic. Bump the population sliders up a little bit and go roaming for packs of hungry bandits with your whole squad, since they're the weakest. Its incredibly easy to fight groups of hungry bandits that are triple your number so long as you have your weakest members on Blocks Only (stats ~<15).
You can even give your strongest members the heaviest weapons (I use clubs Mk 5) to build their Strength even faster, but this only works when heavy weapons are being used to attack, not just to block.
Once your members are all around the 30s range in stats, they will be able to defend themselves while hauling goods around, provided you give them decent equipment and reduce the pop. sliders back to normal values.

I currently have a full squad of 20 running between 3 separate bases (1 farm, 1 stone, 1 iron) with both pop. sliders at 2, and I only worry when its a 2v20 Dust Bandits match or some Dead Cats randomly invade (cuz I may have raided Clownsteady and Telbooze).